The Treatment

Twenty-seven.

He didn't let it touch him he didn't let it get to him. He did what he'd said he was going to do and put a line under it. He had already wasted enough of the morning. Cigarette between his teeth he put his tie back on, checking in the mirror, put on his sunglasses, and grappled his mobile out of his jacket. What was Souness doing right now? Sitting in the SIO's office, counting off the minutes, waiting for him to come through the door, waiting to ask him the questions about Tracey Lamb and Norfolk. It was time to get it all out into the open.

"Well?"

"Well what, Jack?"

"Have you got something to tell me?"

"About what} Your lads aren't back they were going to call you direct, weren't they?"

"Anything else?"

"Jack, listen, son. I hate to be a pain in the arse, but I've got the DACe-mailing me, the borough fucking commander on the line and, oh, just one or two reports to get ready for the case review, so with all due respect…"

He sat back in his seat, staring at the alley of beech trees that marched off towards the abbey. She didn't know. Souness didn't know. What the fuck was

"Jack? I don't want to hang up on ye, son, but '

"OK, Danni. I'm sorry. Put me through to Marilyn, will you?"

Kryotos agreed to contact Champ and reschedule the meeting. Champ was in the West End he wanted lunch and if Caffery could make it for two thirty they could meet in Soho. So he pointed the car down the M11: Canary Wharf on his horizon for nearly an hour as he closed on London. He got to Soho for two fifteen, parked in one of the expensive local car parks, went into a branch of his bank and paid the three thousand straight back into his account, then walked calmly down to Shaftesbury Avenue.

Champ was only twenty-four but he already owned an electrical retail shop in the streets behind Chinatown. "I do know which way is up, you see. I make it here with my Laotian name because nearly all my blood is Chinese." He'd had acne at some point in the past, but his hair was neat and gelled, and he was well turned-out in a slate grey Armani suit and immaculate leather shoes. "I get left alone as long as I'm quiet. I understand the guan chi see." The boys sunbathing in Soho Square lifted their heads to watch him and Caffery walk by.

They went to a good, honest Italian in Dean Street: hand-painted Amalfi plates on the walls, bottles of Strega and Amaretto in a rack above the heads of the kitchen staff. Caffery had fish and sat with his back to the window watching Champ twisting up the spaghetti alle vongole. He leaned forward as he ate to avoid getting tomato sauce on his suit.

"When it happened they all came up out of nowhere, all the do-gooders trying to help me. I just kept quiet. I was working, you see."

"Working?"

"When it happened. He was a punter."

"A punter}' Caffery wondered if the PNC had made a mistake. "But you were only '

"Almost twelve, and it wasn't my first." He pushed some spaghetti into his mouth and pointed the fork at Caffery. "You probably want me to say I was harmed by it, don't you? By the men? But some of them had more time for me than my own mother. I was in care for a year when I was two." He chewed and swallowed. "They found me in my cot with half a pound of shit in my nappy, me just lying there not moving or crying, even." He twirled more pasta on his fork and pushed it into his mouth. "She was, and still is, a slag, my mother." Chewing, not taking his eyes off Caffery he reached inside his suit pocket and drew out a scrap of paper. "Fished this out for you." It was a crumpled, faded small ad. "That's how he found me."

I am an 18-year-old who had an accident which has left me looking only 10. Call…

Caffery pushed the paper back across the table. "You were eleven and you were advertising?"

"I was a clever little Asian monkey even then. Our minds are quick, you know, skip through the gaps that GI Joe can't get through. Look where I am today -you know why? Because I never got a junk habit like everyone else. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bombita in those woods, believe me, businessman's specials meth, the lot. But me, I saved my money." He waggled the fork at Caffery. "Told you I'm mostly Chinese meat."

"He asked you about your daddy."

Champ snorted. "Yeah. I'd forgotten that. That's the first thing he said, when he phoned, he asked me did

I like my daddy. I didn't get it at the time now I know it's just, y'know, normal gay talk."

"And he took photographs of you?"

"I didn't show the camera my face, but what weirded me out was that I'm sure he took photos of me after I was down after I fainted. I remember the flash going off." He mopped his plate with some bread and shrugged as if he hadn't given the incident much thought. "Believe me, before that night I thought I knew what weird was some of them liked you to do such shit you wouldn't believe. There were the ones who liked yellow you know what that is, don't you?"

"Uh yeah."

"And brown and fawn and red y'know, fisting. Hey, you're the police, nothing I can say is going to shock you, right?"

