The Treatment

by Mo Hayder

  “Get the fuck awayfromme—” She batted the hand away. “Let go.”

  The PC, afraid Lamb might roll onto her back and kick at him—worse, that he'd see more of what was under her skirt—backed away a touch, looking up at his colleagues for help.

  “Miss Lamb,” a WPC tried, “that's crucial evidence you've got there. If you don't let me near it I'll have to arrest you. Can't you see what's happening to that poor little girl there?”

  Tracey Lamb, lying like a frog on the floor with all her limbs moving at once, became still at this sentence. The two officers exchanged glances, wondering at this sudden hiatus. Then Lamb rolled onto her side and covered her face, her chest convulsing, tears making mirrors of her red cheeks.

  “Miss Lamb, you have to get up—have you seen—”

  “Yes, I have seen, I do know,” she wailed. “Of course I've seen. Who do you think she is, you cunts? Eh? That ‘poor little girl’—just who do you think she is?”

  They had to drag her, one on either side, out of the house and over to the car, past the rusting oil containers, the old ivy-covered engine hoist. The arresting officer had just spent a day at Hendon learning the Quik-Kuf arrest technique. By the time Caffery arrived at 11 A.M. the PC was using a ballpoint to close the double-locking pins of the handcuffs and Tracey Lamb was under arrest.

  It took until lunchtime for the MG 1-16 forms to be filled in and signed so that Tracey Lamb could be officially charged with the indecent assault of the boy in the video. The interviewing officers—members of the pedophile unit down from Scotland Yard—had brought the video with them. They'd had it for ten years and had been looking for her all that time. A wig, they told her, didn't make much difference in identifying her. After she'd been charged they agreed with the custody officer that she could be bailed.

  Outside, on the trimmed lawn in front of the police station, she lit a cigarette and stood for a moment, ignoring the council workers coming in and out of their offices for sandwiches, and gazed up over the unfinished stump of the cathedral tower, out to the clouds moving in ranks across the sky. Shit. She couldn't believe it—just couldn't believe it. They'd warned her that there might be other charges under the Obscene Publications Act, which “might arise in the course of our investigation,” but the duty brief, Kelly Alvarez, a little Latin-looking woman in a navy suit with a grubby lifeboat sticker on the lapel, told her it wasn't as bad as she thought. They only had one tape, and the photos taken of her as a child would help establish “the enormous influence your father and later your brother exerted over you. Don't worry, Tracey, we might, if we're lucky, get away with a noncustodial.”

  But she couldn't accept it. She'd been hauled in before, of course, done her own bits of time here and there, but what really slaughtered her was the money. When the unit had dragged her out of the house and into the panda car, she'd caught sight of Caffery standing just inside the trees, watching, a stuck sort of look on his face. Now she didn't know what to think.

  “How did they find me?” she wanted to know. “Who fitted me up?”

  Alvarez shrugged. “They've had the video for years.”

  “But how did they know it was me?”

  “I'll find out—I promise. Now, don't worry about this, Tracey—it's not the end of the world.”

  “Of course it's not,” she muttered to herself now, walking away from the station, down the sunny Bury streets. Like a bag lady in your Wellingtons. “Not the end of the fucking world.”

  She paused, the cigarette halfway to her mouth. A familiar car. Just crouching like a cat at the corner of the road. Quickly she turned on her heel and walked in the opposite direction, pulling the collar of the T-shirt higher as if it might make her invisible.

  Caffery had seen her coming out of the turning ahead and started the car. He was wired, his eyes hurt—in the hours that Lamb had spent in the police station everything had come into focus: now he understood the tail on the country lane yesterday. Souness's red BMW. Rebecca hadn't gone to the police, it was all down to bottle-blond Paulina with her infant-blue eyes and pedigree car. An intelligence officer for the pedo unit, in the incident room she had latched on to him instantly. She must have heard about Penderecki's death, must have been watching him. Souness hadn't said anything about it over dinner last night. She must have known—she knew Paulina had taken the car— so what was all that trust and love and tolerance shit last night? Now he was in the business of waiting for the other boot to fall, waiting to get the first sinister hint that Souness or the pedophile unit were talking to the CIB—

  let's count your breaches of the discipline code, shall we? Corrupt practice, abuse of authority. He knew the whole thing was about to crash around him—all he could do now was give it one last shot.

