The Treatment

by Mo Hayder

  She sat back in her chair and stared around herself. The shutters were open—flat white oblongs of light lay on the polished oak floors—and along the right-hand wall her sculptures were lined up on a trestle table, ready to be taken to the gallery next month. Like little men, or little towers. Ridiculous. Jack's right—they're ridiculous. On the left, stacked against the wall, her old paintings, the ones Jack liked, done before the attack. The artwork seemed to have come from two different places, two different mothers. On the left the old. On the right the new. And between them, poking out of the ceiling in the center of the room, glinting slyly and scattering a secretive glitter on the walls, a butcher's hook.

  Rebecca had got up onto a stool and screwed it into the plaster the morning after Jack turned on her in Tesco's. Of course it wouldn't take any weight—certainly not the weight of a body—but she wanted it there: she thought it might help kick over the blank in her time line. But so far it hadn't worked. So far the blank was still there—an absence, a space—a space with shape and weight and texture and it was directly here, under the hook, between the old paintings and the new. The attack. “How did you get from there to—” She clenched the cigarillo between her teeth and reached her arms up above her, trying to make a bridge, an electric charge to leap between the two. “From there to there.” She tried to picture Malcolm Bliss—she must have been in the room with him in that little bungalow … and Joni must have been there too—but it felt like forcing a tired muscle, like trying to push her thoughts through a needle eye, and suddenly instead of Bliss she saw Dali's spindle-legged camels, the image of the bungalow slipped out of reach and she was left again with just the hook in the ceiling and nothing else.

  Shit shit shit.

  She pinched out the cigarillo and stood up. Her memory wouldn't make the jump here and now, so there was absolutely no reason to think it might when she and Jack were in bed. She was being ridiculous—ridiculous and childish. She ought to just toughen up. She pushed her hair off her face and tied it in a knot at the back of her neck. She was going to go over to Jack's tonight and they were going to start all over again.

  14

  THE BARRACUDAS—THE TEN-YEAR-OLDS, just the age they started to be trouble—were showing off. They made Fish Gummer uncomfortable.

  “Can we do a trick now?”

  “Yeah, let's do that trick thing.”

  “No, no.” He checked the big clock at the far end of the steamy pool. “I think we're finished now—it's gone half past.”

  “Yeah, let's do it.” A muscular Nigerian girl in a lemonyellow swimsuit was jumping up and down excitedly. “Let's do that thing where we swim through your legs.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “The other teachers let us do it.”

  “I don't care.”

  “You get in the pool and we swim through your legs—”

  “Underwater—”

  “Yeah—like mermaids—”

  “No, I don't think so.”

  Two of them slithered toward him at the edge of the pool, their wet, glowing little faces smiling up at him. “We hold our breath like this.” A head disappeared under the water.

  “Yes yes yes!” a girl in pink squealed, throwing an exuberant backward roll in the water.

  “No!” He was getting anxious. The two had neared the pool edge and were giggling uncontrollably.

  “That's it,” giggled a third. “We all hold our breath.” She pinched her nose and disappeared into the water.

  “And you put your legs open—and we swim through them—”

  Now he saw a little hand come out of the water, groping for his ankle. “No!” He wrenched his foot away and fumbled for the whistle on the tape around his neck, his face rigid with fear. “Just stop!” he said. “I said no. Absolutely not.” The hand subsided and all the children flicked up their legs like dolphins and came to the surface, spluttering and shocked. They stared at him in stunned silence, getting their breath back, not knowing how to react.

  Then, suddenly, at the back of the group, the Nigerian girl clamped her hand over her mouth and began to snicker. It spread quickly and soon they were all laughing. All of them looking at him and giggling. He wanted to turn and run into the changing room. They had discovered how to upset him, and he knew it wouldn't end here.

