The Treatment

by Mo Hayder

  Someone in the dark cockpit whistled. “It's bigger than I thought.”

  The three men peered dubiously down at the vast expanse of black. This unlit stretch of wood and grass in the middle of the blazing city seemed to go on forever—as if they'd left London behind and were flying over an empty ocean. Ahead, in the distance, the lights of Tulse Hill marked the farthest borders of the park, twinkling in a tiny string on the horizon.

  “Jesus.” In the little dark cockpit, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, the air observer shifted uncomfortably. “How we going to do this?”

  “We'll do it.” The commander checked the radio frequency card in the plastic leg pocket of his flying suit, adjusted the headset and spoke above the rotor noise to Brixton Divisional Control. “Lima Delta from India ninenine.”

  “Good evening, India nine-nine. We've got a helicopter over us—is that you?”

  “Roger. Request talk through with search unit on this code twenty-five.”

  “Roger. Use MPS 6—go ahead, India nine-nine.”

  The next voice the commander heard was DI Caffery's. “Hi there, nine-nine. We can see you. Thanks for coming.”

  The air observer leaned over the thermal imaging screen. It was a bad night for it—the trapped heat was pushing the equipment to its limits, making everything on the screen the same uniform milky gray. Then he saw, in the top left-hand corner, a luminous white figure holding up its hand into the night. “OK, yes. I've got him.”

  “Yeah, hello there, ground units,” the commander said into his mike. “You're more than welcome. We've got eyeball with you too.”

  The observer toggled the camera and now he could see them all, the ground units, glimmering forms strung out around the perimeter of the trees. It looked like almost forty officers down there. “Jeez, they've got it well contained.”

  “You've got it well contained,” the commander told DI Caffery.

  “I know. Nothing's getting out of here tonight. Not without us knowing.”

  “It's a large area and there's wildlife in there too, but we'll do our best.”

  “Thank you.”

  The tactical commander leaned into the front of the cockpit and held up his thumb. “OK, lads, let's do it.”

  The pilot put the Squirrel into a right-hand orbit above the southern quarter of the park. About half a mile to the west they could see the chalky smudge of the dried-out boating lake, and from among the trees the basalt glitter of the other four lakes. They took the park in zones, moving in concentric circles five hundred feet in the air. The air observer, hunched over his screen, steeled against the deafening roar of the rotors, could see no hot spots. He toggled the controls on his laptop. The ground crews had been easy, hot and moving and outside the trees, but tonight the thermal return was as poor as it got and anything could be hiding under that summer-leaf canopy. The equipment was virtually blind. “We'll be lucky,” he murmured to the commander, as they moved on through the rest of the park. “Peeing in the wind.” Peeing, not pissing, careful what he said—everything up here was recorded for evidence. “Peeing in the wind is what we're doing.”

  On the ground, next to the TSG's Sherpa van, Caffery stood with Souness and stared up at the helicopter lights. He was relying on the air unit to crack this—to find Rory Peach. It was an hour now since the alarm had been raised. It had been the Gujarati shopkeeper who had dialed 999.

  Most of the Peaches' dole money went on Carmel's Superkings—by the weekend the money had run out and there was usually a tab to be settled at the corner shop. This weekend nobody had paid off the bill so on Monday evening the shopkeeper went down Donegal Crescent to demand his money. It wasn't the first time, he'd told Caffery, and no, he wasn't afraid of Alek Peach, but he had taken the Alsatian with him anyway, and at 7:00 P.M. had rung the Peaches' doorbell. No reply. He knocked loudly but still there was no reply. Reluctantly he continued into the park with the dog.

  They walked along the back gardens of Donegal Crescent and were some distance into the park when the Alsatian turned suddenly and began to bark in the direction of the houses. The shopkeeper turned. He thought, although he wouldn't swear to it, he thought he saw something running there. Shadowy and wide-beamed. Moving rapidly away from the back of the Peaches' house. His first impression was that it was an animal, because of how furiously and nervously the Alsatian was barking, straining at the lead, but the shadow had disappeared quickly into the woods. Curious now, he dragged the reluctant dog back to number thirty and peered through the letter box.

  This time he knew something was wrong. There was junk mail scattered on the hallway floor and a message, or part of a message, had been spray-painted in red on the staircase wall.

  “Jack?” Souness said over the roar of the helicopter above. “What're ye thinking?”

  “That he has to be in there somewhere,” he yelled, jabbing his finger at the park. “He's in there.”

  “How do you know he didn't come out again?”

  “No.” He cupped his hand around his mouth and leaned into her. “If he did come out I can promise you someone's going to remember. All the park exits lead into main streets. The little boy's bleeding, probably terrified—”

  “WHAT?”

