The Treatment

by Mo Hayder

  When she came back a few minutes later she was wearing his old toweling dressing gown. She had brushed her hair and was carrying a glass of vodka and a lighted cigarillo. She stood at the small bookshelf in the bedroom smoking and reading the titles calmly as if nothing odd had happened. He got up and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Look—last night—I—”

  “Don't worry about it.” She pulled away from him. “I'm going to bed now.”

  And that was it. He stood in the doorway, determined not to get angry as she put the cigarillo in the ashtray on the bedstand, crawled under the covers, levered her knees up and rested a book on them. Her tidy little face was illuminated from the bedside lamp. Serious and intent on the book as if he weren't there. He knew there were things he should say. Things he should be able to say. But he was tired and full of the images of Rory's autopsy and he knew this was a bad time for them to start talking. “Right.” He turned away and went straight into the back bedroom. This was the room he'd shared with Ewan as a child— Ewan's room, he called it now. He found his trainers and pulled on jogging pants and a T-shirt. Ducking briefly to check the lights at Penderecki's over the railway, that habit he knew he would never shake, he put a door key on a piece of tape around his neck, went downstairs and slammed the door. He hadn't said good-bye to Rebecca.

  As soon as he closed the front door she dropped the book on the floor and slumped down in the bed, staring at the ceiling. When the gate had closed and the street outside became quiet—only the occasional car going by, the headlights crossing the ceiling—she sat up, pulled the pillow from behind her head, lay back down on the bed and pressed the pillow across her face. Oh, God, Jack, this is so screwed up. Using the weight of her forearms she held the pillow down against her nose and mouth and began to scream.

  She screamed until her throat was sore and her head ached. Then she lay still with the pillow resting across her face, muffling her breathing. The moisture in her breath wet the cotton, but otherwise her face was dry—she hadn't cried.

  Running, which in his twenties had been a release of energy, in his thirties had become his way of letting his mind float free. It stopped his thoughts from battering themselves against the walls and tonight the release was instant. He knew exactly what the deal was: he wanted Rebecca to talk about what had happened, and in return she wanted him to turn his back on Ewan—in fact, she'd like him to leave the house. In this she was exactly like the others, but only in this. Where everything else was concerned Rebecca was utterly different—she held his attention more than any of the others, he loved her more, he fancied her more. Still, he didn't want to have to choose. He ran, trying not to think about it, the door key banging on his chest, wrapping itself around his mother's Saint Christopher, out through the bad estates of Brockley—resolute little Brock-ley—row upon row of artisans' cottages pecked at by Von Braun's Vergeltung doodlebugs. The view had changed since Ewan. Now Lewisham's neon monolith, the Citibank, the faulty C blinking and fizzing and popping like an ultraviolet flyswatter, filled the skyline. Around its feet, instead of wealthy city commuters, drug dealers bought the airy six-bedroom houses in the avenues near Hillyfields and sometimes shot one another in the dead of night.

  Caffery had bought the house he lived in from his parents in his early twenties. Once it had been called Serenity, but some wag in the sixties had got up a stepladder with a handful of quick-drying cement and changed it to Gethsemane. The first thing the Cafferys did was have the whole plaque chiseled out. “No need to bring agony here,” his mother said. “Anyone who lives in a house with that name is going to be cursed.” Her cure hadn't worked.

  He continued down the road, sweat darkening his T-shirt, taking a left at the end, and went on, past Nunhead cemetery, out onto the starlit Peckham Rye with its dark-moving lakes and open spaces. He wondered about Brockwell Park, about Rory's killer, about connections. Was there a pool of tricks and skewed thoughts that every pedophile in London came to drink in? He'd read once, years ago, about the world's largest organism: a fungus, it lived underground and covered almost forty acres of Michigan. Sometimes he imagined the pedophile network to be a little like that fungus: every one of them living invisibly under society—under our noses—every one of them connected on some fleshy outcrop to every other. Penderecki was an old man, spent, his days of boys and prison sentences over, but he was part of that network and Caffery could guarantee that the old man knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone else who knew Rory Peach's killer. The number of degrees of separation he could only guess at—but he sensed it wouldn't be many.

