The Treatment (44 page)

Champ was only twenty-five but he already owned an electrical retail shop in the streets behind Chinatown. “I do know which way is up, you see. I make it here with my Laotian name because nearly all my blood is Chinese.” He'd had acne at some point in the past, but his hair was neat and gelled, and he was well turned out in a slate-gray Armani suit and immaculate leather shoes. “I get left alone as long as I'm quiet. I understand the
guanchi
, see.” The boys sunbathing in Soho Square lifted their heads to watch him and Caffery walk by.

They went to a good and honest Italian in Dean Street: hand-painted Amalfi plates on the walls, bottles of Strega and Amaretto in a rack above the heads of the kitchen staff. Caffery had fish and sat with his back to the window watching Champ twisting up the spaghetti alle vongole. He leaned forward as he ate to avoid getting tomato sauce on his suit.

“When it happened they all came up out of nowhere, all the do-gooders trying to help me. I just kept quiet. I was working, you see.”

“Working?”

“When it happened. He was a punter.”

“A
punter
?” Caffery wondered if the PNC had made a mistake. “But you were only—”

“
Almost
thirteen, and it wasn't my first.” He pushed some spaghetti into his mouth and pointed the fork at Caffery. “You probably want me to say I was harmed by it, don't you? By the men? But some of them had more time
for me than my own mother. I was in care for a year when I was two.” He chewed and swallowed. “They found me in my cot with half a pound of shit in my nappy, me just lying there not moving or crying, even.” He twirled more pasta on his fork and pushed it into his mouth. “She was, and still is, a slag, my mother.” Chewing, not taking his eyes off Caffery, he reached inside his suit pocket and drew out a scrap of paper. “Fished this out for you.” It was a crumpled, faded small ad. “That's how he found me.”

I am an 18-year-old who had an accident which has left me looking only 12. Call …

Caffery pushed the paper back across the table. “You were twelve and you were advertising?”

“I was clever even then. Our Asian minds are quick, you know, skip through the gaps that GI Joe can't get through. Look where I am today—you know why? Because I never got a junk habit like everyone else. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bombita in those woods, believe me, business-man's specials—meth, the lot.” He waggled the fork at Caffery. “But me, I saved my money.”

“He asked you about your daddy.”

Champ snorted. “Yeah. I'd forgotten that. That's the first thing he said, when he phoned, he asked me did I like my daddy. I didn't get it at the time—now I know it's just, y'know, normal gay talk.”

“And he took photographs of you?”

“I didn't show the camera my face, but what weirded me out was that I'm sure he took photos of me after I was down—after I fainted. I remember the flash going off.” He mopped his plate with some bread and shrugged as if he hadn't given the incident much thought. “Believe me, before that night I thought I knew what weird was—some of them liked you to do such shit you wouldn't believe. There were the ones who liked yellow—you know what that is, don't you?”

“Uh—yeah.”

“And brown and fawn and red—y'know, fisting. Hey, you're the police, nothing I can say is going to shock you, right?”

Caffery looked down at the fish on his plate. “That's right.”

“But this was one sicko, weird from here to next week. First he's telling me he's going to watch over me. He said he would come and look down at me, that he'd like to watch me in my bed.”

“What do you think he was talking about?”

“No idea. Probably just his mad-speak—and, anyway, he's fiddling around with me down there as he's saying it and I'm like, ‘Hey, hang on, you better put something on— this is not barebacking times no more. You put something on. ’ But when I turned to check he hardly had nothing to put a rubber on anyway. Tiny,
tiny
little pecker like …” he held his thumb and finger apart “… like that. Never seen nothing like it—Midget Dick, the Angry Inch—and he hadn't even got a hard-on. Couldn't get himself up. 'Course, turns out he had better ideas than that.” Champ forced the bread into the corner of his mouth. “When he rammed that thing up my arse I fainted.”

Caffery put his hands on either side of his plate and looked down for a moment. His black nail looked purple against the yellow-check tablecloth. “They never caught him.”