Caffery looked down at the fish on his plate. "That's right."

"But this was one sicko, weird from here to next week. First he's telling me he's going to watch over me. He said he would come and look down at me, that he'd like to watch me in my bed."

"What do you think he was talking about?"

"No idea. Probably just his mad-speak and, anyway, he's fiddling around with me down there as he's saying it and I'm like, "Hey hang on, you better put something on this is not bare backing times no more. You put something on." But when I turned to check he hardly had nothing to put a rubber on anyway. Tiny, tiny little pecker like…" he held his thumb and finger apart'… like that. Never seen nothing like it -Midget Dick, the Angry Inch and he hadn't even got a hard-on. Couldn't get himself up. Course, turns out he had better ideas than that." Champ forced the bread into the corner of his mouth. "When he rammed that thing up my arse I fainted."

Caffery put his hands on either side of his plate and looked down for a moment. His black nail looked purplish against the yellow check tablecloth. "They never caught him."

"Nope. He never did it again. Stopped just like that. And I never saw him again. I called him the troll, cos he was so big and so fucking ugly, man. I told the other boys I mean the meat-rack boys and the name just got handed down, like a legend. Later the other kids, you know, the straight little kids from the estates, they used to talk about the troll in the woods, play these games and run around and scream and work themselves up and shit."

"We think we've got him."

Champ didn't stop chewing. He scooped some tiny pieces of clam on to a piece of bread and pushed it into his mouth. "I guessed that when you called. Who've you got?"

"I've got a photo. Do you think you'd remember him?"

"Yeah I'd remember him. Plain as day. Black hair he weren't a black guy, he was white but he had this black hair shiny' he held his hand up next to his head 'like mine. And he was huge I reckon about six and a half feet but he was young, you know. He can't have been more than sixteen."

"Sixteen? You told the police in his twenties."

"Well, yeah, I was only eleven he seemed really old. But I s'pose he can't have been all that much older than me."

Caffery didn't speak for a while. He sat with his mouth slightly open, staring blankly at the cups resting on the cappuccino machine, a clean white napkin spread across them. Champ continued to chew, watching him. After a while he sat forward and said: "Problem?"

Caffery closed his mouth and dropped his chin. "No, no. No problem." He pushed away his plate and felt under the table for his briefcase. "I'll show you the picture then, if you think you'll remember."

"I'll never forget him, the troll." He leaned over, looked at Peach's photograph and shook his head. "Nope. Not him."

"You sure?"

"Sure I'm sure." He put his fork down and patted his mouth with the napkin. "Right dessert?"

"What's this fucking mess you've made?" Tracey Lamb was furious. While she'd been at the police station Steven had tried to get out of the caravan he'd thrown himself around, putting a long crack in one of the acrylic windows and upsetting his slop bucket. Now he sat on the bunk bed rocking himself, his head in his hands. "I wasn't gone that long." She splashed around some Dettol from under the sink, then grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. "Was I eh, you little fuck? I wasn't gone that long." She shook his arm roughly. "So what the fuck's all this about?"

Traaaytheee His bottom lip stuck out. He looked as if he was going to cry.

"Oh, stop it, for fuck's sake." She shoved a cloth in his hand and pulled him down on to his knees. "There, wipe it up. Go on, clean it up, you filthy little shit."

He started to move the cloth across the floor and Tracey dropped down on the bunk lighting a cigarette, watching him. On the way back from the police station she had been turning the problem of Steven over and over in her mind. When she was arrested her first thought had been that Caffery had set her up, that she'd been wrong about him, that he wasn't bent, wasn't working for someone. But during the questioning, as she calmed down and thought it through, she started to wonder if maybe she was mistaken. She sensed that Caffery was just as cautious of the dirty squad as she was. When he came down yesterday he'd been as nervous as a horse he had spent half the time looking over his shoulder as if he knew someone might turn up at any minute. He was cacking it. And during the arrest that morning he hadn't wanted to show himself he had taken one look at the area cars and melted away into the trees before any of the officers saw him. He hadn't expected it because, she decided, because he is as bent as you thought. And afterwards, outside the nick. What was that in his top pocket if it wasn't the gelt?

