The Treatment

by Mo Hayder

  “No leads?”

  “Oh, we've got one lead—a great lead. The guy wore trainers, Peach thinks.”

  “He thinks?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “He's not sure what make, but he thought maybe they were cheap ones and suggested Hi-Tec.”

  “Hi-Tecs? Magic. As if we've never seen that on a witness statement before.”

  “Good, eh?” She scratched her chin. “I pushed him for all he could give me. He cooperated—I believe him. I don't think there's more.” She swiveled the chair, fired up her PC and began to type up the report for Kryotos to enter in HOLMES:

  On July 14 I was at home at number 30 Donegal Crescent. My son Rory and me were playing on the PlayStation in the basement. We were supposed to be going down to Margate the next day for a long weekend. No one else was in the room. I believed at that time that my wife, Carmel Peach, was upstairs, but I hadn't seen or heard from her for some time, so at about 7:30 (P.M.) I came upstairs to see where my wife was. I had not heard anything suspicious and all the doors were locked, the windows closed.

  I came into the hallway and turned to face the stairs at which point I believe I was hit from behind. Nothing was said—

  Caffery, standing over Souness as she typed, pointed at the screen. “Didn't he hear the window breaking in the kitchen?”

  “Says not.”

  “So this guy just drops into their hallway? Like Santa Claus?”

  “That's how it sounds.”

  He frowned. He put his hand on the monitor and leaned over to read the rest of the statement:

  Nothing was said and from that point on I remember nothing until I woke up later with a headache and a sore throat. I do not know how long I had been unconscious. I was handcuffed to something and blindfolded and gagged. After a while I realized it was the radiators I was handcuffed to. I didn't know which room I was in, but I could hear my wife crying and it sounded as if she was on the landing which seemed to be above and behind me, so I guessed I was in the living room. And I recognized the carpet because it's new. I didn't know what time it was because it was dark, but when the sun came up I could see the light through the blindfold and I thought it was coming from the direction of the kitchen at the rear of the house. I stayed in this place for three days, during which time I did not see or hear my son, although I could hear my wife crying on and off. I do not know what happened to my son. I glimpsed the man once only under the bottom of the blindfold. I think he was very tall, even taller than I am maybe. I would say in his late twenties, maybe thirty, because he seemed strong and he must have been strong to have dragged me from the hallway into the living room. He was wearing a pair of dirty white trainers, I couldn't see the make, but they looked like old Hi-Tecs or something. He had very large feet. I heard him moving up and down the wall and at one time he stayed in the corner of the room, crouched down—I could tell that from the sound of his breathing—like he was going to pounce, but he didn't. All I remember is that he sniffed a lot—as if he was smelling something. It's the way my wife is sometimes—she was always thinking she could smell something. On, I think, Monday morning I lost consciousness. Knowing my son I do not believe that he would have voluntarily left the house with anyone. I do not know the man who was in my house and there is no one that I know of who has any grudge against me or against my family.

  “And that's it.” Souness opened a new document and began the witness assessment attachment—her observations of Peach's state of mind, intelligence, ability with the English language, his emotional state (poor: Peach had been clearly confused during the interview, becoming tearful and agitated, particularly when his son was mentioned).

  “What about the photos? The camera?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Maybe Carmel imagined it—I asked him, he doesn't remember photographs.”

  “He's sure.”

  “Oh, aye—I double-checked.”

  “Shit.” While Souness typed, Caffery went to his desk. He sat down and picked off the Post-it notes Kryotos had stuck to his monitor. Messages: Rebecca had called, a few journalists wanted an interview, Kryotos wanted him to know she'd received the Quest Search disk from Registry and that she had made a call to Missing Persons. After a period of forty-eight hours the Horseferry Road coroner's office would receive any unidentified bodies found in the metropolitan area, but Caffery knew the call was a token gesture—futile: the whole of London was burning over Rory Peach—he wouldn't have made it as far as Missing Persons without someone speaking to Shrivemoor. He stuck this last Post-it to his finger and stared at it blankly. Where was Rory Peach? And were there photographs of the whole event somewhere? A camera flash. The sound of a wind-on mechanism. Not easy things to imagine. Had Carmel really imagined it? If not then Alek hadn't heard it in the living room so they must have taken place in the hallway. What the fuck do you want with photographs of the poor bastard's hallway?

