The Treatment

Eighteen.

"Where do we start?"

"OK let's go through it." Caffery put his briefcase on the kitchen counter, pulled out his glasses and the crime-scene photographs. The room had been stripped by Quinn's team: large chunks of the lino had been excised, rectangular sections of the curtains had been removed and the skirting-board where Rory's blood had been found was still covered in amido black and stick-on number tags. Glasses on the draining-board had been dusted and a toasted-sandwich-maker that had been taken away to the lab had been returned, the cord coiled and taped to the lid.

They thought that it was here, in this room, that the bite had been inflicted on Rory Peach the damage had been enough for the eight-year-old to drop blood on the floor. The paper towel had soaked up the rest. Caffery put on his glasses, looked briefly at the photos of the kitchen and handed them to Souness. He tried to imagine the scene Rory struggling, Alek Peach, chained and exhausted, unable to move, or simply unconscious. Alek was not in the photographs but the impression and the stain he had left on the floor was.

"So he was lying like this." He stood at the intersection of the rooms, on the floor divider, and swung his hand along the mark. "Across the floor between the kitchen and the living room chained here," he indicated the living-room radiator, 'and here to this radiator."

Souness wrinkled her nose. "Is there food left in the fridge?"

"Eh?" He looked round and sniffed. "Oh, that, no -I think it's just…" Carmel, Rory and Alek Peach had all defecated on themselves at some point in the three days. They hadn't had a choice. DS Quinn had been surprised by the amount of urine Carmel produced -it had seeped out on to the landing carpet. "I think that's just them."

Souness made a face and opened the fridge to check. Inside were a few flowers of mould, fingerprint dust on a plastic carton of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and a jar of pickle in the door compartment. Otherwise it was empty. She closed the fridge and looked around the room, her mouth pulled down at the sides. "Is that really what the smell is? Those poor wee fuckers."

"Come here." Caffery went into the hallway and stood at the bottom of the stairs. Rory Peach's water-gun, covered in fingerprint dust, lay on the first step. "Right. This is where Alek Peach says he was attacked so what do we think?" They both looked back down the hallway at the kitchen, then Souness turned to the living room.

"Here. Probably came from in here." '

"I think so too so let's say he's come from in there, from the living room, and attacked Peach from behind. No blood, but that might not be important -he might not have started bleeding straight off."

"What're ye getting at?"

"I don't know just bear with me." He stood with his arms out at ninety degrees, one hand pointing down the hall to the kitchen, one pointing into the living room. "Now, before he attacked Alek, he had broken in through the back door and then he must have overpowered Carmel must have done that first, and taken her all the way up here." He took the stairs two at a time, coins jangling in his pocket. Outside the airing cupboard he stopped. "Hospital says she was dragged up the stairs so he did that and somehow or other got her tied up in here '

"Christ smells even worse up here."

" and then he went back downstairs like this." They both went back down, Souness with her fingers under her nose. "And waited we're guessing here." He stood in the doorway of the living room and raised his eyebrows at Souness. "Right?"

"Aye, I'll go along with that."

Caffery raised his eyebrows. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"He did all of this in total silence?"

"Uh." Souness shook her head. "I'm not with you."

"OK, listen. Carmel 's no help, right? She has no idea where she was attacked; the last thing she remembers is making supper. But as for Alek…" He went to the closed door next to the kitchen and rested his hand on it. The basement. "Now Alek remembers." He opened the door and went down two or three steps. "Alek was here with Rory. They were playing on the Play Station that's when he wondered where Carmel was." Souness followed him down the stairs, peering at the room. The walls were decorated with Deep South memorabilia, crossed pistols, longhorn belt buckles, a framed picture of Elvis. The carpet was deep pile, white, and in one corner was a mirrored bar, a photograph of a young Alek Peach next to a Las Vegas-style fruit machine, wearing a cowboy hat, smiling at the camera. Caffery went down the last few stairs and beckoned to Souness. "Come down I want to try something. Here." He switched on the TV and the Play Station and handed Souness the controls. "Quake any good to you?"

"You'd be surprised. I'm an expert."

"I'm not surprised. Put it on loud as you want turn up the volume."

