The Treatment

Ten.

(21 July)

The next morning Caffery found Kryotos in tears in the incident-room kitchen. He pulled her face against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. She cried harder, her shoulders shaking. The only time he'd ever seen Kryotos cry had been at Paul Essex's funeral. It felt strangely intimate.

"Don't let Danni see me, please."

"OK, OK, here." He kicked the door closed, not letting go of her. "What is it, Marilyn? Is it the kids?"

She shook her head and wiped her nose. "Danni just spoke to Quinn about…"

"About what?" He stroked her hair. "She spoke to Quinn about what?"

"The PM on Rory Peach." She pressed the heels of her hands against her face. "The photos are on your desk. Quinn wants all these tests she wants you to call."

"What's upset you?"

"They think he was alive in the tree. They think he was alive for two days up there. He tried to get out of the ropes She tore off a piece of kitchen roll and balled it up against her eyes. "I know it's stupid I just can't help thinking about him fighting, just skinny little arms but he still fought."

Caffery stroked her hair and stared at the ceiling. Of course he'd known. He'd known it when Krishnamurthi had been unable to uncoil the small body. When he'd massaged the feet to see if he could flex them. When there was no smell. Had Rory been dead long enough for the rigor to have died away, he would have already been unidentifiable in this weather. As it was the boy had been smooth and perfect. The rigor hadn't even had time to reach his feet, he was so newly dead.

"Here." He pulled her against his chest. He could feel her warm breasts under the neat white blouse. He'd never been this close to Marilyn before she smelt like a woman, she smelt of shampoo and baking and lipstick, and she smelt utterly different from Rebecca. He thought about last night, about Rebecca calmly leaving him in the bedroom, about him lying there on the bed with his useless erection, and, as if she sensed the shift, as if she was suddenly self-conscious about their closeness, Marilyn, with her face against his shirt, became still. She stopped shaking and breathed through her mouth. When she pulled away the tears had gone but she was red in the face and wouldn't meet his eyes. She went to sit at the computer terminal and as Caffery walked to the SIO's room he noticed that the back of her neck was flushed.

In the SIO's room, Souness, looking fresh in a Marks amp; Spencer's man's suit over an open-necked lilac shirt, was standing at the desk staring out of the window. She didn't speak when Caffery came in, just nodded at the blue and white Metropolitan Police Photographic Branch envelope on the desk. He put down his coffee, shook out the photos taken in the blue ALS light and called Fiona Quinn.

"How much do you know?" Quinn asked.

"Well, I guessed a lot yesterday," he said. "I guessed it took him some time to die."

"Krishnamurthi asked us if we could smell pear drops or nail varnish when he opened the body, yes?"

"Yeah acetone."

"Ketosis." At the other end of the line Quinn shuffled some papers. "He was beginning to starve his body was breaking down its fat, putting fatty acids into his bloodstream."

"And that killed him?" he said cautiously.

"No no, it takes a long time to starve to death. We're doing shear rate tests and haematocrits -doesn't mean much to you, but his blood had got thicker. Remember Hippocratic fades?"

"Yup."

"That's the look you get from severe dehydration. He, well yes, he died of thirst."

Oh, Christ Caffery sat down at his desk. Oh, Christ, oh, Christ, oh, Christ It was true, then. He thought of the public fury about to land on the heads of the search team and the helicopter team failing to find a child until it was too late.

"I was surprised he lasted as long as he did," Quinn said, 'but Krishnamurthi reckons it can take quite a long time the longest he'd heard of was a hospice death which took fifteen days but at the other end it can take only hours, depending on the circumstance. You've only to drop about a fifth of your weight in fluids."

"What about kids?"

"Exactly with kids it's more serious. They need more water for their weight than adults plus Rory struggled through two hot days and really increased his use of water. You might ask yourself whether the killer gave him some water in those three days in the house. Maybe it's in Alek's statement?"

"No nothing in the statement." Caffery fiddled with a paper-clip. Souness was standing with her hands on the desk, still staring out of the window, and he realized she'd already heard everything Quinn was saying. "Right," he said, trying to crank his thoughts forward. "Those bites? Do we know when they were inflicted?"

"Yeah, pretty late probably about the time that he was taken from the house. That's where the blood on the skirting-board and his trainer came from."

"So he was put up the tree and left."

"That's what it looks like."

"No one came back to him?"

"Don't appear to have."

"Anything we can run for DNA?"

"Yes you've got the photos, haven't you? You can see the toluidine blue that Krishnamurthi used there was penetration, or an attempt at penetration. And that contaminant."

"Yes?"

"Semen."

Right. Caffery put a hand on his forehead. Right. OK, it's definitely a paedo you're dealing with you knew that anyway so it doesn't have to poleaxe you. He glanced at Souness. She was still staring out of the window, so he found a pen and took a deep breath. "Good, that's, uh, right, good, we'll get some DNA?"

"Well, maybe:

"Maybe?"

"Well…" she was cautious, '… Rory was alive, see, and his body might have already broken down a lot of the sample. You know, if the victim is semiconscious, not moving around too much, sometimes we can still harvest DNA, even after a few days but Rory was moving, and you do see it sometimes, the sample gets broken down and '

"That's OK do it anyway." He started to jot down details of the conversation. "And I don't want to wait two weeks for a slot like I did last time."