  “I SAID HE'S NAKED AND BLEEDING. I THINK SOMEONE WOULD PICK UP THE PHONE FOR THAT, DON'T YOU? EVEN IN BRIXTON.”

  He looked up at the helicopter. He had another good reason to think that Rory was in the park—he knew the statistics on child abduction: most studies would predict that if Rory wasn't alive he would probably be found within five miles of the abduction site, less than fifty yards from a footpath. Other worldwide stats would tell a more chilling story: they'd predict that Rory wouldn't be killed immediately, that his kidnapper would probably keep him alive for anything up to twenty-four hours. They'd say that the motive in an abduction of a boy within Rory's age range would probably be sex. They'd say that the sex would probably be sadistic. If Caffery had more than a passing knowledge of the habits and life cycle of the pedophile there was a simple reason: he could reach back twenty-seven years into his own past and find a mirror image of this in another disappearance. His own brother, Ewan—the same age as Rory—had been sucked out of the middle of a normal day. From the back of the family house. Rory could be Ewan all over again. Caffery knew he should say something about it to Souness, he should take her aside right now and tell her, “Maybe you should cut me out of this—give it to Logan or someone—because I don't know how I'm going to react.”

  “WHAT IF THEY DON'T FIND ANYTHING?”

  Souness yelled.

  “DON'T WORRY. THEY'LL FIND SOMETHING.”

  He lifted the radio and switched on to the helicopter com-mander's channel. “Nine-nine.” He lowered his voice. “Anything happening up there?”

  Five hundred feet overhead, in the dark cockpit, the commander moved as far forward as the coms lead, which tethered him like an umbilicus to the roof of the helicopter, would allow. “Hey, Howie? They want to know how we're doing, Howie.” He couldn't see the air observer's face, hunched over as he was, his attention on the screen, the helmet obscuring his eyes.

  “I'm struggling. Looks like an effing snowfield. Unless it moves it just blends in. Has to pretty much stand up and wave at me.” He tried switching so that heat showed black on his screen. He tried red, he tried blue; sometimes a different color helped, but tonight the thermal washout was beating him. “Can you give us some more right-hand orbits?”

  “Rog.” The pilot nosed the helicopter over, turning in circles, both he and the commander looking out the righthand side of the craft at the dense forest below. The air observer narrowed his eyes on the screen. He moved the laptop joystick and under the cockpit, in the sensor pod, the gyroscopically mounted camera, deathly stable, rotated its cool eye across the park.

  “What you got?”

  “I dunno. There's something at about ten o'clock but …” Without depth perception it was difficult to tell what he was seeing on t
he screen, and every time they got near, the helicopter made the leaf cover shift. He thought he had seen an odd, doughnut-shaped light source, about the size of a car tire. But then the leaf cover shifted again and now he thought he'd dreamed it. “Scheisse.” He leaned intently over the screen, moving his head from side to side, flicking the screen from wide field to narrow and back again. “Yeah, maybe get them to have a look at that.” He tapped the screen. “Can you see it?”

  The commander leaned forward and looked at the screen. He couldn't see what the observer was talking about but he sat back and tuned the radio control into DI Caffery's loop. “Ground unit from nine-nine.”

  “Yeah, have you got anything?”

  “We think we might've got a heat source but we can't quite confirm. Do you want to have a look at it?”

  “Will do.”

  “Right, well, there's a pool, or a paddling pool or something …”

  “The boating lake?”

  “The boating lake—and the forest starts, I dunno, two hundred meters away?”

  “Yup—sounds about right.”

  The commander leaned forward and looked to where the observer held his finger over the screen. “If you could start at that edge of the forest and move in about a hundred yards …”

  “Rog. Got you.”

  The commander held his hand flat, instructing the pilot to hover, and the three crew members sat forward, not speaking, only the sound of their breathing in the headsets as they watched the glimmering forms of the TSG, the Territorial Support Group, streaming across the screen in the direction of the heat source.

  “Right,” the commander muttered. “Let's give them some help, shall we?” He threw a switch and powered up the Night Sun—the gargantuan spotlight dangling from the helicopter's belly. Thirty million candlepower—it could burn through concrete at close range: the ground units followed it like the nativity star, yomping toward it through the trees. But on the screen the observer had lost the glowing, ring-shaped heat source and now he was starting to wonder if he'd imagined it.

  “Howie?” the commander said from behind. “Are we in the right place?”

  The observer didn't reply. He sat hunched forward, trying to relocate the source.

  “Howie?”

