The Treatment (18 page)

“Don't lecture me, Jack, don't lecture
me
when there's a few things of your own we don't exactly rip apart and put under the microscope.”

“OK.” He stopped her, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “This is disintegrating.” He turned to the door. “When you want to talk you know where I'll be.”

“Where?”

“In the bathroom—having a wank.”

He jerked himself off in the shower then pulled on his running gear and left the house without speaking, slamming the door behind him.

The night sky was the color of sea. The deep blue that can sometimes be seen curled in the paw of a coral atoll. It was warm and someone's late-night music pounded out of a bed-sit window and up into the starlit sky. Sweat dribbled into his eyes—he concentrated on making his heels hit the tarmac straight and tried not to think about Rebecca. But his mind kept orbiting back to it, back to the stalemate they were in. Neither of them was going to give way, that was clear; they'd just get harder and harder in their determination.
Shit, Rebecca.
He loved her, there was no question about it, he had a real tenderness for her that was hard to heal, but from where he stood he couldn't see a way past these rigid battle lines they stood in.

“Jack,” Rebecca said suddenly, sitting up on the sofa and turning to the door. Her sudden sense of him was almost as if he'd walked in. “Jack, it's because—” she held her fists
hard against her stomach—“it's because I'm wounded. Big bloody wound.” She paused, open-mouthed, staring at the empty doorway—letting what she had just said sink in. Then her face crumpled and she laughed out loud at the stupid drama. “Oh, for Christ's sake.
I'm wounded!
Wounded? Poor, poor wounded Becky!” She jumped up, went into the kitchen for the champagne glass and came shimmying back into the living room, twisting her free hand in front of her face, a long-nailed Shiva dancing on the bare floor. “Wounded—you silly cow, wounded, wounded,
wounded
!” There was some grass she kept in an old Oxo cube box on the mantelpiece and she sang as she rolled a joint, sipping the vodka, her tongue getting numb and furry. She knelt down, put the glass on the floor, lit the spliff, took a few hits then suddenly rolled onto the floor, on her back, her hands over her eyes. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”

They were in a hole. The pair of them, deep in a hole: Jack, with his determined tearing apart of himself over Ewan—it terrified her where that all might end—and then, on the opposite side of the battlefield,
she
stood, with her mouth healed over, her eyes shut. All Jack wanted was for her to sit and discuss it calmly, to flush it through, make it clean again.
I don't blame you, Jack, I don't blame you.
She wanted, really wanted, to tell him. But she couldn't, and that was really where the wound was. In her memory. Because what Jack didn't know was that all the way through Joni's inquest, through him patiently taking her statement in the hospital room overlooking the dripping trees, through him gently prompting her when she dried, through her pretending to cry when the coroner asked her a question she didn't know the answer to—even when she alluded to it in the press—all along Rebecca had been telling a lie. The truth was something she hardly dared admit, even to herself. She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the ceiling. The truth was that, of the attack in the little Kent bungalow a year ago, she could remember nothing.

The pavement was warm, it had trapped the day's heat. He had been going for half an hour when he became aware of
his surroundings. This was Penderecki's street he was running down. He'd come here without thinking about it— drawn by some internal compass. He slowed to a jog, looking at the houses.

It was one of those peculiarly neat roads that bring with them the odd aroma of a seaside town, as if you might see vacancy signs propped in front of the lace curtains. Pen-derecki's was halfway along it, flush with the others, but so luminous a landmark in Caffery's conscience that sometimes it seemed to him to protrude from the other houses, proud-bellied. He approached, feet curling down onto the pavement, and stopped outside, resting his hands on the gate, bending over for a moment, catching his breath, his sweat dripping in dark coins on the pavement. He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the house. How long would it be before one of the team came knocking on this door asking about the troll? How long before Danni's girlfriend, Paulina, with her agile little mind and her databases, would point out the similarities between what had happened to Rory and what had happened two and a half decades ago to Ewan? Again he got that image, that slow, spreading image of fingers reaching out under the soil. Of Penderecki touching fingers with the troll.