“Nope. He never did it again. Stopped—just like that. And I never saw him again. I called him the troll, 'cause he was so big and so fucking
ugly
, man. I told the other boys—I mean the meat-rack boys—and the name just got handed down, like a legend. Later the other kids, you know, the straight little kids from the estates, they used to talk about the troll in the woods, play these games and run around and scream and work themselves up and shit.”

“We think we've got him.”

Champ didn't stop chewing. He scooped some tiny pieces of clam onto a piece of bread and pushed it into his mouth. “I guessed that's why you called. Who've you got?”

“I've got a photo. Do you think you'd remember him?”

“Yeah—I'd remember him. Plain as day. Black hair— he weren't a black guy, he was white but he had this black hair—shiny”—he held his hand up next to his head—“like mine. And he was huge—I reckon about six and a half feet—but young, you know. He can't have been more than eighteen.”

“
Eighteen?
You told the police in his mid-twenties.”

“Well, yeah, I was only twelve—he seemed really old. But I s'pose he can't have been all that much older than me.”

Caffery didn't speak for a while. He sat with his mouth slightly open, staring blankly at the cups resting on the cappuccino machine, a clean white napkin spread across them. Champ continued to chew, watching him. After a while he sat forward and said: “Problem?”

Caffery closed his mouth and dropped his chin. “No, no. No problem.” He pushed away his plate and felt under the table for his briefcase. “I'll show you the picture, then, if you think you'll remember.”

“I'll never forget him, the troll.” He leaned over, looked at Peach's photograph and shook his head. “Nope. Not him.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I'm sure.” He put his fork down and patted his mouth with the napkin. “Right—dessert?”

“What's this fucking mess you've made?” Tracey Lamb was furious. While she'd been at the police station Steven had tried to get out of the trailer—he'd thrown himself around, putting a long crack in one of the acrylic windows and upsetting his slop bucket. Now he sat on the bunk bed rocking himself, his head in his hands. “I wasn't gone
that
long.” She splashed around some Dettol from under the sink, then grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Was I—eh, you little fuck? I wasn't gone that long.” She shook his arm roughly. “So what the fuck's all this about?”

“Treeeytheee—” His bottom lip stuck out. He looked as if he was going to cry.

“Oh, stop it, for fuck's sake.” She shoved a cloth in his hand and pulled him down onto his knees. “There, wipe it up. Go on, clean it up, you filthy little shit.”

He started to move the cloth across the floor and Lamb dropped down on the bunk, lighting a cigarette, watching him. On the way back from the police station she had been
turning the problem of Steven over and over in her mind. When she was arrested her first thought had been that Caffery had set her up, that she'd been wrong about him, that he wasn't bent, wasn't working for someone. But during the questioning, as she calmed down and thought it through, she started to wonder if maybe she was mistaken. She sensed that Caffery was just as cautious of the dirty squad as she was. When he came down yesterday he'd been as nervous as a horse—he had spent half the time looking over his shoulder as if he knew someone might turn up at any minute.
He was crapping it
. And during the arrest that morning he hadn't wanted to show himself—he had taken one look at the area cars and melted away into the trees before any of the officers saw him. He hadn't expected it—because, she decided,
because he's just as bent as you thought. And afterward, outside the nick. What was that in his top pocket if it wasn't the gelt
?

Kelly Alvarez had promised to tell Lamb how the unit had tracked her down. Maybe Scotland Yard had already been on to her, maybe loose-cannon Caffery had discovered she was about to be done and used the opportunity to get in a little ahead of the pack. Maybe he really did want Steven. She started to feel better.
You might still be in for that three K, Trace.
She decided to call him tomorrow straight after the initial hearing, the “Narey” hearing, and try to suss him out again. She chucked the cigarette in the sink. Whatever his true nature, she knew that the person on his hands and knees in front of her was far more important to Caffery than that pervert in Brixton, with his insane photographs and hygiene obsessions.

The Barracudas. Named after fish, but not real fish: real fish would die in the chlorinated water. “The water tastes funny because of the chlorine,” Gummer would tell the new children. “And chlorine is there for a
purpose
see? And what does it do? It
protects
us. It protects us against germs and other nasty things that get into the water. Very important.”

