The Treatment (43 page)

“No! You
cunts
!”

Everywhere the house was being clawed at. They were walking around in their shirtsleeves, ignoring her wails, in and out of the rooms, snapping on their latex gloves. At the top of the stairs she could see a stepladder placed in the attic access panel, and a woman's elegant ankles in tan high heels, cut off just below knee height. She could hear someone walking around up there and see the flash of a torch.

“
Get out of my fucking attic
,” she yelled up the stairs.

An officer put both hands on her shoulders. “Miss Lamb, I think you'd be better off just letting us get on with it.”

“You fuckers—oh, God—” She knew she couldn't fight this.
Caffery—that bastard—that fucking shit-for-brains piece of filth.
She sank to the floor, her hands in her hair. “You bastards.”

The woman in the attic came carefully down the steps and passed an old blue shoe box, covered in cobwebs, to the PC at the foot of the ladder. He turned and carried it down the stairs.

Lamb saw him coming toward her and was furious. “Don't you dare take my things.” She grabbed hold of his leg. “Give me back my things—give me that.”

“Yow!” The PC tried to wrench away his leg, holding the shoe box in the air out of her reach, but Tracey clung on. “Get off—get her off me, someone!”

“Miss Lamb,” another officer said, “that contains evidence.”

“I know what it fucking
contains
. It's my bollocking shoe box—”

“Get her off—”

With unexpected speed Lamb jumped up and swung out her arm, catching the PC enough of a blow for the box to tumble to the floor. “Jesus, you
cow
—” The contents spilled out, slithering along the floor. For a moment everyone fell quiet, staring at the images among their feet. Even Lamb was momentarily shocked by what she saw. She stood over them, her body curled forward, her knees half bent, her face white as if she had been about to fall to her knees.

“Tracey, let's make this as easy as—”

“FUCK OFF.”

There were thirty or so photographs—the old type of print with a small white border around them, the images grainy. They showed a tiny blond girl of about ten sitting on a garden bench. In some of the photos she wore hot pants with a bib and braces, a bunny rabbit embroidered on the bib. Her hair had been back-combed and given a shoulder-length sixties flip, like an adult's. In some shots she was pictured playing with a beach ball; in others the bib was peeled down and she was proudly baring her thin white chest, her head tilted on one side for the camera. In two photographs, which had fallen near the back door, between the feet of an embarrassed officer, one slightly covering the other, the same little girl was on a bed. She was straddling the face of a grown man. No hot pants in this one.

“
No!
” Lamb fell forward, landing facedown on the photographs. “No—they're mine, don't take them,
please
!” She moved her arms compulsively up and down— like an exhausted swimmer trying to stay afloat—gathering the images under her body, one Wellington boot coming adrift.

“Come on, Miss Lamb.” The silence in the hallway broke, and someone put a hand on her shoulder. “Get up. And pull your skirt down too—you're showing the world what you've got.”

“
Get
the
fuck
awayfromme—” She batted the hand away. “
Let go
.”

The PC, afraid Lamb might roll onto her back and kick at him—worse, that he'd see more of what was under her skirt—backed away a touch, looking up at his colleagues for help.

“Miss Lamb,” a WPC tried, “that's crucial evidence you've got there. If you don't let me near it I'll have to arrest you. Can't you see what's happening to that poor little girl there?”

Tracey Lamb, lying like a frog on the floor with all her limbs moving at once, became still at this sentence. The two officers exchanged glances, wondering at this sudden
hiatus. Then Lamb rolled onto her side and covered her face, her chest convulsing, tears making mirrors of her red cheeks.

“Miss Lamb, you have to get up—have you seen—”

“Yes, I
have
seen, I
do
know,” she wailed. “Of course
I've seen
. Who do you think she is, you cunts? Eh? That ‘poor little girl’—
just who do you think she is?
”

They had to drag her, one on either side, out of the house and over to the car, past the rusting oil containers, the old ivy-covered engine hoist. The arresting officer had just spent a day at Hendon learning the Quik-Kuf arrest technique. By the time Caffery arrived at 11 A
.
M
.
the PC was using a ballpoint to close the double-locking pins of the handcuffs and Tracey Lamb was under arrest.

It took until lunchtime for the MG 1-16 forms to be filled in and signed so that Tracey Lamb could be officially charged with the indecent assault of the boy in the video. The interviewing officers—members of the pedophile unit down from Scotland Yard—had brought the video with them. They'd had it for ten years and had been looking for her all that time. A wig, they told her, didn't make much difference in identifying her. After she'd been charged they agreed with the custody officer that she could be bailed.

Outside, on the trimmed lawn in front of the police station, she lit a cigarette and stood for a moment, ignoring the council workers coming in and out of their offices for sandwiches, and gazed up over the unfinished stump of the cathedral tower, out to the clouds moving in ranks across the sky.
Shit
. She couldn't believe it—just couldn't believe it. They'd warned her that there might be other charges under the Obscene Publications Act, which “might arise in the course of our investigation,” but the duty brief, Kelly Alvarez, a little Latin-looking woman in a navy suit with a grubby lifeboat sticker on the lapel, told her it wasn't as bad as she thought. They only had one tape, and the photos taken of her as a child would help establish “the enormous influence your father and later your brother exerted over you. Don't worry, Tracey, we might, if we're lucky, get away with a noncustodial.”

