Suffer the Children (30 page)

The girl is smiling still. She has a collection box in one hand and extends it towards him. She shivers as she does it and says, ‘All right for cats and dogs.’

‘Cats and dogs?’ Now he smells sweet, roasting tar.

‘The rain. I don’t suppose I could step inside, just for a minute.’ She shakes her head and her high-up ponytail sends water spouting in a wide arc. Errol stands back, away from the wet and she takes that as an invitation to come in, makes a stride on to the threshold.

‘No!’ says Errol. He holds out his hand and looks at the mobile. He watches as his thumb presses green.

The girl’s smile disappears in an instant and she too raises a hand – not the one with the collection box. In it, she holds a tiny canister.

Errol looks at the screen, waits for the call to engage. ‘This is the police,’ he says to the girl, pleading. ‘I’m calling the police. Now go. Go away! Please!’

The girl shakes her head, looks angry now and says, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Hello!’ he shouts into the phone.

The girl laughs a sneer and reaches out, points the canister at Errol’s face.

‘Hello!’ he shouts into the phone but looking up at the girl. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Errol is walking
backwards
now. He can’t stop her coming in, such a tiny girl. How could he raise a hand to her?

He is backed up against the understairs cupboard and wants to sink to the floor, curl into a ball and let the hurt come so it can go again. Her frown disappears and as she smiles he hears a hissing sound and a fine spray comes towards him. It stings around his eyes, burns his nostrils. He can’t breathe and when he gulps at the air, the acid burn gets into his mouth and throat. He can’t see and he throws himself on the ground, screws his eyes tight shut, fills his lungs and holds his breath. His head jolts and a sharp pain shudders down into his spine. Then another. And another. He curls into a ball, tries to make himself small. The pain gets duller, cruel in his kidneys. He tries to hold on to his breath but as the pain registers, he can’t help himself. He wails. He tries to keep it quiet, trap it inside himself to preserve some dignity, but he fails.

After what might have been seconds or minutes, she stops kicking him. His eyes still sting from the spray and his throat burns. There is blood on his hall carpet. He bought the carpet with Theresa. They almost had an argument about it, but Errol reined himself in.

Errol squints up and sees the girl bent double, exhausted. Her hands are on her bare knees. She has a short skirt on, even though she is wearing heavy walking boots – built for the job. He looks further up and sees fat streaks of mascara all down her thin, white face. In the newspaper, she had worn a white hood and a cloak. When he makes this connection, he can’t help himself, feels the wet spread of urine warm in his groin.

She sees him looking and summons an effort to stand up straight. She spits down at him and he closes his eyes again. He feels nothing, just hears the girl say, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me? Fuck
you
!’ And she stamps on him, this time in the midriff. It knocks all the wind out of him. The last thing he hears, before the darkness takes him, is the girl say, ‘I am Sally and this is from Martha.’

‘What do you mean, Montefiore’s missing?’ says Staffe.

Josie is sitting at a table in the window of the café. ‘He insisted on going for a walk, told the officer on his door that he was only going round the block. That was three hours ago.’

Staffe looks out of the window and down the street. He can’t see Regis’s house for the rain. ‘I’ve an idea where he might be.’

‘Where?’

‘I can’t say, in case I’m wrong.’

‘What happened to us being a team?’

He wants to tell her, to see if she might immediately come up with an argument to prove him wrong – something so obvious he can’t see it. ‘I promised you, I’ll only damage myself.’ He pulls up the collar of his jacket, buttons it all the way and makes to leave. ‘I’ll be an hour.’

‘What about Regis’s house?’

‘Keep an eye on it. Call me if anything happens. For God’s sake don’t go in.’

‘I’m going to call Smethurst. Tell him where I am.’

‘No. You can’t do that.’

‘It’s his case, sir.’ Josie stares out of the window, down Gibbets Lane – into the darkness and rain. ‘He’s on our side.’

‘He doesn’t believe there will be a fourth – it goes against everything he’s saying about this case. He doesn’t want it. He’ll go storming in and ruin everything. They’re working to a different agenda.’

‘Maybe it’s you that’s got the different agenda, sir.’

‘Think what you like.’

‘At least tell me where you’re going.’

‘Will you hold off from telling Smethurst?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Jessop’s flat.’