  He jogged back to Brockley, turning left across the railway bridge, letting his eyes skim along the tracks. The trees had still been in leaf when Ewan disappeared—it would have been easy, in the dead of night, to store a body in one of them, then take it down before the leaves fell. Not a good thing to think about. He crossed into Pen-derecki's road and jogged past the sunburst gates, the leaded stained-glass windows, the little enclosed porches with their wall baskets and shoes lined up in neat rows. The light was on in Penderecki's bathroom and Caffery paused—just for a moment—outside the house, looking up at that light with the fatal intensity of a moth. The frosted window made tinted diamonds of the light beyond, and it took him a moment to see that something was hanging just behind the glass—something long and colored, a paper lantern, perhaps, the sort you might see in a stu-dent's bed-sit. Not like Penderecki to decorate or to flaunt something. Unless there was a reason. You're probably meant to see it—it's the start of something new. New torment.

  He turned and began to retrace his footsteps back home, back to Gethsemane. There he took off his soaking shorts and T-shirt and stood in the shower, thinking of terraced houses and how claustrophobic they were and trying, above all, not to think about Rory, curled on the autopsy table. Then he lay next to Rebecca in the darkness, listening to her breathing.

  10

  July 21

  THE NEXT MORNING CAFFERY found Kryotos in tears in the incident-room kitchen. He pulled her face against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. She cried harder, her shoulders shaking. The only time he'd ever seen Kryotos cry had been at Paul Essex's funeral. It felt strangely intimate.

  “Don't let Danni see me, please.”

  “OK, OK, here.” He kicked the door closed, not letting go of her. “What is it, Marilyn? Is it the kids?”

  She shook her head and wiped her nose. “Danni just spoke to Quinn about …”

  “About what?” He stroked her hair. “She spoke to Quinn about what?”

  “The PM on Rory Peach.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her face. “The photos are on your desk. Quinn wants all these tests—she wants you to call.”

  “What's upset you?”

  “They think he was alive—in the tree. They think he was alive for two days up there. He tried to get out of the ropes—” She tore off a piece of paper towel and balled it up against her eyes. “I know it's stupid—I just can't help thinking about him fighting, just skinny little arms but he still fought.”

  Caffery stroked her hair and stared at the ceiling. He'd known, of course. He'd known it when Krishnamurthi had been unable to uncoil the small body. When he'd massaged the feet to see if he could flex them. When there was no scent of death. Had Rory been dead long enough for the rigor to have died away, he would have already been unidentifiable in this weather. As it was the boy had been smooth and perfect. The rigor hadn't even had time to reach his feet, he was so newly dead.

  “Here.” He pulled her against his chest. He could feel her warm breasts under the neat white blouse. He'd never been this close to Marilyn before—she smelled like a woman, of shampoo and baking and lipstick, and she smelled utterly different from Rebecca. He thought about last night, about Rebecca calmly leaving him in the bedroom, about him lying uselessly on the bed, and, as if she sensed the shift, as if she was suddenly self-conscious about their closeness, Marilyn, with her face against his shirt, became still. She s
topped shaking and breathed through her mouth. When she pulled away the tears had gone but she was red in the face and wouldn't meet his eyes. She went to sit at the computer terminal and as Caffery walked to the SIOs' room he noticed that the back of her neck was flushed.

  In the SIOs' room, Souness, looking fresh in a Marks & Spencer's man's suit over a lilac shirt, was standing at the desk staring out the window. She didn't speak when Caffery came in, just nodded at the blue and white Met Police Photographic Branch envelope on the desk. He put down his coffee, shook out the photos taken in the blue ALS light and called Fiona Quinn.

  “How much do you know?” Quinn asked.

  “I guessed the worst yesterday,” he said. “I guessed it took him some time to die.”

  “Krishnamurthi asked us if we could smell peardrops or nail varnish when he opened the body, yes?”

  “Yeah—acetone.”