She sat down with the controller, shuffling to get comfortable in the velour chair. "And where are you away to, then?"

"Just keep at it."

He went upstairs, into the kitchen, the rumbling sound of the Play Station with him all the way. He stood outside on the doorstep and did what he'd been planning to do all afternoon. Within seconds Souness appeared at the top of the stairs. "Ye all right?"

"Yeah."

"What happened?"

"Broke a bottle. Out here on the patio. The door was closed."

"I heard it."

"Exactly." He could feel a little pulse of excitement flicking at the side of his mouth. "So why didn't Peach hear this back door being broken into?"

"You're saying he's lying}'

"No I believe him. I believe him one hundred per cent when he says he didn't hear that glass breaking on Friday night. Because…" He laid the crime-scene photos out on the work top '… because I think the glass broke on Monday."

"Duh sorry, Jack, I'm not with ye."

"OK, OK." He handed her the photos and went to the back door. "Now the glass fell inwards onto the floor when the door was closed see on the photos?"

"Aye."

"Which is why we all even Quinny assumed the offender did it breaking in. He smashed the glass, put his hand through and unlocked it. The door opens…" He pushed it open to demonstrate. "It opens outwards '

"So the glass on the ground wouldn't have been disturbed."

"Exactly."

"But?"

He nodded. "But if that's what happened then Alek would have heard it even from downstairs."

"So you think '

"So I think it happened on Monday when the offender was leaving. Maybe it fell out when he slammed the door, or maybe Rory kicked it out in the struggle. It's the sound the shopkeeper's dog heard. Look," he tapped the first photo, 'this is how the kitchen looked when we got here. Glass on the floor."

"Aye."

"There was a rainstorm on Monday morning a cloudburst. If the window had already been smashed those curtains should've been damp, but they weren't. And that glass on the floor from the break-in it hasn't been moved around, right?"

"Uh…" She squinted at it. "No that's just fallen straight out. Just sat there, hasn't it?"

"So all the time he was moving around in here it didn't get moved? Not once?"

"Could he not have just avoided it? Walked round it?"

"Then how did he get his prints under the glass?"

Souness was silent. She rubbed her head until the skin under the colourless hair became pink. "Uh…"

"Look at this photo." He handed her the photo taken after the glass had been removed and the ninhydrin developed. He carefully counted the cross-hatched trellises on the lino. "There." He stood with his feet on either side of two faint brown stains just next to the door the ninhydrin glove prints. This part of the floor had been under glass when the police arrived. "His prints were there before that window smashed." He leaned forward, tapping the photo to make the point. "He didn't come in through that back door."

"Then how? Everything else was battened down, Peach says all the doors were locked the TSG had to use the sodding Enforcer to get in."

"Exactly." He took the photos from her and dropped them into his briefcase. "You know what I think?"

"What?"

"I think Peach let him in." He took his glasses off and looked at her. "I think Alek Peach knows exactly who did this to them."

The snuffling stopped as abruptly as it had started. Benedicte held her breath Think, Ben, think What the? Out of the hissing silence came the sound of water being poured on to the door. She rocketed back against the radiator.

Petrol it's petrol

The noise stopped and then she heard the long release of gas, or air. He was spraying something. Hairspray? Something to start the fire? Smurf growled softly, her fur pumped straight up along her spine and around her neck like a lizard ruff. Then in the hallway the thing, the troll, huge oh, Jesus, he sounds too heavy to be human turned and lumbered away, banging against the walls like a cornered sow, slithering and bumping down the stairs.

Then, quite suddenly, silence.

"Hal? JOSH!" That breathing sounded like an animal. Not a human being… "Josh!" She bawled so loudly that Smurf lifted her old, deaf head and howled along with her. "JOSH!!!"

When she couldn't scream any longer, and when there was no noise from downstairs, no exploding whump of fire, she dropped exhausted on to the floor, shaking uncontrollably. She rolled on to her side and pulled her fingernails along the marbled, transparent flesh on her inner arm, scratching and gouging, and trying not to think about what might happen to Josh.