Kelly Alvarez had promised to tell Tracey how the unit had tracked her down. Maybe Scotland Yard had already been on to her, and maybe loose-cannon Caffery had discovered she was about to be done and used the opportunity to get in a little ahead of the pack. Maybe he really did want Steven. She started to feel better. You might still be in for that three K, Trace. She decided to call him tomorrow straight after the Narey hearing and try to suss him out again. She chucked the cigarette in the sink. Whatever Caffery's true nature, she knew that the person on his hands and knees in front of her was far more important to him than that pervert in Brixton, with his insane photographs and hygiene obsessions.

The barracudas. Named after fish, but not real fish: real fish would die in the chlorinated water. "The water tastes funny because of the chlorine," Gummer would tell the new children. "And chlorine is there for a purpose see? And what does it do? It protects us. It protects us against germs and other nasty things that get into the water. Very important."

But the barracudas didn't need to be told about chlorine the barracudas knew far too much already. They were at that dangerous age. All the instructors were trained, not only in their own responsibilities towards the children but also to be on the look-out for any signs of abuse and Gummer knew that children in their swimsuits attracted more than their fair share of inappropriate interest. Once, a man had paid the spectator's fee to get into the building, gone into the gallery and had stood there blatantly taking photographs of the barracudas swimming around. Gummer didn't raise the alarm, instead he stood on the pool edge and waved his hands warningly until he'd scampered away. Gummer was relieved he didn't want the police coming and questioning him about the incident and making him start thinking about the wrong things. They'd see it in his face. Safer not to be questioned at all. So the mysterious cameraman had gone off with his cache of photographs scot free.

Photographs

Gummer, standing now on the pool edge in his T-shirt and bathing cap, was thinking about the photos he had in his flat a nine-year-old boy, beautiful, so beautiful. He had them displayed in a back bedroom, pasted on the walls. No one would ask questions about them there was no one to see them, no one ever came into his flat, nor would they ever. He let his mind wander off and tinker with the subject, and the first image he got was of Rory Peach. A boy, naked, arms crossed over his chest. Tied to a radiator. That bit, the bit about the radiator, hadn't actually been in the newspapers, but he knew it was reality. Then Gummer thought about another set of photos. Where were they? In someone's house? Maybe displayed somewhere? He wondered for the hundredth time if the police would find them…

"Look at me I'm a mermaid!"

Gummer stiffened. The barracudas, especially the girls, were always getting too close for comfort. If one of them brushed against him it made his flesh crawl.

"Can we do that thing now?" They were jumping up and down in the shallows, one or two climbing out of the water, pushing themselves on to their bellies on the pool edge and kicking their legs out. "Want to do that trick now."

"No, I don't think so."

"Yes!" In the pool a little girl spiked out her arms and legs into a star. "I stand like this and then you have to swim through my legs."

"No, we don't do that in this class." The children coming out of the pool were making him nervous, too many of them and too fast, like penguins flinging themselves at a rock. And when he got nervous his head got red all the way across the top to the bony bit at the base of his skull, and down his neck and into the tops of his arms. "I think we should all get back into the pool."

"And we swim through your legs." They knew his weak spot and were prodding at it now standing on the pool side, squirming around his legs like fat tadpoles, tugging at his hands, trying to get him into the water, teasing him, brushing him. "And after that you swim through ours."

"No definitely not '

"We're all mermaids. Look '

"Let go!" Gummer was starting to shake. He'd taken his pills that morning, but there was still that bloating tension in him, waiting to burst out. He wanted to cry. The girls were swarming around him now, stirring the hairs on his skin. He couldn't bear them to touch him it was so important that they didn't touch him. It was no good it was no good he was going to

"STOP!"

His voice echoed around the pool. The lifeguards and the spectators in the gallery all looked up. "Just stop it now!" A blast on his whistle and one or two heads, slick heads like young seals, popped up in the water, shocked and sobered. "When I say no I mean no." The children next to him backed away, surprised. He was trembling, bright red, his whole face the colour of his rubber bathing cap. This time none of the children laughed. "Right." He gestured to the changing rooms. "Lesson's cancelled for today. You've proved you can't follow the rules so the lesson's cancelled."

It was getting late but there was nowhere to park in King's car park, and Caffery had to take the Jaguar almost half-way to Brixton before he found a side-road to leave it in. Souness still hadn't paged him. Walking to the hospital, twice he broke into a jog as if he might silence his mind. Hyper hyper hyper a hothouse of images and voices, making connections where none should be. Peach, Alek Peach, it wasn't you ten years ago, but it was you with Rory. What's happening? Are you copying someone? It didn't make sense. He felt like striking his forehead. Exasperated and tired, he stopped in the main corridor to get a cup of vending-machine coffee.

