The Treatment (16 page)

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.

I
T 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.

In central Brixton the traffic was already heavy. He parked in a turning off Acre Lane and wove through the cars, the
thump-thump-thump
of subwoofers resonating against his stomach muscles. Amazing to think that this was less than a mile from Brockwell Park. Rory Peach, had he been able to sit up, would have been able to look down from his tree—
His tree? His
tree?
You make it sound as if he chose it
—and see these darkened stretches of decaying municipal pride. The person who had put Rory up that tree had form. Which meant that he had almost certainly made and developed connections in prison—segregated prison units were key cogs in pedophile networks, seeding beds for ideas and plans, where contacts and lifelong friendships were made. AMIT were going to concentrate one of their pods on moving through the nonce register and Kryotos's Quest Search results, speaking to convicted pedophiles in the Brixton area, trying to tap into that vast underground switchboard. He thought about those invisible connections, the creeping circuitry that linked every sick thing to every
other sick thing. And inevitably, as it always did these days, his mind circled back to Penderecki. Penderecki. He thought about him as he crossed to the police station. How long would it be before Penderecki was grilled? How many degrees of separation? And what if? What if …?

DI Durham was welcoming. He remembered the 1989 attack well. “Yeah—little Champ. Nasty.” The office window was level to a streetlight that came on red as they talked. Durham, in navy blue shirt and tartan tie, had been in Brixton fifteen years. He played with his double chin as he spoke, squeezing it and massaging it as if it had appeared overnight. “Dug that out for you.” He slammed the filing cabinet and put the file in front of Caffery. “Is it the Peach thing, then? Is that what you're thinking?”

“I don't know yet.” He opened the file. November 1989 and thirteen-year-old Champaluang Keoduangdy had been attacked in Brockwell Park and so badly injured he had spent a week in hospital. “I was searching for a nonce called the troll and this case came up.”

“That's right—it's all in there.” Durham leaned over and picked out Champ's statement between thumb and forefinger. “That's what Champ called the guy who did him. A troll. Don't know why.” He paused. Caffery had sat forward, hands flat on the desk, and was staring at something in the file. “You all right there, son?” He didn't answer. He felt as if something had landed claws first on his shoulders. This was the forensic medical examiner's report. The assault on Champ had indeed been violent: the attacker had almost ripped a chunk of flesh from the boy's shoulder. Caffery closed the file and looked up at Durham. He knew the color had left his face. “He was
bitten
?”