"Right, crew. Listen up." He used an empty Sprite can to bang on the wall. "Come on, listen, everyone. I know you're all on short notice but let's get this bit done. We'll do it in the SIO's." Holding the videotape above his head, he started towards the office he and Souness shared, beckoning the officers to follow. "Come on, it'll only take ten so you can have your piss breaks later."
The senior investigating officer's room was small -for all the team to cram in, the door had to be left open. Souness stood against the window, coffee mug cupped in both hands as Caffery plugged in the video and waited for everyone to gather.
"Right. You all know the basics. DCI Souness is doing the search and house-to-house parameters so whoever's on the knock come and see her after this. First light we've got the search-team meeting in Brockwell Park so I want everyone ready. SPEC RIMs go out as usual, but bear in mind what I'm going to tell you now for hold-back on the press bureau. Exhibits, family liaison, organize yourselves. What else? We've got primacy but we'll appoint a liaison officer for, I'm sorry to say, the paedophile unit and the risk-management panel at Lambeth and, uh, someone better have a whisper with the child-protection lads at Belvedere, make sure Rory hasn't made an appearance there before. Now…" He gestured at the blank TV screen and took a deep breath. "When I show you this, the first place you're going to wonder about is the Maudsley." He paused. At the mention of the Maudsley the mental-health clinic on Denmark Hill one or two of the civilian workers had sucked in a breath. He didn't want that: he wanted the team thinking and functioning and not overreacting to the nature of the crime.
"Look," he said, "I don't want you writing him off as a psycho just yet. I'm only saying that's how it looks." He glanced around at the faces. "Maybe that's how it's meant to look. Maybe there's some trail-covering here maybe he's your common or garden paedo who's trying to throw up a smokescreen, pave his way to an insanity plea if he gets caught. And keep in mind that he's been in play for three days. Three days. That's controlled, isn't it? Have a think about those three days and what they mean. Do they mean, for example, that he knows he's not going to get disturbed?"
Or do they mean he was enjoying himself so much with Rory that he'd decided to stay on for the long weekend?
He pointed the remote control at the video. Donegal Crescent appeared on screen. It was dusk. Beneath the time-code a crowd jostled the cordons, trying to get a better glimpse of the little terraced house: blue ambulance lights flashed silently across their faces. Caffery, standing back against the wall now with his arms folded, watched the AMIT detectives out of the corner of his eye. This was the first they had seen of the crime scene and he knew they'd find something terrible about the Peaches' house. Something terrible about its normality.
"This is on the edge of Brockwell Park," he said evenly. "Just to give you some geography, that tower you can see in the distance is Arkaig Tower on Railton Road, which the divisionals know and love as Crack Heights."
The camera tracked down the path to the doorstep of number thirty, and turned to pan across the street, the little scrap of grass opposite, the neighbours' faces shocked white ovals against the evening sky. Any point that could be observed from the Peaches' house could also be a vantage-point for a potential witness. The camera recorded everything then swung 180 degrees and faced the house head on. The number '30' in gold screw-on numerals filled the screen.
"All the doors and windows were closed." The camera ran itself around the splintered front door -opened with the Enforcer battering-ram zooming in on an intact lock. "The Territorials had to batter their way in. The only thing not locked was the back door we think it's our point of entry. Watch."
They were inside the house now, the camera flooding the hallway with halogen light. Slightly worn wallpaper, a grey cord carpet protected by a heavy-duty plastic runner. Two badly framed prints cast long, bobbing shadows up the hall and a child's turbo water-gun lay on its side on the bottom step. Up ahead, at the end of the hall, a doorway. The tape blurred for a moment, helical scan traces across the screen, and when the picture steadied the camera had gone through the doorway and was in a small kitchen. A glazed terra cotta chicken eyed the camera beadily from next to the bread bing and a checked curtain over the door wallowed in the breeze, revealing a broken window, flashes of the darkened yard, a glimpse of the trees in the park beyond.
"Right. Important." Caffery rested his elbow on the monitor, leaning over to point at the screen. "Glass on the floor, door unlocked. This is not only the point of entry but also the exit point. Intruder breaks window and lets himself in we think this is some time after seven p.m. on Friday evening." The camera zoomed through the broken window and out into a small yard beyond. A carousel clothes-dryer, a child's bike, some toys and four overturned milk bottles, their contents rancid and yellow. "The intruder then stays in the house with the Peach family until Monday afternoon when he's disturbed at which point he picks up Rory Peach and leaves through the same door." The camera pulled back into the kitchen and panned the room, pausing at a set of bloody drag marks on the doorpost. Caffery tapped the remote control on his leg and looked around the silent faces, expecting a reaction. But no one spoke or asked questions. They were staring at the blood on the screen.
"The lab thinks his wounds aren't fatal at this point. The received wisdom is that the intruder carried him out of the house through this broken fence here and into the woods. He's probably found a way to staunch the blood flow, maybe a towel or something, because the dogs lost him early. Right." The camera was moving. "Good, now I'm going to show you where the family were found."
A woman's face came briefly in and out of shot: DS Quinn, the crime-scene co-ordinator, the most experienced CSC in South London. After she and Caffery had orchestrated the video she had returned to the kitchen to ensure that the glass from the break-in was carefully photographed and removed. Then she had called the Specialist Crime Unit biologists down from Lambeth. While Caffery was with the helicopter crew the scientists had come through the house, dressed in protective suits, applying their specialized chemicals: ninhydrin, amido black, silver nitrate.
"Alek Peach that's Dad was found here, handcuffed by the wrists to this radiator, and by the ankles to this radiator. You can tell the position he was in from the mark he's left." Caffery pointed it out to the team a large dark stain on the shag-pile carpet, stretching between the two radiators in the living room. "He's got a wound to the back of his head so we won't be talking to him for a while. Maybe not at all. And the second place watch, you'll see it now we're going upstairs is where Carmel was held."
Carmel, who was now sedated at the hospital, had given something of a statement in the ambulance. Although a cursory examination showed no head wounds it was assumed she had lost consciousness at some point: apart from making dinner at 6 p.m. on Friday, she remembered nothing until she had woken gagged and cuffed to a water-pipe in the airing cupboard on the first-floor landing. There she had remained until the shopkeeper had called through the letterbox three days later. She hadn't seen or spoken to the intruder, and, no, there was no reason, business or personal, that someone would want to hurt her family. When the paramedics helped her out of the cupboard they angled the stretcher so that she faced the stairs. They didn't want her to turn and see what was spray-painted on the wall behind her.
"And when you see it," he looked around at the faces, "I think you'll agree that, in spite of the heavy traffic through the house, it's what we should keep from the press."
He turned back to the TV. The camera operator was climbing the stairs, the shadows danced across the landing ahead. When Caffery had seen the spray-painting he had instantly recognized it as a tool to weed out false confessions.