The Treatment (9 page)

In spite of himself Caffery caught himself smiling. Later, he stopped her before she left the office. “Danni, I know I've made you late for Paulina, so thank you for talking to me.”

Caffery's little Victorian cottage was quiet. He parked his battered old Jaguar carefully next to Rebecca's black VW Beetle and went inside, unknotting his tie. She was still awake in spite of the hour—there was warmth and noise coming from the living room at the back of the house and in the hall a pair of green metallic slingbacks, heels scuffed, lay toppled over, the words “Miu Miu” fading and worn on the inside. He paused before he opened the door, as he always did these days, wondering what mood she would be in.

She was doing a shoulder stand on the sofa, giggling and watching her bare toes wriggle. She wore khaki shorts and one of his gray T-shirts; a bottle of Blavod leaned drunkenly against the cushion and a cigarillo smoldered in the ashtray.

“Happy?”

“Oooops!” She dropped her legs with a bang and twisted round, grinning up at him.

He saw with relief that she was calm. Flushed and tipsy but mellow.

“You look happy.”

“Uh-huh.” A CD played in the background—some-thing smooth, Air or someone like it. “Drunk.”

“You lush.” He bent over and kissed her. “I've been calling you all day.” He went into the kitchen, hung his jacket on the back of the door and got his Glenmorangie and a glass.

“I've been in Brixton with some Slade finalists. They think I'm God or something.”

“Shameless.” He pulled off his shoes and collapsed on the sofa, uncorking the whisky. “Egotistic little tart.”

“I know.” She coiled her hank of spice-colored hair into a long snake, laid it over one shoulder, and clambered across to him. Good gymnast's legs she had—always lightly tanned, the color of sesame oil. “Ouch,” Souness once admitted, after half a bottle of scotch. “She's the sort of woman you feel right here. In your groin.”

“I saw someone I knew on the news.” Rebecca rested her arms on his shoulders and kissed his neck. “Just from behind. I knew it was you from your backside. And because you looked pissed off, even from a distance.”

He downed a glass, refilled it and linked his fingers through hers. In the last three days they hadn't had time together—he'd realized it that morning when the sound of one of the indexers crossing her legs in her fawn Pretty Pollys had popped a sweat on his forehead.

“You must be knackered.”

“I've got a four-hour turnaround. Back to the office by five.”

“It's a little kid, isn't it?”

“Mmmm. Yes.” He held up her hand and studied her fingers. Her pearly clean nails against his. The thumb on his left hand was black; it was a bruise that wouldn't grow out. His own stigmata. Injured the day Ewan went missing, never changing in twenty-eight years. “Let's not talk about it, eh?”

“Why not?”

Why not?
Because already Ewan was willfully superimposing himself over a picture of Rory Peach—
and you've spotted that, Becky, I know you've already spotted the resemblance and if we start, if I let you, we'll be talking about Ewan before I can put the brakes on, and then the mood will change and I'll say something about you, maybe, and Bliss, and …

“Because I'm tired. I've had it all day.”

“OK.” She bit her lip and thought about this. “Well,” she tried, working her fingers inside his shirt and smiling. “How about this? Are you horny?”

He sighed and put down his glass. “Of course.”

She giggled. “Yeah, stupid question. I mean, when are you not?”

“I thought I was constantly pissed off.”

“No. You're constantly randy is what you are. Pissed off is what you do between having hard-ons.”

“Come here.” He pulled her astride his lap and worked his hands up her T-shirt. “Did you see
Time Out
?”

“I know.” She began to unbutton his shirt, closing her eyes when he found her nipples and worked them between his thumb and forefinger. “How ace am I, then, eh?” she murmured dreamily, her head back. “Oh, God, that's nice. Did you read it, then?”

“Yes. I'm proud of you.”

But he was lying. He shuffled down the sofa a few inches and moved his hands across her skin, like oil against his hard fingers, down the whole width of her pelvis, and the long fierce muscles of her stomach. Rebecca had told him that her body had changed since her artwork had taken off—she said her skin was smoother, her waist thinner; that she didn't get calluses on her feet anymore and that these days she walked more slowly. But what Caffery saw was the opposite: a hardening, a quickening. And he knew it dated back to the assault. To Bliss. Reflecting this switch came the new artwork, the sculptures. Before the assault Rebecca's work had been something quite different. Now the colors had disappeared and with them a softness of style. Something in her had shifted, but she still wanted Jack and so here he was, still hopelessly and helplessly attracted to her, in love with her in spite of how she had changed—she was the sweet weight in his heart and in his cock. Just the smell of one of her cigarillos in an ashtray could give him a hard-on.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her face above him, eyes closed, a calm, distant smile on her face. I should close the curtains, he thought vaguely, looked at the dark window and saw the white smudge of a face, a snoutlike impression and the telltale frosting of excited breath on the panes—

“Shit!” He pulled Rebecca's T-shirt down.

“What?”

“Move it. Quick.”