He straightened. Tonight something about Penderecki's house struck him as odd. The bathroom light was still on and the giant lantern, red and yellow and gray, was still hanging there. He thought it looked a little bigger. He stood for a moment, frowning, then slowly pushed open the gate.

He had never walked up Penderecki's path before—on the few occasions he had ventured to the house he had used the back route and traveled under darkness because Penderecki, being a criminal, knew his rights inside out and would have snapped restraining orders,
quia timet
orders, down on his head without blinking.

The front garden was a mass of candyfloss-pink mallow, like crystallized sweets, thin as paper, gone native and seeming to move as if there were a breeze here. Long grasses brushed at his aching calves. At the bottom step he paused. The front door still had its original leaded glass—
a hill and a windmill, sun rays delineated in black. As he climbed the two steps he knew, he could hear what was inside, the hum of insects, the hum of wet bodies sucking and breeding, and then he could see them, individuals blackening the rays of the glass sunrise, and instantly he knew that whatever was hanging in Penderecki's bathroom, it wasn't a Chinese lantern.

What Rebecca did remember was this:

Night. She is in bed with Jack.

In the morning they wake up. It's raining.

After Jack has gone to work she has coffee and toast.

She notices Joni hasn't come home.

She phones around and discovers that Joni is at Bliss's flat.

She puts on old shorts and a T-shirt and begins the cycle journey to his flat.

Blank.

Blank.

Blank.

A flash of light and something—a knife? A hook?

Blank.

Blank.

Another light—a doctor shining it into her eyes.

Blank.

Just a little scratch—hold still, you won't feel a thing.

Blank.

Jack, in his hired mourning suit, bending over her hospital bed on his way to Essex's funeral.

Jack again. Taking her statement. When she passes her hand over her face, embarrassed to admit that she can't remember, he looks at her sympathetically and gives her a prompt—trying to make it easier on her.

Did you see Bliss take Joni?

Take her?

Into the hall where we found her.

Oh, yes, that. I—Yes, I saw that happen. He carried her.

From a distance Rebecca's most striking feature was her resilience: she wore it like a bright red winter coat—some-times naturally and sometimes self-consciously. Always
unmissably. She knew it could make her appear brittle, but she also knew why it was there. She'd had to grow it, like a new pelt, early in life, when she realized that her father would never be pried away from his obscure metaphysical apologias, and her mother would never be tricked down from the place she floated, doped and fat on imipramine. “The daughter of an English professor and a clinically depressed beauty” was how one journalist had summed her up. It took Rebecca a while to recognize that this was why she couldn't admit to the blank section of her memory: it was an admission that her tough little character was a lie, that she'd been left out of control for a while—without a skin—open to infection. She didn't think she'd ever be able to talk calmly about it.
How can you not remember?

For a year now she'd kept a lid on it—until:
Think about what it was like for me to find you hanging, Rebecca, hanging from a hook in the fucking ceiling.
It was the first time she'd got a glimpse of what had happened that day in Kent and now she found she couldn't look at Jack's face above hers without the fear that Malcolm Bliss's would appear superimposed over it. Something was on the move in her—something that wouldn't let her lie flat on her back without squirming, something that wouldn't let her sleep a night through. She rolled onto her front and lit the spliff, hoping it would stop her mind from rambling. It was important to Rebecca, very important, that she didn't let anyone know the truth.

At home Rebecca was asleep. Or pretending to be. Two lipstick-stained cigarillo butts sat in an ashtray next to the bed on top of an article about the Turner prize. Caffery didn't wake her. He changed into joggers, a sweatshirt and lightweight walking boots, got some tools from under the stairs and went into the back garden. He waded out through the undergrowth, past the green Express Dairies crate that Penderecki had used to stand on, through the nettles and submerged branches. The cutting was quiet, the last train gone, and down here, below the level of the city, there were cooler, clearer isotherms. Along the empty tracks the signals glowed green. Caffery crossed quickly, hearing the startled
movements of an animal in the undergrowth. On the opposite side he found a fox path—
or maybe it's Penderecki's path
—leading straight to the garden.

