The Treatment (32 page)

“He was a weird one, him,” said Carl. “Always reckoned women were dirty. You should have seen him; he had to put on rubber gloves before he touched any of the boys in case they'd been near a woman.” He lived in Brixton and although DI Caffery hadn't said
where
the little boy had been bitten, Tracey had a suspicion it might have been on the shoulders. But in any case her predator instinct told her that actually it wasn't the “biter” Caffery was most interested in at all—in his questions about him she sensed a cover of some sort—and it was only when he began asking about Penderecki's boy that she thought he was getting to what really interested him.

Penderecki's boy. Although Tracey knew what the shifty old Polack had done to the child, she had never been told who the boy was, neither his name nor where he'd come from. But, from the way Carl had built a mile-high wall of silence around the subject, she had always guessed it was because the boy meant something to someone important. She guessed there was money in it somewhere. And maybe, she thought, that was why Caffery was so interested.

She stopped. She wasn't far now. She could see the sun glinting off Carl's abandoned vehicles on the edge of the quarry: an old Triumph, a moss-covered trailer, a pickedclean Ford. Only another ten minutes to the garage, but she stood quite still, the pain in her feet forgotten, hardly
registering the clutch of pheasants that rose screeching from the trees. Something was emerging from the dank, unexercised walls of Tracey Lamb's brain. Something about DI Caffery. Maybe she thought, maybe he wasn't the beginning of her problems after all. Maybe he was the solution.

Roland Klare had spent the morning making notes, considering shortcuts, finding new ways of looking at it, and had finally worked out what he needed: a few sheets of print paper, a liter can of fixer and some Kodak D76 powder. The photography book was clear: it warned him that he might damage the film if he didn't use a professional safelight, but he had decided to take the gamble anyway and added a twenty-five-watt red lightbulb to his list. He had turned out his pockets and drawers and old cider bottles full of coins, and had got together thirty pounds, all of which he put into a dustbin liner, twisted up and slung over his shoulder.

It was heavy, all that change, and it took him a long time to get to the bus stop. On the bus the other passengers gave him strange looks, sitting at the back with the dustbin liner squat at his feet. But Klare was used to people moving seats to get away from him, and today he sat quietly, his eyes wandering patiently around in his head, until the bus reached Balham.

He got off just outside the photographer's shop, the shop whose dustbins he routinely purged, and before he even thought of going into the front he slipped up the road and around the back. He put down the bag of coins, pulled over an old crate and stood on it, up on tiptoe so he could peer down into the big Dumpster. His heart sank. It had been emptied recently. There was nothing in there except an old cardboard Jaffa oranges box. He climbed down off the crate, wiping his hands, resigned now, picked up the bag full of coins and trudged round to the front of the shop.

N
EITHER CAFFERY NOR SOUNESS
could believe what the computer was telling them. They sat for a long time, chairs a few feet apart, staring at the screen in silence. They had gone into the Police National Computer and come back with a CRO number—a criminal records office number—for Alek Pechickjian. Indecent assault on a minor. Sentenced in 1984 to two years.

“No.” Caffery shook his head. “Nah—I can't believe it. Just because he's got a record, doesn't mean—”

“For indecent assault? On a minor?”

“Jesus—Jesus.” He put his head in his hands, his mind racing. The first of Peach's offenses was pre-1985 and not back-record converted—they had e-mailed the records office for the microfiche to be couriered down—but Peach's second offense, a nominal term for a pub brawl in which a seventeen-year-old's eye had been popped out, had started at the end of 1989, shortly after the assault on Champ and the Half Moon Lane hoax. He stared at the screen in disbelief. All the odd loose ends in Peach's account of the events at number thirty Donegal Crescent— his denial of photographs being taken, his denial that he'd heard Rory at all in those few days, the fact that his wife and son were dehydrated and he wasn't—all the drifting question marks seemed to be settling silently around Caffery.

He got up and took the photofit of Champ's attacker from the file. Then he took all the crime scene photographs and spread them out on the desk. “What do you think?”

Souness leaned over the photofit and shook her head. “I dunno. What do you think?”

“I don't know either.” He turned it one way then the other. “Could be, could be.” He picked up the crime scene photos. “That thump he took on the back of the head, d'you think he could have …” They both leaned forward and looked at the mark that Alek Pechickjian, Alek Peach, had left.

“If he manacled that end first …” Souness pointed to the photo. “And then the hands—ye know, Jack, he could actually've done it.”

“No, no, no. Hang on.” Caffery pushed his chair back. They had asked Bela Nersessian to leave for a moment and she was in the incident room with Kryotos; he could see her red hair bobbing up and down, as if she'd like to get a look through the window. He leaned closer to Souness and lowered his voice. “No, look. What are we saying? That he ran out the back when the shopkeeper knocked on the door? Climbed up that tree, dumped Rory, got
back
to the house and tied himself up—
all
before the police could …”

His voice trailed away—Souness was nodding. The shopkeeper had gone all the way back to his shop to raise the alarm and in that period Peach had had more than enough time. Quite enough to make it look as if he'd been attacked. Caffery and Souness had both heard of this sort of scene staging—the manic writing on the wall, that was a popular one. And they had both seen enough to know that people can, if they put their mind to it, push themselves into unimaginable positions, inflict unimaginable injury on themselves. Caffery was thinking not only of autoerotic deaths—sad souls wrapped in tent bags, in rubber masks, faces obscured by used underwear, manacled on pulleys to the ceiling—but of others which could have so easily been mistaken for murder: he had once seen a suicide who had pulled out his own intestines and snipped
them into pieces with sewing scissors, another who had set fire to herself in the locked boot of a car. He knew too well how murder can masquerade as suicide and how suicide can masquerade as murder.

