The Treatment

Twelve.

At midnight, when Caffery finally got home, Rebecca did it again. This time it was in the kitchen. She had been sitting on the table, drinking vodka from a champagne glass, hardly speaking as he poured himself a drink but when he drew the blind behind her, put his hands either side of her, when his jacket dropped open and he kissed her, she sweetly opened her legs and it happened all over again: she let him make her come, twice, and when he pushed himself up and undid his flies she sat up straight and turned her head away. "I'm sorry," she said, and slipped off the work top straightened her dress and left the room.

Caffery dropped forward, hands on the table. He took long, deep breaths and stared blankly down at the wet print she'd left on the table. Don't lose your temper. Don't prove her right. He waited until his pulse had slowed, then zipped up and followed her through to the living room where she sat silently watching the TV without the sound on.

"Rebecca."

"Mmmm?" She wasn't looking at him. "What?"

"I know why this is happening, Rebecca. I do know."

"Do you?"

"And you need to talk about it. You need to talk about what happened."

"I never stop talking about it."

"I don't mean to the press, I mean to me." Impatient now, he buckled up his belt. "Or just leave me be, Becky, just leave me be. Unless you want to give me a blowjob instead of giving one to the whole London art scene, then just leave me be."

For a moment she seemed to be about to say something but she changed her mind and dropped her hands on the sofa with an exasperated sigh. "God! What's got into you?"

"What do you think's got into me? I'm standing here, look at me, a raging hard-on, and you' he gestured at the TV 'you're watching the fucking television."

"Don't lecture me, Jack, when there's a few things of your own we don't exactly rip apart and put under the microscope."

"OK." He stopped her, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "This is disintegrating." He turned to the door. "When you want to talk you know where I'll be."

"Where?"

"In the bathroom having a wank."

He jerked himself off in the shower then pulled on his running gear and left the house without speaking, slamming the door behind him.

The night sky was the colour of sea. The deep blue that can sometimes be seen curled in the paw of a coral atoll. It was warm and someone's late-night music pounded out of a bed sit window and up into the starlit sky. Sweat dribbled into his eyes he concentrated on making his heels hit the tarmac straight and tried not to think about Rebecca. But his mind kept orbiting back to it, back to the stalemate they were in. Neither of them was going to give way, that was clear, they'd just get harder and harder in their determination. Shit, Rebecca. He loved her, he had no question about it, had a real tenderness for her that was hard to heal, but from where he stood he couldn't see a way past these rigid battle-lines they stood in.

"Jack," Rebecca said suddenly, sitting up on the sofa and turning to the door. Her sudden sense of him was almost as if he'd walked in. "Jack, it's because' she held her fists hard against her stomach it's because I'm wounded. Big bloody wound." She paused, open-mouthed, staring at the empty doorway letting what she had just said sink in. Then her face crumpled and she laughed out loud at the stupid drama. "Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm wounded! Wounded? Poor, poor wounded Becky!" She jumped up, went into the kitchen for the champagne glass and came shimmying back into the living room, twisting her free hand in front of her face, a long-nailed Shiva dancing on the bare floor. "Wounded you silly cow, wounded, wounded, wounded!" There was some grass she kept in an old Oxo cube box on the mantelpiece and she sang as she rolled a joint, sipping the vodka, her tongue getting numb and furry. She knelt down, put the glass on the floor, lit the spliff, took a few hits then suddenly rolled on to the floor, on her back, her hands over her eyes. "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God."

They were in a hole. The pair of them, deep in a hole: Jack, with his determined tearing apart of himself over Ewan it terrified her where that all might end and then, on the opposite side of the battlefield, she stood, with her mouth healed over, her eyes shut. All Jack wanted was for her to sit and discuss it calmly, to flush it through, make it clean again. I don't blame you, Jack, I don't blame you. She wanted, really wanted, to tell him. But she couldn't, and that was where the wound was. In her memory. Because what Jack didn't know was that all the way through Joni's inquest, through him patiently taking her statement in the hospital room overlooking the dripping trees, through him gently prompting her when she dried, through her pretending to cry when the coroner asked her a question she didn't know the answer to -even when she alluded to it in the press all along Rebecca had been telling a lie. The truth was something she hardly dared admit, even to herself. She dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the ceiling. The truth was that of the attack in the little Kent bungalow a year ago she could remember nothing.