Caffery stopped outside the Blacka Dread music shop on Coldharbour Lane to let Souness trot back down the road and pick them up some food from a take away He smoked a cigarette while he waited, and watched the local pond-life a white guy in a leather deerstalker hat was dealing on the corner next to the Joy clothes shop, and from the Ritzy came a trio of trendy young black guys in sharp fawn leather jackets, with bleached blond hair and goatees. They saw the dealer and subtly crossed away from him to the other side of the street. A girl on a cranky bike, her mirrored Indian skirt caught in the mudguard, shouted something to the dealer as she cycled by.

Caffery lit another cigarette and leaned back, suddenly realizing that he was opposite the deli Rebecca sometimes came to for mozzarella, still dripping in its muslin. Closed now, but he remembered her wandering with her bright, intrigued eyes among the loops of mountain salami, sea-green olive-oil bottles, dusty tins of something untranslatable: "Probably merda d'artista," she had whispered to Caffery, who had stood speechless, transfixed by a row of air-dried serra no hams hanging by the knuckles along the back of the shop: afraid that Rebecca would look up, scared of what she would make of those odd, dangling shapes. Now, from the car, he could see them, ghostly in the blue light of a fly-killer. He wished he had taken her by the arm then and said, "Do you ever think about how Bliss left you suspended just like that, suspended like a piece of meat?"

"Oh, God not this again." He rubbed his face wearily, wondering what she was thinking wondering where she was. He knew she wasn't at home crying, scrubbing herself in the shower; he knew she wasn't shivering in a blanket in a medical examination room at the local station, dark rings around her eyes. He had a sudden picture of her looking over her shoulder at him, blood on her mouth, watching his face. What was she thinking? Rapist? Maybe she was happy he had been proved the foxy, unclean thing she said he was. Maybe there was no working back from that.

"Hey!" Souness was tapping on the window. "Will ye take that glaekit expression off your face and let me in the shagging car?" She was sweating from standing in the steamy take away She'd got gun go pea soup in polystyrene cups and two Jamaican patties. "It's all I could find. Don't worry, it's all vegetarian no billy goat in any of it."

They ate on the way back to Shrivemoor – Souness got soup on her tie and patty flakes all over her suit, but she didn't notice. She was still thinking about Alek Peach: "So why not just fess up and tell us who it was?" At Shrivemoor she swiped her card and they got into the lift. "It's his own wain, for Christ's sake."

"Guilt. Maybe he's into something maybe with the business, maybe… I don't know, but maybe he's in so bad that this was a reprisal. He'd feel guilty, wouldn't he? Wouldn't he feel guilty if he'd done something that had brought this on to his family?"

"I don't know." She stared blankly at her fractured reflection in the aluminium lift walls. "He'd have to be well shit ted up by whoever it is not to report them." She sighed. "But I'm with you something's not adding up."

"Less and less is. He says he couldn't hear Rory the whole time he was tied up. Don't you think that's odd?"

"Hmmm…"

"If he couldn't hear Rory, how come Carmel could? She was," he reached up and knocked on the ceiling of the lift, 'upstairs and she could hear him crying. But Alek couldn't?"

"I did wonder." She looked at him sideways. "You think he's lying?"

"Look at the inconsistencies. The photographs Carmel heard being taken? The ones Alek knew nothing about? And this holiday thing? Luck? Or was it not such a coincidence after all? Maybe someone knew they were going on holiday, someone knew they wouldn't get disturbed." The lift doors opened and Caffery got out, walking backwards, looking at Souness. "Now I keep asking myself, how would a stranger know that they were going on holiday? Wouldn't it be more likely that it was someone they knew?"

"OK. OK." She swiped her card and they went into the deserted incident room. The monitors were dark and silent; Kryotos, as she did every day, had washed everyone's mugs and left them on a tray in the corner. Souness put her hands on the desk and leaned over towards him. "Jack. I think you're on to something. I don't know what but I think you've got a point…"

Benedicte lay on her back, exhausted, thirsty. She had felt through every inch of her prison, moving her body like a sidewinder, rubbing her elbows raw. She could reach the wardrobe but even at full stretch the door and the window fell more than a yard from her fingertips. She used every atom of energy trying to buckle the copper pipe she had pulled so hard at the handcuff that her ankle had swollen and was almost enfolding the cuff, and the handcuff screws were ruined she'd jabbed at them so much with the wire.

