The Treatment (51 page)

Neither spoke. They stood, peering cautiously into the darkened hallway.

Souness took a deep breath. She pocketed her mobile, handed Caffery his jacket and keys, and stepped across the threshold. From somewhere inside, somewhere in the darkness, came a stale smell. She hesitated, felt in her pocket for the sturdy torch. “You sure he's not here?”

“I'm sure.” But his voice was low. Cautiously he flicked on the light and they both stood, looking into the hallway. It was an unremarkable, council-block hallway, ending a few feet ahead in a doorway. No carpet on the floor; the boards were bare. The walls were woodchip and on either side of the hallway were two painted doors. “Hello?”

Silence.

“This is the police, Mr. Klare.”

Silence.

From the landing behind them came the creak of another letter box opening. “Nosy wee fuckers.” Souness closed the battered door with her foot and turned back to Caffery, who was standing at the first door, his hands up, palms facing the door, an odd softness in his expression as if there was warmth coming from it.

“Jack?”

He didn't answer. The hair on his arms prickled, standing straight up against his shirt. On the door, in tiny, almost invisible letters, someone had written very plainly the word “Hazard.”

He turned to Souness and smiled.

Outside it was getting dark. From the window in the living room they could see the weather rolling in for miles around—clouds as big as cathedrals stalked above the park, pink evening light prismed up from the horizon. Souness put some calls in to mobilize the locals, to get a bulletin out to the area cars, to mount surveillance on the flat and to get the SSCU over to Arkaig Tower to see if they could pick up some DNA to match to their target. “Right,” she said. “Let's give the place a wee spin, then. Before the cavalry arrive.”

They brought the lifts to the top floor, jammed them
and propped open the door to the staircase—if Roland Klare decided to come home between now and the time new officers arrived, they wanted to hear his footsteps on the stairs. They zoned the flat roughly between them: Souness wrapped polythene freezer bags around her hands and took the living room and bathroom while Caffery did the kitchen and the bedroom. They used lights only in the rooms that didn't have windows: in the others they relied on what daylight remained. Klare's flat, they soon found, was a warehouse: every imaginable object was hoarded here, from a collection of vacuum cleaners to a tawny owl in a glass dome. Some areas were filthy—the smell of the bathroom made Souness put her hand over her mouth— and the fridge was full of rotting food: they could well imagine Klare was responsible for the mess in the Peaches' attic. But in erratic ways the flat had been kept scrupulously clean. The kitchen had been scrubbed: in some places the worktop had been so manically scoured that small scoops of the Formica had worn through and showed chalky white. Cloths sat in a large boiling pan on the hob. The floors, none of which had carpets, were obsessively clean.

With the first stone Souness turned she found something of interest. “Hey, Jack,” she called, “have a deek at this.”

He went into the living room and found her standing at a metal-framed desk, silhouetted against the sunset, staring into an opened drawer. “What's that?”

“Fuck knows.” She picked it up and they both peered at it. It was a battered notebook, a rubber band around it. “What d'you make o' that, then?”

He took her elbow and lifted it higher, tilting it toward the window so he could see better. The words “The Treatment” had been carefully stenciled in a box on the front cover, and the curling pages were covered with detailed drills and formulae, all written in a tiny, hectic scrawl. Looking at it made his skin tingle. “Grab it, then.”

“Right.” Souness slipped the notebook into a freezer bag, put it inside her jacket and turned back to the living room. “Come on, snap-snap.”

They worked for another ten minutes, neither sure exactly what they were looking for. In a magazine rack Souness found a card picturing a toddler in a nappy with the caption: “I HATE TO BOTHER YOU WITH A PERSONAL PROBLEM …” She opened it and read the punchline: “BUT I'M HORNY.” In the bedroom, deflated and tucked into a drawer, Caffery found a blow-up doll of a male child, a tag in Japanese attached on the seam at the ankle. They were definitely in the right place, and it was all so
weird
, he thought, like an after-hours museum, all Klare's collection neatly ordered on fold-out tables— metal, the sort you might see at a jumble sale. Caffery noticed that none of the collection touched the floor, everything rested on these tables—it made him think about how Rory Peach had been stored, off the ground, the way a big cat would drag a carcass into a tree.

