The Treatment

Nine.

Caffery, the exhibits officer and DS Fiona Quinn had a brief plan-of-action meeting with the pathologist, Harsha Krishnamurthi, in the coroner's office reception. Over dusty silk flower displays on formica tables they discussed how to cut up Rory Peach. Afterwards Caffery went into the men's and splashed water across his face.

When he had looked into the branches and seen how Rory had been tied his impulse had been to drive back to Brockley, walk straight into Penderecki's house, take him by his thinning hair, slam his face into a wall and kick him. Kick him until he stopped moving. The eight-year-old had been curled into a ball, fastened with rope, knees up to his chin, arms covering his head from above he would have resembled something the size and shape of a car tyre. His fingernails had carved demilunes into his own cheek. If Rory had been any bigger they might have seen him earlier, if he'd been ten or eleven and not eight, maybe, Caffery thought, and then he thought that twenty-seven years ago no one had checked the trees along the railway track. No one had wondered about the trees. Even today he was stumbling over new ways Penderecki could have concealed Ewan during the police search of his house.

He wiped his face with a paper towel and went through, past the ante-room where bodies were stored in banks of lockers, ID tags slotted into holders on the doors, pink for a girl and blue for a boy We are colour coded by our sex, he thought, not only at birth but in death too and into the dissecting room. It was cool in here, as if it was winter. Mint-green tiles lined the walls, like an old-fashioned swimming-pool, and there it was that familiar butcher's smell of old, mopped-around blood. Hoses lay under the tables, releasing small puddles of water on to the tiled floor. Two bodies, names written in black marker on each calf, had been pushed to one end of the room to make space, their belongings and toe-tags sitting on a separate gurney in yellow plastic hospital waste-bags. The bodies were split open: a heap of colours, blue paper towels crammed in the neck cavities, and a mortician in a green plastic apron and black Wellingtons stood over one, lifting out a pile of intestines. He shook them, as if he was shaking washing coming from a bowl.

Rory Peach, once a boy who played football and stuck go-faster stripes on his bike, was now a circle wrapped in a white plastic sheet on the table in the centre of the tiled room. Around him stood three morticians arranged in an odd tableau. They didn't look up when Caffery appeared in the doorway. Morticians are a strange, silent group. Sometimes secretive, often cliquey, always down to earth: the real muscle behind the pathologist, they do most of the hard labour in an autopsy without raising an eyebrow. Caffery had never seen them behave the way they did that summer afternoon. It took him a moment, after they had broken off and gone in separate directions, collecting bowls, turning on hoses, to realize that he had just witnessed them paying respect. Oh, God, he thought, this isn't going to be easy.

Harsha Krishnamurthi came in. Tall, greying. All business. Fiddling with his new toy, a hands-free dictaphone with headset, he got it into position then briskly pulled away Rory Peach's sheet. Everyone in the mortuary stiffened slightly, as if they'd drawn a collective breath.

He was crunched into a croissant shape, almost like a sleeping cat, his hands wrapped over his head. He looked as if he was examining something on his chest. Brown parcel tape had been wrapped around his head, covering his mouth and eyes. He didn't smell, as if his flesh was too clean and young to smell, and his skin was smooth as if he'd just got out of a bath. Krishnamurthi cleared his throat, asked Caffery if this was the same body found in the tree in Brockwell Park. Caffery nodded: "It is." The formalities were over.

They removed the knots first. Krishnamurthi severed the rope with painstaking attention, more than two inches from the knot: the ligatures could be tested not only for DNA, but also by forensic knot analysts and he was careful to preserve their shape as he put them into an exhibits bag. The photographer moved around the table, working from every angle as the exhibits officer sealed and initialled the bag and put it on his trolley.

The process was repeated until all the ropes were removed and Rory looked quite different. He lay curled up, like a young spider in defence mode, deep swollen furrows made by the ropes on his arms, knees and ankles. Krishnamurthi gently tested the thin legs. When they uncurled obediently he hesitated, an odd look on his face. For a moment no one dared breathe. Krishnamurthi looked quickly up at the clock on the wall and carefully flexed Rory Peach's feet, then examined the boy's hands and face.