  By the end of the day nothing was moving. The teams came back in dribs and drabs, dropping the completed Actions forms into Kryotos's tray. They'd give verbal reports at the day's meeting, but Caffery, sitting in the SIOs' room watching them through the glass, already knew from their faces that no one had any new leads. He sighed and sat back, lighting another cigarette. His stomach was tight— he hadn't eaten—and the day had been long and exhausting and dry.

  Champ's nickname for his attacker had passed into the local folklore, but none of the children could give the police more than the myth, nothing concrete. Caffery had Brixton send the photographs of Champ Keoduangdy's bite over to King's, hoping Ndizeye, the forensic odontologist, could establish if the person who had bitten Champ in the boating lake more than twelve years ago was the same person who had inflicted the mark on Rory Peach. Ndizeye had completed Rory's casts—“An adult-sized arch and the incisors look smooth, so he's over twenty.

  Great clear casts. Teeth can be as individual as DNA, you know.” But, no matter how individual the teeth were, Caffery knew that what they really needed was some DNA. And then at four-thirty Kryotos came in with a smile on her face. “Fiona Quinn on the line,” she said, jabbing her finger at the phone. “The DNA's back.”

  He snatched up the phone and stood looking out the window. “Fiona.” He desperately needed to hear what she had to say. He wondered how his voice sounded. “How are you?”

  “I'm OK, Jack, but I've got bad news. It's come back no profile.”

  “No profile?”

  “No profile.”

  “Shit.” He sat down again, deflated.

  “But, Jack, at least eighty percent of our samples come back this way, no or partial profile. It's really fragile, DNA.”

  “I know—you told me that already. I just thought …” He sighed. Without DNA they couldn't start a mass screening—all they had to work with were Ndizeye's casts. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Haven't we got anything else to go on?”

  “Well, I've had a look at the corner of the room Alek Peach was talking about in his statement.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “The white fibers—from Rory's wounds?”

  “Nothing yet. But that'll come. And we're still looking at his shoe, trying to see if there's anything on that. Then there's the stuff the biologists sprayed on the wall, the nin-hydrin—in a couple of days we'll see how that's devel-oped—but with the witness statements you got we're groping in the dark, to be honest. And even if his prints are all over the place there's no guarantee the ninhydrin will pick it up. Keep your fingers crossed the offender's not a vegetarian—if he doesn't eat meat we'll get diddly.”

  “OK, OK.” He closed his eyes. His head was beginning to hurt, as if he'd come off a drinking spree. “And absolutely nothing you can do with that DNA?”

  “Um—I'm not sure.”

  He opened his eyes. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I can't say for sure.”

  “Jesus.” He whistled between his teeth. “I don't believe this.” In the incident room Souness and Paulina had come back. He could see Paulina's right foot where she was sitting, dangling in midair, with its expensive sandal and nails painted in shell pink, tapping in a lazy rhythm. He turned away.

  “Listen,” he said to Quinn, “it's two days since the postmortem and now you turn round and tell me you can't—”

  “There's no need to—”

  “It's a good job we haven't got someone sitting here under arrest or we'd look a right bunch of tits.”

  “You're not listening.”

  “I paid to have it fucking premiumed. If you think that means I was prepared to sit around f
or days and then get a phone call saying we might do it, we might not, we might just sit here and file our nails—”

  “Jack—”

  “—then I wouldn't have bothered to pay through the nose. This fucking SGM plus stuff you're all crowing about, two K a pop—why don't you just admit it's a great, infested, steaming pile of—”

  “Mr. Caffery!”

  “Wha-at?”

  They both stopped. Caffery locked his mouth and tapped his foot on the floor. He could almost see the pair of them, pawing the ground, red-eyed, snorting across London at each other. He knew he'd raised his voice, he sensed Kryotos watching him from the incident room, and suddenly he saw himself through her eyes—volatile, unreasonable, sliding at a hundred miles an hour. He took a deep breath, leaned back, rapped on the desk with his knuckles and said: “Yes. Look, I'm sorry. What?”

