Mrs. Nersessian turned to Caffery and put her hand on his arm. "Nersessian. That's an Armenian name. Now, you don't meet an Armenian every day and you need to know before you come into an Armenian household that you got to be prepared to eat." She slipped into the kitchen and began fussing around, opening the fridge, getting her good crockery from the shelves. "I'm going to get you a little pistachio loukoum," she called through the door. "And some mint tea, and then we'll say a little prayer for Rory."
"No I – I just came to thank you, Mrs. Nersian '
"Nersessian."
"Nersessian. I'll pass on the tea if that's OK, Mrs. Nersessian. We're trying to beat the clock on this."
She reappeared in the doorway holding a tea-towel. "Come on, darling, you need to eat. Look at you no fat on you. We all need to eat at a time like this keep our spirits up."
"I promise I'll come back and have some tea with you when we've found Rory."
"Rory." She pressed a hand over her heart. "Just the mention of his name! Poor soul. But God is protecting him. I feel it in my heart. God is watching him and -Annahid!" she said suddenly, her eyes fixing on the doorway behind him. "Annahid! I said '
Caffery turned. "The troll did it." The little girl was standing in the doorway, addressing him directly, as vehement as a resistance messenger, her brown eyes huge and serious. "The troll climbed out of the trees and did it."
Mrs. Nersessian made tut-tut ting noises and shooed Annahid away, flicking the tea-towel at her. "Go on, go on." She turned to Caffery, her painted eyes half closed, pressing her hair lightly into place. "I'm sorry, Mr. Caffery, I am truly sorry about that. The things the kiddiwinks dream about, these days."
There are vortexes and whirlpools in Brixton like nowhere else in London. Hot, funky Caribbean blood finds a home under the austere ceilings of cool nineteenth-century houses, and since the nineties the new breed had been moving to town: the art crowd. Primarily white. Primarily trendy. They moved here for the local 'colour' and then slowly, insidiously, pushed it off the streets. Gentrification writ big. On the station platform a statue of a Windrush boy, like a latter day Dick Whittington bandanna around his neck, tiny bag at his feet stood with arms folded, one foot bent back against the wall, ignored by the trendy new Brixtonites pushing and shoving to get on the train with their Gucci briefcases.
On this school summer holiday the streets were steaming. Lambeth Council cleaners had been through, hosing last night's jittery ravers back down into the underground station and the sun was burning the water off the pavement. Over the park another helicopter circled, sun glinting from it. A TV news team, drawn by the noises coming from South London, had cruised over to see if there was something to which it could turn its jaw. The team could look down and see the odd, piston-like movement of the search and investigation officers at work: the Police Search Advisory team moved in formation across the park, and other dark figures, detectives, radiated out through the surrounding streets.
Good morning, madam, sorry to bother you, I'm with the CID
Is this about what was on the TV this morning? The little kiddie?
In and out of houses: down the front paths like morning rush-hour businessmen and back up the next path:
There was an incident last night. Do you remember where you were?
Never liked that park. See them trees over there? All sorts of things is coming out of them trees. It worry me some, know what I is saying?
The search team, with their red coats and black and yellow sticks, were professionals, but they all found something odd about the clump of wood around the ponds. It was high summer but there was a Bavarian darkness in the trees, too thick for London. They tried to keep it light joked about it, swore that at any minute an allosaurus or something was going to come steaming out of the vegetation but no one felt comfortable that day. In the ponds the frogmen did more safety checks on each other than they would ordinarily.
Caffery came out of the Nersessians', rolled a cigarette, and walked for a while along the park perimeter, watching. Woods: he didn't like them, hadn't liked them for almost a year now. It wasn't the sight of the trees, or the sound of the breeze manipulating the branches: it was the smell. Leaf mulch and damp bark. The smell could catapult him back eleven months in a breath back to the attack on Rebecca, back to the day she wouldn't talk about, back to the wall that stood between them, and then the pressure in his chest would suddenly become so great he imagined that if he looked down he'd see his heart poking out through his ribs.
He turned his back on the trees and looked up at Arkaig and Herne Hill Towers. From a distance they looked proud, like Rhine castles above the trees, but closer up the land they stood in amounted to little more than a scrap of balding grass covered in dog shit. Used condoms and syringes decorated it and flyblown derelicts slept in the sun. A pod of AMIT detectives had been assigned there as Caffery lit his cigarette he could see two of them moving along the balconies. He was about to head away, to the east, to join the house-to-house pod working on Effra Road, when something made him stop. The back of his neck prickled. He'd had the brief, unsettling sense that something was behind him. Heart thumping, he swung round. But there was nothing, only the search team moving silently through the park, insects hovering, traffic on Dulwich Road and a few fluffy white clouds low on the horizon. Jesus, Jack he took a few puffs on the cigarette and pushed it through the grating of a drain you think the team is jumpy.
It was a DC Logan of AMIT who visited Roland Klare at his flat in Arkaig Tower. Klare didn't like the police, didn't trust them, and this one seemed particularly dismissive of him: in fact, he seemed more interested in the view over Brockwell Park than in asking any questions. He stood at the window, right next to the Pentax in the biscuit tin, and looked down at the billowy treetops. "Nice view."
"Oh, yes, a very nice view."
"Well." DC Logan tapped his hands on the window-sill so close to the camera and turned, wrinkling his nose and looking suspiciously around the flat, taking in the piles of objects on the tables, the boxes all annotated and arranged one on top of the other.
Klare didn't avoid his eyes: he expected this reaction, knew quite well that his system would seem disordered to someone who didn't understand why he had to scavenge and curate like this. But it was all clean, no one could say it wasn't, and that almost excused the fact that sometimes even he lost track of what it all meant, where and why it had started. "Now, then," Logan sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs and pulled his jacket around his stomach, 'this incident last night."
"Ye-es?"
Klare sat down too. He had decided that there was a way of answering the questions truthfully without giving away anything about the camera. He folded his hands in his lap, tried to stop his eyes flickering and admitted that, yes, he'd been in the park late last night but, no, he hadn't seen anything unusual. Logan asked him again, "Are you sure? Think carefully," and Klare did. He put his head back and closed his eyes. There wasn't anything unusual about the camera, he decided. Technically it wasn't unusual. Nor was there anything unusual about the gloves anyone who kept half an eye open could see all sorts of flotsam and jetsam lying around the park. And the camera was worth money.
"No." He opened his eyes and shook his head decisively. "No, nothing unusual."
And Logan seemed to accept that.
Afterwards Klare stood in the window and watched him leave the building, no bigger than a microbe all that way down on the forecourt. When he was sure the detective had gone he drew the curtains in the living room, blotting out the sun and the fractured, dried-out park, picked up the camera and began in earnest to try to free the film. When he couldn't, upset by the visit and angry with the officer's cold disapproval, he sat down on the sofa, breathing hard, staring at his hands.