"What's that?"
"Calms me down." He stuffed the bottle back in the bag, then sat forward and turned his hands over, showing Caffery the insides of his wrists. He looked up. His eyes were red and swimming in tears as if they were bleeding. "It's wrong, I know, it's wrong to give up. But sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time."
The boys at the vending machine had noticed that Gummer was crying. One by one they turned to stare. Caffery leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Chris, I think we should take this somewhere else, don't you? Will you come to the station with me?"
He nodded and gazed out of the window at the rainy streets, biting his lip. "Is it what happened to that family? The Peaches?"
Caffery didn't answer. He got to his feet, put his hands on the table, and spoke in a low voice. "I wish you'd talked to someone back then."
"The world was a different place back then."
Champaluang's attack had happened a few days after Gummer's wife had left. Gummer had read about the attack in the South London press and was seized with the notion that the man Champ called 'the troll' was the same teenager responsible for destroying his life. He watched the papers like an owl after that, but until the intruder at Donegal Crescent he hadn't seen one incident with the hallmarks of the troll on it. When he and Caffery got to Shrivemoor they found out why.
Klare had been in high-security psychiatric facilities for eleven years. Kryotos had the file on her desk and was photocopying pages from it. "Stabbed a WPC in Balham in 1989. He'd tried to abduct a little boy from outside a supermarket." This was his 'index offence', the offence that first put him into the mental-health system. It had happened when he was just eighteen. The WPC had cornered him in a stairwell on a council estate and he'd jumped at her with a penknife. The child was unharmed but the WPC had suffered severe cuts to her hands.
"The abduction charge fell through." Kryotos spoke quietly. Gummer was sitting on a chair next to the SIO's room, just out of earshot. He looked as if he might cry. The boy's parents didn't press charges, didn't want to put him through the trial, so they charged him with the assault on the WPC." For this he had been convicted and held for over ten years under
Section 41 of the Mental Health Act, until fifteen months ago when he was considered stabilized on clozapine, and the home secretary lifted the restriction order, sending him for a year to a halfway hostel before, in April, releasing him back into the community. "Even if I'd had time to feed all the house-to-house interviews into HOLMES and seen his CRO She shook her head. "It was for assault. It never went down as an abduction. He'd've still slipped through." She paused, and looked at him, standing there in front of her all dishevelled. "You stink, Jack. You smell like a swimming-pool."
"Thanks, Marilyn."
"That's OK. Want some shortbread?"
"No thanks, Marilyn."
"One day I'll stop asking."
"No, you won't."
Souness and the rest of the team were in Brixton so Caffery took Gummer into the SIO's room, sat him down and got the story from the beginning.
It had started in 1989. The Gummers had planned their holiday quite openly and none of their friends ever found out that they hadn't made it to Blackpool, that they had never even left Brixton. But something went wrong on that holiday, everyone agreed, they were never the same afterwards. No one knew about the tall youth who had appeared out of thin air in the hallway of the little terraced house. No one knew how he'd tied Gummer's wife in an upstairs bedroom, "X' spray-painted on the door. No one knew about the act Gummer was forced to perform on his own son, nor that afterwards, curled up in the corner and crying, he'd had to watch Klare make his own attempt on the nine-year-old. Klare had been impotent. Frustrated, full of rage, he had bitten a hole in the boy's back.
"Did he use a belt?" Caffery felt sorry for Gummer, who sat with his arms wrapped around his knees as if it was cold, his shoulders hunched up, staring blankly out at rainy Croydon. But he knew he had to ask. "Did he use a belt? Around your son's neck?"
"No. Not a belt. But he beat him. And he bit him."
So that's a skill you learned later, in prison, you bastard. "Anything he said? Anything in particular you remember?"
"No. I've gone through it a hundred times. Oh, I mean of course there were excuses, you can imagine the sort of thing, said he didn't mean it that he had to do it etcetera, etcetera."
"He had to do it?"
"Oh yes." Gummer twisted his mouth up as if the memory was a sour spot on his tongue. "Oh yes. A few times he said it said he couldn't help it had to treat himself it was all madness to me, all just an excuse '
"The Treatment."
Gummer paused. "What?"
"The Treatment," he said softly, thinking about the little notebook in Souness's drawer. He looked up at Gummer. "I'm sorry it's nothing he's schizophrenic, we think. He's '
"He's mad that's what he is."
"Yes. Maybe." Caffery tapped his fingers on the desk. "Anyway go on, Chris, go on."
After the attack Gummer had tried to persuade his wife to go to the police but she had resisted and, in a few bitter and well-chosen words, spelled it out to him: if he went to the police then the rest of the world would know he was a child molester. A child molester! Never ever ever let anyone know. It will stay with us until the day we die. But keeping the secret eventually got too much and she had packed up her records, her Jane Fonda workout videos and her son, and left, leaving Gummer in London with nothing: no pillows, no sheets, no towels just a sticky bottle of tomato ketchup in the fridge and the round conviction that he was a pervert because of what he had managed to achieve. "With my son, my own son, I wouldn't have thought it possible, if it hadn't happened."
"Did you have an attic?"
"Yes. There was an attic in that house."
Caffery pictured Klare, in the attic like a patient spider, just watching and waiting, waiting for a moment when he could scamper out and do what he wanted without interruption. "I think that's where he came from."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Found out afterwards. He left by the front door just opened it and walked out but how did he get in? I found the mess he left afterwards when I got a ladder up there." He shrugged. "Looking back I realized my wife had sensed something was wrong."
"Before?"
He nodded. "She kept saying she could smell something she said there was a smell in that house. I couldn't smell it but it was driving her crazy trying to get rid of it before we went on holiday she said something had died under the floorboards. If she'd got her way she would've had me rip the place apart. Now I wish I had '
He stopped. Caffery had just sat back so fast it was as if someone had wrenched him by the collar. "Your wife smelt the stuff in the attic before}'
"She kept moaning about it I couldn't smell it myself, but they say women have a better sense of smell than men."
Caffery stood and went into the incident room, rapping his knuckles on Kryotos's desk. "Marilyn. How far's Danni?"
"She just called she'll be back in fifteen or so."
"Right. Can I leave Gummer with you until she's back? You could make him some tea or something."
"I'll give him some shortbread. Where are you going?"
"Brixton. Tell Danni I'll call her later."
Thirty-three.
What pitched her out of that long, trancy sleep? The voice? Benedicte thought so. A man's voice, murmuring. She opened her eyes. A bluebottle was picking its way carefully through the crust on Smurf's nose. She stared blankly at it, lying on her side, trying to decide if she was dreaming or really hearing a man's voice in the kitchen below.
Hal? Was it Hal? What's happening? She raised her head. Maybe the troll had gone. Maybe Hal was talking to Josh. Yes, that's what it sounds like he's gone and I missed it because I was asleep. She rolled on to her front and fanned her hands out on the splintered boards. The skin on her arms had taken on the papery, transparent look that dried honesty got she almost expected to see the little veins in her hands turn blood-black and noded like seeds. Her throat was so dry it seemed no longer a functioning part of her body, but a long, living welt running under the muscles.