"There's uh, yes." He flipped up his plastic visor and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. "There's rigor mortis present only in the face and upper torso. I'm… going to…" His pause was almost imperceptible. Only those with their antennae quivering, like Caffery, would have noticed the brief blush of emotion. Those flexible feet had started the pathologist thinking the unthinkable. "I'm going to take a liver temperature."

Caffery turned away. He had seen hundreds of postmortems, most less recognizable as human beings than Rory was. He'd seen a forty-year-old man, reduced by faceless business associates to nothing but a one and a half stone cut of torso, rolling on the dissecting table. He'd seen a fifteen-year-old girl eaten by foxes from her eyes down to her shoulders. He didn't kid himself that he had a right to feel horror more deeply than anyone else but, like Krishnamurthi, he knew the mechanics of rigor he knew what that stiffness in the facial muscles, what the flexibility in the feet said about Rory's death. He didn't want to think about it. For the first time in his life he had to step out of a post-mortem.

He was standing in reception, pressing Altoid mints into his mouth, rubbing his hands together hard, the smart of blood clearing his thoughts, when the door opened. Souness came in, brushing her jacket as if she'd walked through a cobweb.

"Fucking press all over me." She shuddered. "Talk about quick off the mark." She pushed the door closed behind her, pressing her foot on it to check that it was properly shut, turned and saw instantly that Caffery was trying to avoid her eyes, was trying hard to find somewhere to hide his attention. Her voice softened. "Ye all right?" She came a little bit nearer. He was slightly cyanosed around the mouth. "No, ye're not. Ye're crapping it, aren't ye?"

"I'm fine. Mint?"

"No thanks." She chewed her thumbnail, looked towards the dissecting room, and back at him. "Funny. I suppose if it was me I might be just a wee bit jealous."

"Jealous?"

"Rory's been found. He's dead, but at least he was found Mum and Dad can start grieving now." She rested her hand affectionately on his arm. "And where does that leave ye, ye poor wee soul?"

Caffery didn't answer. He didn't dare speak or even reach into his pocket for cigarette papers in case his hands were shaking. He turned for the door to the autopsy suite. "I uh I think we've got a time of death. Just guessing from the rigor."

"And?"

"Uh look, let's go back inside, shall we?"

Back in the dissecting room Krishnamurthi had moved on. He had taken nail cuttings, putting the scissors he used into the exhibits bag with the last cuttings and passing them all to the exhibits officer. He had removed the packing tape from Rory's face. DS Fiona Quinn was hopeful: in evidence bags on a separate gurney were five white fibres Krishnamurthi had removed from the ligature furrows on Rory's wrists with a strip of low-tack tape. She could run them through mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to find chemical composition and colour hopefully match them to a suspect's clothing. Now Krishnamurthi was carefully breaking the rigor mortis in Rory's upper body and gently straightening him out on the table.

Caffery and Souness stood against the wall, Caffery sucking mints, Souness jiggling her finger in her ear as if she was embarrassed to be watching this.

Rory measured 127 centimetres from his left heel to his crown. He weighed 26.23 kilos. A Tanner scale reading would mark him down as slightly bigger than an average eight-year-old. A bloody paper towel with pale blue flowers around the edge had been scrunched against his shoulder and it clung there, pressed under his back when he was straightened.

Krishnamurthi, the photographer and the morticians moved around the table in a complex, calm ritual, each anticipating without word or signal when it was time to step in. Caffery and Souness watched in silence they had the same two questions in their minds: was the paper towel hiding the source of the blood in the kitchen? And: had Rory Peach been sexually assaulted?

"I'm looking at an averagely nourished body of a child," Krishnamurthi said softly, into the headset. His voice echoed in the scrubbed-down room. "The face shows marked turgor, and what appears to be multiple aspects of Hippocratic facies, the occular orbits are prominent, while the globes are sunken. Cheekbones and mandibles prominent. Mouth and nose appear…" he bent in and squinted at the child's face '… dry. Crusted. Skin is tight to palpation so flag histology to look for hyperkalemia and I want sodium counts, anti-diuretic hormone levels and plasma volume."