But she couldn't accept it. She'd been hauled in before, of course, done her own bits of time here and there, but what really slaughtered her was the money. When the unit had dragged her out of the house and into the panda car, she'd caught sight of Caffery standing just inside the trees, watching, a stuck sort of look on his face. Now she didn't know what to think.

“How did they find me?” she wanted to know. “Who fitted me up?”

Alvarez shrugged. “They've had the video for years.”

“But how did they know it was me?”

“I'll find out—I promise. Now, don't worry about this, Tracey—it's not the end of the world.”

“Of course it's not,” she muttered to herself now, walking away from the station, down the sunny Bury streets.
Like a bag lady in your Wellingtons.
“Not the end of the fucking world.”

She paused, the cigarette halfway to her mouth. A familiar car. Just crouching like a cat at the corner of the road. Quickly she turned on her heel and walked in the opposite direction, pulling the collar of the T-shirt higher as if it might make her invisible.

Caffery had seen her coming out of the turning ahead and started the car. He was wired, his eyes hurt—in the hours that Lamb had spent in the police station everything had come into focus: now he understood the tail on the country lane yesterday. Souness's red BMW. Rebecca hadn't gone to the police, it was all down to bottle-blond Paulina with her infant-blue eyes and pedigree car. An intelligence officer for the pedo unit, in the incident room she had latched on to him instantly. She must have heard about Penderecki's death, must have been watching him. Souness hadn't said anything about it over dinner last night.
She must have known—she knew Paulina had taken the car— so what was all that trust and love and tolerance shit last night
? Now he was in the business of waiting for the other boot to fall, waiting to get the first sinister hint that Souness or the pedophile unit were talking to the CIB—

let's count your breaches of the discipline code, shall we?
Corrupt practice, abuse of authority.
He knew the whole thing was about to crash around him—all he could do now was give it one last shot.

He put the car into gear and slid along next to her before she could turn into a side street. He opened the passenger window. “Tracey.”

She ignored him, kept on walking, and he had to edge the Jaguar forward, one hand on the steering wheel, leaning across the passenger seat: “
Tracey
—listen—this wasn't mine—I swear—I didn't have anything to do with it.” He held his hand over the envelope in his breast pocket to stop it from falling out on the seat. “The money's here. It's right here.”

“Bit fucking late now, isn't it?”

“No—we can still talk.” He looked up at her. “We can still talk.”

She stopped. She tucked her bottom lip under her long teeth and bent a little, trying to see what was inside his pocket. So intent, so fascinated, she had the wet mouth of a dog running a scent line. He'd got her by the nose.

She took a step closer and slowly he opened his hand away from the pocket to show her.
That's it, that's the way—just a little nearer …
Reflected in the car's wing mirror someone walked out of the courthouse and Caffery registered it momentarily, a passing flash of anxiety that he might be seen with Lamb, and that momentary lapse cost him the day. When he looked back the line had broken. She'd seen the simple flicker of his attention and followed his eye, seen what he was looking at, and lost her faith. She took a step back, glancing up at the courthouse, her eyes darting back and forward.

“Tracey—”

“What?”

“Come on—talk to me.”

“No. There's nothing to tell. I was lying.” She was backing away now.

“
Shit.
” He slammed his fist on the steering wheel and put the car in gear. “
Tracey.
”

“There's nothing to tell.” She set her face and walked
away. He had to shoot the car forward to keep up with her.

“Tracey!”

“There's nothing to tell—I was lying. You're not stupid, you knew I was lying.” She took a last puff on the cigarette. She didn't want to stop to tread on the butt so she threw it through the opened window of the Jaguar, crossed her arms resolutely across her breasts and turned into the abbey grounds, where the car couldn't follow.

H
E DIDN'T LET IT TOUCH HIM
—he didn't let it get to him. He did what he said he was going to do and put a line under it. He had already wasted enough of the morning. Cigarette between his teeth he put his tie back on, checking in the mirror, put on his sunglasses, and grappled his mobile out of his jacket. What was Souness doing right now? Sitting in the SIOs' office, counting off the minutes, waiting for him to come through the door, waiting to ask him the questions about Tracey Lamb and Norfolk? It was time to get it all out into the open.

“Well?”

“Well what, Jack?”

“Have you got something to tell me?”

“About what? Your lads aren't back—they were going to call you direct, weren't they?”

“Anything else?”

“Jack, listen, son. I hate to be a pain in the arse, but I've got the Assistant Commissioner e-mailing me, the borough fucking commander on the line and, oh, just one or two reports to get ready for the case review, so with all due respect …”

He sat back in his seat, staring at the alley of beech trees that marched off toward the abbey. She didn't know. Souness didn't know. What the fuck was—

“
Jack?
I don't want to hang up on ye, son, but—”

“OK, Danni, forget it. Put me through to Marilyn, will you?”

Kryotos agreed to contact Champ and reschedule the meeting. Champ was in the West End—he wanted lunch and if Caffery could make it for two o'clock they could meet in Soho. So he pointed the car down the MI1: Canary Wharf on his horizon for nearly an hour as he closed on London. He got to Soho by one forty-five, parked the Jag, with its small cigarette burn on the passenger seat, went into a branch of his bank and paid the three thousand straight back into his account, then walked calmly down to Shaftesbury Avenue.