He was still wondering about this when, ten minutes later, he pushed open a cupboard door in one of the bedrooms and found what he knew they were looking for. “Hey, Danni,” he called, “got a moment?”

“What?” She came in from the living room, puffing, holding her arms above her head and squeezing past the tables to get to him. “What you got?”

“I don't know.” He reached inside and switched on the light.

“Red bulb,” Souness muttered, peering suspiciously into the cupboard. “Freaky.”

“It's a darkroom.”

“Eh?”

“It's a darkroom—look.” He pointed to a small plastic table covered in equipment: bottles of chemicals, a pair of rubber gloves, trays, a lamphouse mounted on a stand that he guessed was for printing film. Set aside from the clutter, at the far end of the table, was a biscuit tin, sealed with brown tape. “Darkroom equipment.” He reached in his pocket for his army knife, slit the tape on the tin, popped the lid off and looked at what was inside. “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Here we go.” He handed the torch to Souness and started pulling out prints.

“Photos.”

“What?”

“Look.”

Souness came into the cupboard and shone the torch on the photos. Human faces stared up at her. “Oh, God,” she said, tipping back a bit on her heels. The images were blurred but she thought she knew what she was looking at. She recognized the crosshatched lino on the floor. “Rory Peach?”

“I think so.”

“Jesus.” She picked up the top photograph and stared at it. “Poor wee mite.” She had Alek and Rory, and the truth of what had happened to them in number thirty Donegal Crescent, in her hand, and it made the blood go from her face. “Not enough that he's dead,” she said quietly. “He had to go through that first.”

“I know.” Caffery was rummaging in the tin. Underneath the pictures of Rory Peach he found an old Polaroid of a child wrapped with torn sheets, a gag on his face, his hands placed across his chest like a pharaoh. He knew what this was. He recognized the wallpaper. And the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster. “He was right,” he said, handing the photo to Souness. “He was fucking right—it wasn't a hoax.”

“
Who
was right?”

“DI Durham.” There were more pictures of the same child underneath. “See? It's the Half Moon Lane family.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, what the fuck ever happened to them, then?”

“I don't know. I just don't know.” Farther down, under the Polaroids, he found a photograph of a boy—face-down in a scatter of dead leaves, his trousers and underwear pulled down to his knees. This, he knew instantly, was Champaluang Keoduangdy twelve years ago—one of Roland Klare's earliest victims. “Jesus,” he muttered. “It's all here.” He lifted the tin and found underneath it four more Polaroids. These pictured a boy tied to a radiator, a white radiator against a cantaloupecolored wall. The boy, it was clearly a boy, lay on his side.
He was white, he looked about Rory Peach's age and he wore sandals, a blue T-shirt and shorts—just like the child in the Half Moon Lane photograph. The child's face was half hidden, a glimmer of brown tape on the side of his cheek where he'd been gagged, and his shorts had been half unzipped to show his underwear. It wasn't Rory Peach and it wasn't the Half Moon Lane child. This time when she saw it Souness began stamping her feet. “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “Oh, my God, I smell trouble. My God. I think you were right.”

“
The next family?
” He looked up at her. “Do you think that's the next family?”

“Aye, aye—I wouldn't be surprised. Come on—let's get them back to Shrivemoor.” She tucked the torch into her waistband and started gathering up the photos, stuffing them into the tin. “Come on.”

She pressed the lid closed, grabbed them, squeezed her way back past the tables to the bedroom window and glanced out. In the street below cars were arriving—subtly as ants from a nest, clustering around the foot of the building.

“They're here.”

“Right.” He closed the door and came out from behind the tables. “I want to look in the cupboard in the hall.”

“I thought you'd done it.”

“Nope. Come on.”

In the hallway he stood for a moment, his hands resting on the door. Logan had been up here on the first day of the investigation—Caffery remembered seeing Roland Klare's name in his statements—but this writing, “Hazard,” was so small Logan could easily have missed it. He tried now to picture the size of the room beyond. Another bedroom? No door handle—just a brass knob, so maybe a cupboard?
Just like Carmel Peach, sealed away in a cupboard, a warning scrawled across it.