It was dark, but she'd learned quickly how to estimate time. Trains, distant, on the other side of the park she'd heard them once or twice before in Brixton: sometimes at night the sky lit up momentarily like white lightning from an electrical fault on the rail, and once, the June night that England had beaten Germany in the Eurocup, she'd heard the drivers blowing their horns at each other. Now the trains had a beautiful cadence in the quiet, they reminded her that people were out there, and the rhythm of them began to make sense. When they stopped she estimated it must be between twelve and one in the morning.

From downstairs she had heard nothing. Now she could smell the liquid she'd heard pouring on to the landing floor. It wasn't petrol, it was urine. He had come up here, stood only a few feet away from the bathroom, and pissed against the door. The disgusting little shit. Just be grateful, she told herself, that it wasn't petrol.

She sat up, began to unroll her buckled body. Urine. She had avoided that indignity until now but she knew there was no point in holding on. "Gotta pee, Smurf." She had to stop herself apologizing to the dog. "It's got to be done."

She pulled her trousers and knickers down over the free foot and crumpled them around the bound ankle. With a pinched, contrapuntal squirm, she rotated herself so that she was crouching facing the radiator, holding on to it for balance, and crab-shuffled one leg sideways so she was as far from the shackled foot as possible. She held the trousers clear with one hand, feeling like crying as the carpet under her feet grew wet and warm. She hoped, dear God, she hoped they'd be out of here before she had to move her bowels.

Suddenly in the hallway downstairs something moved. The front door slammed. Benedicte stayed quite still, facing the radiator, trousers around one foot, hardly daring to breathe.

He's gone? Then what about…

lJosh?" Her voice rose frantically and, forgetting the mess under her on the floor, she hopped around like an injured animal, getting hopelessly, pathetically, tangled in her underwear. "HAL? JOSH? JOSH -GIVE ME BACK MY SON! JOSH!" She hammered on the wall, screaming, bawling. And when no one answered she collapsed on the floor, on her back in her own urine, put her hands over her face and sobbed.

In the back of the cupboard in the incident-room kitchen Caffery found a dusty, forgotten bottle of Tesco's gin and some flat tonic water. He and Souness had spent an hour sitting at Kryotos's workstation, finishing off the Laphroaig and hashing through their next move. Bela Nersessian, they both agreed, was the person to speak to. They'd bring her to the office and start lightly, just casual inquiries into Alek Peach, his personal life, his business dealings if he had any. The family liaison officer set up the interview for the following day, and Caffery felt a small lift of spirit. Souness, too, was satisfied that they had a new direction. At 11 p.m. she decided she was over for the night.

"Ye should do the same." She stood in the doorway with her jacket on, trying to scratch off the soup on her tie, spitting on her finger and rubbing fruitlessly at it. "You'll be no good to me, Jack, shagged out."

"Yup." He held a hand up. "I'm right behind you."

But he wasn't. He had no intention of going home. When she had gone he took Penderecki's cache from the lock-up filing cabinet, and sat with a mug of warm G and T at his elbow, staring out of the window, building houses from the videotapes. Several times he picked up the phone and put it down. Rebecca hadn't called and he didn't know how to approach it. Dark fathoms under your feet, Jack. At 11.30 p.m. he pushed the tapes aside, swallowed the G and T, took off his glasses, and dialled her mobile.

She answered, sounding a little indistinct.

"Rebecca where are you?"

"In bed."

"My place?"

"No. Mine." He pictured her dreamy and warm, one long brown arm stretched out across the pillow, her hair pulled above and behind in a long helix -serpentine, like a diving mermaid's. "I'm in my bed."

"Look He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry -Rebecca, I love you I really I He stared out at the lights of Croydon not knowing how to put it. But this is as far as I can go. I can't give it up I can't leave that house and you're something I don't understand any more. "I'm sorry, Rebecca '

"You're dumping me."

"No I look, I've tried very hard I've tried hard, but something's happening to you and I just seem to make it worse '

"You are, you're dumping me, aren't you?"