  He put the car into gear and slid along next to her before she could turn into a side street. He opened the passenger window. “Tracey.”

  She ignored him, kept on walking, and he had to edge the Jaguar forward, one hand on the steering wheel, leaning across the passenger seat: “Tracey—listen—this wasn't mine—I swear—I didn't have anything to do with it.” He held his hand over the envelope in his breast pocket to stop it from falling out on the seat. “The money's here. It's right here.”

  “Bit fucking late now, isn't it?”

  “No—we can still talk.” He looked up at her. “We can still talk.”

  She stopped. She tucked her bottom lip under her long teeth and bent a little, trying to see what was inside his pocket. So intent, so fascinated, she had the wet mouth of a dog running a scent line. He'd got her by the nose.

  She took a step closer and slowly he opened his hand away from the pocket to show her. That's it, that's the way—just a little nearer … Reflected in the car's wing mirror someone walked out of the courthouse and Caffery registered it momentarily, a passing flash of anxiety that he might be seen with Lamb, and that momentary lapse cost him the day. When he looked back the line had broken. She'd seen the simple flicker of his attention and followed his eye, seen what he was looking at, and lost her faith. She took a step back, glancing up at the courthouse, her eyes darting back and forward.

  “Tracey—”

  “What?”

  “Come on—talk to me.”

  “No. There's nothing to tell. I was lying.” She was backing away now.

  “Shit.” He slammed his fist on the steering wheel and put the car in gear. “Tracey.”

  “There's nothing to tell.” She set her face and walked away. He had to shoot the car forward to keep up with her.

  “Tracey!”

  “There's nothing to tell—I was lying. You're not stupid, you knew I was lying.” She took a last puff on the cigarette. She didn't want to stop to tread on the butt so she threw it through the opened window of the Jaguar, crossed her arms resolutely across her breasts and turned into the abbey grounds, where the car couldn't follow.

  27

  HE DIDN'T LET IT TOUCH HIM—he didn't let it get to him. He did what he said he was going to do and put a line under it. He had already wasted enough of the morning. Cigarette between his teeth he put his tie back on, checking in the mirror, put on his sunglasses, and grappled his mobile out of his jacket. What was Souness doing right now? Sitting in the SIOs' office, counting off the minutes, waiting for him to come through the door, waiting to ask him the questions about Tracey Lamb and Norfolk? It was time to get it all out into the open.

  “Well?”

  “Well what, Jack?”

  “Have you got something to tell me?”

  “About what? Your lads aren't back—they were going to call you direct, weren't they?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Jack, listen, son. I hate to be a pain in the arse, but I've got the Assistant Commissioner e-mailing me, the borough fucking commander on the line and, oh, just one or two reports to get ready for the case review, so with all due respect …”

  He sat back in his seat, staring at the alley of beech trees that marched off t
oward the abbey. She didn't know. Souness didn't know. What the fuck was—

  “Jack? I don't want to hang up on ye, son, but—”

  “OK, Danni, forget it. Put me through to Marilyn, will you?”

  Kryotos agreed to contact Champ and reschedule the meeting. Champ was in the West End—he wanted lunch and if Caffery could make it for two o'clock they could meet in Soho. So he pointed the car down the MI1: Canary Wharf on his horizon for nearly an hour as he closed on London. He got to Soho by one forty-five, parked the Jag, with its small cigarette burn on the passenger seat, went into a branch of his bank and paid the three thousand straight back into his account, then walked calmly down to Shaftesbury Avenue.

  Champ was only twenty-five but he already owned an electrical retail shop in the streets behind Chinatown. “I do know which way is up, you see. I make it here with my Laotian name because nearly all my blood is Chinese.” He'd had acne at some point in the past, but his hair was neat and gelled, and he was well turned out in a slate-gray Armani suit and immaculate leather shoes. “I get left alone as long as I'm quiet. I understand the guanchi, see.” The boys sunbathing in Soho Square lifted their heads to watch him and Caffery walk by.