‘But he’s gone. That’s what you said.’ Josie looks at her watch, says, ‘I’m calling Smethurst in an hour. Sooner, if anything happens.’

‘Thanks,’ says Staffe, taking out his car keys.

Outside, he ducks his head to the rain and runs full pelt for his car, wondering if the lie he has just told Josie may come to haunt him. He quickly calculates that it could cost him dear.

The traffic is terrible, the way it always is when the rain comes. Nobody is walking and taxis are everywhere. Staffe switches into pursuit mode. He overtakes and undertakes,
constantly
switching lanes and mounting the kerb or going the wrong side of bollards. He switches on his hazards and all the way along Holborn he drives through red lights with the heel of his hand pressed full to the horn.

As he drives like a maniac, Staffe questions whether this could all prove to be a horrible misjudgement – a jump, feet first, into a pool full of mistaken conclusions.

J
, the recipient of the fifty thousand from VABBA.

J
signing off the note that says he was ‘showed how and I had to follow’.

Turn everything on its head, perhaps. ‘Don’t follow me’, Jessop had written.

The traffic slows to a dead halt, nose to tail with three lanes cramming into two, so Staffe turns left down a no-entry street, switchbacking north of Oxford Street and through the embassy squares to the sound and vision of blaring horns and abusive fingers. Then he’s on the taxi-cuts up towards Marble Arch and across Hyde Park towards his own place.

He leans back, relaxes his hold on the wheel, begins to re-rack the evidence that led him to a final hunch that brings him snooping on himself: wanting to be right but praying he is wrong.

Staffe parks round the corner from his Queens Terrace flat and breathes in, deep. He calls Helena Montefiore. Why would Guy go walkabout when he knows the venger is waiting to catch up with him? Staffe can think of only one type of wild horse that would drag him outside.

‘Mrs Montefiore, it’s DI Wagstaffe, Leadengate.’

‘Oh.’

‘Can I speak to Thomasina?’

There is no response.

‘Please.’

‘She’s out.’

He can hear Helena’s breath catch on the edge of her words. ‘They told you not to speak to the police, did they?’

‘Are you involved?’ she says.

‘She’ll be all right. I have a feeling. They’re just using her to get to Guy.’ He looks down along his street. His curtains are drawn shut. He knows he left them open and his heart leaps. Then sinks. A bright light glows beyond the curtains. ‘I’m sure she’s fine.’ He walks slowly towards his flat, heavy footed.

‘Are you there?’ he says, stopping, listening hard. He is sure he can hear her breathing: slow, even.

‘You’re not always right, are you, Inspector?’

The light within his flat seems unnaturally bright – or is it simply that the storm’s black sky makes it seems so?

‘I have to go,’ he says, hanging up and putting his key in the door, urging himself to slow down but his head is pounding, hands shaking. He can’t make sense of what Helena Montefiore has said.

The lock slides across and he slowly presses open the door, goes into the communal hallway and leans back against the wall, cups his hands around his mouth and nose, taking back his own carbon dioxide.

Staffe eases the door shut. The hallway is dark but he doesn’t want to use the lights so he feels his way along, treading as lightly as he can. The closer he gets to his own oak door, the thinner the oxygen seems to be. He presses his ear to the oak, can hear something happening inside. He is sure there are low, measured voices. He can feel the rhythm of an earnest exchange. Or can he?

He uses his Yale key and eases open the door to his flat. A bright band of white light shows under the closed door to the lounge and he questions what his eyes tell him. The light seems ridiculously bright. He holds his breath, the better to hear what is going on inside. At least two people are talking: one man, one woman. Maybe more. Staffe feels his thigh vibrate. ‘Shit,’ he hisses under his breath. His phone is about to burst into ringtone and he fumbles it from his pocket, retreating towards his kitchen. As he goes, the sound from the lounge diminishes and he opens the door to the dark kitchen, goes inside quickly and closes it silently behind him, looking at the screen. Pulford is calling and he holds the handset tight to his ear, cups his hand around the mouthpiece, and whispers quickly, ‘I can’t talk.’ He wonders what the hell he can do now – trapped in his own home.

‘The website’s on the move,’ says Pulford. ‘It’s switched to indoors. There’s a body laid out on a table and a figure in a cloak – just like the Karl Colquhoun photograph.’