"Harsha?"

Krishnamurthi looked up at Souness. "Yes, yes. When the micros copies are back I'll tell you more." Krishnamurthi had a reputation for denying the police the immediate answers they wanted. "And when I've looked at the organ capsules."

"What are you expecting?"

"Sticky, tacky capsules, maybe bleeding in the intestinal tract."

"Meaning?"

"I'll tell you when I've had a look." He narrowed his eyes at her, making a disapproving clicking noise in his throat. "OK?"

"Fair enough." Souness held up her hands. The last thing they needed was to alienate him. "That's fair enough."

"Right." Krishnamurthi bent nearer to look at Rory's throat. "There is a poorly defined mark overlying the larynx indicating some sort of uh -occlusion of the carotid and jugular, some sort of ligature strangulation, but no petechiae in the eyes. Some scratch marks and bruising to the neck." He looked up at Souness. "But it's not the cause of death."

"Really?"

"Really."

Yes, really, Danni. Caffery looked at his shoes. That's not how Rory died. I think I already know how he died.

"I'd like later," Krishnamurthi continued, 'to get some alternative light sources on these marks, photograph the area and see if we can see anything else. Right." He stepped back and allowed the mortician to turn Rory's body expertly, efficiently, not looking at the child's face. The dissecting room was absolutely silent. Lying on his face the little lumps of Rory's spine protruded through the thin skin; the paper towel stayed stuck in place. Krishnamurthi didn't look at anyone as he peeled it away, dropping it in an evidence bag. He peered down at the wound on Rory's shoulder and after a breathless pause he stepped back and looked up.

"Yes," he said to the assembled team. "Yes. Someone have a word with the coroner. Need to have a dentist look at this."

Out in the high blue afternoon furnace Josh was in the paddling-pool in his Darth Maul trunks, his back to the woods, intense concentration on his face as he plunged Thunderbird Four to the bottom of the pool and let it bob back up to the surface. Sunlight flashed on the water, and over the fence in the park gnats hummed in the shade of the Spanish chestnuts.

Hal stood on the veranda with a cold bottle of Coke, staring at those trees. He could see flashes of white and blue out there where a police team had congregated on a small area fluttering crime-scene tape had appeared, draped around bushes. They must have found something. He sipped his Coke thoughtfully -he had been so happy to be out of central Brixton, out of the cramped flat above an off-licence on the Front Line, but now Brixton's problems seemed to be chasing them up the hill.

The Front Line. At one time they had been proud of the cachet of the address, and life for them was Hoy Hoy cockroach traps under the sink, tuna and Scotch bonnet sandwiches in the Phoenix cafe, Hal forever tracking down and arguing revisionism with Darcus Howe. Life on the Front Line. He liked that him and Ben frontiersmen, living down with the real people. They'd been there for the '95 Wayne Douglas riots he had stood in the street, holding his door keys in one hand, library books in the other, and watched the Dogstar go up in flames. Whoomp! Up into the sky. And everyone looked out of their doors and windows to see burning, curling, crisp packets floating down from the clouds.

But with Josh it all changed. Responsibility kicked at them. The schizophrenics screaming, the muggings, the rich young clubgoers and the sinister followers of Louis Farrakhan impossibly handsome black men in razor-sharp suits, standing on street corners with hands folded piously, terrifying plans darting behind their eyes suddenly none of it was glamorous, it wasn't funny. One day Josh came screaming through the room with Buzz Lightyear: Buzz en garde with his scorching new weapon. A syringe, the words Single Use Only For U 100 Insulin printed on it. After that Hal decided to work himself lame to get his family out of central Brixton. But the life belt when it came, was from Benedicte's family: an inheritance from her aunt in Norway had put them in this new house, just far enough out of the centre to keep them safe. There was lighting and security fencing, there was a bus ride separating them from the Fridge and life was, well, really rather cushiony.

"Hal!" From a window above him Benedicte was calling. He put the Coke bottle on the veranda. "Josh stay there, OK?" He went inside, climbing the stairs two at a time. She was in the bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed.