"Mr. Caffery."

He looked up. Ndizeye stood a few yards along the hallway, body turned slightly away as if he had been crossing the corridor and stopped when he'd noticed Caffery. He was holding a stack of X-rays under his arm and his glasses had slipped down his sweaty nose.

"Mr. Ndizeye." Shit I haven't returned his calls. He straightened up. "I'm sorry I've been meaning to uh I just…" He tailed off, looking down at the empty styrofoam cup in his hand, embarrassed. "How's the family?"

"Yes. Very well. My family's my blessing." He pushed the glasses up his nose and crossed the corridor to watch Caffery adjust the plastic cup under the nozzle.

When he didn't say anything and didn't move, and when Caffery could feel the clown face smiling at him, he let go of the cup and straightened. "Did you want me to did you want to talk about the case? You can just submit your expenses to our office manager."

"That's OK, I've done it."

"Good, good."

"Well," Ndizeye leaned back slightly, clutching the X-rays to his round stomach, 'it's not going too well for you I suppose."

"You can say that again."

"Is there anyone else you're interested in? Anyone else you'd like me to have a look at."

"Maybe if something comes up on another case, then yes, but we've got the corroborative evidence with the DNA. I mean, I'm sure prosecution will be wanting to see you in court, of course, but that won't be for some time."

Ndizeye frowned and leaned up against the coffee machine. "Corroborative evidence?"

"DNA. We got DNA proving that Peach was the motherfucker who did his own son sorry if that's offensive."

"Mr. PeachV Ndizeye blinked behind his thick spectacles. "Then who on earth bit him?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I said who on earth bit Rory? It was the same person who bit that young lad in the park, but it wasn't Alek Peach."

"What?"

"I'm sorry, I thought that's what you meant. His cast. Doesn't match the bite."

"His cast? But I thought

"Oh it's not perfect, he moved too soon. But I got enough. Oh yes. Whoever it was bit Rory it certainly wasn't Alek Peach."

It was an odd sunset as if the earth was tilting sideways, or the solar wind had lost track and was mixing pink light from another galaxy. Caffery cruised slowly round Brixton, as conscientious as a kerb-crawler, looking at the lights in the houses, wondering, just wondering. He parked on Dulwich Road and walked across the park, listening to the wind howl and chase things through the trees.

Number thirty had been released as a crime scene and technically he should get Carmel Peach's permission to enter, but she was still at the Nersessians' and, anyway, he'd kept a copy of the padlock key. Donegal Crescent was quiet no cars passed. The only sounds were a TV in a lit-up living room next door and a dog barking in one of the back gardens. He carried the torch in his pocket. He liked its heaviness.

Inside, the hallway was dark, the air bitter and salty, sealed up, heated and reheated. He reached for the light and even as he did he remembered Shit. The electricity key: Souness had removed it when they left and placed it on top of the meter. He switched on the torch, followed the beam quickly to the kitchen, and pushed the key back in. The lights came on, the fridge started up noisily. He stood for a moment, blinking in the light, his senses quivering. The walk down the hallway the silent living room on his right, the door to the basement had set the hair on his neck straight up. Not like you not like you It took a moment for his heart to stop racing.

He flipped open the fridge it was covered in DS Quinn's fingerprint dust and a black and grey crust of microbes. The smell was of riverbeds and mushroom fields, but there was another smell in the house. The smell that Souness had been troubled by the last time they were here. This time it was stronger, still faint but distinctive. He switched off the fridge at the plug, anxious to preserve whatever electricity was left, and went back to the kitchen doorway, finding the light switch for the hallway. It was just as he'd remembered it the framed prints on the wall, the plastic runner to protect the carpet, Rory's turbo water-gun on the stairs. And the smell. Stronger now.

He sniffed, trying to imagine the receptor that very particular smell stroked. It was almost, almost but not quite, the sweetly familiar smell in Penderecki's house. Almost the smell of death. 7s it something the science unit missed? Something else in the house no one's seen?

Something else in the house. Yes. Someone else had been in the house with the Peaches. He was sure.

He put the torch in his trouser pocket and went to the bottom of the stairs. The last thing Peach said he remembered was standing here, looking up the staircase. Caffery hung his jacket on the newel post and went slowly up the stairs. The higher he got, the stronger the smell. He stood on the landing, resting his hands on the cupboard door. The message was still there, smudged and scraped where DS Fiona Quinn had cut samples from the paint. Female Hazard. This little cupboard had been Carmel Peach's home for more than three days. Here she had lain, crunched up and in pain, listening to her son crying below, her wrists bleeding.

