The Treatment (33 page)

YES!
Benedicte's heart had leaped. “
I'm here. HERE!
”

Keys in the lock.

Keys?

The front door opened and, with a horrible lurch of despair and panic, she understood her mistake. She heard his feet on the stairs, racing up—then the furious pounding on the door. She curled back against the radiator, hands wrapped around her head. Surrendering.

And he'd done the same thing several times that day, coming and going, using the front door. Slamming it as he left and ringing the doorbell on his return to reassure himself the coast was clear, that no one had arrived to spoil the party. Benedicte knew he was using her keys—she could hear him in the hallway fiddling with the key ring: those irritating Space Invaders sound effects that Josh loved, starship bleeps, rapid fire echoing in the quiet. Every time the troll came back Benedicte curled into a silent, shivering ball. She wasn't going to let him know a thing—wasn't going to let him know if she was dead or alive. And every time he was out she rolled onto her stomach and yelled encouragement through the floor, praying they could hear.

The trains told her that this time the troll had been gone for more than four hours. What if he wasn't coming back? That meant it could all be over already—and Josh could be …

Stop it!

What about the Cornwall cottage agency? Wouldn't they raise the alarm? A construction worker might notice the troll coming and going or Ayo might decide to come over early. Maybe someone would look through the garage window and spot the Daewoo in the garage all ready to go, their packed lunches festering in the heat, popping the lids on the Tupperware.

Smurf stopped her incessant wandering and lay down in the corner, deflated, her head on the good paw. The wound was beginning to smell, and Benedicte had seen bluebottles trying to land on it so she'd torn the sleeve off Hal's shirt and tied it around the area. But still the flies came, drawn by the scent. It broke Ben's heart—she knew that even if they were saved now, Smurf may not survive this assault on her system—she was too old, far too old.

“It's all right, Smurf, old girl …” she murmured. “Not long now, I promise.”

In the car Peach didn't stop complaining. He'd thrown up that morning and he really didn't feel like going any-where—the excuses kept coming. Caffery didn't say a word all the way to Denmark Hill.

Dr. Ndizeye was waiting for them outside King's Dental School, smiling and sweating. Visible under the open medical coat he wore a T-shirt bearing the logo “Programme Alimentaire Mondiale” in blue.

“Mr Peach.” He took Peach's hand from his side and shook it. “Come with me.” He took them to the small office that doubled as a tutorial room in his role as consultant dental pathologist. It was comfortable, slightly cluttered. A modern, computerized dentist's chair stood in the center of the room, and on the windowsill an antique goniometer gathered dust. There were few pictures on the walls: some X rays of skulls, a studio portrait of a smiling American (
Robert S. Folkenberg
, said the gold plaque) and a photo of a woman and two girls in church clothes. A silent nurse in a blue shift was laying out a series of trays on a paper towel.

“It's a beautiful day,” Ndizeye said, opening the window. “But then, he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, on the just and the unjust.” His eyes seemed to look simultaneously in opposite directions behind the thick glasses, his clown mouth seemed to be smiling and Caffery had to tell himself that Ndizeye wasn't aiming that comment at him. As Peach lay down on the dentist's chair, staring at the ceiling, his hands resting at his sides as the nurse Velcroed a bib around his neck, Caffery found an aluminum chair and sat with his back to the window, sucking Altoid mints and watching in silence while Ndizeye worked.

“I'll get an impression first, and then we'll get bitewing X rays and an orthopantogram.” Ndizeye circled his hand around his head. “A look at the whole lot. OK?”

Alek nodded. He hadn't spoken a word since they had
arrived. His face was red, as if fevered, but he patiently allowed Ndizeye to try the stainless-steel impression trays for size. “Right.” Ndizeye rinsed the last, largest tray. “That's a U14 so I think we'll go for three scoops. You're a big man, Mr. Peach.”

The nurse mixed the pale pink alginate with warm water, a smell of something like violets and warm plastic coming from the mixing bowl. Ndizeye folded the mixture into the upper impression tray. “Right, let's just lift these lips up.” He caught Peach's lips on his fingers and carefully seated the tray, allowing bubbles to escape and the tray to settle neatly into the sulcus, the fissure between the cheek and the gum. “And just keep still.” He began to time it, counting off the seconds on his wristwatch. “Only takes a minute.”

But after only thirty seconds Peach rolled onto his side, his face sweating, groping for the tray, saliva spilling onto his lips. “I'm going to—”

“Keep still,” Ndizeye tried to keep Peach upright, “big breaths through the nose.”

“I'm going to puke—” He rolled himself off the chair and put his hands out, stumbling forward, the tray falling on the floor and his trainers slipping in the alginate.

Ndizeye leaned over and tapped the sink. “Here, over here, not on the floor, please.”

“Here.” Caffery stood, grabbed his arm and jerked him toward the sink. “In there.” Peach barely made it before a thin, brown, coffeelike fluid came up. He stood at the sink, his body heaving, mucus coming from his nose.

Ndizeye laughed. He pulled paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and wiped the sweat from his face. “Don't worry—it gets some people like that. I'll spray a little surface anesthetic on the back of your mouth while we do the lower tray.”

“I don't think I'm well.” Peach clutched the sink and looked up, a rope of saliva depending from his bottom lip. His face was brilliant red, the veins around his eyes startling blue in contrast. “I don't think—”

“Here.” Caffery hooked him under the arm and helped
him back to the chair. He pressed a mouthwash cup and a paper towel into his hand. “Get yourself cleaned up.” “I'm not well.” “We can see that.” “I think I'm going to wait till you feel a bit better,”

Ndizeye said, tearing another paper towel and going over to the sink. “Yes. We'll wait till you feel better.”

