'Stop.' Caffery's voice came from somewhere in the darkness. 'I can see something. Don't move until I find the fucking light.'
She froze, on her knees, her elbows locked under her, her hair hanging round her face.
'I mean it. Don't stand up.'
Trembling, sweat running down her arms, she listened to him moving around in the darkness. There was a smell here — something familiar, coppery and dead — and when she turned back towards the entrance something about the light, the way it was chopped short, gave her the weird idea that she was enclosed — that somehow she'd rolled under something. There was a sound too, it dawned on her. A sound, under and above the noise Caffery was making finding a light switch. A dripping, thick and unpleasant.
'What's going on?' she hissed. She didn't want to think too hard about that dripping sound. 'What're you doing?'
There was a silence. Then Caffery released his breath and everything was flooded with bluish-white light. Flea blinked, her brain taking a moment to make sense of the shapes and colours, and when it did it was as if all the air had been knocked out of her. She began to pant, low and hard.
'Oh, fuck,' she heard Caffery say. 'Fuck fuck fuck.'
55
The good thing about not having much to live for, was that you stopped caring.
It had crept up easily on Caffery, this resilience to all that was wrong in the world, until it was as natural as opening his eyes in the morning and yawning when he was tired. So it was strange that day on the Hopewell estate, scrabbling along the walls trying to find a light, tearing his hands on exposed plaster and brickwork, to feel a moment's trepidation, a brief pulse of unease just before he put on the light. It lasted only a few seconds. Then he'd found the switch, the room was illuminated, and he saw what they'd been sharing the darkness with.
The room was about as big as Baines's bedroom, but from the patterned lino on the floor and the marks round the walls where cabinets might have stood, he guessed it had once been a kitchen. The wallpaper had been pink-striped before the mould and the bad air had eaten into it and it contained only two pieces of furniture: a sofa to his left and a table, which was pushed up against the wall, with Flea under it.
He got a snapshot of her — of the way she didn't really understand what was happening. She was kneeling frozen and shocked, blood on her arms and on her T-shirt, her hands planted on the ground, eyes swivelled to him, waiting for him to tell her what to do. She couldn't see what lay on the table above her. A body, on its back: bare-chested, jeans, a leather belt securing it at the waist.
Caffery knew who it was. Even without stepping forward, he knew it was Jonah. And that he hadn't been dead long. The blood pooling under the table hadn't begun to congeal. It was still dribbling slightly out of the hacked-out hole in his neck, dripping into a plastic measuring jug under the table and spilling over the top on to the floor. Once Tig had made the first cut into Jonah's neck there was only one way it was going to end. He'd tried to cut Jonah's head off and would have succeeded if he hadn't been interrupted. He'd wadded towels round the boy's chest to soak up the overflow and put more under his buttocks, maybe in case his bowels opened.
'It's him.' Under the table in her peculiar freeze-frame, Flea had seen the jug, the blood pooling round it. 'It's him,' she muttered. Slowly she raised her eyes to the underside of the table. 'Isn't it? It's Jonah.'
Caffery looked over to where a video-camera on a tripod was tilted down at the body, its record light flashing on and off. He's dead, he told himself, trying to force himself to scan the rest of the room, to see beyond the horror on the table. There's fuck all you can do. You don't know him. Get your priorities right. Forget Jonah and find the bastard who did it.
Flea grunted and scrambled out, like a dog, from under the table. 'Christ Christ Christ,' she said, when she saw the body. 'Fucking Christ.' Slipping in the blood she got to her feet, her hands out tense at her sides, staring at the body.
'Sssh,' Caffery said, trying to work out where the noise had come from. 'Be quiet.'
He went to the sofa, put one hand on the back, leaned over and saw instantly what he was looking for. From waist height down, another hole had been dug into the wall. He dragged the sofa back and tried to listen, but behind him Flea was talking to herself, breathing hard.
'Ssh,' he whispered. 'I need you to be quiet, for fuck's sake.' It had been cut out with an angle-grinder, maybe, or a hacksaw. A dim blue light, daylight perhaps, was filtering on to the floor. 'Be quiet. This is it.'
When she didn't answer he turned. She was still at the table. She'd planted her feet solid and wide, had pulled Jonah's head back and had her hands locked together on his chest, squeezing down on him, each compression pushing a half-hearted dribble of blood out of his neck.
'Christ! Stop that.'
But she went on pumping.
'Hey.' He came back from the sofa and grabbed her arm. 'He's dead. Now stop the fuck what you're doing.'
She froze, her hands on Jonah's chest. Her face was grey, her pupils dilated.
'Remember what we're doing,' he growled. 'Remember.'
'What?' she murmured, her mouth moving slowly.
'Fuck's sake. Keep with me, Sergeant Marley.' He dug his fingers into her arm. 'Keep with me. We've got to get going.'
She turned her eyes to the sofa, the gap behind it. Then she looked back at the corpse. He was about to shake her, when something in her face changed. Her forehead creased, and she seemed to snap back into herself.
'Yes,' she said, wiping her bloodied hands on her vest. She bent down, put both hands on her thighs and breathed fast through her mouth. 'Yeah, I'm OK. Let's do it.'
Caffery held up the CS canister in front of his face, the knife in his other hand, and ducked into the gap. It opened into a small passage with a similar gap cut at the other end. This one had a gate welded into it, like the one they'd seen before, but it stood open.
He scrambled towards it, squat-walking, the hand with the knife hitting the floor at every other step. For a moment Flea wasn't with him — she was still in the room getting a grip on herself — but before he reached the end of the passage she'd caught up and he could feel her breathing behind him. For some reason he remembered something in the files from the Met — that the Tokoloshe could become invisible if it put a pebble in its mouth — and had to check over his shoulder that it really was her behind him. And it was. Her eyes were shining, her small face set and determined.
At the far wall they stopped in crouches by the gap, and listened again. On the other side of this wall someone was breathing, hot, panicky breaths.
'Three-sixty sweep,' she mouthed.
'What?'
'We do a three-sixty sweep. Check the room.'
He copied her, turning slightly to the side in the crouch, pressing his left hand on the inside of the wall and mirroring her by pushing his right foot ahead of him into the opening. 'Now,' she whispered. 'Now.'
Holding the CS gas and the ASP in front of them, they craned their necks and scanned the room fast. It was small — there were two other doorways in it and a boarded-up window — and filthy, full of flies and used food containers. On a sofa pushed up against the opposite wall sat two men, one skeletal and white, one short and black.
'Police!' Caffery yelled, pointing the CS gas into the room. 'Police!' The two men shrank into each other. One was the guy they'd chased, the little witch doctor in the jacket; the other — Caffery didn't have to see the stumps of his arms to know that it was Mallows. Alive. They'd cut off his hands. They'd taken his blood. And he was still alive. The fucking Crime Scene Manager. He'd been right, the bastard.