The pavement was warm, it had trapped the day's heat. He had been going for half an hour when he became aware of his surroundings. This was Penderecki's street he was running down. He'd come here without thinking about it drawn by some internal compass. He slowed to a jog, looking at the houses.

It was one of those peculiarly neat roads that bring with them the odd aroma of a seaside town, as if you might see Vacancies signs propped in front of the lace curtains. Penderecki's was half-way along it, flush with the others, but so luminous a landmark in Caffery's conscience that sometimes it seemed to him to protrude from the other houses, proud-bellied. He approached, feet curling down on to the pavement, and stopped outside, resting his hands on the gate, bending over for a moment, catching his breath, his sweat dripping in dark coins on the pavement.

He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the house. How long would it be before one of the team came knocking on this door asking about the troll? How long before Danni's girlfriend, Paulina, with her agile little mind and her databases, would point out the similarities between what had happened to Rory and what had happened two and a half decades ago to Ewan? Again he got that image, that slow spreading image of fingers reaching out under the soil. Of Penderecki touching fingers with the troll.

He straightened. Tonight something about Penderecki's house struck him as odd. The bathroom light was still on and the giant lantern, red and yellow and grey, was still hanging there. He thought it looked a little bigger. He stood for a moment, frowning, then slowly pushed open the gate.

He had never walked up Penderecki's path before -on the few occasions he had ventured to the house he had used the back route and travelled under darkness because Penderecki, being a criminal, knew his rights inside out and would have snapped restraining orders, quia timet orders, down on his head without blinking. The front garden was a mass of candy floss-pink mallow, like crystallized sweets, thin as paper, gone native and seeming to move as if there was a breeze here. Long grasses brushed at his aching calves. At the bottom step he paused.

The front door still had its original leaded glass a hill and a windmill, sun rays delineated in black. As he climbed the two steps he knew, he could hear them, the hum of them, the hum of wet bodies sucking and breeding, and then he could see them, individuals blackening the rays of the glass sunrise, and instantly he knew that whatever was hanging in Penderecki's bathroom, it wasn't a Chinese lantern.

What Rebecca did remember was this: Night. She is in bed with Jack.

In the morning they wake up. It's raining.

After Jack has gone to work she has coffee and toast.

She notices Joni hasn't come home.

She phones around and discovers that Joni is at Bliss's flat.

She puts on old shorts and a T-shirt and begins the cycle journey to his flat.

Blank.

Blank.

Blank.

A flash of light and something a knife? A hook?

Blank.

Blank.

Another light a doctor shining it into her eyes.

Blank.

Just a little scratch hold still, you won't feel a thing.

Blank

Jack, in his hired mourning suit, bending over her hospital bed on his way to Essex 's funeral.

Jack again. Taking her statement. When she passes her hand over her face, embarrassed to admit that she can't remember, he looks at her sympathetically and gives her a prompt trying to make it easier on her.

Did you see Bliss take Joni?

Take her?

Into the hall where we found her.

Oh, yes, that. I Yes, I saw that happen. He carried her.

From a distance Rebecca's most striking feature was her resilience: she wore it like a bright red winter coat sometimes naturally and sometimes self-consciously. Always unmissably. She knew it could make her appear brittle, but she also knew why it was there. She'd had to grow it, like a new pelt, early in life, when she realized that her father would never be prised away from his obscure metaphysical apologias, and her mother would never be tricked down from the place she floated, doped and fat on imipramine. "The daughter of an English professor and a clinically depressed beauty', was how one journalist had summed her up. It took Rebecca a while to recognize that this was why she couldn't admit to the blank section of her memory: it was an admission that her tough little character was a lie, that she'd been left out of control for a while without a skin, open to infection. She didn't think she'd ever be able to talk calmly about it. How can you not remember?