Peach's eyes were closed. He rolled his head slowly from side to side, having trouble finding a comfortable position for it. He patted his mouth with the towel and sipped the water, then folded his hands across his chest, his hands tucked lightly under his armpits.

“OK?”

He nodded weakly.

“Feeling better?”

“I think so.”

Ndizeye wiped the sides of the sink and ran the tap to clear it. He paused, looking dubiously at the brown fluid in the sink. “Mr. Peach? How's your stomach? Have you got pain?”

Peach nodded. His eyes were small in the bright face.

“Do you mind if I feel your abdomen?”

Peach didn't speak as Ndizeye gently pressed it. Caffery could see that the skin was taut, the stomach rigid, like a drum.

“What is it?”

“Do you take ibuprofen, Mr. Peach?” Ndizeye leaned near to his face. “Do you take any anti-inflammatories?”

He shook his head again, groaning softly, his eyes flickering. Ndizeye reached for Peach's hands. “Hot,” he said. “Right.” He kneed a button on the base of the chair and the platform reclined flat. “I think we should get someone up here to have a look at you.”

One of the photos of the outstanding suspects on the wall of the pedophile unit on the third floor of Scotland Yard showed a woman in half profile, from the waist up, sitting next to a red curtain. An overweight brunette, she was wearing a black bra and her flesh was so dimpled that in
the harsh overhead light she looked as if she had taken a dose of grapeshot across her belly.

No one knew her name. The photograph was a still taken from a video the unit had discovered in the early nineties. The film had been scoured and put through the usual enhancement processes, but apart from two cans of John Smith and an empty glass on the bedside table, the only identifying sign was the distinctive tattoo. A heart behind prison bars. The enhancement unit at Denmark Hill froze and blew up a frame where the woman had leaned sufficiently close to the camera for both the tattoo and her face to be in shot, and the photo had been there on the wall ever since Paulina had joined the unit—“I'm so used to these faces now,” she had once told Souness, “that if I walked past one of them in Waitrose I probably wouldn't even notice.”

When she came up to AMIT's offices that evening the woman on the video was the last thing on Paulina's mind. What she wanted to know was why Danni was in this foul mood. She walked around the incident room picking up papers, barking instructions, and already they were twenty minutes late for the table booked at Frederick's. When Paulina saw she wasn't going to make Danni move any faster by sitting there and glaring, she wandered away into the SIOs' room and sat in Caffery's empty chair, head bent over, using her index finger to push back the cuticles on her nails, lazily swiveling the chair round and round.

Souness found her there twenty minutes later. “I'm sorry, baby.” She stood behind the chair and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. “I'm sorry.”

Paulina looked up. “You want to cancel, don't you?”

“Our chief suspect's just been taken back into Intensive Care. I'll take you at the weekend—how about that?”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “I don't suppose we'll get another reservation till next week. But whatever …”

Souness didn't reflect that she'd got away unusually lightly. She didn't know that Paulina would have taken it a lot worse had she not become quite intrigued in the time she'd been left alone in the office—quite fascinated, in fact—by an unusual little doodle she'd seen on Jack Caf-fery's desk.

T
HE DARKROOM, THE LITTLE CUPBOARD
in his bedroom, was ready, and now he closed the door, sealed it with tape, switched on the red lightbulb, and got himself comfortable: seated on a stool, the canister inside the bag on his knees, the book propped open on the enlarger easel in front of him.

The photograph in the book showed a woman's hand using a specialized tool for removing the top of the canis-ter—Klare's coins hadn't stretched that far, “but you could use a bottle opener,” the shop assistant said, eyeing him suspiciously. “A bottle opener will do the trick.” And the assistant had been right—the bottle opener worked perfectly, snapping the lid off, and now the film was ready to be transferred into the little plastic developing tank.

Klare withdrew the bottle opener from the bag, dropped it on the floor, wet his thumb and turned the pages to the next section. Tongue between his teeth, slightly hunched over the book, he followed the instructions minutely, cutting the film leader, then, with his right hand, introducing the developing tank into the bag. He replaced the rubber bands on the jacket sleeves, opened the tank and finally, after a lot of fumbling, fed the film onto the spindle in the center. He pressed the button to let the spindle take up the film, closed the tank, one top after another, so it was tight and safe, and pulled it out of the jacket.

“There!” He stood, put the tank on the easel and went into the living room to mix up the Kodak D76 powder.

Smurf was snoring in an unhealthy way and bluebottles flocked around the wound on her leg. Where had they all come from? From nowhere, it seemed, magically secreted by the walls, the carpet, the curtains. From time to time when the dog stopped snoring Benedicte could hear how silent the house was beneath them, nothing on the move down there, not a creak or murmur, only the faint helicopter buzz of the flies, and the incremental change of temperature as another summer's day ticked by.

But something was different. Benedicte felt it rather than knew it. The troll hadn't come back last night. She didn't dare to imagine what that meant for Josh. There must, she decided later, be a brain chemistry linked to full-blooded, angry desperation because suddenly she started to feel strong. Something odd and preternatural descended on her—a cool, pearly calm. Her spine felt harder now that she knew she was going to die—and she made a decision to see her child and husband one last time. Whatever had been done to them she wanted to see them, see their eyes.