  “Ketosis.” At the other end of the line Quinn shuffled some papers. “He was beginning to starve—his body was breaking down its fat, putting fatty acids into his bloodstream.”

  “And that killed him?” he said cautiously.

  “No—no, it takes a long time to starve to death. We're doing Shear rate tests and hematocrits—doesn't mean much to you, but his blood had got thicker. Remember Hippocratic facies?”

  “Yup.”

  “That's the look you get from severe dehydration. He, well, look, it's hard. He died of thirst.”

  Oh, Christ— Caffery sat down at his desk. Oh, Christ, oh, Christ, oh, Christ— it was true, then. He thought about what it must have been like up there for Rory, not knowing if he was going to be rescued—maybe even hearing the helicopter, the voices of the search team, unable to cry out.

  “I was surprised he lasted as long as he did,” Quinn said, “but Krishnamurthi reckons it can take quite a long time—the longest he'd heard of was a hospice death which took fifteen days—but at the other end it can take only hours, depending on the circumstance. You've only to drop about a fifth of your weight in fluids.”

  “What about kids?”

  “Exactly—with kids it's more serious. They need more water for their weight than adults—plus Rory struggled through two hot days and really increased his use of water. You might ask yourself whether the killer gave him some water in those three days in the house. Maybe it's in Alek's statement?”

  “No—nothing in the statement.” Caffery fiddled with a paper clip. Souness was standing with her hands on the desk, still staring out the window, and he realized she'd already heard everything Quinn was saying. “Right,” he said, trying to crank his thoughts forward. “Those bites? Do we know when they were inflicted?”

  “Yeah, pretty late—probably about the time that he was taken from the house. That's where the blood on the skirting board and his trainer came from.”

  “So he was put up the tree and left.”

  “That's what it looks like.”

  “No one came back to him?”

  “Don't appear to have.”

  “Anything we can run for DNA?”

  “Yes—you've got the photos, haven't you? You can see the toluidine blue that Krishnamurthi used—there was penetration, or an attempt at penetration and we got a sample we can use.”

  Right. Caffery put a hand on his forehead. Right. OK, it's definitely a sicko you're dealing with—you knew that anyway so it doesn't have to poleax you. He glanced at Souness. She was still staring out the window, so he found a pen and took a deep breath. “Good, that's, uh, right, good, we'll get some DNA?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Well …” She was cautious. “Rory was alive, see, and his body might have already broken down a lot of the sample.”

  “That's OK—do it anyway.” He started to jot down details of the conversation. “And I don't want to wait two weeks for a slot like I did last time.”

  “If you get it premiumed it'll be faster.”

  “Ahem, Fiona, that was premiumed.”

  “God, I'm sorry. I can't always dictate what the lab'll do.”

  “Don't worry. I'll get the governor to rattle a few cages.”

  Even before Rory Peach the team had been at a low. Funds were constantly challenged, they were all overworked, there were eight “critical” racial harassment incidents outstanding: a four-year-old serial rape case, and the tyings up and collation of disclosure on five drug shootings on their patch. Morale was low, and it was reflected in the tired way they dragged through the routine jobs: in the house-to-house inquiries, DC Logan had only managed three houses in an entire day, and Caffery knew that with Kry-otos's workload none of the results would make it onto the HOLMES database. But they had to present a different face to the world.

  At the press conference that morning Souness asked the assembled journalists and TV reporters to observe a minute's silence for Rory Peach. The country was gripped: the News of the World pawed the ground in the wings, gearing up for a new name-and-shame campaign. As if in divine judgment of the engine she had set rumbling, on Souness's way back to the incident room, sitting at traffic lights in the red BMW, the skies over South London cracked open and dropped hundreds of gallons of rainwater into the streets in minutes. A proper summer cloudburst: the streets looked as if they might be washed away.