If she was to be believed.

Come on, then.

He pushed open the door. There was a lagged tank at the back of the cupboard and slatted shelves above. On the top shelf, a stack of towels. Caffery sniffed. He crouched down, sniffing the carpet. Here, even outside the cupboard, it had been soaked in Carmel's urine and the sharp alleyway smell of it came up to him now, almost making him cover his nose. But that isn't the smell you're after it's something else… He straightened and turned, looking up and down the landing.

The master bedroom was at the front of the house, the bathroom facing it. The boards creaked as he walked to the end of the landing, flicking on the lights and looking in both rooms. Silence. The street-light shone orange on the bedroom curtains. A copy of Hello! magazine lay on the dressing-table, Carmel's cosmetics stood in a silent little line, a cardigan and a pair of socks were on the floor. In the bathroom Rory's bath toys were piled in a plastic laundry basket under the sink. Caffery turned off the lights and went back on to the landing. He watches them he watches them, in bed. Past the cupboard, Carmel's cupboard, down to the back of the house. This was Rory's room. He pushed open the door and stood for a moment.

It was a neat square stuck on the house over the kitchen, with a big casement window. DS Quinn had pulled the curtains to stop curious eyes, but there was enough of a gap to see the trees in the park moving in the wind. The smell was stronger in here.

Caffery had the sudden sensation that something was standing in the hallway behind him. He turned quickly. The corridor was silent, just the street-lights glowing from the bedroom. You're imagining things now. Making things up… He moved quietly into the room, bending to pick up toys, turn things over, trying to imagine someone in the park looking through the window and watching Rory play. Wolverine stared silently down at him from an X-men poster next to the bed, Gundam and WWF models lay scattered on the floor try to imagine Rory crouched here playing with his toys and being watched. He turned. In the little sliver of window-pane between the curtains the bare bulb glared back. He snapped the light off and opened the curtains. The trees on the other side of the broken fence were less than fifty yards away.

He said he liked watching me in bed…

It was one of those odd cloudless nights in which the wind keeps the stars clean and the sky never seems to get properly black. In the park the trees moved as one, shivering where the wind licked at them. Caffery stood quite still, letting his attention move around the room behind him, up the walls, around the doorway then up, across the ceiling, over his head and out through the window, touching the sides of the house, down the garden path, over the fence and out, out into the night into the woods. Could someone sitting in one of those trees see into this room? Someone who liked climbing?

He went to Rory's bed and lay down, taking the torch out of his pocket and resting it on his stomach, conscious of the cold, bare window on his right. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, wondering if he was expecting something to happen something to hurtle through the window and land on him on the bed. Secret places. There is always somewhere to hide things. Not the place you expect. His movement in the room had set up a small rotation of the lightbulb above the bed. He watched it dreamily, circling circling, thinking of Ewan does everything circle back? Rory's South Park duvet smelt of fabric softener and faintly of leaves, and Caffery half closed his eyes, enjoying that smell, remembering the tree-house. Tracey Lamb… was she really lying… did she know?

He sat up, the torch rolling off and banging loudly on the floor. A fly had crawled out of the plastic rose at the base of the light fitting.

He jumped up on the bed, reaching inquisitive fingers to it, turning the rose on its axis to face him. There was a small square hole in the plastic he poked his fingers in, feeling the roughness of the edge. The square had been excised as if with a Stanley knife.

Fiona? His pulse was racing now, pressing on his ears in the silence. Fiona, this isn't you, is it? What would the science unit want with a sample of the light rose?

"Hal, I hope you're having fun in Cornwall, it's Darren, mate. Look, I'll see you when you get back but Ayo wanted me to call and say that she never got round to coming over to your house, see, and she's sorry but the ting is our baby got here last night." He paused for a moment and Benedicte had a picture of him, embarrassed, trying to be cool, shifting from foot to foot, being the big man. "He's a bit early, our baby, right, a month early, cos she, you know, someone went and got her all stressed up at work over some fink some filth, Josh, you're right about them, Josh man, and anyway little Errol, that's gonna be his name, little Errol, he's in one of them premie things -he's OK, like, but…" He paused and seemed to be wondering what to say. "Oh, man, don't get worried, he's OK, it's just we couldn't water no plants, and I'm sorry. We're going to open something together, the four of us, when you get back, and celebrate." He coughed. "Anyway, that's all, homeys. See you."