  “Have you heard of LCN? Low count number?”

  “No.”

  “It can multiply the sample thirty-four times. It's only approved for major crime—”

  “Then do it. You've got our lab cost code—it should have already been started.”

  “That's what I was trying to say. It has been. It's already been started.”

  The envelope was on the doormat when he came in. The conversation with Fiona Quinn had finished him for the day. He had lost his temper with her—you just can't help proving Rebecca right, can you?—so he'd left Shrivemoor early, knowing he should just go home and sleep. He drove to Sainsbury's, where he bought four bottles of Pinot Grigio on sale, a bottle of Laphroaig, a carton of Coke bottles, milk and some Nurofen. Just before he left the shop he saw a bunch of sage-green leaves mixed with peonies. He hesitated then bought two bunches, for Rebecca.

  Now he picked up the letter and took it into the kitchen. He put it on the table, then stood for a moment and stared at it. It had a second-class stamp on it. It had been posted on Wednesday afternoon and was from Pen-derecki—he could tell from the writing. Maybe posting this had been the last thing he had ever done. Caffery emptied the carrier bags, stopping from time to time to go back to the table and look at the envelope. He carefully put one bottle of the wine in the freezer, another in the fridge, looked through the cupboards for a vase, and when he couldn't find one took a plastic lemonade bottle from the bin, cut off the top, peeled away the label and filled it with water. He put the flowers in it, rested it on the window ledge in the living room, rolled himself a spliff using the sensi that Rebecca kept in an Oxo tin, and then, when he could bear it no longer, he lit the joint, sat down at the table and opened the envelope.

  It contained just one sheet of paper. There was no need for a note or explanation. The single sheet of paper told him everything he needed to know. It was a map.

  15

  IT TOOK HIM ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES to understand exactly what the map represented. He sat at the kitchen table, next to the open window, turning the paper over and over in his hands, holding it up to the light. The little rectangle represented a building—“cottage” written next to it in Penderecki's distinctive hand. Caffery knew the slang for a public toilet—but the odd ladder rungs lying next to it? Steps? He turned the paper through ninety degrees, laying the ladder on its side. It was broken halfway along—a double-headed arrow joined the separated rungs, and above the arrow Penderecki had scratched: “10-140.” The rungs to the right of the arrow were numbered: 141, 142, 143, 144, 145. Caffery ran his fingers over the paper. Above rung number 145 was another arrow, annotated with the number 5, at its head an X, circled twice. He turned it through forty-five degrees, twisted it on its side and suddenly the meaning was blazing out at him. Oh, fuck, of course. Of course. He sat up, his heart pumping. The railway line—Penderecki's natural warren, he used it to come and go: he was as at home down there as the rats and the foxes. The lines on the map were sleepers. And if these lines represented the railway sleepers, then the rectangular box probably represented—oh, shit, yes—the unused public toilets just up the road from Brockley station? The X was one hundred and forty-five railway sleepers past the station.

  “X marks the spot,” he muttered, stubbing out the spliff. Penderecki could still jerk his strings—even past life he had the power. He found tools in the cupboard, a small camera in Ewan's room, and took the back-door key from above the lintel. “This had better not be a dead end, you old fucker. You old fucker.”

  The sun was sinking low over the roofs, and in the back gardens along the rail cutting children shrieked, hung on jungle gyms, chased one another in circles. Caffery used a fox track—two yards into the undergrowth, parallel to the railway—moving carefully, quietly, his head down: the Transport Police, who resented the “real” police, would be in hog heaven to find one of his kind wandering down the track. It was oddly silent down here. A sort of muffled, suspended silence. Occasionally the rails would hum and a train would race past, making the air thunder, and for a moment the cutting would hold its breath. But then the train would pass and the stillness would descend again, grass pollen floating to earth like duck down.