He sighed. "What would you want me to do after last night? You couldn't go on with me after that -you don't want that."

"Don't tell me what I want!" Her voice rose. "How dare you tell me what I want? I don't know what I want so how can you possibly know?" She stopped.

He could hear her breathing at the other end of the line, as if she was trying not to cry.

"Look…" He wound the phone cord around his finger and found himself saying, "If it would make you feel better, then report it. Tell them I raped you. Tell them what you said about Bliss too."

"What?"

"Report it." It would be suicide, the end of everything, if she did, but he suddenly realized he didn't much care any more. "Seriously get it over with. I'm not going to fight."

"You're crazy '

"No. I'll take the consequences." He paused. "Rebecca?"

"What?" Her voice was small, distant.

"I'm sorry. I really am."

"Yeah." She put the phone down.

Jesus. He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the dead receiver in his hand. Then he hung up and sat forward, rubbing his eyes, pulling his hands down his face. "Fuck fuck fuck." What have you done? What have you done? How did it ever get this screwed up? He'd had no indication, no reason to expect that the words were suddenly going to come out like that. How does it feel? he asked himself. Does it feel good to self-destruct? Do you feel free?

He sighed and pressed his fingers against his forehead. It's all over, then, isn't it? He couldn't sleep, he couldn't go home. He sat forward, and rolled a cigarette, staring out at the night as he smoked it. When he'd finished it, he stood, took the Half Moon Lane photos from the envelope on the window-sill, looked at them for a long time, then put them back into the envelope. Then he went into the incident room and detached Marilyn's zip drive from her computer, brought it back into the SIO's room and plugged it into his own PC. His hands were shaking as he took Penderecki's disks from the filing cabinet and sat down at his desk.

The zip disks were labelled from one to nine, and each one contained up to a hundred jpegs, harvested from Russian websites, from ever-moving news groups Caffery had been on a day course to Hendon to learn how woefully ill-equipped the police were to do anything about tracking the posters of these photographs. The process of serving warrants on ISPs was lengthy and the perpetrators knew it as soon as they felt the ground getting hot beneath their feet they'd move to another service provider. Among the files Caffery found saved newsgroup postings where users dealt passwords for sites, tips on masking ISP info, adverts for 'cop software' 'to tidy up your hard drive sectors for those awkward technical support visits…". He found the address of a safe mailbox to dump AVI and JPG files, the entire series of the notorious 'kindergarten' photos, updated URLs for Russian "Lolita' websites, binary newsgroup postings with familiar file names FreshPetals.jpg, Buds.jpg, SweetAngel.jpg. That night he saw every type of child porn imaginable: some of the photos wouldn't have looked out of place in a high-gloss coffee-table book, beautiful, soft focus, blond children in T-shirts, shorts, bare-chested under dappled trees -but some of the files at the other end of the spectrum made his stomach turn, weathered to it though he was. He had to drink a little more G and T and press his palm flat on his stomach. Some of the photographs were so cropped it was impossible to tell the sex of the child.

He worked on, until he had a blister on his thumb pad from moving the mouse, imagining that he would find a clue in the corner of a photo for fuck's sake, what are you expecting to see? And then, very suddenly, he sat back and released the mouse. It was 1.30 a.m." the traffic noises outside had long died away, and the building was quiet. He turned slowly, an odd sensation racing across him, to look at the videocassettes. Something had occurred to him. He had just realized why there were no pictures on them. Quickly he went into the exhibits room and got latex gloves from the evidence grab bag when he handed the tapes over he didn't want the unit thinking he'd jumped into them like a nonce filled up his mug and switched off all the lights in the incident room. But it's classic nonce behaviour, Jack, Just think how this would look, sad old sack with his booze and his smutty vids. Back in the office he found the old Swiss Army knife in his jacket pocket, pulled up a chair and positioned the Anglepoise over the desk.