Benedicte lay against the radiator with her face in her hands.

She had a headache, cramps in her limbs, and even with the dribble of water her mouth was still so filled with a glue-like substance that closing it was uncomfortable. The papers said that Carmel Peach would have been dead within twenty-four hours in that heat if she hadn't been found. Smurf's breathing was laboured and Benedicte knew that she was deteriorating fast. She was such an old dog, a poor old dog, and so confused her eyes were dull and crusted and in the last few hours she had stopped moving, except to pant or whimper. Ben dropped her hands and took deep breaths, trying to stop herself crying. Ayo had a new baby, and she and Josh and Hal were all going to die.

Caffery found a mop in the kitchen cupboard and took it upstairs. He switched on all the lights on the first floor and stood on the landing, looking up at the hatch in the ceiling. Secret places. The attic is one of the most common places for 'missing' children to hide Always check behind the water tank. The first attending team had searched the attic at number thirty looking for Rory. Had they missed something?

He switched on the light and prodded the hatch. It swung open smoothly, and when he stood on tiptoe and pushed up his hand, he found a light switch and the rubberized feet of a stainless-steel fold-down ladder suspended in the opening. The light came on and the ribbed vault of the roof lit up like a church. Tucking the flashlight in the back of his waistband he pulled down the ladder and began to climb.

Caffery was six foot on the nose and the roof was too low for him: he had to bend his head slightly to stand. The attic was neat tea chests from some long-ago move, "Rory/clothes' written on one, "Kitchen' on another, rolls of orange insulating material and in the corner, where the shadows ran down from the walls, leaned a plastic Christmas tree and a Woolworth's bag full of red tinsel. Cobwebs strung across the ceiling clung to the lightbulb like a fairground ghost-train prop. He could feel the prickle of insulating material on his skin and that high, warm smell in his nostrils. Something was up here something that all the people who had come through the house had missed. He made a slow 360-degree turn, taking in every incongruity, and immediately he saw what he was looking for.

It was at the other end of the attic, right above Rory's bedroom: a small, indistinct pile of something, smeared like mud into the shadows, flies buzzing above it.

He picked his way across the joists, hand covering his mouth afraid of what you might find? He stopped half a yard away from the pile, waving away the flies. He was looking at a long, wet deposit of food half-eaten food slumped over polystyrene fast-food boxes, slimy hamburgers, a small pile of McDonald's cups, a pile of scrunched tissues. Off to one side a faecal mound, a tissue on top of it. And in the middle of it all a circle had been cleared in the insulating material, from the centre of which a single spiral of yellow electric light poked up into the room. When he went and stood above it he found he was looking through a hole straight down at a South Park duvet.

Someone had made a camp here someone had relaxed here, lived here, shat here, watched Rory from here, probably masturbated here. You fucker. He straightened up and looked around. Two yards away, leaning against next door's shared wall, was a piece of fibreboard. When he tried to move it he found it was light it came away easily and he pushed it to one side. He put one hand on the bare wall and leaned over to inspect what had been behind it.

Fucking hell you clever bastard.

Nine or ten breeze blocks had been removed. Bracing his feet on two joists Caffery rolled up his sleeve, and slowly, slowly, as if he was feeling for something sharp, he put his hand into the hole. In the silent, unblinking darkness of the neighbouring attic his disembodied hand clenched and unclenched, patted blindly up the walls. He retreated and pulled the torch from his waistband, leaning forward a little to shine it into the darkness, and found he was staring into an identical attic. This one was unused there was no bric-a-brac piled up and the only chink in the geometry was the access hatch outlined in light from the hall below and the sound of a television playing downstairs. He shone the torch against the far wall and saw what he was expecting: another piece of MDF propped against the far wall.

Someone had burrowed along the top of the houses until they could get to Rory Peach.

Quickly he switched off the torch, climbed down the ladder and went into the street, walking backwards into the middle of the road, hands in his pockets, head back, looking at the roofs. These were terraced houses, low-pitched roofs: none of the attic spaces was big enough to convert, and if someone had a mind to, and an understanding of the flesh and bones of a building, they could probably make their way from one end of the street to the other. If they could find a way into one of the other houses from the street

He stopped.

Two doors down from the Peaches was the boarded-up shell he and the TSG officer had searched on the first day. Shit yes. He reached in his pocket for his mobile, trying to find DS Fiona Quinn's number in the memory.