But the Barracudas didn't need to be told about chlorine—
the Barracudas knew far too much already. They were at that dangerous age. All the instructors were trained, not only in their own responsibilities toward the children but also to be on the lookout for any signs of abuse—and Gummer knew that children in their swimsuits attracted more than their fair share of “inappropriate” interest. Once, a man had paid the spectator's fee to get into the building, gone into the gallery and had stood there blatantly taking photographs of the Barracudas swimming around. Gummer didn't raise the alarm; instead he stood on the pool edge and waved his hands warningly until he'd scampered away. Gummer was relieved—he didn't want the police coming and questioning
him
about the incident and making
him
start thinking about the wrong things. They'd see it in his face.
Safer not to be questioned at all.
So the mysterious cameraman had gone off with his cache of photographs—scot-free.

Photographs
—

Gummer, standing now on the pool edge in his T-shirt and bathing cap, was thinking about the photos he had in his flat—a nine-year-old boy, beautiful,
so beautiful.
He had them displayed in a back bedroom, pasted on the walls. No one would ask questions about them—there was no one to see them, no one ever came into his flat, nor would they ever. He let his mind wander off and tinker with the subject, and the first image he got was of Rory Peach. A boy, naked, arms crossed over his chest. Tied to a radiator. That bit, the bit about the radiator, hadn't actually been in the newspapers, but he knew it was reality. Then Gummer thought about another set of photos.
Where were they? In someone's house? Maybe displayed somewhere?
He wondered for the hundredth time if the police would find them.…

“Look at me—I'm a mermaid!”

Gummer stiffened. The Barracudas, especially the girls, were always getting too close for comfort. If one of them brushed against him it made his flesh crawl.

“Can we do that thing now?” They were jumping up and down in the shallows, one or two climbing out of the
water, pushing themselves onto their bellies on the pool edge and kicking their legs out. “Want to do that trick now.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Yes!” In the pool a little girl spiked out her arms and legs into a star. “I stand like this and then you have to swim through my legs.”

“No, we don't do that in this class.” The children coming out of the pool were making him nervous, too many of them and too fast, like penguins flinging themselves at a rock. And when he got nervous his head got red all the way across the top to the bony bit at the base of his skull, and down his neck and into the tops of his arms. “I think you should all get back into the pool.”

“And we swim through your legs.” They knew his weak spot and were prodding at it now—standing on the poolside, squirming around his legs like fat tadpoles, tugging at his hands, trying to get him into the water, teasing him, brushing him. “And after that you swim through ours.”

“No—definitely not—”

“We're all mermaids. Look—”

“Let go!” Gummer was starting to shake. He'd taken his pills that morning, but there was still that bloating tension in him, waiting to burst out. He wanted to cry. The girls were swarming around him now, stirring the hairs on his skin. He couldn't bear them to touch him—it was so important that they didn't touch him. It was no good it was no good—he was going to—

“STOP!”

His voice echoed around the pool. The lifeguards and the spectators in the gallery all looked up. “
Just stop it now
.” A blast on his whistle and one or two heads, slick heads like young seals', popped up in the water, shocked and sobered. “
When I say no I mean no.
” The children next to him backed away, surprised. He was trembling, bright red, his whole face the color of his rubber bathing cap. This time none of the children laughed. “Right.” He gestured to the changing rooms. “Lesson's canceled for
today. You've proved you can't follow the rules so the les-son's canceled.”

It was getting late but there was nowhere to park in King's car park, and Caffery had to take the Jaguar almost halfway to Brixton before he found a side road to leave it in. Souness still hadn't paged him. Walking to the hospital, twice he broke into a jog—as if he might silence his mind.
Hyper hyper hyper
—a hothouse of images and voices, making connections where none should be.
Peach, Alek Peach, it wasn't you twelve years ago, but it was you with Rory. What's happening? Are you copying someone?
It didn't make sense. He felt like striking his forehead. Exasperated and tired, he stopped in the main corridor to get a cup of vending machine coffee.

“Mr. Caffery.”

He looked up. Ndizeye stood a few yards along the hallway, body turned slightly away as if he had been crossing the corridor and stopped when he'd noticed Caffery. He was holding a stack of X rays under his arm and his glasses had slipped down his sweaty nose.