For a year now she'd kept a lid on it until: Think about what it was like for me to find you hanging, Rebecca, hanging from a hook in the fucking ceiling. It was the first time she'd got a glimpse of what had happened that day in Kent and now she found she couldn't look at Jack's face above hers without the fear that Malcolm Bliss's would appear imposed over it. Something was on the move in her something that wouldn't let her lie flat on her back without squirming, something that wouldn't let her sleep a night through. She rolled on to her front and began to get up it was important to Rebecca, very important, that she didn't let anyone know the truth.

At home Rebecca was asleep. Or pretending to be. Two lipstick-stained cigarillo butts sat in an ashtray next to the bed on top of an article about the Turner Prize. Caffery changed into joggers, a sweatshirt and lightweight walking boots, got some tools from under the stairs and went into the back garden. He waded out through the undergrowth, past the green Express Dairies crate that Penderecki had used to stand on, through the nettles and submerged branches. The cutting was quiet, the last train gone, and down here, below the level of the city, there were cooler, clearer isotherms. Along the empty tracks the signals glowed green. Caffery crossed quickly, hearing the startled movements of an animal in the undergrowth. On the opposite side he found a fox path or maybe it's Penderecki's path leading straight to the garden.

The back of the house was silent and dark, the fence rotten with water. He moved quickly through the garden, his chest tightening as he got nearer. And now why hadn't he watched more carefully? he saw that along the metal frame of the broken old annexe flies gathered like clusters of hanging black fruit, rippling lazily.

He used his Swiss Army knife to gouge away the ancient putty of the kitchen window, flaking wood and paint on to his sweatshirt. Levering out the panel pins, he eased the pane from the frame and the stale trapped air inside the house came at him like a train. He could smell what was in the bathroom the stench that stimulates the rarely stimulated root of humanness the smell of opened human bowels, the smell of the dead sitting up in their graves and exhaling into the night. He could hear the flies No way, no fucking way, this can't be happening as he reached in, turned the key and opened the back door.

Quiet.

"Ivan?"

He stood there, counting to a hundred, waiting for a response.

"Ivan?"

He'd never addressed Penderecki by his first name before.

"Are you here?"

Still no reply. Only the pounding of his own blood in his ears. He stepped into the annexe.

Once twenty years ago, before Penderecki had got wise to him and started locking the doors Caffery had sneaked in here, and the surprise had been how ordinary the house was. Damp and fraying, but ordinary for that. Just an old man's house. Patterned carpets, a gas fire, a folded copy of the Radio Times next to the sofa. Milk in the fridge and a paper bag of sugar on the work top The home of a twice-convicted paedophile, and there was milk in the fridge, sugar on the work top and a Radio Times in the lounge. Now, as he moved through the rooms, he was struck by how little it had changed. The house was smaller, the wallpaper yellower than he remembered, a strip of it hung from the ceiling above the stairwell and the carpet was shiny with dirt. A Local Shopper newspaper lay on the doormat with a pile of flyers from local restaurants, but apart from the flies it was all so unchanged it was like having his memory shaken out in front of his eyes.

On the small window-sill at the bottom of the stairs was the digital readout that he knew Penderecki used to monitor phone calls. On top of it sat a ripped-open brown envelope. No letter inside but the return address was the Oncology Unit, Lewisham Hospital. The first clue he stuffed it into his pocket. Oh, Jesus, he thought, oh, Jesus, let this not be happening. He turned to the stairs, moving slowly, dead-fly husks crunching underfoot. Above him the living insects thrashed their wings in a single low note, in and out -as if the house was breathing with them.

All the doors on the landing were open, save the one into the bathroom. He could see the light coming from the crack under the door. The smell was denser here, and he had to lift the hem of the sweatshirt, exposing his stomach, to cover his face as he reached for the light-switch at the top of the stairs. The bulb pinged, died. Shit. Reaching inside one of the open doors, he found a switch and this time the light came on, throwing a rectangle of yellow out into the small landing. Quickly, breathing shallowly, he checked inside the doors. In two of the rooms there was nothing just an empty Coke can and a few squares of carpet on the bare floorboards. In the third he discovered where Penderecki had been living.