  He leaned back in his chair and sighed. He was out of ideas. “If we had just had some DNA we could start a screening locally.”

  Souness looked up. “Aye, and if we had a body we could get some DNA.”

  “So what's our next step?”

  “Och, ye know the answer to that, Jack. More in-depth interviews with the Peaches, doctors allowing, get a victimology sketched out, widen the parameters, and—uh …” She paused. “Drop the area around the park—” Before she could hold up her hand Caffery had sucked breath in between his teeth. “I know, I know ye don't like it—”

  “No, I don't like it—I still think he's in there. How could someone have left that park carrying a struggling kid and no one see him?”

  “Maybe the bairn was walking.”

  “No one saw him. Anyway, none of Rory's clothes are missing.”

  “Maybe the intruder brought his own clothes.”

  “Rory was bleeding, he was probably in shock—I just don't buy it.”

  “Well, he's not in the park now, is he?”

  “Doesn't look like it,” Caffery admitted, ferreting under the desk for the holdall. He needed a drink. “It really doesn't look like it.” He held up a bottle of scotch but Souness shook her head.

  “Nah.” She clicked, sending the report to the printer in the incident room, and stood, stretching, looking at her watch. “Nah, it's late. I need a kip.”

  She went into the incident room to distribute the statement in the team's pigeonholes and for a few minutes Caffery was alone. He stood, holding the bottle, looking at his eyes reflected in the window, superimposed over the Croydon skyscrapers. What if Rebecca was right? What if people saw the naked teeth of a killer every time they looked at him?

  A little thing growing—it'll keep growing and growing and if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then, bam! You'll do it again.

  He half filled a mug with scotch, knocked it back and stared at his face, green tie unknotted and hanging loose around his neck.

  It might go as far as it did last time—

  She was wrong, he decided. She was making it up to get him away from the house. When Souness came back he turned and looked at her. “Danni?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “What do you think that was all about, before? You know, Peach giving me the old treatment about my eyes.”

  “Och—Christ knows.” She shrugged and bent over the workstation, closing down the computer for the night. “Ye know how they get—he's probably got post-traumatic stress. Probably felt more comfortable talking to a woman, even an ugly old dyke like me.” She straightened, pulled on her jacket, looked at him and smiled, clapping him on the back. “There's nothing wrong with your eyes, Jack, believe me. Ask any of the lassies in the team if there's anything wrong with your eyes and you'll get the answer.” She coughed and straightened her back, running her palms down her lapels. “Except me, of course. I don't count.”

  7

  HE CALLED REBECCA. The whole weight of the day was on him. “Let's just go home, cook something and go to bed.…” But she was exuberan
t. She was inBrixton—she was at a private view at the Air Gallery on Coldharbour Lane—and she wanted him to pick her up. OK, she agreed, they'd do some shopping in twenty-four-hour Tesco's, get some wild rice, some lamb, a bottle of something red and cook at home. But he could tell he was souring it for her. He could tell she wanted to stay at the party.

  As he parked on Effra Road a herd of bright young things passed, bussed in by the score from West London and the home counties, moving through the street on their long, alien legs, heads back, faces lit like God's own converts as they moved through the darkness toward the lights in Brixton Central. Just as if they didn't know what had happened half a mile away in Brockwell Park. Just as if they had never heard of Rory Peach. He pocketed his keys and crossed Windrush Square into Coldharbour Lane, heading for the chief source of light, a great living column of heat and color: the Air Gallery, lifting up into the night, a huge industrial space of textured concrete and galvanized steel. As he got nearer he could see at the foot of the building, in the entrance, Rebecca, sipping a cocktail and looking at her watch.

