The Treatment (37 page)

“Hello?” A man's voice. “Hello?”

The police—maybe Ayo's sent someone—maybe …
Benedicte started to open her mouth, but something stopped her, a survival instinct, maybe, a survival instinct older than her own cells.
No, it's a trick—it's him. It must be him.
In the family room Josh was scrabbling at the rope again. “Josh, don't say anything, don't move,” she hissed. “Keep quiet.” He obeyed, kept quite still, and in the silence she could hear her heart thudding.
It's OK
, she told herself.
If it is the police they'll see something's wrong— they'll know something's wrong and they'll come and find us, I'm not giving myself away if it's—

The doorbell rang once more. She sucked in a breath, biting her lip, the look in her eyes keeping Josh pinned where he was. The house was silent. To anyone on the
garden path at the front of the Churches' deluxe polished oak door, with double glazing and thermal seals, the house would have appeared quite uninhabited.

Souness came in, placed both hands on the desk and leaned forward. “Right.”

“OK.” Caffery threw his pen down on the desk. “Lecture?”

She nodded. “Lecture. I got through to the consultant. We had a wee slanging match about my DI.”

“Great.”

“Jack,
what
were ye thinking?” She pulled up her chair and sat down. “Can you imagine the field day Peach's brief'll have?”

“I don't care, Danni, I've got to speak to him. He's got someone else. I
know
it.”

She closed her eyes, pursed her mouth and shook her head. “Jack, you're
squeezing
me. I've spoken to the gov and what he's saying is clear: you've got your man, put the resources into closing it, put your energy into being ready for the interviews when Peach is well enough. We've got another critical incident come in this morning, they want this Peckham rapist
off
the back burner, and we just haven't got the manpower, Jack, for what, in the cold light of day, is a domestic incident, we haven't got—”

“Maybe I shouldn't be on the case anyway.”

“Don't talk nonsense.”

“Maybe I've lost my perspective.”

“Oh, please, cut the melodrama—” She stopped. Caffery had stood up. “Jack? Ye've to try to see it from my point of view.”

“Yeah, I'd love to, Danni.” He picked up his keys, his cigarettes and put them into his pocket. “I'd love to, but to be honest, I don't know if I could get my head that far up my own arse.”

Souness shot to her feet. “Don't ye speak to me like that.” She lifted her finger to him, her lips a dry, angry pink. “I did nothing to merit that—I'll discipline ye for it.”

“Thank you.” He stood, pushed some papers into a drawer and locked it. Pressed pens into the pen tidy and
pushed his chair firmly under the desk so that it lined up perfectly. Suddenly his taste for the job had turned. “I think I'll go now. Since there's nothing else to be done but sit around with our feet up and wait for Peach to get better.”

“Go on, then, fuck off home.” She rubbed her head until it was hot. She was furious. “The rest should do you some good.”

But when Caffery turned to the door Kryotos was standing there holding a green message form. “What?”

“Call from the hospital.”

“That's OK, Marilyn.” Souness reached past Caffery and took the form. “I got through to them on another line.”

“No—I mean, not the hospital, I mean the sergeant. On the ward. It's Alek Peach. They want one of you. Urgently.”

“Josh—” The house was silent and Benedicte's heart rate had slowed. But now she was seized with the idea that she'd been wrong. “Josh, listen—can you get out of that rope?”

He nodded and redoubled his efforts, gnawing at the nylon with his teeth.

“OK, darling, OK, listen. When you're free just go straight into the hall and open the front door. Into the hall and open the door.” Josh looked from his father to his mother, his eyes huge with fear. “Go on, darling. I promise you it's OK. Just
hurry
.”

With one last tug of the rope he freed himself. He was up, staggering a little, his leg muscles cramped, shooting out a hand to steady himself, but he was up. He held out his thin arms in front of him, as if it were dark, and pattered over to the kitchen sink, turning on the tap and putting his mouth under it to drink. Benedicte could almost
smell
how cold the water was. When he straightened, panting, water dripping from his chin, she whispered to him, “Good boy, now go and open the door.”

But Josh pulled a glass down from the cupboard, filled it with water, and knelt down next to Hal. He pulled the
packing tape from his father's mouth, rested the lip of the glass against Hal's lips, tipping water into his mouth. Hal bucked a little, almost choked, then greedily swallowed the water, his Adam's apple moving madly. Benedicte watched, impatient, resisting the urge to tell Josh to hurry. He was sitting next to Hal, as expert as a nurse, running a hand over his forehead and pouring more water into his mouth. “You next, Mummy,” he said.

“OK, baby—but first go to the door, OK, go to the door—there might be someone out there to help us.”

“OK.” He put the glass on the floor and stood, unsteady on his feet, looking down once at Hal, who was thrashing his head from side to side, his mouth moving, trying to speak. Josh turned to the hallway, using the kitchen cabinets to keep his balance, jolting his way out. Benedicte could just see the bottom of his feet and his reflection in the laminate flooring. Tiny, thin little boy. He reached up, fumbled with the catch and opened the door.

She stayed there, her eye bulging down from the ceiling like the silent dome of a CCTV camera clicking on and off. There were no sounds from the hallway for several minutes. She imagined him opening the door and simply stepping out into a summer's day, bluebirds, maybe, carrying a ribbon in their beaks, flying over the park.

The door slammed and she could see the reflection coming back. One tall, with heavy dark hair, one her son, being led back into the room—the familiar ease of an older brother guiding a small boy through a shopping center. Except that Josh was crying.