The back of the house was silent and dark, the fence rotten with water. He moved quickly through the garden, his chest tightening as he got nearer. And now—why hadn't he watched more carefully?—he saw that along the metal frame of the broken old annex, flies gathered like clusters of hanging black fruit, rippling lazily. He used his Swiss Army knife to gouge away the ancient putty of the kitchen window, flaking wood and paint onto his sweatshirt. Levering out the panel pins he eased the pane from the frame, and the stale, trapped air inside the house came at him like a train. He could smell what was in the bath-room—the stench that stimulates the rarely stimulated root of humanness—the smell of opened human bowels, the smell of the dead sitting up in their graves and exhaling into the night. He could hear the flies—
No way, no fucking way, this can't be happening
—as he reached in, turned the key and opened the back door.

Quiet.

“Ivan?”

He stood there, counting to a hundred, waiting for a response.

“Ivan?”

He'd never addressed Penderecki by his Christian name before.

“Are you here?”

Still no reply. Only the pounding of his own blood in his ears. He stepped into the annex.

Once—twenty years ago, before Penderecki had got wise to him and started locking the doors—Caffery had sneaked in here, and the surprise had been how ordinary the house was. Damp and fraying, but ordinary for that. Just an old man's house. Patterned carpets, a gas fire, a folded copy of the
Radio Times
next to the sofa. Milk in the fridge and a paper bag of sugar on the worktop. The home of a twice-convicted pedophile, and there was milk in the fridge, sugar on the worktop and a
Radio Times
in the lounge. Now as he moved through the rooms, he was
struck by how little it had changed. The house was smaller, the wallpaper yellower than he remembered; a strip of it hung from the ceiling above the stairwell and the carpet was shiny with dirt. A
Local Shopper
newspaper lay on the doormat with a pile of flyers from local restaurants, but apart from the flies it was all so unchanged it was like having his memory shaken out in front of his eyes. On the small windowsill at the bottom of the stairs was the digital readout that he knew Penderecki used to monitor phone calls. On top of it sat a ripped-open brown envelope. No letter inside but the return address was the Oncology Unit, Lewisham Hospital. The first clue—he stuffed it into his pocket.
Oh, Jesus,
he thought,
oh, Jesus, let this not be happening
. He turned to the stairs, moving slowly, dead fly husks crunching underfoot. Above him the living insects thrashed their wings in a single low note, in and out—as if the house were breathing with them.

All the doors on the landing were open, save the one into the bathroom. He could see the light coming from the crack under the door. The smell was denser here, and he had to lift the hem of the sweatshirt, exposing his stomach, to cover his face as he reached for the light switch at the top of the stairs. The bulb pinged, died.
Shit
. Reaching inside one of the open doors he found a switch and this time the light came on, throwing a rectangle of yellow out into the small landing. Quickly, breathing shallowly, he checked inside the doors. In two of the rooms there was nothing—just an empty Coke can and a few squares of carpet on the bare floorboards. In the third he discovered where Penderecki had been living.

The mattress was covered with stained nylon sheets, worn almost to transparency; a pile of newspapers lay next to the bed, a cup and an empty baked-beans can with a fork sticking out of it resting on top of the pile. There was only one decoration in the room, on the far wall: an Athena poster of two boys wearing straw hats, sitting on a wooden jetty, one with his arm draped around the other's shoulder. It was a photograph from the seventies— the sun had been a different color three decades ago, softer and more yellow than a third-millennium sun. The two
boys looked about the same age that Jack and Ewan had been when …
shit
.

He had to stop.

“
Shit, shit, shit—let's get this over with.
”

He pressed the sweatshirt into his nostrils, went back onto the landing, took a deep breath and tried the bathroom door.

It opened smoothly and there, in front of him, in the center of the pale green bathroom, covered and moving with flies, hung Ivan Penderecki.

Somewhere someone was screaming. Benedicte fought up toward it, through hot layers of sleep, and sat up in the cool darkness of the bedroom, her pulse elevated, her skin damp.