The mattress was covered with stained nylon sheets, worn almost to transparency, a pile of newspapers next to the bed, a cup and an empty baked-beans can with a fork sticking out of it rested on top of the pile. There was only one decoration in the room on the far wall: an Athena poster of two boys wearing straw hats, sitting on a wooden jetty, one with his arm draped around the other's shoulder. It was a photograph from the seventies the sun had been a different colour three decades ago: softer and more yellow than a third-millennium sun. The two boys looked about the same age that Jack and Ewan had been when… He had to stop.

"Shit, shit, shit let's get this over with."

He pressed the sweatshirt into his nostrils, went back on to the landing, took a deep breath and tried the bathroom door.

It opened smoothly and there, in front of him, in the centre of the pale green bathroom, covered and moving with flies, hung Ivan Penderecki.

Somewhere someone was screaming. Benedicte fought up towards it, through hot layers of sleep, and sat up in the cool darkness of the bedroom, her pulse elevated, her skin damp.

"Muuuuuum!"

"Josh?" Sleepily she dropped out of bed and padded along the corridor. "Coming, tadpole." In his bedroom she flicked on the switch and stood in the doorway, blinking in the light. Josh was sitting against the bed head a pillow clutched to his chest. His feet were stretched rigid in front of him, his hair sticking up from his head as if electricity had passed through him. He was staring at a crack in the curtains.

"Mum the troll '

"It's all right, tadpole." Benedicte went straight over and pulled back the curtain. The garden was dark and silent, the window closed. Over the fence the outline of Brockwell Park was purple against the stars and in the distance the Crystal Palace transmitter lit up the sky. "Troll's not there, darling. Nothing there at all." She dropped the curtain and sat down on the edge of his bed, putting a hand on his hot little forehead. "It's Mummy's fault. I shouldn't have put you in these pyjamas, they're too warm." She tried to pull the flannel pyjama top up over his head. "You're wet through, I'll put you in a T-shirt '

"No!" Josh jerked away from her, moving his head so that he could see past her to the window.

"Now, come on, darling, it's the middle of the night and Mummy just wants to get you out of these wet jammies so you can go back to sleep."

"Nooo!" He pulled his hands away. "He's watching me. He was there."

"Josh, I think you dreamed it the troll couldn't get this high. You're all the way up in the air here, you're quite safe."

"You all right, peanut?" Hal was standing in the doorway blinking like a sleepy cat.

Benedicte turned. "Oh, Hal, I didn't mean to wake you up…"

"That's OK." He looked at his son bolt upright in bed bracing the pillow against his chest. "What's up, peanut?"

"He thinks maybe he saw the troll '

"Not maybe."

"He saw the troll at the window, you know, the one from the park."

"OK, ssh, ssh." Hal came to the bed and kissed his son's head. "Want me to go and check he's gone?"

Josh nodded.

"Ooooh." Hal went to the window, whistled softly and pressed his nose to the pane, looking down into the back garden. He pretended to squint and jiggle around, trying for a better view. After a while he stood back and smiled. "OK, all over. He's gone now."

"NOO-OOO!!" Josh began to cry. "You can't see him like that, he's hiding under the window. You can't see him if you don't open the window."

Hal sighed, pulled back the curtains and unscrewed the window lock. He put his hands on the ledge and leaned out. The air was balmy, a delicious, palm-frondy night, and he could smell the rank green water of the four ponds in the park. The crackle of electricity came like cicadas from the building-site spotlights. He pantomimed looking carefully down at the garden. "Hmmm… Well, he's run away now -absolutely not here. Do you want to see?"

Josh wiped his nose on the sleeve of his pyjamas and blinked at the window.

"Want to see?"

He shook his head.

"OK." Hal pulled the window closed and was about to lock it, when Benedicte noticed him hesitate. He opened the window again and stretched his arm round, rubbing his fingers on the outside of the pane.

"Hal?"