Rolling her away, he sprang to his feet and slammed open the French windows. Penderecki had reached the foot of the garden, running for the back fence. Caffery sprinted the forty feet in seconds, but Penderecki was prepared: he had brought a green plastic milk crate which he used to hike himself over the back fence, and scurried away into the undergrowth of the railway cutting, leaving behind just the crate and the sound of his wheezing trailing in the air behind. Caffery, shoeless, shirt undone, picked up the crate and threw it after him. “
Do that again and I will kill you.
” He stood in the garden his mother had planted, watching the larval shape of the old man scuttling away through the undergrowth. “I
mean it
—I've got your
blood
in my
mouth
, Penderecki.” He dropped his hands on the wire fence, letting his breathing slow, trying not to be drawn, trying to pull his anger back in. “I've got your blood.”

It's just a new way of him disturbing the silt. Ignore it. Ignore it—

He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbor's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back—
Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you.
Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them. Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a predator himself, operating from Amsterdam … Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will.
It was his work to ignore them all. Someone touched his shoulders. He started. “Rebecca.” He shook his head. “I'm sorry.” He was still shaking with anger.

“Not your fault. He's a little shit.”

“He's baiting me.”

“I know.” She kissed his back. “He makes it difficult.”

“Yeah, well.” He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. “He's always made it difficult.” She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep:

And now this spying, this creeping around his garden. Caffery rolled a cigarette. He hated Penderecki for keeping
up the pressure, hated him for the constant reminders. Rebecca kissed his back again and wandered away, over to the old beech at the foot of the garden. She pressed her palms against the trunk. “This is where the tree house was, am I right?”

“Yes.” He lowered his head and lit the cigarette.

“Then …” She rested her ear against the tree trunk, as if listening for a pulse, and looked upward into the spreading branches. “How did you—oh, I see.”

“Rebecca—”

But before he could stop her she was monkeying up the trunk using the iron handholds his father had nailed into it for his two sons. She crouched like a gnome in the elbow of a branch. Astonishing how a tree can cup a human body, he thought, looking up at her. Strange that we ever crawled down, traded the leaves and nooks for the wide uncertainties of the prairie. “Come on,” she called. “It's great up here.” He put the cigarette between his teeth and followed reluctantly, feeling the familiar irregularities of the iron loops against his palms. The night was clear, the sky sprinkled with stars. When he came level with Rebecca he leaned back against the branch, facing her, his feet braced against the trunk, the bark husky and warm against his soles. Behind her, above the houses, the green millennium laser on Greenwich Park sliced the great dome of black.

“Good, isn't it?”

“Maybe …”

He rarely came up here. Once a year, maybe, and not at all since Rebecca. He thought that she wouldn't want him sitting up here dwelling on everything. The view hadn't changed much. Still the long scar of the railway. Still Penderecki's house on the other side: unpainted for years, the guttering hanging so that the back of the house was coated in moss—as incongruous in the terrace of cared-for houses as the boarded-up house next to the Peaches'.

Okay, he told himself, no more connections like that. Rory isn't Ewan and Ewan isn't Rory.
Get it straight.

“Zeus was a baby in a tree.” Rebecca dangled her feet
over the edge and smiled. “He was hung in a cradle and fed by the bees.… Stop thinking about him.” She grabbed his hand suddenly. “Come on, stop it. I know you're thinking about Ewan.” Caffery didn't answer. He pulled his hand from her and looked across the railway cutting.

“Jesus.” She shook her head and looked up at the stars. “Can't you see what's happening? Penderecki's got you so wound up that you carry it everywhere—the more he pushes the tighter you get. You're being eaten alive by it all, by Ewan, by that …” she nodded over the railway cutting, “that
pervert
.”

“Not now, Rebecca—”

“I mean it. Look at you—a fucked up, hunched-up, shriveled-up
miserable
git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backward through Hades by his heels and
it's all because of Ewan
. You're
carrying
him, Jack, carrying him everywhere. The
smallest
thing makes you explode. And now you've got a case at work that's similar—”

“Rebecca—”

“And now you've got a case at work that's similar and God alone
knows
what'll happen. How will you control yourself? Someone'll get hurt—might even be you. You might even end up like Paul.”

“That's enough.” He held his hand up. “Enough.” He knew where they were going. He knew that Paul Essex, the DS who had been part of the frantic hunt for Malcolm Bliss, stood for all Rebecca's fears about the job. Essex had died, on his back in a Kent forest, his blood soaking like bitumen into the ground, and all that Caffery had left of him was his driving license. He'd removed it from Essex's wallet before handing it over to his parents. Maybe Rebecca imagined that was how he, Caffery, was going to end.

“He's got nothing to do with this.”

“Yes, he has.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Because it might happen to you if you can't calm down—if you can't get Ewan off your back.
And
you
know it. You
know
that if you get pushed on this it might even go as far as it did last time.”

He looked up. “What
last time
?”

“Ah—that made you listen.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He
knows
what I'm talking about.” She smiled out into the darkness. “He knows to whom I allude.”

“Becky—”

“Mark my words, Jack, you'll do it again. It's like a little thing growing in you, right about …” she put a finger on his chest “…
there.
And it'll keep growing and growing, and if you don't get away from this house, if you don't get away from that sad old pervert over there, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then
bam!
you'll do it again and—”

“Stop it.”
He pushed her hand away from his chest. “What the
fuck
are you talking about?”