Rebecca was sitting in her studio with the curtains open, holding a vodka and orange and staring at her solitary reflection in the dark window a few feet away. Beyond it the lights in Canary Wharf were on, and the other great citadels of dock lands blazed in the sky, but she hardly saw them. She was trembling. "Right -right. OK fine," she said. "You didn't expect this but that's OK, just keep calm, keep it in perspective." She downed the drink in two straight gulps and looked at her hands. They were still shaking. "For heaven's sake, calm down it's not the end of the world." She went into the kitchen, sat at the table and filled her glass. Vodka: the secret drink the alcoholic's drink. Her mother's drink. It's supposed not to smell. But Rebecca could smell it. She had learned the smell of it at her mother's breast: as a baby she had tangled the smell of vodka with the smell of milk for years alcohol on her mother's breath could make her salivate.

She swallowed the drink, made a face, and looked down into the empty glass, peering at the line of orange pulp. Just get on with it maybe you and Jack, maybe you weren't ever supposed to… She stood, almost lost her balance, recovered and took the glass to the sink, rinsed it out, and poured another drink, marvelling at the way the juice dropped into the clear, oily vodka. Yes, that looked good. And it tasted good it tasted so good that she swallowed it whole and quickly poured another. Through the door she could see the stupid little sculptures lined up in the studio. "Your work!" she said out loud, holding up the glass, toasting them. They make the place look like a bloody sex shop. She should smash them all to pieces a grand gesture an artistic gesture. Yes! She finished the drink, put the glass down, and walked decisively, in a perfect straight line, to the studio, only swaying once, pleased at how sober she was. But by the time she'd got to the door she'd forgotten what she was going to do. She stood there for a moment, her hands on the doorposts, trying to remember where she was headed and, when she couldn't remember, turned, shaking her head silly cow went back to the kitchen table and picked up the vodka bottle. She'd had a lot already, she thought, holding the bottle up to the light, and she supposed she really shouldn't have another. But this is different, she told herself, quite different.

She took the next drink into the bathroom, a little unsteady now that the vodka was taking effect, and stood in front of the mirror. "Cheers," she said to her reflection. "Here's to you and Jack." She downed the vodka in three swallows, banging the glass carelessly against her teeth. I will survive, she thought, feeling immediately sick and closing her eyes, resting her hand on the sink, taking deep breaths. What? Did you really want to end up hitched to a cop} Coffee mornings with the other wives, whingeing about the hours you spend on your own, and maybe, if you're lucky, a couple of brandies with your husband in the golf-club bar on a Sunday? When she looked up the room had stopped swaying and her own stupid face was staring back at her. "Oh, just go away." She flapped her hand at the mirror. "Go away." She bent over the sink to rinse out the glass, but there must have been something on her fingers, because now the glass was slipping out of her grip and although she made a grab for it her fingers didn't seem to be working properly, and instead of catching it she just knocked it sideways against the tap. It rebounded and shattered in the sink.

She stood for a moment staring at it, the noise still moving around her skull. Shit, Becky, you're drunk. She went into the kitchen and made a drink in a fresh glass. You need to be careful with the vodka. She didn't want a hangover, so after this one she was going to stop. The fridge, she thought, distractedly, why is the fridge so loud? And then she thought, You must clear up the glass, or you'll cut yourself. She put the drink down, determined to stop with the vodka now now, before you do something stupid got newspaper from under the sink to put the glass in, and hurried back into the bathroom, quick, too quick, sliding on something, and before she had time to realize what was happening she was on the floor, on her bottom on the floor, the newspaper still clutched in her hand.

She sat there for a moment, blinking at the wall like a doll with moving eyelids, wondering if she was going to laugh about it. She should laugh about it. She should laugh about it and then she should get up, but she didn't have the energy and the room was spinning. Get up, Becky, get up.

She roused herself, groping upwards for the towel-rail, pulling herself up off the floor, head still whirling. She was going to clear up the glass and then have a Horlicks and go to bed and she'd be OK, but the towel-rail came away in her hand, snowing plaster down and dropping her back on to the floor, her head banging on the bath. And there she stopped, propped up against the bath, one leg tucked under her body, her hair all over her face, and began to sob.

