The Treatment (15 page)

“What do you think?” Souness asked. “Have you got enough to work with?”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Ndizeye was waiting impatiently for his assistant to fill a gun with polysilicone. “Some of these were slowly inflicted.” He bent over, looked inside the wax tray molded onto Rory's shoulder and moved his finger above it in a little stirring motion. “Radial abrasions so he's a bit of a suck while he's at it. Typical sadistic marks.” He pulled a tissue from a back pocket and mopped his forehead to stop sweat dropping onto Rory's body. “I can see—um—upper left incisor one, two, three, and upper right one, probably two.” He looked up, his eyes magnified like fish behind the glasses, his clown mouth smiling. “Yes, I'm happy. I think we'll get a perfect cast from this.”

After the postmortem there were the alternative light source, ALS, photos to be taken. The science unit brought in their mobile blackout blinds and Souness and Caffery left, Souness to a press conference, and Caffery back to Shrivemoor to submit the results of the day's actions to Kryotos's ever-growing pile of documents. When he finally decided to call it a day, late in the night, he realized he hadn't eaten and was shaking. He got a takeaway in Crystal Palace and that stopped the shaking—but back at home he still had to pause in the doorway for a moment, promising himself not to let what he'd just seen show in his face.

He needn't have worried. Rebecca wasn't in a mood to discuss his work. She was lying on the sofa, dressed in caramel suede trousers and a short white sweater. She had a pink varnished nail in her mouth and was staring blankly at the TV screen. There was a pile of
Time Outs
on the table in front of her. She didn't look up when he came in— he had to be the first to speak: “How are you feeling?”

She glanced up at him vaguely, like someone looking at a window that has been left open, someone who can't be bothered to get up and shut it.

“My head hurts.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

He dropped down on the sofa next to her, his arm around her. “I'm sorry about last night.”

She didn't shrink from him or lose her temper. Instead she just shrugged and said nothing, and went on staring at the TV screen. He suddenly felt immensely sorry for what he had done last night, pushing her facedown into memories she didn't want to address. He knew he'd have to move gently with her tonight.

“Let's go upstairs,” she said, much, much later, and so he followed her up the staircase, still baffled by her odd, silent aura. In the bedroom they hardly exchanged a word. It should have tipped him off—he should have seen the signs. Rebecca liked Jack to go down on her. They'd established that early on in their relationship. “Actually it was the first night,” she'd told her friends, “I didn't even have to ask him—it was a miracle.” He would do it for hours if she wanted, her neatly turned legs hooked up and resting on his back. Sometimes she laughed because he insisted on keeping one foot off the bed or sofa, on the floor, as if he was ready to sprint off at a moment's notice.
What do you think's going to happen? A raid or something?
This evening she said nothing. She lifted her hips and let him roll down the suede trousers, resting her hands on his head, running her fingers through his hair, looking ruminatively at the ceiling. After she came he straightened, took off his shirt, wiped his face on it and was about to undo his trousers when Rebecca pushed herself past him
and up off the bed. She picked up her clothes from the floor.

“Where you going?”

“To have a wash.”

“What?”

“To have a wash.”

She walked out of the room, pressing her heels into the boards, and he fell backward on the bed, his hands over his face, his erection painful, he had been so ready.
What the fuck is she doing?
He listened to the old water pipes creak, listened to her finish, leave the bathroom, go downstairs. She didn't return. The bedside clock ticked on and now his hard-on was dying. He groaned, dropped his hands from his face and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his head throbbing.
You've started something now, Jack. This is all about last night.

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.

T
HE 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 stopped 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.