He didn't answer. He frowned momentarily, then pulled the window closed, locking it carefully, drawing the curtains.

"There you are, tadpole all gone. No trolls out there."

But Benedicte didn't like Hal's expression. Something was wrong. She leaned over quickly, pushing her face towards Josh. "Come on, tadpole. Kiss on the nose for Mummy?" But Josh turned on to his side, harrumphing like a girl, his little face knotted and angry. "OK night-night, then, darling."

At the door she waited for Hal to blow Josh a kiss, then switched off the light, closed the door and beckoned Hal to follow her downstairs. In the kitchen she slipped bare feet into Hal's muddy trainers and took the torch into the garden. Hal followed in his slippers. "What?" he hissed. "What's up?"

She shone the torch around the garden, looking at the grass for any sign that someone had walked across it. "What did you see, Hal?"

"Eh?"

"Up there." She turned and shone the torch up the side of the house to Josh's window. "On the window?"

"Oh, nothing. Just a handprint."

Benedicte turned to him, her face white. "A handprint?"

"Sssh. I don't want to frighten him even more."

"Well, just a bloody moment," she hissed, 'you're frightening me now." She went to the bottom of the wall and shone the torch into the flower-bed. "Josh thinks he saw something and now you tell me there was a handprint. I mean '

"Ben," he looked up at the window, 'it's twenty feet above the ground someone would have to float up there."

She looked up and down the wall. Hal was right -someone would need a ladder and she couldn't see anything in the flower-beds. No footprints. Nothing disturbed down here.

"Come on, Ben." Hal was starting to feel cold in his pyjamas. "One of the workmen left it on the pane when he put it in."

She stood in the grass biting her lip, feeling stupid.

"It was one of the workmen, Ben, we haven't cleaned the windows on the outside. And anyway '

"Anyway what?"

"It was upside down."

"What?"

"It was upside down so it must have been there before the pane went in."

Benedicte sighed. She hated these night fears of hers. She hated the park for being where it was, just over the fence, she even hated poor little Rory Peach for getting himself kidnapped and killed. She couldn't wait to get to Cornwall. She shone the torch around the little fenced garden. Josh's paddling-pool reflected the moonlight but nothing else stirred. OK fair enough, but don't blame me for being nervous. Reluctantly she clicked off the torch and followed Hal back up the steps, locking the door behind her and pulling the little curtain. Hal was awake now, so he got a beer from the fridge and leaned on the kitchen work top looking at her.

"I do understand," he said suddenly. "I saw Alek Peach. In the park."

"Jesus." Benedicte rubbed her face and sat down on the sofa, blinking. "When?"

"When me and Josh walked Smurf this evening. I didn't tell you I didn't want to upset you."

"What does he look like?"

"Terrible. I've seen him up there before, when I was walking Smurf." As if she'd heard her name, Smurf, who had been asleep in the TV room, got up and came through, yawning, her claws clicking on the tiles, and Hal bent down to stroke her and rub her old, deaf ears. "Haven't we, Smurfy, we've seen him before, haven't we? I just didn't recognize him from the newspapers."

"What was he doing?"

"I don't know. Wandering around where He straightened and drank half of his beer, an odd look on his face. "He was wandering around where his little boy was."

"I've seen it," she murmured, slightly embarrassed that she'd actually gone up there to look. Walking through the forest, it had been a shock suddenly to come upon a carpet of dying flowers. Purple paper, ribbons, cellophane, cards, teddy bears saturated with dew. Rory had been nearly nine, she remembered thinking, he'd have been horrified by the teddies. "I don't know what they'll do with all those flowers."

"There are families out there, can you believe it? Making it into a day trip kids wearing Kill the Paedos T-shirts."

"I know. I know." She shook her head. "Did Alek Peach see them?"

"Yeah saw it all. He was just standing back, among the bushes, watching. You should have seen him staring at Josh as if he was seeing a ghost."

"Poor bastard." She got up, came into the kitchen and put the torch in a drawer. "I can't wait to go to Cornwall, Hal, I can't wait to get out of Brixton for a few days." She kissed the side of his face. "Don't stay up all night."