“ ‘Do you like your daddy … ’ ” Caffery said quietly.

“Eh?”

“Champaluang Keoduangdy. That's what his attacker said. ‘Do you like your daddy? ’ ”

“What?”

“That's right.” He sat up, his blood stirring. Suddenly his dry trip to Norfolk, the tangle he and Rebecca were in, it all began to sting a little less.

“Hang on.” Souness pulled over the photos and peered at them, her mouth pressed in a little doubting bud. “He was half dead when they found him.”

“But he snapped back, didn't he? Snapped right back.” Caffery pushed his chair back. “Proper little Lazarus—the consultant was popping veins, he was so surprised.”

“He'd pissed and shat all over himself—that's some good playacting.”

“Probably thinking of Gordon Wardell.”

“What?”

“Don't you remember?” Caffery took his glasses off. “One of the things that tipped them off was that Wardell never pissed himself in all the time he was tied up. That's how they guessed he'd done his wife. If that wasn't all over the papers, Danni, from Brixton to Birmingham, I'll buy you dinner.”

She sighed. Shook her head. “It's not in my nature to say this, Jack, but I think you're right.” She stood and hitched up her jeans. “So what do we do?”

“I'd like some DNA. Wouldn't you?”

“How long is that going to take?”

“Christ knows.” Caffery got to his feet. “Anyway, we've got another way.”

Souness stayed in the incident room to arrange an emergency briefing for the team and Caffery accompanied Bela back to Guernsey Grove. He was so wired and ready to see Alek Peach again, to reassess him in this new light, that
when Souness stopped him on his way to the lift, dropping her head and turning slightly so that Bela couldn't hear, and murmured, “Ye were going to tell me something, Jack? Ye had something to say?” he shook his head. “No, that was—that was nothing. Really. Nothing.”

He was back in the saddle. He wanted to know if, after everything, Peach had been squatting—complacent like a toad—right under their noses. It took him out of himself, made him forget everything. He wasn't tired anymore.

Explaining to Bela without giving the game away wasn't easy: “Our forensic team have discovered tooth marks on some food in the Peaches' kitchen—it's normal to get the victims to give us a cast of their own teeth, just in case they left the imprint.”

“Well, I don't suppose he's here.” She let him into her antiseptic house, her bracelets jangling, her face set. “He was off again this morning, crack of dawn.”

“That's OK.” He put his head around the living room door. It was quiet, just the gold-plated carriage clock in the display cabinet starting up its chime. “If he's not here I'll wait.”

“See if he's in the garden, darling.” She hung her handbag behind the door. “And I'm going to bring you a little
soorj
—a little demitasse—keep your spirits up.”

“That's OK, Bela—thanks, but I'll pass.” He went into the kitchen. Strings of walnuts, steeped in sugar, hung like wood-carved mobiles above the sink. He unlocked the back door and stood on the little concrete patio, blinking in the sunlight. The garden was neat, the sunken fitting for the carousel clothes dryer dead center in the little square of grass. Annahid's pink Barbie bike was in position up against a newly creosoted toolshed, but otherwise the garden was empty. He closed the door, locked it again and went into the kitchen, where Bela was boiling water in a kettle. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. We're trying to beat the clock on this.”

“You need fattening up. I know they'll all say you look fashionable, but fashionable doesn't mean healthy.” Bela
followed him up the stairs, breathing heavily behind him. When she realized he was going to the top floor she plucked at his sleeve. “You're not going to disturb Carmel, darling? I don't think you should, she doesn't need to be reminded. It's not my business, but really, you should have more tact.…”

But Caffery went ahead and opened the door. The room was filled with smoke and sunshine. Carmel lay on the bed, cigarettes and ashtray next to her, body facing the window, head rolled backward over her shoulder to see who was at the door. Beyond her, staring out at the garden, a cigarette between the fingers that hung out the opened window, was Alek Peach, dressed in a nylon Arsenal shirt and stonewash jeans.

Caffery hadn't known what to expect. Alek Peach must have anticipated what was coming, he must have heard him downstairs, but he appeared calm and took his time turning round. He took one last drag on the cigarette, crushed it in a pile of dog ends on the windowsill and stood slowly. His big face was redder, more blood-infused than Caffery remembered, but his eyes hadn't lost that hollow, guarded look. If he was surprised to see Detective Inspector Caffery, standing in the door, slightly breathless as if excited, he didn't show it.

Smurf was limping in a confused circle, panting and whimpering, trying to get comfortable, the old claws making little fricative picks at the carpet. Her leg was oozing a clear sticky fluid and she had relieved herself twice in the corner of the room. Benedicte guessed now that she was searching for water.
Me too, Smurf, me too.
She lay on her back, letting the trains mark off the hours, running her sore, swollen tongue along the inside of her mouth. She had licked her lips so often that now she could feel the tender raised outline of them. For a moment yesterday she'd believed they were safe—sometime in the morning the doorbell had rung.