It had been one of the Russian "Lolita' websites that did it. The name Lolita. From his time in Vice he remembered a seized set of the infamous Rodox/ Colour Climax Lolita videos. For Lolita 1-12 the Dutch dealers had been careful to export the videotape cracked out of its casing so it didn't X-ray as a cassette and arouse the suspicions of customs or post-office workers. Mainstream porn often came into the country like this. But Caffery wondered if Penderecki had gone one step further.

Hunched over the videos like an East End jeweller, cigarette in his mouth, glasses all the way down his nose, carefully he unscrewed the plastic casing. The shell cracked he opened it cautiously, like a precious book, lifting out the white plastic spools. He put the cigarette in the ashtray and gently pressed the tape between his lips, soft-biting it. When he opened his mouth the tape had stuck to the top lip. This was exactly what he'd betted on: the mylar coating was on the inside. The tape had been taken off its spool, flipped over and rewound.

He dug in the Swiss Army knife, released the little white clip from the spool and flipped the tape over. It took him twenty minutes to respool it, a roll-up wedged between his teeth, the G and T dwindling in the mug. And this stray end in here on this spool. He inserted it in the casing and tightened up the little screws. He pushed the tape in the VCR and aimed the remote control at it.

"There isn't much that's surprising in kiddie porn," one of the 'dirty squad' had told him in the eighties. "Once you get over the fact that it's kids, then it's not all that much different from adult porn. Of course, getting over the fact that it's kids is the trick. If you can't do that you're buggered. Pardon the expression."

Caffery prepared himself, sat himself down and waited for the feelings, the panic, the sadness, to come at him. And they did: as he watched the videotapes all the feelings came back, only this time they were duller. And this time he found himself irritated by them. There you go, he thought throwing down the Army knife, you're almost resigned to it.

Where did all these children come from, he wondered. Where were they now? This small blonde girl he was looking at, she could have only been about three foot tall, standing in front of a pink and gold painted dressing-table, scalloped ankle socks on, her hair in bunches. Who was she? Where was she now? What had they said to convince her that it was right and good to smile and hold her legs open for the camera?

He sat through poorly lit scenes in trailers, hotel bedrooms, one on a balcony in broad sunlight flags on a golf course visible in the distance. Slowly he began to realize exactly what he'd stumbled on to: these videos weren't porn for Penderecki's personal use, they were more serious than that. They were first-generation tapes, he was sure of it: the quality and the manner in which they had been stored suggested they were master tapes. Caffery thought that he'd come smack bang to the coal-face of a paedophile ring. This was their payload, stored by Penderecki next to the railway track.

"Fuck."

He stood up, windmilling his arms, trying to get rid of the crick in his neck. He lit another cigarette and paced the office, smoking and staring at the screen. What he should do at this point was call the paedophile unit. What he should do was call Souness at home, wake her up, get Paulina on the phone. But Penderecki had sent him these tapes for a reason. He put out the cigarette and went into the incident room, locked the door to the passageway and came back to the office. The tapes were staying with him, he decided, until he knew what message or what torment Penderecki intended him to get from them.

Eleven twenty-minute tapes. Almost four hours. They seemed to constitute only five different episodes, some spanning more than three tapes, and he sensed from the quality and changing clothes styles that the sessions had taken place over ten or more years. He worked into the night, letting one play as he re spooled the next. A one-man assembly line: spooling, watching, spooling, watching.

By 6 a.m. he had watched all the tapes and there was only one that he wanted to see again. It was possibly the most shocking of the tapes, for the simple reason that the abuser who leaned on the creaking fake leather sofa to unzip and fellate a boy of, Caffery guessed, about eleven, was a woman. She had been in four other tapes, but this one was the one he pushed back into the VCR and rewound.

When Benedicte could cry no longer she lay on the floor, on her back, in a straight line next to the radiator so that her ankle wasn't bent, and imagined she was still a child, her mother's face above hers, downy and warm as the underside of a wing, smiling as she bent over for a goodnight kiss. She thought about Josh, little Josh, when he was a baby, so new that part of her had been jealous that she would never be so new again. And Hal picking Josh up and holding him above his head and waggling him, his fat little legs wiggling with delight as if he could swim through the air. Nights when he had a fever, Hal rolling a glass over the rash terrified that meningitis would come and steal him away. They'd always known there were black holes in the world: Sarah Payne; Jason Swift; a little boy knocked over by a truck in Camberwell; another falling from a fourteen-storey high-rise. She thought of him sprawled out in front of the telly, picking a scab on his knee, and all she could think was how much she wanted to take his socks off and kiss his little toes. He could walk all over the house in his muddy boots, he could scribble on the walls, put footballs through every window in the house, steal her life, shout abuse at her if only she could see him again just once. If only she could smell his hair again. Just once.