"If you get it premiumed it'll be faster."

"Ahem, Fiona, that was premiumed."

"God, I'm sorry. I can't always dictate what the lab'll do."

"Don't worry. I'll get the governor to rattle a few cages."

Even before Rory Peach the team had been at a low. Funds were constantly challenged, they were all overworked, there were eight 'critical' racial harassment incidents outstanding, a four-year-old serial rape case, and the tyings up and collation of disclosure on five drugs shootings on their patch. Morale was low, and it was reflected in the tired way they dragged through the routine jobs: in the house-to-house inquiries DC Logan had only managed three houses in an entire day and Caffery knew that with Kryotos's workload none of the results would make it on to the HOLMES database. But they had to present a different face to the world.

At the press conference that morning Souness asked the assembled journalists and TV reporters to observe a minute's silence for Rory Peach. The country was gripped: the News of the World pawed the ground in the wings, gearing up for a new name-and-shame campaign. As if in divine judgement of the engine she had set rumbling, on Souness's way back to the incident room, sitting at traffic lights in the red BMW, the skies over South London cracked open and dropped hundreds of gallons of rainwater into the streets in minutes. A proper summer cloudburst: the streets looked as if they might be washed away.

At Shrivemoor Caffery was sitting at an open window watching the rain. He could smell earth and thought he wouldn't have blinked if he'd seen an uprooted palm floating along in the gutter in the street below. He closed the window and sat back at his desk, watching Kryotos through the open door. She seemed to have recovered and was bashing away at the HOLMES database. The tears in the kitchen had been a shock: he'd never known Kryotos lose perspective before. He'd always been a little envious of her -wondering why he couldn't keep a distance like that.

Suddenly, as if she could sense him watching her, Kryotos looked up. Their eyes met but this time she didn't look away embarrassed. Instead she seemed confused as if Caffery's thoughts were strung out in a long banner above his head and she was reading them. She frowned, perplexed, and Caffery, uncomfortable with the sense that his naked brain was being watched, gave her a brief, efficient smile. He leaned over, kicked the door closed and went back to studying the ALS photos of Rory's neck.

"In the plus column, at least finding Rory means we've got some forensics." When Souness got back from the press conference she seemed to be making an effort to be positive. She brought through coffee and some of Kryotos's sticky, flaky pastries in a tin and shook the rain off her jacket, draping it on the back of her chair. "We've got those white fibres and as soon as Quinny's got us some DNA we can think about doing a mass screening."

"And what are your parameters going to be? Every white nonce in Brixton over five eleven?"

"I've got to show them something we're three days and closing on the area interim report She stopped. "OK, Jack. Ye've got that look on your face again. Come on, what's on your mind?"

He shrugged. "He's going to do it again. Very soon."

"Ah, I wondered when this was going to start! My profiling baby getting out of his wee pram."

"Only this time he'll make sure he doesn't get disturbed and he'll complete his fantasy whatever that was. It's a progression and he won't stop at the Peaches. He's juicing himself up for something more, I think he's probably chosen his next victims already."

"Oh, aye?" Souness pulled the chair back and sat down, folding her arms. "And where's all this coming from, if it's not a rude question?"

"We've got an ex-con."

"Oh, we have, have we?"

"Yes. He's got form and he's done time for it. Probably for the same thing or something similar." He took off his glasses. "I've told Marilyn to go into that Quest Search database and put any non-custodial sentences on the back-burner."

"Are ye going to explain?"

He pushed the photos towards her. "See?" No one had seen it or mentioned it in the morgue, and yet photographed under the blue alternative light source it was clear what had made the marks on Rory's neck. "See these?" Souness nodded. "Can you see these underlying marks? Here and here?"

"Aye, I can."

"Well?"

Souness tipped her chair forward and was silent for a moment, squinting at the photos with her head on one side. Her eyes moved rapidly across the odd marks, trying to shape them into something recognizable. When it came to her she dropped the chair back with a thud. "Jesus of course, of course."

Roland Klare, who, like most Brixton residents, had been following the Donegal Crescent case on the television, now very much wanted to see the photographs that were stuck inside the Pentax. There was no question of taking the film to a chemist, even if he could get it out of the camera. But there was an alternative. When he got home that afternoon he consulted his notebook.

Yes! He'd been right. He'd been sure it was somewhere in the flat. He went into the bedroom and began pulling things aside.

Within an hour he had found it. It had been stored in a box of old Ladybird books: a large, slightly battered paperback, Build Your Own Darkroom AT HOME! On the cover there was a picture of a man in a white coat holding a piece of photographic paper by the corner, swilling it in a tank. Klare had discovered the book years ago on the platform at Loughborough Junction. Pleased with himself, he took it into the kitchen and wiped it clean, then made himself a drink and went into the living room. Outside it was dark and light at once: big clouds curled up from the distant horizon and shuffled across the sky, shooting sunlight down one moment, tipping out rain the next, but Roland Klare didn't notice. He got a pen and paper and settled on the sofa, his back to the window, and began to read.