Staffe’s mind races. He wants to tell Pulford to get himself down to Gibbets Lane straight away and to alert Smethurst, but he daren’t say anything. Figuring whoever is in the lounge will hear anything he says, he stays quiet, nudges inch by inch, round the kitchen that is fed only by the storm’s dark twilight. He reaches for his knife block but it is empty. He opens the cutlery drawer, peers in. It is empty. ‘No knives,’ he says to himself. Someone has made it a safe house.

Pulford says, ‘I feel like I should go down there. Jesus! … What shall I do? Where are you?’

Staffe cups his hand back round the phone and whispers, ‘I can’t talk.’ A sound appears from somewhere in the flat. Low and human. He presses himself to the wall, behind the door.

‘I’m going down to meet Josie,’ says Pulford. ‘If you don’t want me to, don’t hang up. If you hang up, I’m going.’

Staffe closes his phone down and lets his arm drop to his side. All he can hear is the thud of his own pulse, the roar of his own tight breathing. He tries to fathom what to do for the best. He knows he cannot stay here, skulking in his own disarmed kitchen, waiting for the situation to come to him. So he steels himself, stands tall and opens the kitchen door, walks steadily towards the bright seam of light underlining the door to the lounge. It sounds as if the conversation is becoming more heated and he pauses with his palm wrapped on the brass handle.

He twists the handle and pushes, walks quickly into the room, his arms taut, flexing at the knees ready to swerve or rush his adversary, but he is blinded by a fierce light. The room is floodlit and Staffe has to blink his eyes open-and-shut to adjust. He squints and holds a hand up to shield the direct glare. His heart races to catch up and he suddenly feels weak, slightly absurd. All he can see, when he has adjusted to the glare sufficiently, is history repeating itself.

Strung up and gagged, Montefiore is lashed to a steel cross, a piece of wood jutting from the floor and his trousers ruched around his ankles – his legs bound up and tied to his chest like trussed fowl. His mouth is stuffed with gauze and his eyes bulge, pleadingly. His cheeks are streaked with dried blood, the shape of blades, like the last time.

Staffe wants to look away but he makes himself watch as fresh blood trickles from Montefiore’s eyes, down his face. He can’t help think that the man has had enough. He wants to die. They have finally got him to the point they wanted. A fate worse than death. Staffe turns quickly on his heel, checking behind him, but nobody is there.

On the floor, by the fireplace, his portable TV broadcasts an unravelling drama. These are the voices he heard earlier. He feels a fool. ‘Who’s here? Who did this!’ He strides to Montefiore, reaches up to untie the gauze and when he gets up close, he smells faeces. He looks down, sees it on his floor; sees also that the jutting wood is inside Montefiore – God knows how far.

Staffe can’t believe that he could have got in here so easily. This makes him afraid – as though anything might be possible. What else has he overlooked or underestimated? What horrors might simply lie outside of his own abilities? He can’t work out why Montefiore has been left like this, alone. Why do this? He weighs up the options, but he thinks he hears something shift, behind him. He freezes. Before Staffe can turn around, Guy Montefiore convulses. He open and closes his wild, bleeding eyes, and he shakes his head. Staffe’s heart sinks. Montefiore is trying to tell him something.

But Staffe knows already. He didn’t check the bedroom. He senses a presence behind him coming closer in the same instant that he hears the voice.

‘Don’t touch him. Don’t help him,’ says the voice.

Staffe recognises it immediately.

He turns, sees Johnson – as if he is seeing him for a first time, the fatigue replaced by a bright-eyed zeal. His sleeves are rolled up, as if he has been getting stuck into a job of work. He has thick forearms, big hands, dappled with freckles. Johnson puts on a pair of black sunglasses and smiles at Staffe, watching the light hurt his eyes.

‘Sergeant,’ says Staffe.

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ says Johnson.

‘You wanted me to, though. Didn’t you?’

Johnson shrugs. He reaches behind his back. He pulls out a short tubular length of steel from the back of his trousers. It gleams, looks freshly machined. Johnson lets the steel hang loosely, down by his side. He taps the side of his knee with it.

‘I said, you wanted me to catch up with you. Why the messages – on my car, in my flat.’

‘It wasn’t me, that’s for sure,’ he says. ‘Sounds more like Jessop.’

‘You were in it together.’