  He couldn't help thinking about Ewan as he walked along here, with the smell of the tracks after a day in the sun. Metal and hot black engine oil. He thought of the two of them, racing up and down the cutting, playing cowboys and Indians, setting traps for each other. Ewan—oh, Jesus. He rubbed the sweat off his face with his T-shirt—he didn't want to imagine what he might find down the track. He reached the public toilets—their graffitied backs staring out blankly over the track (Tracii sucks cock—Shaz sucks pussy), tiny windows, like gun slots in a pillbox, smashed and plugged with chipboard. Checking the map he positioned himself with New Cross behind him, Honour Oak ahead, and began to count along the sleepers.

  Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—

  Stepping over dead rats, dried toilet paper, sunbleached Coke cans.

  Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two—this had better not be a wind-up.

  Outside Brockley station the land on either side of the railway lost its undergrowth and lay as flat as an alluvial plain, dusted with thistle and dock leaves, until about ten feet away from the railway line, where the banks rightangled abruptly upward in great walls of vegetation, so deep and entwined that anything could live in there—ca-puchin monkeys, maybe, chattering and swinging on vines. Up ahead a footbridge, remote and spindly, like a bridge slung over a jungle gorge.

  One hundred and forty-three, one hundred and fortyfour, one hundred and forty—

  The hundred and forty-fifth sleeper. He stopped. Dropped the hammer and stood, feet straddling the sleeper, facing at right angles away from the line, in the direction of the arrow on the map. Immediately he could see that someone had been here before. Someone had walked back and forward in a straight line between this sleeper and the foot of the bank—under tender new ivy shoots the vegetation was dead and trampled. Just do it, don't stop to think. He went to the bank and began tugging at the woodbine, tearing open a hole large enough to get into. He ducked inside.

  It smelled of stinging nettles and dandelion, of fox dirt and oil, and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light. He stopped, wiping the sweat from his face, getting his bearings, and now he found he could straighten up in here. Someone had cleared a dome shape in the hanging undergrowth—in front of him was the bank, behind him curtains of ivy and bramble. And down here? Down on the ground? He crouched and found dried stems and root matter. He tore at it, tugging the meshwork away.

  In spite of what he'd expected, in spite of the fact that he was prepared, when he saw what was under the roots his heart began to race. He didn't really believe what he was seeing. A small circle of ground, about two feet by three, had been disturbed within the year. Few plants had taken root there.

  He sat down next to the circle, next to the turfed-over clumps of brown Eocene London clay, rested his hands on his ankles and began to shake.

  “You can see the balloon at Vauxhall.” Ayo Adeyami went straight into the family room at the back of the house and knelt on Be
nedicte's sofa, opening the window and leaning out. “And look! The London Eye.”

  “I know.” In the kitchen Benedicte pulled off her shoes and put down a bowl of water for Smurf. They'd been for dinner at Pizza Express and afterward had agreed to leave the men, Hal and Ayo's husband, Darren, in the pub “just for one pint.” The two women had come back here with Josh and Smurf. Ayo was going to water Benedicte's plants while they were in Cornwall and she still hadn't seen the house.

  She was enthralled. “It's brilliant! Absolutely brilliant.”

  “I know.”

  “No need to be smug.”

  “I know. Hey!” From the kitchen she leaned across the low units and spoke to Josh, who had already flung himself on the floor in the family room and was watching The Simpsons, his chin in his hands. “Hey, brat, keep the volume down, OK? Come on—we've got guests.”

  Josh grumbled about it. But he turned the sound down and dropped the control.

  “Good.” Benedicte got a bottle of Freixenet out of the fridge. “That fireplace,” she said to Ayo, putting the bottle between her thighs and trying to pry out the cork. “That fireplace is Travatino limestone.”

  “Is it, crap.” Ayo looked over her shoulder and grinned. “It's cast concrete. Darren put one in our place.”

  “Yeah …” She scrunched up her face and wrestled with the champagne cork. “But most people'd believe me.”