"You OK?"

"Yeah." She was wearing a T-shirt, pink knickers and sheepskin slippers, as if she'd been in the middle of changing. One side of her hair was set in rollers, the other loose. "I'm OK, but look look at the bed."

Hal could see that the whole length of her side of the bed was wet. As if Smurf had tottered up and down the bed peeing as she went. "Christ."

"Oh, God." Ben rubbed her face. "I'm sorry I yelled. I suppose it's not Smurf's fault. She's old." She sighed and began to remove the saturated duvet cover. "She gets on to the bed and she can't always get down quickly enough when she needs to."

He shook his head. "Should have seen her this morning. Dragging. Her back legs you know. She started peeing before she'd even stopped walking.

Walking along and peeing all down her legs. It's pathetic'

"She took her pills this morning but, oh, Hal, you know I still think we should get the name of a vet in Helston, just in case. Yeew-eee!" Ben puffed air from her mouth and slotted her hands under the pillow to pull back the sheets. "I thought my days of changing pissy sheets were over."

"It's probably all that excitement this morning."

"Oh, yeah, getting your bits examined by a total stranger makes you pee with excitement. Only a man could say that." She piled up the bed linen. "We're going to have to stop her coming up the stairs, Hal, OK? Keep her shut in the kitchen."

He sighed. "I suppose when we get back we're going to have to face it." He pressed two fingers to her temple and clicked a trigger with his thumb. "Poor old girl."

"Oh, for God's sake, please don't." She wiped her face on the shoulder of her T-shirt. She didn't think she could face losing Smurf. Secretly they hadn't expected her to survive this far on her ID disc, after "My name is Smurf. If you find me please call…" their old telephone number was still given. They hadn't thought it was worth changing. Even so, Ben hadn't really accepted that the end was near. "Can't we think of something better to talk about?" She turned to the door, the bundle of sheets in her arms, and left the room.

It was a bite. An open red hole in the white flesh. As if Rory had been snapped at by a meat-eater. There were four or five less violent bites in the same area, but Krishnamurthi couldn't find any on the other places a male victim of rape is typically bitten: the axillae, the face and the scrotum. Only the shoulders.

Bites to the shoulders a method a rapist often uses to subdue his victim. And when Krishnamurthi did the anal swabs he found something else. "Yes." He cleared his throat and straightened up. "There's a contaminant."

No one spoke. Souness and Caffery exchanged a glance.

"Do you know what it is?"

"You can't tell just looking at it in this light not until you get it in the lab but I suppose we can hazard a guess."

Souness nodded. "I see." She looked at Caffery. He nodded tightly at her, put his hands in his pockets and turned back to watch Krishnamurthi working. Until the contaminant was identified they couldn't make assumptions. It could be anything.

The photographer fitted film into a Kodak 1-to-1 fingerprint camera and fished a pale-blue right-angled ruler from his kit. When Krishnamurthi stepped away he placed the ruler next to the wound and began to focus the camera. Souness and Caffery watched in silence, shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the autopsy suite, as the photographer recorded every bite on Rory Peach's shoulders. He was finishing just as the odontologist arrived from King's.

Mr. Ndizeye, BDS, Ph.D. and Seventh Day Adventist, wore thick National Health glasses and a Hawaiian shirt under his white coat. His mouth was turned up at the corners like a clown's, as if he was permanently smiling. Sweat ran in rivulets down his polished mahogany forehead, as he inspected the wounds, made notes, and built up impression trays from dental boxing wax. The morticians exchanged glances behind his back.

"What do you think?" Souness asked. "Have you got enough to work with?"

"Yes, yes, yes." Ndizeye was waiting impatiently for his assistant to fill a gun with poly silicone "They were slowly inflicted, some of these bites." He bent over, looked inside the wax tray moulded on to Rory's shoulder and moved his finger above it in a little stirring motion. "Radial abrasions, so the biter has had a bit of a suck while he's at it. Typical sadistic bites." He pulled a tissue from a back pocket and mopped his forehead to stop sweat dropping on to Rory's body. "I can see um upper left one, two, three, and upper right one, probably two." He looked up, his eyes magnified like fish behind the glasses, his clown mouth smiling. "Yes, I'm happy. I think we'll get a perfect cast from this."

