Meanwhile, down on Dulwich Road, Logan met the other officers with nothing to report. He held his hands up, as if to say 'empty-handed'. He hadn't even the whisper of a suspicion of how close he'd just come, close as a breath, to the only piece of evidence that could have closed the case for AMIT in hours.
Five.
The artist's impression on the hoarding outside the Clock Tower Grove Estate, a Hummingbird Houses development overlooking the eastern flank of Brockwell Park, showed trees in blossom, blue skies. Professionals with suitcases walked along pavements bordered by shrubs and glass-globed street-lights. The skies were blue and there were no biscuit-brown machinery tracks on the roads, no windows marked with taped Xs. The girls in the marketing suite would protest "It's not finished yet, not till autumn, three months to go' and they'd direct any enquirer up a side entrance, along a brick herring boned street and into Clock Tower Walk, to a collection of four-storeyed terraced townhouses at the rear of the development, overlooking Brockwell Park: own back gardens, own garages, 295,000 a pop and completed three months ahead of schedule. An exclusive street for the middle-management classes who couldn't quite reach Dulwich village even on financial tiptoe.
One family had already moved in, just in time for the summer holidays. Number five's railings and woodwork were painted glossy black and two small bay trees, topiaried into cones, stood on either side of the small flight of steps. On the building site a workman often sat on a pile of RSJs in his lunch hour and watched the blonde as she ferried her son back and forth in the lemon-yellow Daewoo. The workman looked after his body at the moment he was on a high-protein diet and whenever he needed inspiration he'd look at the blonde. She was very pretty, but in his opinion her weight spoiled her beauty. In fact, when he thought about it, the whole family could have done with dropping a few pounds. They didn't look healthy. The shiny hair, the sun-brushed skin, the good clothes none of it could make up for those extra pounds, he'd think, as he munched his tuna and whole meal sandwiches.
That July afternoon he had spent a good part of the day watching the search teams in and around the park, and had even given a statement to the plain-clothes officer who had appeared on the building site. He was packing up to go home when he spotted a dark-haired man in his thirties on the doorstep of number five. The workman supposed he could have been another police officer, but looked more like a City type, with his well-cut hair and well-cut suit. The blonde answered the door.
"Hello." She had a tidy little face, a sweet crescent of pale skin under honey-blonde hair. She was wearing white trousers and a fisherman's striped T-shirt. An old black Labrador stood next to her. Caffery knew instantly that he had wandered off the track and into classier waters.
"Afternoon." He showed his warrant card. "Name's DI Jack Caffery."
"Like the beer?"
"Like the beer."
"Is it about the little boy?" She had very large, almost silvery eyes. He imagined if he stood any nearer he'd be able to see a perfect reflection of himself. "Little Rory?"
"Yes."
"You'd better come in, then." Bending over to take the old dog by its collar and turn it round, she beckoned Caffery in with the other hand. "Come through kick the door closed. My son and I are making chocolate truffles. We're past the crucial point but you'll have to let me just clean up a bit." She paused in the hallway to open a cloakroom and switch on the extractor fan. "Sorry, there's a bit of a smell in here. Can you smell it?"
"No."
"My husband says it's my imagination."
"Women have a better sense of smell, you know."
"Ah, yes all the better to detect a dirty nappy."
"Your husband here?"
"Still at work. Come through."
She led him to the back half of the house, a single huge space, divided into two areas by waist height cabinets. On the right an airy modern kitchen, light-filled: Scandinavian lines, skylights and raw wood, recessed lighting and heavy glass jars in rows. On the left a spacious family room with sea grass floors and sunlight streaming through huge clean windows. Designed so that one could cook a meal, hold a conversation and watch television all at the same time. Modern living.
"Oh, hi," Caffery said.
"Hi." In the kitchen a boy of eight or nine, slightly sloping eyes, nose rather pointed like an elf's and shortish hair sticking up from a tanned forehead as if he'd just come in from a beach volleyball match, stood to attention, hands at his sides, pretending he hadn't been doing something punishable while his mother's back was turned. He was wearing flip-flops and a
T-shirt over blue swimming-trunks and had chocolate smeared around his mouth.
"Oh, yes, sorry about him he's the hound." She smoothed back the hair from her son's forehead. "My little boy, Josh."
Caffery extended his hand. "Hi."
"It's OK," Josh said sombrely, shaking his hand. "I'm mad, not bad."
Caffery nodded. "Sometimes the mad ones are worse."
"And I'm Benedicte Church." She smiled sweetly and shook Caffery's hand. "Ben for short." She bent over her son, hands on his shoulders.
She was not the average middle-class housewife. She was enormously pretty, Caffery thought, with rather short legs and a round bottom. He imagined it would take a long time to tire of a bottom like that. He caught himself staring as she pulled her hair from her face and murmured to her son, "Tadpole, go and wash your face, OK? Then we can all have a chocolate."
Josh went into the cloakroom and when she could hear the tap running she dropped her chin and leaned a little closer to Caffery, her smile gone. "It's horrible, isn't it?" she whispered. "The TV's really vague. I mean, do we need to worry?"
"There's no harm in being aware."
"Heard the helicopter last night." She jerked her chin in the direction of the park. Only a few feet beyond the back-garden fence the trees started, as immediately thick and dark as if this was the dense heart of a forest. "Whenever I hear them looking for someone I always think of the Balcombe Street siege. Convinced the police are going to chase them through my front door and then we'll be kept hostage for days on end. But there you go." She smiled. "Paranoia can be a beautiful thing for the easily bored. Coffee?"
"Please."
"And I'll bring you a, uh…" She gestured at the tray of chocolates. "A truffle, if you can bear it." She poured coffee from a cafetiere into two Isle of Arran mugs, spooned sugar into an earthenware pot and set it on a tray. "Go through and sit down. Make yourself at home."
He went into the family room. Here the walls were a fresh, cantaloupe colour, the sofas in pale, glazed linen and other things told him this family was doing well the gleaming wide-screen TV still with a piece of polystyrene packaging clinging to its shoulder. He sat down on one of the sofas facing out of the window. The dog, which had curled up in a patch of sun, blinked sleepily at him. Everywhere Pickfords boxes lay half unpacked.
"Just moved in?"
"Four days ago." She took milk from the fridge and filled a small glass jug. "The first ones on the estate. And I mean, how crazy is this} Sunday we're straight off to Cornwall for ten days."
"Nice."
"Absolutely lovely, if you haven't already been living out of boxes for weeks. This place was finished early so we went for it. And we couldn't cancel our holiday." Josh reappeared from the cloakroom and scampered over to the tray of chocolates. "We couldn't cancel Helston, could we, tadpole? The seals?"
"Nope." He stood on a stool and pulled the chocolates nearer. "Seals out of the sea."
The dog limped over to Caffery, looked up at him mournfully and rolled on to her back. "Hello." He began to scratch her, when something just above his field of vision, something in the woods, moved suddenly. He stared out of the window. For a moment he had thought he saw a shadow racing in there, but now whatever he'd seen was gone, an animal, a trick of the light, or one of the search team, and Benedicte was coming in with the coffee and he had to cool his imagination.