  They went to a good and honest Italian in Dean Street: hand-painted Amalfi plates on the walls, bottles of Strega and Amaretto in a rack above the heads of the kitchen staff. Caffery had fish and sat with his back to the window watching Champ twisting up the spaghetti alle vongole. He leaned forward as he ate to avoid getting tomato sauce on his suit.

  “When it happened they all came up out of nowhere, all the do-gooders trying to help me. I just kept quiet. I was working, you see.”

  “Working?”

  “When it happened. He was a punter.”

  “A punter?” Caffery wondered if the PNC had made a mistake. “But you were only—”

  “Almost thirteen, and it wasn't my first.” He pushed some spaghetti into his mouth and pointed the fork at Caffery. “You probably want me to say I was harmed by it, don't you? By the men? But some of them had more time for me than my own mother. I was in care for a year when I was two.” He chewed and swallowed. “They found me in my cot with half a pound of shit in my nappy, me just lying there not moving or crying, even.” He twirled more pasta on his fork and pushed it into his mouth. “She was, and still is, a slag, my mother.” Chewing, not taking his eyes off Caffery, he reached inside his suit pocket and drew out a scrap of paper. “Fished this out for you.” It was a crumpled, faded small ad. “That's how he found me.”

  I am an 18-year-old who had an accident which has left me looking only 12. Call …

  Caffery pushed the paper back across the table. “You were twelve and you were advertising?”

  “I was clever even then. Our Asian minds are quick, you know, skip through the gaps that GI Joe can't get through. Look where I am today—you know why? Because I never got a junk habit like everyone else. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bombita in those woods, believe me, business-man's specials—meth, the lot.” He waggled the fork at Caffery. “But me, I saved my money.”

  “He asked you about your daddy.”

  Champ snorted. “Yeah. I'd forgotten that. That's the first thing he said, when he phoned, he asked me did I like my daddy. I didn't get it at the time—now I know it's just, y'know, normal gay talk.”

  “And he took photographs of you?”

  “I didn't show the camera my face, but what weirded me out was that I'm sure he took photos of me after I was down—after I fainted. I remember the flash going off.” He mopped his plate with some bread and shrugged as if he hadn't given the incident much thought. “Believe me, before that night I thought I knew what weird was—some of them liked you to do such shit you wouldn't believe. There were the ones who liked yellow—you know what that is, don't you?”

  “Uh—yeah.”

  “And brown and fawn and red—y'know, fisting. Hey, you're the police, nothing I can say is going to shock you, right?”

  Caffery looked down at the fish on his plate. “That's right.”

  “But this was one sicko, weird from here to next week. First he's telling me he's going to watch over me. He said he would come and look down at me, that he'd like to watch me in my bed.”

  “What do you think he was talking about?”

  “No idea. Probably just his mad-speak—and, anyway, he's fiddling around with me down there as he's saying it and I'm like, ‘Hey, hang on, you better put something on— this is not barebacking times no more. You put something on. ’ But when I turned to check he hardly had nothing to put a rubber on anyway. Tiny, tiny little pecker like …” he held his thumb and finger apart “… like that. Never seen nothing like it—Midget Dick, the Angry Inch—and he hadn't even got a hard-on. Couldn't get himself up. 'Course, turns out he had better ideas than that.” Champ forced the bread into the corner of his mouth. “When he rammed that thing up my arse I fainted.”

  Caffery put his hands on either side of his plate and looked down for a moment. His black nail looked purple against the yellow-check tablecloth. “They never caught him.”

  “Nope. He never did it again. Stopped—just like that. And I never saw him again. I called him the troll, 'cause he was so big and so fucking ugly, man. I told the other boys—I mean the meat-rack boys—and the name just got handed down, like a legend. Later the other kids, you know, the straight little kids from the estates, they used to talk about the troll in the woods, play these games and run around and scream and work themselves up and shit.”

  “We think we've got him.”

  Champ didn't stop chewing. He scooped some tiny pieces of clam onto a piece of bread and pushed it into his mouth. “I guessed that's why you called. Who've you got?”

  “I've got a photo. Do you think you'd remember him?”

  “Yeah—I'd remember him. Plain as day. Black hair— he weren't a black guy, he was white but he had this black hair—shiny”—he held his hand up next to his head—“like mine. And he was huge—I reckon about six and a half feet—but young, you know. He can't have been more than eighteen.”