“Come on, Jack.” Souness stood next to him, clutching the tin to her stomach. “We haven't got all—”

“OK.” He pushed the door. It opened smoothly and he found he was looking at another small cupboard. The bulb
was out and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light, but when he did he put his hands on the edges of the door frame to keep his balance.

“What is it?”

“Uh.” He wiped his mouth. “I don't know. Give us the torch.”

Souness passed the torch to him. He clicked it on and let the beam play around the small area. At the back of the cupboard was a waist-high glass tank. Like a fish tank. “There's something at the back of the cupboard.”

“Then go and have a look.”

“Yeah.”
Yeah, sure, no problem.
The tank was about two thirds full of liquid, semi-opaque, and near the surface something clogged floated.
Sure, something's fucking floating in it but that's no problem.

“Come on, Jack, let's get on wi' it.”

“It stinks—sure you don't want to do it?”

“Ye wee coward.”

“You do it, then.”

“No fucking way—that's a man's job.”

“Right.” He took a deep breath and stepped inside. “First off, there's something on the floor here.” He let the torch play across the wall to the right. “Clothes,” he said. “A pile of clothes on the floor.” He could come back to those later. “And, uh, then, this tank …” He stepped nearer, let the light play over it, and immediately saw that the object floating in the yellowish fluid was a tangle of clothes. Clothes floating in—he bent nearer—clothes floating in—“Jesus.” He took an involuntary step back.

“What?” Souness said. “What is it?”

“Piss. It's only about a hundred gallons of piss.”

“Jesus—”

“Crazy fucking bastard.” Caffery shone the torch into the tank. Men's clothes, a nylon zip-up top, a hooded tracksuit, three pairs of trainers. Roland Klare had been storing clothes in two feet of urine. “Crazy, crazy fucking bastard—”

Benedicte was fevered, light-headed. Her skin was scratchy, there were sores inside her mouth from her manic
suctioning of the copper pipe, and her fingerpads were raw from digging into the floor. It had been a day's work to push Smurf's corpse as far away as she could. She had covered her with Hal's shirt, but the bluebottles had managed to find their way under it and were feeding on the lushest, choicest food they had ever known. They proliferated, doubling their numbers, it seemed, in her fever, every time she opened her eyes.

Sometimes she knew she was awake, and sometimes she wasn't sure. Her eyes raced around inside their sockets, lights floated in and out, and sometimes she could see her life before this—flickering along so happily, so happy and smooth, only soft edges and milky comfort and,
look
, there she was with Josh and Hal and Smurf, the whole family, sitting on the lawn. It was summertime—they were wearing shorts, Josh's Pocari Sweat canister on the steps, a radio playing, fresh-cut grass sticking to the back of Josh's legs when he got up to jump into the paddling pool. Then she could hear Josh downstairs crying.
Josh?
Was that really Josh? And the other noise? What was that? An animal grunting? Or was it a man sobbing?

Ben—come on, now, come on—wake up.

Josh?
Sweating, her heart thudding, she opened her eyes in the dark room. Moonlight on the ceiling. Over in the corner the gray shape of her poor dead puppy. She was awake. Really awake. Had that been Josh, crying? She rolled onto her side so that her ear was pressed against the floorboards and listened to the house under her. Silent.

She'd imagined it.

She crunched up her eyes and tried to go back to the picture of Josh and Hal, sitting on the grass. But her brain seemed swollen, as if it were pressing against her eyes, and she just couldn't do it. She couldn't see their faces. In just four days her son and her husband had been reduced to a few blurry images—Josh a tiny, defenseless shadow with grasping hands, and Hal a dark landscape in bed next to her at night.

“Oh, Josh,” she whispered. “Hal, Josh, I love you.”

The house was silent as she closed her eyes again. Over the roof she could hear a plane. She had a sudden image of
the light in the cabin, the lovely rosy light of sunset racing around the cabin—Hal and her on the way to Cuba in the days when no one went to Cuba, a travel agent would laugh if you asked to go to Cuba, and you had to fly through any number of Caribbean islands just to get there. And he had wanted to go just because he wanted to see the furniture factories in Holguín. She held her hands across her face and imagined a sea she had always wanted to visit—a magical sea, the Sea of Cortez maybe—a mysterious sea where whales came to mate and strange singing could be heard coming across the water at dusk.…