She should have stayed, should have pushed through the ceiling, should have torn away her own skin before she let someone hurt Josh, but instinct sent her squirming back up through the hole, whimpering like a child, pulling the dangling light fitting behind her like a trapdoor spider. Her ankle twisted, pain shot up her leg, but she didn't scream.

She knew that figure—she knew exactly whose it was. And now everything made sense.

Caffery left the Jaguar in the car park, didn't stop to buy a ticket and raced into the building. He took the stairs two
at a time, the squeal of his shoes on the shiny lino making orderlies pushing wheelchairs stop and stare.

He ran. Ahead of him, at the end of the long, polished corridor, the door to the ICU flew open. A nurse came out, pressing a crumpled paper towel against the bib of her uniform. As he got closer to her he could see darkness on the towel and when they passed each other he saw it was blood that was mashed into her bib. The door opened again and this time the police officer came out, his face pale, blood on his hands. “In there.” He nodded. Caffery pushed past him into the unit.

The window in the nurses' room was open, a soft breeze playing through the ward. In Peach's small annex curtains had been pulled around his bed, and two nurses, faces set, busied themselves, silently mopping the floor and the walls. The curtain, lit from within like a vast, stretched Halloween lantern, had a huge peacock-tail stain in the center, a great, plumed splatter of blood, almost the size of a human. And beneath the bed—on the floor where the nurse was mopping—shiny and rubbery as black PVC, more blood fattened out toward Caffery's feet.

Two miles away in Brixton, DC Logan was enjoying that Red Stripe in the Prince of Wales. The marketing girls at Clock Tower Grove had been funny with him, stared at the sweat marks under his arms, so he'd given up and come back down the hill. He could fake the report, he decided. Jack Caffery, it was well known in AMIT, had gone off the rails recently: probably his head done in by his nutty girlfriend with her trick pelvis and weed habits. DI Jack Caffery was crazy. Everyone knew he was letting loose in all directions, giving everyone both barrels for no reason. And Logan had not liked the sly threats Caffery'd made about his overtime.
Young Turk, my arse,
Logan thought, going to the bar for a refill.

I
N NORFOLK THE FOREST
at the top of the quarry was quiet, only the ghostly pitter-patter of rain on the leaves. Every ten minutes or so a car went by on the road half a mile away. Some had their headlights on although it was midday. Tracey Lamb lit a cigarette and leaned back against the rusty old Datsun, staring blankly at the cars. She felt confident, pleased with herself. When she got home yesterday she had taken Carl's “book” and sat in his bedroom, on his bed—
that bed was his pride and joy
: black and silver lacquer with mirror set in the head-board—and started calling his friends. None of them seemed to know about Penderecki's death—as if they cared—and when she told them about the visit from DI Caffery they all went into a panicking freefall.

“
Jesus Christ, Tracey
! Don't bring your shit to my doorstep.”

“It's not just my shit.”

And then horrified realizations at the end of the line. “Tracey?
Tracey, whose fucking phone is this?
Don't tell me you're calling on your own phone?”

“Why?”

“Oh, you stupid fucking slag, you're even stupider than I thought.” And down went the phone. By the time she got to the end of the book the bush telegraph had been humming
and the phones had all been taken off the hook. She sat there smoking, among Carl's barbells, the weightlifting belts and his DVD collection. She wanted to cry. The gates were closing and she'd been left outside. Penniless.

Well, fuck you all—fuck every last one of you, you bunch of perverts.
She should have given them all up to Caffery—the arseholes.

Now she wiped her face, threw the cigarette into the undergrowth, straightened and coughed up a little phlegm. Here, the grass and ferns stood high and thick and undisturbed; this was the little clearing Carl had used for dumping dodgy vehicles. At the far end, past the dead cars and among the wild poppies and storksbill, so far over it was almost in danger of falling into the quarry, was the trailer. It was old—the rain was turning it green in places and the scratched acrylic windows were thick with condensation. Peeling letters on the side were a reminder of Carl's attempts to start a hot-dog stand. The business hadn't taken off, but the sign was still there—she could see a faded stenciled price list, “Hot Dog—15p,” and the nailed-up hatch he'd cut in the side. The Borstal boys used to live in the trailer when they stayed. They always seemed to be drunk on White Lightning cider and puking into the quarry. Carl, who could always find work for an extra pair of hands, had liked having them around, especially in the late seventies when he had somehow wangled the license to pick up wrecks from car accidents. “Cut and shunt,” they called it, and most of the write-offs somehow found it back onto the streets with a little help from the Borstal boys: resprays, welding, fiberglass filling, “
get rid of those etched windows.
” Carl would pay them in duty-free cigarettes and gin from his beer runs to Calais, or he'd give them the car radios to fence if they could stop the bereaved parents from claiming them. How many times had Tracey witnessed one of the Borstal boys standing in the garage explaining to a couple why they couldn't have the radio from their dead son's car: “The radio's not in a very pretty state, as it happens, probably best left well alone—eh?” And if they persisted: “I never wanted to say this but you can't
'ave the radio 'cause there's claret all over it—and something worse clogging up the tape deck.” That would usually end the argument.

They'd cut up cars like abattoir animals, using every spare piece. Carl really had a way with him—the only thing he hadn't been able to outthink was the cancer. He got it, like a present, for his forty-eighth birthday.