The Treatment (12 page)

“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 hook 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.

R
ELUCTANTLY 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.

“Aye, this morning.” Souness was sitting with one foot up on the other knee, using a screwdriver to pick a stone out of the sole of her cowboy boot. Her sunburn had turned a little brown overnight, making her ordinary eyes a starry, periwinkle blue. “He's definitely not dying—and even if he was he decided he was going to go a lot faster if he couldn't get a Superking in his mouth. The consultant's got the right arse about it.”

“So where is he now?”

“At the Nersessians'.”

The family liaison officer had called Souness from the house and told her about Alek Peach's tears: “Every inch of the sodding way from King's to Guernsey Grove.” He
had ignored Mrs. Nersessian—standing with her arms wide open, a tragic look on her face—and had gone straight upstairs to where Carmel Peach was still lying on her side and had curled up on top of the coverlet, his arms around her. There they lay for an hour, neither speaking, chain-smoking together as if the cigarettes were the glue in their marriage. And by the way, the officer, who had just consumed almost a pound of baklava and four Armenian demitasses, wanted to know, what was it that Mrs. Nersessian owed the Peaches? If all she wanted was a captive audience for her vineleaf
mezzas,
wasn't she taking the Good Samaritan thing a little far?

Caffery listened to Souness in silence. He hadn't slept last night. Rebecca had lain next to him with her eyes closed, but he didn't believe she had slept either. He knew that she was seeing a ghostly image of herself—like a kite, a body distorted and reangled. Dangling from a ceiling. He'd picked a scab off all the things she didn't want to talk about and she'd reacted as if he'd punched her in the face. He rubbed his eyes. “Danni.”

“Mmmm?”

“I'm going to take the dog team into the park, just for a while.”

“Eh?” She looked up. “What're ye talking about? We've finished in there.”

“The human-remains dogs this time. We're not going to find him alive, are we?” He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, not now.”

“I'll ignore that, Jack. I don't want to hear ye talk like that again.”

“I still want to go.”

She looked at him for a long time. “When you get a bone between your teeth, Jack …” Shaking her head, she went back to the stone. She freed it, chucked it in the bin and brushed off her hands. “Go on, do what you like. Just make sure ye don't tell any of the hacks what those dogs are. I'll not have that in the papers.”

In the incident room Marilyn Kryotos had arrived and had taken off her shoes as was her usual habit before the team
arrived at the office. She was talking on the phone and Caffery paused for a moment on the other side of the desk, drawing a question mark in the air. She finished the call and straightened, hands pressed in the small of her back. “Intelligence unit at Dulwich.”

“Well?”

“This.” She handed him the notes she had made. The search word “troll” had dragged up an old outstanding case. A violent sexual assault on a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy, Champaluang Keoduangdy, in the dried-out boating lake of Brockwell Park. “I'll try and track him down today, but in the meantime there's a DI at Brixton who was there in the eighties and might remember something.”

“No one done for it?”

“Nope—and it's before the nonce register.”

“Set up an appointment, will you, with the victim and with the DI.”

In Brockwell Park the sun edged in increments up the sky behind that great Druid tor, Arkaig Tower: its shadow raced down the park to collect at its feet. Two dog handlers in blue shirts were climbing into forensic overalls next to the unit van. Caffery could see, on the passenger seat of the van, two SIRCHIE-brand antiputrefaction masks. The dogs in the back were not the same ones that had been there for the last two days. These were human-remains dogs.

“You do know if we find him the dogs might, uh, destroy some evidence, don't you?” The sergeant was embarrassed. “We can't always stop them, they're hungry.” There were pork trotters in a Dewhurst carrier bag—three days overripe—for the dogs to blunt their hunger on if they were unable to find dead Rory Peach.

“Yes.” Caffery rubbed his nose and looked across the trees. It was still there—that draw he felt to the park. He just couldn't give up on it yet. “Yes, I know.” They started near the van, pounding the earth with heavy metal probes. This was a familiar ritual to the dogs—the noise told them why they were here. It opened the glands in their mouths and they moved in excited circles, blood-boltered, dripping saliva into the earth. Caffery's hope rose a little as the
dogs pushed noses into the holes made by the probes, crawled under bushes, and sniffed around the soft black edges of the lakes. But it is not only a helicopter's thermalimaging equipment that is hampered by hot weather: heat decreases a dog's sensitivity too, and an hour into the search they had found nothing. The officers were sweating in their forensic overalls, but Caffery didn't call a halt. He was watching Texas, the larger of the two German shepherds. From time to time the dog lifted his head, distracted, and turned in a small, fidgety circle.

“Come on, boy.” The handler jerked the dog back to his task. “Over here.” But in the dog's odd lapses Caffery sensed something. Every square inch of the park had been searched—there had to be an angle he was missing: a light was being shone dead into his eyes and still he couldn't see it.

You're the one who thinks that he knows, thinks he has a special tap into the mind of the killer, and yet you can't see what happened here.

“
What's a troll, Danni?
”

“
A troll? A troll's just an old queer who likes gorgeous young meat. A tree jumper
.”

He thought about Rebecca the other night, squatting in the tree like a leprechaun.
Zeus was a baby in a tree
. He thought about the little boy in the Clock Tower Grove Estate pretending to climb a drainpipe. And then suddenly he had it. He was right—Rory was still in the park. And he thought he knew where.

At twelve-thirty P
.
M
.
Hal Church came home for lunch from his furniture-design studio in Coldharbour Lane. He was a largish man—with his sleeves rolled up, sandy hair receding from a tanned forehead, he looked far more the broad-shouldered artisan than the designer.