  “Yeah—I think, but I—”

  “Nine-nine from ground units.” Caffery came through on the radio. “We're drawing a blank down here. Can you help us out?”

  “Howie?”

  “I dunno—I dunno. There was something.” He threw the screen into narrow field once more and shook his head. The noise of the engines and the rotor blades, the heat and the smells were oppressive tonight, and he was having trouble concentrating. On the ground the TSG officers stood looking up at the helicopter, arms open. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. “Howie, you sodding idiot.” He was going to have to back down. “I—look—I don't know—”

  “OK, OK.” The commander was getting impatient. “How are we for fuel?”

  The pilot shook his head. “About twenty-five percent.”

  He whistled. “So we need to be going somewhere in about, what? Twenty minutes. Howie? What are we thinking?”

  “Look, I—nothing. I imagined it. Nothing.”

  The commander sighed. “OK, I've got you.” He switched to the CAD controller's frequency. “India Lima, we're low on fuel so we're going to slip into Fairoaks for a slurp. I think we've got a no-trace. Haven't we, Howie? Got a clear?”

  “Yeah.” He ran a finger under his chin strap, uncomfortable. “I guess so. A no-trace. I guess.”

  “Nine-nine to ground units, if you're clear down there so are we.”

  “You sure?” DI Caffery sounded tense. “You sure we're in the right place?”

  “Yeah, you're in the right place but we've lost the source. It's a hot night—we're fighting interference up here.”

  “Rog, if you're sure. Thanks for trying.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It's OK. Good evening to you all.”

  The commander could see Caffery on the screen, waving. He adjusted his headset and switched back to the CAD controller. “That's a no-trace in the open, so we're complete on scene at grid ref TQ3427445, now routing to India Foxtrot.” He noted the time on his assignment log and the helicopter banked away into the night.

  On the ground below Caffery watched the helicopter disappear across the rooftops, until its light was scarcely bigger than a satellite.

  “You know what it means, don't you?”

  “No,” Souness admitted. “No, I don't.”

  It was late. The TSG had zoned off the area where the air observer had imagined a heat source, got down on their hands and knees and covered every square inch of it. Still no Rory Peach. Eventually they'd stopped, and Caffery and Souness had finalized arrangements for a specialized search team to come in the next day: a Police Search Advisory team would start at first light in Brockwell Park. There was still an emergency team briefing to get through and search parameters to establish before the night was out and so, at 11 P.M., they drove back to AMIT headquarters in Thornton Heath. Caffery parked the car and swung the door open. “If he's in the park and they can't see him then he's not much of a heat source and he's not moving.” In spite of what it meant professionally, part of him secretly hoped, for the boy's sake, that he was already dead. There are some things, he believed, not worth surviving. “Maybe we're too late already.”

  “Unless,” Souness climbed wearily from the car and together they crossed the road, “he's not in the park.”

  “Oh, he's in the park. I promise you he's in the park.” Caffery swiped his pass card and held the door for Souness. “It's just a question of where.”

  “Shrivemoor” was how most officers referred to this old red-brick building, after the unexciting residential street in which it stood. AMIT's offices were housed on the second floor. Tonight lights were on in all the windows. Most of the team had arrived, called away from dinner parties, pubs, babysitting duty. The HOLMES database operators, the five members of the intelligence cell, seven investigating officers, they were all here, wandering between the desks, drinking coffee, murmuring to one another. In the kitchen three embarrassed-looking paramedics in white-hooded forensic suits—nonce suits, the team called them—waited while the exhibits officer photocopied their boot soles and used low-tack tape to lift hairs and fibers from their clothing.

  While Souness made strong coffee, Caffery put his face under the tap to wake himself up and quickly checked his in tray. Among the circulars, the memos, the postmortem reports, someone had left this week's copy of Time Out. It was folded open at a page titled “The Artists Who Turn Crime into Art.” A photograph of Rebecca—eyes closed, head tilted back, a prison number painted on the center of her forehead where a bindi spot would go.

  Rebecca Morant, tabloid totty or the genuine

  article? You have to be a long way out of the loop

  not to have heard of Morant, sex-assault victim

  turned art-world darling. Suspiciously beautiful, the

  critics found it difficult to take lynx-eyed Morant

  seriously, until a nomination for the ultracool

  Vincent award and a shortlisting by Becks confirmed

  her as a key player in the post YBA pack.…

  Caffery closed the magazine and placed it facedown in the in tray. How much more publicity do you need, Becky?

  “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 SIOs'.” Holding the videotape above his head he started toward 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 officers' 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 ev
eryone 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. SPECRIMs 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 pedophile 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 sicko who's trying to throw up a smoke screen, 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 at 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.