  He could remember a time when she would wait for him calmly, hands behind her back, the left foot resting lightly on the right. Now she stood with feet planted wide, dressed in a short leather jerkin, bubble-gum-pink combat trousers, and, of course, her new accessory: her strange unhealthy energy, unraveling out into the night around her like a veil.

  “Jack.” She wormed a long brown arm under his jacket and pulled him nearer, standing on tiptoe for a kiss. Her nose was warm and her breath was sweet and orangy like Cointreau. He realized she was drunk. “I've just been speaking to someone from The Times, and Marc Quinn's in there—you know, the one with the frozen-blood head. He's in there and Ron Mu—”

  “Great—shall we go?”

  “And I told the guy from The Times I was doing more of my vaginas—”

  “I'm sure he's well pleased about that.” He tried to take the cocktail from her but she grinned and shook the glass at him, a lovely crushed-strawberry color, rattling the ice.

  “Diabolo,” she sang, curling her fingers at him. “It's a Diiiii-aaabolo. The devil.”

  “Becky,” he could feel irritation rising, “can we just get something to eat and head home—” He broke off. A Japanese woman in zipped PVC platform boots and a white vinyl raincoat had appeared from inside the crowded gallery bar and was staring at Rebecca. Caffery was used to the shamanic appeal she had for strangers, but he didn't like it. He turned to the woman. “What?”

  In reply she gave him a long, cold look, lifted a camera and before he realized what was happening had fired off two flashes. “Hey!” She slid back into the gallery bar and he caught Rebecca by the arm. “Right, come on—time to go.” He took the drink from between her fingers and put it on the pavement outside the gallery. “Let's get some food.”

  She trotted along beside him, smiling and chattering about all the journalists she'd met. He walked fast, not listening to the details. Where had she got this hard gaiety of hers? The change in her had started like a sudden fever a month after the inquest. In the first few weeks, while she was back and forward from the hospital and he had been busy with tying up the case, there had been a strange, lulled silence, a dreamy fermata in which Bliss's name wasn't mentioned. Then suddenly, overnight it seemed, Rebecca began talking. But not to him—to the press. To him she still wouldn't mention it directly.

  “Are you ever going to talk to me about it?”

  “I already have. I gave you a statement, didn't I?”

  And off she went to bury herself in her mad art. Plaster casts of other women's genitals. It was as absurd as it was dispiriting. Sometimes he believed she could make her heart move in the opposite direction to her body, in a way his unsophisticated heart couldn't.

  “You could have been a bit nicer,” she said, as they walked around Tesco's. “You don't know who she was— she might have been with one of the papers.”

  “Or she might have been a ghoul.”

  “You don't understand.” She lingered a little behind him, idly looking at the shelves, swinging her arms like a bored schoolgirl. “I have to be on display at these things— it's part of the game.”

  “Well, I'm not up for it.” He walked ahead, not waiting for her, trying to get this over and done with, wanting to be out of Brixton as soon as possible, subconsciously scanning the other shoppers, wondering if Rory Peach's abductor might walk past him. He half expected someone to come up to him, point a finger, and say, “Why aren't you looking for him? What do you think you're doing, hanging around in the pasta section of Tesco's when Rory's still missing?” He threw some rice into the basket and continued up the aisle, Rebecca trailing behind. “I'm not up for another night of watching you talk to every dickhead with a mike and a pen.”

  “Ooooo-wooh,” she trilled behind him. “Where's this coming from?”

  He didn't answer. He walked a bit faster.

  “Is it coming from the case we're working on?” she whispered, closing on him. “Does it all remind us of something we'd rather forget? Is that what the mood is?”

  “Shall we change the subject?”

  “Oh, Jack! I was joking.” She got ahead of him, stopped to pull a bottle of red wine off the shelf and turned to him. “You should learn to lighten up a bit. You take everything so seriously.”

  “I mean it, Becky. Don't push it.” He walked past her. “Unless you're after something, unless you really want to talk, really want to take the gloves off—and I don't think you do.”