  “Eighteen? You told the police in his mid-twenties.”

  “Well, yeah, I was only twelve—he seemed really old. But I s'pose he can't have been all that much older than me.”

  Caffery didn't speak for a while. He sat with his mouth slightly open, staring blankly at the cups resting on the cappuccino machine, a clean white napkin spread across them. Champ continued to chew, watching him. After a while he sat forward and said: “Problem?”

  Caffery closed his mouth and dropped his chin. “No, no. No problem.” He pushed away his plate and felt under the table for his briefcase. “I'll show you the picture, then, if you think you'll remember.”

  “I'll never forget him, the troll.” He leaned over, looked at Peach's photograph and shook his head. “Nope. Not him.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I'm sure.” He put his fork down and patted his mouth with the napkin. “Right—dessert?”

  “What's this fucking mess you've made?” Tracey Lamb was furious. While she'd been at the police station Steven had tried to get out of the trailer—he'd thrown himself around, putting a long crack in one of the acrylic windows and upsetting his slop bucket. Now he sat on the bunk bed rocking himself, his head in his hands. “I wasn't gone that long.” She splashed around some Dettol from under the sink, then grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Was I—eh, you little fuck? I wasn't gone that long.” She shook his arm roughly. “So what the fuck's all this about?”

  “Treeeytheee—” His bottom lip stuck out. He looked as if he was going to cry.

  “Oh, stop it, for fuck's sake.” She shoved a cloth in his hand and pulled him down onto his knees. “There, wipe it up. Go on, clean it up, you filthy little shit.”

  He started to move the cloth across the floor and Lamb dropped down on the bunk, lighting a cigarette, watching him. On the way back from the police station she had been turning the problem of Steven ov
er and over in her mind. When she was arrested her first thought had been that Caffery had set her up, that she'd been wrong about him, that he wasn't bent, wasn't working for someone. But during the questioning, as she calmed down and thought it through, she started to wonder if maybe she was mistaken. She sensed that Caffery was just as cautious of the dirty squad as she was. When he came down yesterday he'd been as nervous as a horse—he had spent half the time looking over his shoulder as if he knew someone might turn up at any minute. He was crapping it. And during the arrest that morning he hadn't wanted to show himself—he had taken one look at the area cars and melted away into the trees before any of the officers saw him. He hadn't expected it—because, she decided, because he's just as bent as you thought. And afterward, outside the nick. What was that in his top pocket if it wasn't the gelt?

  Kelly Alvarez had promised to tell Lamb how the unit had tracked her down. Maybe Scotland Yard had already been on to her, maybe loose-cannon Caffery had discovered she was about to be done and used the opportunity to get in a little ahead of the pack. Maybe he really did want Steven. She started to feel better. You might still be in for that three K, Trace. She decided to call him tomorrow straight after the initial hearing, the “Narey” hearing, and try to suss him out again. She chucked the cigarette in the sink. Whatever his true nature, she knew that the person on his hands and knees in front of her was far more important to Caffery than that pervert in Brixton, with his insane photographs and hygiene obsessions.

  The Barracudas. Named after fish, but not real fish: real fish would die in the chlorinated water. “The water tastes funny because of the chlorine,” Gummer would tell the new children. “And chlorine is there for a purpose see? And what does it do? It protects us. It protects us against germs and other nasty things that get into the water. Very important.”

  But the Barracudas didn't need to be told about chlorine— the Barracudas knew far too much already. They were at that dangerous age. All the instructors were trained, not only in their own responsibilities toward the children but also to be on the lookout for any signs of abuse—and Gummer knew that children in their swimsuits attracted more than their fair share of “inappropriate” interest. Once, a man had paid the spectator's fee to get into the building, gone into the gallery and had stood there blatantly taking photographs of the Barracudas swimming around. Gummer didn't raise the alarm; instead he stood on the pool edge and waved his hands warningly until he'd scampered away. Gummer was relieved—he didn't want the police coming and questioning him about the incident and making him start thinking about the wrong things. They'd see it in his face. Safer not to be questioned at all. So the mysterious cameraman had gone off with his cache of photographs—scot-free.