At 4.30 a.m. the sky over the houses in Brockley became baby-eye blue and only Venus was still shining. At the back window where Penderecki had stood so many times to watch Ewan and Jack playing in the tree-house across the railway track, Caffery sat on a chair half stiff with shock. Flies had come to sip his sweat and he hadn't stopped them.

For years he had wondered how he'd feel if Penderecki died and this was it, the end of the possibility that one day he'd discover what had happened to Ewan. Here he was, living out his fear, and it felt like having the life squeezed from him.

When the first morning goods train rattled through the cutting at 5 a.m. at last Caffery moved. He batted at the flies, and stood, letting the blood come slowly back into his legs, and went downstairs into the kitchen, his eyes smarting. He ran the tap, scooped some water on to his face, and set to work.

Somewhere in this house was the answer to his question. He went into the bathroom. The boom of noise and smell when he opened the door almost made him retch. Penderecki was rotted through. Underneath his feet a pool of matter had collected -crunchy with fly coating. He had to stand very still until the gag reflex worked itself out of his throat.

Penderecki had run the noose through a hole smashed in the plaster ceiling and over a joist the small garden mallet he'd used lay on the floor, and the plaster in the bath showed that he hadn't taken much time in doing this. He had come in here with the tools he needed, bashed a hole in the ceiling, slung the rope up there and done the deed. The small bathroom stool was not kicked over.

Dropped in the toilet was a copy of Derek Humphry's Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. Sweatshirt over his mouth, Caffery leaned over and read. One paragraph had been scored through with a pencil angrily: "If you consider God the master of your fate, then read no further. Seek the best pain management and arrange for hospice care." But he was familiar with the book's instructions and recognized that Penderecki had, at the last moment, abandoned his quasi faith in God and turned instead to Humphry: "Ice will stop the air in the polythene bag becoming hot and stuffy…"

On the floor was an empty ice tray, over Penderecki's head a plastic bag. In death his face had swollen to fill the bag, pressing moist against the polythene. A bottle of vodka lay next to the door and a plate of something that looked like chocolate Angel Delight: "Powder your chosen drugs and put them in your favourite pudding…"

There were no flies on the pudding. They were enjoying dabbling and squelching in Penderecki too much. Caffery checked he had left no footprints then closed the door and went to search the rest of the house.

Penderecki had come to England in the forties "Probably something to do with the Yalta conference," Rebecca said sagely. She seemed to understand the demographic waves that had brought Penderecki to the plot of land on the other side of the railway tracks to the Cafferys. Penderecki had never married and seemed to have become fanatical about a religion to which he had been unable to cling at the end. His body had hung here for what? Three, maybe four days, without anyone noticing. Perhaps there was someone still in Poland framed paper cuttings hung on the wall, the sort of folk art distant relatives might send, but apart from this Ivan Penderecki had almost no personal possessions. Nearly seventy and the only children in his life had belonged to other people.

Caffery was prepared to pull the walls down if he thought that he'd find the smallest hint of Ewan, but the house gave up nothing. He got into the loft where the air was warm and circled with dust, but apart from an abandoned wasps' nest hanging from the rafters there was nothing. In one of the bedrooms there was a pile of Hennes children's clothing catalogues innocuous enough. Penderecki wasn't stupid he'd known that with his police record a search warrant would be granted on the slimmest grounds. But apart from that small haul, Caffery found nothing.

In the hallway he pressed redial on the phone. The answer phone at the Lewisham Hospital Oncology Unit picked up. He dialled the number on the last caller ID digital display. Also the Oncology Unit. Someone at the hospital had rung three days ago. Since then no one had tried to contact Ivan Penderecki. And that was all.

Wherever Penderecki had hidden the little scrap of flesh and bone that had been Ewan, it wasn't in this house. The catalogues were only the tip Caffery knew that. There was more. Somewhere. But then, of course, this was part of Penderecki's genius his ability to hide things. Hide magazines and videos and photos and the body of a small boy.