A little before dawn Benedicte fell asleep in spite of herself, a fevered, infected sleep with lights in her brain and voices careening around her skull.

In Croydon the bottom of the sky, jagged between the skyscrapers, had brightened to a cool opal. It was nearly 6 a.m. and downstairs the TSG Tannoy blurted commands through the building. No one would come into the incident room for another two hours. Caffery was watching the video again, aimlessly doodling on a scrap of headed Met notepaper. The woman weighed he'd squinted and tried to guess when he first saw her enter the frame maybe fifteen, sixteen stone? She had a flat boxer's nose, flaky skin, dark glossy hair and was dressed in a black camisole and satin mules. The boy glanced up occasionally at the camera, as if to say, "Am I doing it right?" and the brunette made obscene little moues as she lightly scratched the inside of his thigh with her scarlet and black nail designs. At the beginning of the tape she came into the room and sat on the sofa, and for a moment she passed close enough to the camera for a tattoo on the top of her arm to come into focus: a heart behind prison bars. Caffery absently scratched the image into the doodle.

It wasn't just the woman's appearance and the slack, rather blank way she was abusing the child on the sofa that had struck him: it was the astonishing carelessness with her identity. Maybe because these tapes were intended to be edited a surprising number of them revealed clues about the abuser ordinarily any adult taking part in a film like this would be at pains to keep their face hidden. Identifying peculiarities would be covered, sheets hung over bookcases, labels cut out of any clothes the children wore most pictures that made it to the internet had identifying features airbmshed out with graphics software. Not so in these tapes. He got glimpses of faces, records, CD titles of this tattoo. In three of the videos he could actually hear muttered conversations off-camera, men speaking, commenting on the action, muttering about what they could do to the child on screen. Caffery could even hear names in the conversations: Stoney, Rollo, Yatesy. He carefully noted down everything.

There was no audio on the tapes of the brunette, but in this one there were plenty of visual clues to work with. Behind the peeling, fake-leather sofa was a veneer display cabinet, lighted from above, and he could see decorative glasses, a pile of duty-free Silk Cut boxes, a photograph in a gold frame. But more importantly, and more unbelievably, there was a single, blatant identifier in the earliest part of the tape. Caffery paused the tape and rewound. Played. The woman stood and crossed the room. He rewound. She crossed the room backwards, sinking on to the sofa and crossing her legs. Stop. Play. She uncrossed her legs, stood and crossed the room. Stop. Rewind. Back to the sofa. Stop. Play. Back and forward. Eventually he froze the tape where he wanted it.

As she crossed the room she passed, briefly, a window. The swish glide curtains were slightly open, and although it could only have been ten frames or so, less than half a second, Caffery had glimpsed a distinctive yellow flare. He leaned forward now, staring intently at the screen, and put the ageing VCR on to frame-by-frame, letting the brunette move jerkily forward until the yellow was clear. He paused the tape. He tore the top sheet of paper from the pad and found a pen. His pulse was racing. Now that the tape had stopped he could see exactly what that yellow splash was. Outside the window of the room someone had parked a car. For two frames the number-plate, although at an angle, was legible. He scribbled the number down and went into the incident room.

The PNC2 computer could fit a name to an index number in seconds. By 6.05 a.m. he knew who owned the car, and Phoenix, PNC2's newly attached database, had told him a lot about the owner. Things were starting to make sense. He pushed his chair away from the terminal, rolled it across the incident room to the tray marked "Receiver In' next to Kryotos's workstation, and picked up the sheaf of returned Actions forms for Kryotos to type into HOLMES. He wanted to know if during the day the paedophile unit had detailed any of the team to speak to one Carl Lamb of Thetford, Norfolk.