  “Oooh!” She caught up and grinned up at him. “I wonder what you're talking about.”

  “It's not funny.”

  “I think I can decide what's funny and what isn't. After all—” She suddenly leaned back and lobbed the bottle into the air, her head back, watching the swish-swish-swish of light on the glass above her. The bottle twisted back down and she caught it, turned to him and smiled nicely. “—it was my assault.”

  “Jesus.” He started to walk away, disgusted, but she caught up again, grinning at the side of his face, skipping along.

  “You just can't stand the fact that I'm not traumatized and you are,” she said. “I mean, what am I supposed to be grieving about? I lived, didn't I? I'm dealing with it.”

  “You call what you're doing with your work dealing with it? You call telling some jerk-off from the Guardian how it's ‘informed’ your art dealing with it? You've got a perverted sense, Rebecca, of what ‘dealing with it’ is.”

  “Oooh—perverted!” She scooted up ahead of him and turned, walking backward up the aisle. “Perr-verted,” she sang, whirling the bottle in the air again, almost missing it on its way down. A couple passed her warily, shrinking back a little against the shelves. “This guy, right.” Rebecca stopped in Caffery's path, her face bright. Now he could read the print on her leather jerkin. Article 5 of the Alcatraz inmate regulations, stenciled in white: You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter and medical attention. Anything else you get is a privilege. “This guy says to his girlfriend, ‘Let's have anal sex— ’ ”

  “Rebecca—”

  “He says, ‘Let's have anal sex. ’ And she says, ‘Anal sex? Isn't that a bit perverted? ’ And he says—”

  “Please—just stop it—”

  “And he says, ‘Perverted? Perverted? My, but that's a big word. Especially for a twelve-year-old. ’” She bent over, bottle clasped against her knee, and shook with laughter. “A twelve-year-old!”

  “Yes, very good.” He tried to get past her but she jumped from side to side, blocking his path.

  “Oh, come on, Jack, read the dating manual. You're supposed to find my jokes funny. You're supposed to—”

  “Will you just think!” He pushed a finger in her face and she shrank back a little, taken off guard. “Will you just fucking think, for once.” He put his face near hers, his voice low, stooping slightly so that no one else could hear. “Think about what it was like for me to find you, Rebecca, hanging, hanging from a h
ook in the fucking ceiling. I thought you were dead—he told me he'd fucked you and then killed you. How do you think that felt, eh?”

  She blinked at him and with that small reaction something hardened in his chest. He slammed down the basket, bottles clinking, and walked away, feeling in his pocket for his keys. She asked for it, she pushed me she pushed me. He took deep breaths, half expecting her to be bouncing along at his side, poking him, telling him to take a chill pill or something. He had wanted to push her, wanted more than anything to see her rattled, and when he paused at the exit and turned round he knew he'd succeeded.

  She was standing motionless in the center of the aisle under the vast fluorescent lights, a single, small figure, quite alone in the huge supermarket, her face blank. He took a few steps back down the aisle. “Becky?”

  Her head jerked a fraction and her chin dropped but she didn't answer. When he took her hand it was cold. So you've done it. Congratulations.

  Hating himself and hating her, he led her out of the store and across Brixton to the car. They drove in silence and at home she took a bottle of Blavod and a packet of cigarillos upstairs and went to bed without eating. They didn't speak another word to each other that night.

  8

  July 20

  RELUCTANTLY AMIT MOVED the search from the area of the park and extended their house-to-house parameters and witness-appeal campaign. DS Fiona Quinn went to Donegal Crescent—it was still sealed to allow the Specialist Crime Unit's chemicals to cook, but she went in and swept the corner of the room where Alek Peach's statement placed the intruder. Meanwhile Alek Peach discharged himself from hospital.

  “What?”

  First thing in the morning, his jacket still on, his hair wet, a cup of Kryotos's good coffee in his hand, Caffery stood in the SIOs' doorway, disbelief on his face.