  At Shrivemoor Caffery was sitting at an open window watching the rain. He could smell earth and thought he wouldn't have blinked if an uprooted palm had floated along in the gutter in the street below. He closed the window and sat back at his desk, watching Kryotos through the open door. She had recovered and was bashing away at the HOLMES database. The tears in the kitchen had been a shock: he'd never known Kryotos to lose perspective before. He'd always been a little envious of her— wondering why he couldn't keep a distance like that. Suddenly, as if she could sense him watching her, Kryotos looked up. Their eyes met but this time she didn't look away embarrassed. Instead she seemed confused—as if Caffery's thoughts were strung out in a long banner above his head and she was reading them. She frowned, perplexed, and Caffery, uncomfortable with the sense that his naked brain was being watched, gave her a brief, efficient smile. He leaned over, kicked the door closed and went back to studying the ALS photos of Rory's neck.

  “We've got to be positive.” When Souness got back from the press conference she seemed to be making an effort to be practical. She brought through coffee and some of Kry-otos's sticky, flaky pastries in a tin and shook the rain off her jacket, draping it on the back of her chair. “In the plus column, at least finding Rory means we've got some forensics. We've got those white fibers and as soon as Quinny's got us some DNA, we can think about doing a mass screening.”

  “And what are your parameters going to be? Every white nonce in Brixton over five eleven?”

  “I've got to show them something—we're three days and closing on the area interim report—” She stopped. “OK, Jack. Ye've got that look on your face again. Come on, what's on your mind?”

  He shrugged. “He's going to do it again. Soon.”

  “Ah, I wondered when this was going to start! My profiling baby getting out of his wee pram.”

  “Only this time he'll make sure he doesn't get disturbed and he'll complete his fantasy—whatever that was. It's a progression and he won't stop at the Peaches. He's juicing himself up for something more. I think he's probably chosen his next victims already.”

  “Oh, aye?” Souness pulled the chair back and sat down, folding her arms. “And where's all this coming from, if it's not a rude question?”

  “We've got an ex-con.”

  “Oh, we have, have we?”

  “Yes. He's got form and he's done time for it. Probably for the same thing or something similar.” He took off his glasses. “I've told Marilyn to go into that Quest Search database and put any noncustodial sentences on the back burner.”

  “Are ye going to explain?”

  He pushed the photos toward her. “See?” No one had seen it or mentioned it in the
morgue, and yet photographed under the blue alternative light source it was clear what had made the marks on Rory's neck. “See these?” Souness nodded. “Can you see these underlying marks? Here and here?”

  “Aye, I can.”

  “Well?”

  Souness tipped her chair forward and was silent for a moment, squinting at the photos with her head on one side. Her eyes moved rapidly across the odd marks, trying to shape them into something recognizable. When it came to her she dropped the chair back with a thud. “Jesus—of course, of course.”

  Roland Klare, who, like most Brixton residents, had been following the Donegal Crescent case on the television, now very much wanted to see the photographs that were stuck inside the Pentax. There was no question of taking the film to a chemist, even if he could get it out of the camera. But there was an alternative. When he got home that afternoon he consulted his notebook.

  Yes! He'd been right. He'd been sure it was somewhere in the flat. He went into the bedroom and began pulling things aside.

  Within an hour he had found it. It had been stored in a box of old Ladybird books: a large, slightly battered paperback, Build Your Own Darkroom AT HOME! On the cover there was a picture of a man in a white coat holding a piece of photographic paper by the corner, swilling it in a tank. Klare had discovered the book years ago on the platform at Loughborough Junction. Pleased with himself, he took it into the kitchen and wiped it clean, then made himself a drink and went into the living room. Outside it was dark and light at once: big clouds curled up from the distant horizon and shuffled across the sky, shooting sunlight down one moment, tipping out rain the next, but Roland Klare didn't notice. He got a pen and paper and settled on the sofa, his back to the window, and began to read.

  11

  IT WAS EVENING WHEN CAFFERY found the time to visit DI Durham. He pointed the car against the rush, up over Beulah Hill where the drives were graveled, the roads were wide as French boulevards, and horse chestnuts dropped red sap onto the pavements. In Norwood the buildings were a pace nearer the road, and by Brixton Water Lane the city had thoroughly meshed itself around him.