After the post-mortem there were the alternative light source, ALS, photos to be taken. The science unit brought in their mobile blackout blinds and Souness and Caffery left, Souness to a press conference, and Caffery back to Shrivemoor to submit the results of the day's actions to Kryotos's ever-growing pile of documents. When he finally decided to call it a day, late in the night, he realized he hadn't eaten and was shaking. He got a take away in Crystal Palace and that stopped the shaking but back at home he still had to pause in the doorway for a moment, promising himself not to let the case show in his face.

He needn't have worried. Rebecca wasn't in a mood to discuss his work.

the sofa, dressed in caramel short white sweater. She had a pink varnished nail in her mouth and was staring blankly at the TV screen. There was a pile of Time Outs on the table in front of her. She didn't look up when he came in he had to be the first to speak: "How are you feeling?"

She suede was lying on trousers and a

She glanced up at him vaguely, like someone looking at a window that has been left open, someone who can't be bothered to get up and shut it.

"My head hurts."

"Is that all?"

"Yes."

He dropped down on the sofa next to her, his arm around her. "I'm sorry about last night."

She didn't shrink from him or lose her temper. Instead she just shrugged and said nothing, and went on staring at the TV screen. He suddenly felt immensely sorry for what he had done the night before, pushing her face-down into memories she didn't want to address. He knew he'd have to move gently with her that night.

"Let's go upstairs," she said, much later. He followed her up the staircase, still baffled by her odd, silent aura and in the bedroom they hardly exchanged a word. It should have tipped him off he should have seen the signs.

Rebecca liked Jack to go down on her. They'd established that early on in their relationship. "Actually it was the first night," she'd told her friends, "I didn't even have to ask him it was a miracle." He would do it for hours if she wanted, her neatly turned legs hooked up and resting on his back. Sometimes she laughed because he insisted on keeping one foot off the bed or sofa, on the floor, as if he was ready to sprint off at a moment's notice. What do you think's going to happen? A raid or something? This evening she said nothing. She lifted her hips and let him roll down the suede trousers, resting her hands on his head, running her fingers through his hair, looking ruminatively at the ceiling. After she came he straightened, took off his shirt, wiped his face on it and was about to undo his trousers when Rebecca pushed herself past him and up off the bed. She picked up her clothes from the floor.

"Where you going?"

"To have a wash."

"What?"

"To have a wash."

She walked out of the room, pressing her heels into the boards, and he fell backwards on the bed, his hands over his face, his erection almost painful he had been so ready. What the fuck is she doing? He listened to the old water pipes creak, listened to her finish, leave the bathroom, go downstairs. She didn't return. The bedside clock ticked on and now his hard-on was dying. He groaned, dropped his hands from his face and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his head throbbing.

You've started something now, jack. This is all about last night.

When she came back a few minutes later she was wearing his old to welling dressing-gown. She had brushed her hair and was carrying a glass of vodka and a lighted cigarillo. She stood at the small bookshelf in the bedroom, smoking and reading the titles calmly as if nothing odd had happened. He got up and rested his hands on her shoulders. "Look last night "Don't worry about it." She pulled away from him. "I'm going to bed now."

And that was it. He stood in the doorway, determined not to get angry as she put the cigarillo in the ashtray on the bed stand crawled under the covers, levered her knees up and rested a book on them. Her tidy little face was illuminated from the bedside lamp. Serious and intent on the book as if he wasn't there. He knew there were things he should say. Things he should be able to say. But he was tired and full of the images of Rory's autopsy and he knew this was a bad time for them to start talking. "Right." He turned away and went straight into the back bedroom.

This was the room he'd shared with Ewan as a child Ewan's room, he called it now. He found his trainers and pulled on jogging pants and a T-shirt. Ducking briefly to check the lights at Penderecki's over the railway, that habit he knew he would never slake, he put a door key on a piece of tape around his neck, went downstairs and slammed the door. He hadn't said goodbye to Rebecca.

As soon as he closed the front door she dropped the book on the floor and slumped down in the bed, staring at the ceiling. When the gate had closed and the street outside became quiet only the occasional car going by, the headlights crossing the ceiling she sat up, pulled the pillow from behind her head, lay back down on the bed and pressed the pillow across her face. Oh, God, Jack, this is so screwed-up. Using the weight of her forearms she held the pillow down against her nose and mouth and began to scream.

She screamed until her throat was sore and her head ached. Then she lay still with the pillow still resting across her face, muffling her breathing. The moisture in her breath wet the cotton, but otherwise her face was dry she hadn't cried.

Running, which in his twenties had been a release of energy, in his thirties had become his way of letting his mind float free. It stopped his thoughts battering themselves against the walls and tonight the release was instant. He knew exactly what the deal was: he wanted Rebecca to talk about what had happened, and in return she wanted him to turn his back on Ewan in fact, she'd like him to leave the house. In this she was exactly like the others, but only in this. Where everything else was concerned he found Rebecca utterly different she held his attention more than any of the others, he loved her more, he fancied her more. Still he didn't want to have to choose. He ran, trying not to think about it, the door key banging on his chest, wrapping itself around his mother's St. Christopher, out through the bad estates of Brockley -resolute little Brockley row upon row of artisans' cottages pecked at by von Braun's vergeltung doodle bugs The view had changed since Ewan. Now Lewisham's neon monolith, the Citibank, the faulty C blinking and fizzing and popping like an ultraviolet fly-killer, filled the skyline. Around its feet, instead of wealthy city commuters, drugs dealers bought the airy six-bedroom houses in the avenues near Hillyfields and sometimes shot one another in the dead of night.

Caffery had bought the house he lived in from his parents in his early twenties. Once it had been called Serenity, but some wag in the sixties had got up a stepladder with a handful of quick-drying cement and changed it to Gethsemane. The first thing the Cafferys did was have the whole plaque chiselled out. "No need to bring agony here," his mother said. "Anyone who lives in a house with that name is going to be cursed." Her cure hadn't worked. Maybe she had left it too late.

He continued down the road, sweat darkening his T-shirt, taking a left at the end, and went on, past Nunhead cemetery, out on to the starlit Peckham Rye with its dark moving lakes and open spaces. He wondered suddenly about Brockwell Park, about Rory's killer, about connections. Was there a pool of tricks and skewed thoughts that every paedophile in London came to drink in? He'd read once, years ago, about the world's largest organism: a fungus, it lived underground and covered almost forty acres of Michigan. Sometimes he imagined the paedophile network to be a little like that fungus: every one of them living invisibly under society under our noses every one of them connected on some fleshy outcrop to every other. Penderecki was an old man, spent, his days of boys and prison sentences over, but he was part of that network and Caffery could guarantee that the old man knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who knew Rory Peach's killer. The number of degrees of separation he could only guess at but he sensed it wouldn't be many.

He jogged back to Brockley, turning left across the railway bridge, letting his eyes skim along the tracks. The trees had still been in leaf when Ewan disappeared it would have been easy, in the dead of night, to store a body in one of them, then take it down before the leaves fell. Not a good thing to think about. He crossed into Penderecki's road and jogged past the sunburst gates, the leaded stained-glass windows, the little enclosed porches with their wall baskets and shoes lined up in neat rows. The light was on in Penderecki's bathroom and Caffery paused -just for a moment outside the house, looking up at that light with the fatal intensity of a moth. The frosted window made tinted diamonds of the light beyond, and it took him a moment to see that something was hanging just behind the glass something long and coloured, a paper lantern, perhaps, the sort you might see in a student's bed sit Not like Penderecki to decorate, or to flaunt something. Unless there was a reason. You're probably meant to see it -it's the start of something new. New torment.

He turned and began to retrace his footsteps back home, back to Gethsemane. There he took off his soaking shorts and T-shirt and stood in the shower, thinking of terraced houses and how claustrophobic they were. Then he lay next to Rebecca in the darkness, listening to her breathing.