The Treatment

Thirty-one.

The incident room was emptying for the day. Most of the computers had been turned off and Kryotos had washed up all the cups. She was already half-way out of the office, pulling on her jacket, when she saw him coming out of the lift. She knew Caffery. She knew not to argue with him when he had that look on his face. My God, that look. "Come on, then," she said, taking off her jacket without even waiting for him to speak. They went back into the incident room where she booted up the ageing PC and tapped in the new fields he gave her: prison sentences beginning in 1989, attacks on police officers using a knife or razor blade, and addresses in SW2, specifically addresses on the perimeter of Brockwell Park.

"Where'd you get all this, Jack?" Souness was in her braces and shirt-sleeves, a cup of coffee in one hand, a docket in the other. She'd wandered out of the SIO's room and come to stand behind Kryotos and Caffery. "Where's this all been massaged from?"

"I dunno." He didn't meet her eyes. "Just a hunch." Even as he said it he felt her eyes snap down on him, in that wry, all-seeing way of hers, and he had to turn his head slightly sideways so she couldn't look in through his face.

"Jack?" He moved away, towards the SIO's room, but Souness had him by the tail and she knew it. She could take her time working her way up, hand over hand. "Don't walk away from me, Jack." She followed him calmly. "I know you too well."

"Just a bit of fucking privacy, Danni." He sat down at his desk. "If that's not too much to ask."

But she stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, sipping her coffee. "Jack Caffery's got a wee secret." She looked over her shoulder, closed the door and came into the office. She put the coffee on the desk and bent down to him, her voice a low whisper: "Jack, I wish ye'd tell me more."

He pushed his face nearer hers, his voice matching hers. "What ant I supposed to tell your he whispered. "Danni?

"You're supposed to tell me if something's happening to ye something that could affect your future in the force."

"OK, then," he said, sitting back and opening his hands. At last it was happening. "Come on out with it. I've been waiting for this."

She shushed him, holding her finger to her lip. "Why's the love of my life suddenly so interested in you, Jack? Why's Paulina started subtly bringing you into the conversation all the time?" She jerked her chin at the phone. "I've just had her now, in her snaky little way bringing the conversation back to you."

"I don't know, Danni. Do you?"

"Don't be sarcastic with me." She looked at him, her chin dropped, her eyebrows raised. "If she was just shopping around, looking for a bit of quick recreational dicking, I'd understand. You look like you could do the honours, I'll give ye that. But it's not that, is it? It's something else."

He didn't answer. Souness's face was close to his.

He dropped his eyes and stared at his hand where it lay on the desk, opening and closing it. He didn't want to be the first to say it. He wanted her to have the opening shot.

"Who is it?" she said eventually. "Eh? Who is it's got you looking like you want to blatter someone?"

"No one."

"You're lying. You've been gone all afternoon and now you come back with a face ready to take someone apart. And it's the same person gave you those new parameters."

He shook his head. "No."

"If something's happening I won't be coming to your aid. Ye do know that?"

"You won't have to."

"I'll forget your name if it means I can cover my own arse."

He nodded. "It won't come to that. I promise."

"Jack." Kryotos was at the door, a cool smile on her face. Souness straightened like a guilty child, immediately dropping this hard-faced, ping-pong match.

"Marilyn," Caffery pushed back his chair, 'what?"

"This." She was holding a single page printout. "Detained under Section 41 – a genuine loony tunes. Can I go home now?" She was right to be so smug. She had poured all the new search parameters into the database and out of the soup one name had bobbed up.

When Caffery saw it he shook his head. "Shit." He handed the paper to Souness. "I know that name."

No one answered the door. They'd hammered and called, and now, in the little uncarpeted landing, they had a silent audience of neighbours standing in the doorways, arms folded, the Brookside titles playing in living rooms behind them. Caffery lifted the letterbox and peered in.

"What do you think?" Souness murmured next to him. Neither she nor Caffery had mentioned Paulina all the way here. It was just as if they'd agreed to drop it until this was dealt with. "Well?"

"He's not here."

"You sure?"

"Yes." He straightened and pulled off his jacket. "He's off somewhere." He handed Souness the jacket and began loosening his tie. "With someone else, probably."

"Oh, Christ Almighty." She saw what he was going to do and turned hurriedly to the audience. "If ye'd all just like to go inside. That's it." She made shooing gestures at them, as if to sweep them all back into their flats. "Come on now, nothing to see here." Slowly, reluctantly, they closed their doors and she turned back. "Jack," she hissed, 'we don't even know if this is him."

"We will soon." He emptied his pockets, handing her his keys and some loose change.

"Oh, Jesus I hope you remember how to fill out a Prop Dam

"Remember?" He took a step back. "I could do it in my sleep." He rammed his foot into the door. "Police!" His voice echoed around the small dank landing. Letterboxes opened slyly behind them. A second kick. The door shuddered, seemed for a moment to bow at the centre, but the two locks held.

"That bottom one's a deadbolt, Jack."

"I know. POLICE!" He slammed out his foot, landing the kick perfectly along the line of the locks, jarring the tendons in his knee. The top Yale sprang out of its footing but the bottom one held. He hopped backwards, getting his balance. "Fucking thing."

"Och, look," Souness said impatiently, patting her pockets for her mobile. "You'll never hoof it down.

We need the ghost busters Jack. I'll give them a call."

"OK, OK just give me a He stepped back, pushing his hair off his forehead, and landed the third kick where he wanted it, about four inches to the right of the locks. The thin outer skin of the door crumpled. The next kick went straight through. "There." He hopped back, dragging away long splinters of wood, and began ripping at the opening, breathing hard, dropping pieces of honeycombed interior on to the floor. He pushed his hand into the hole and patted along the inside, his face hard against the door. "Good." He looked at Souness. There was a thumb-turn at the back of the deadbolt. "Got it." The lock rotated easily. He and Souness were in.

Neither spoke. They stood, peering cautiously into the darkened hallway.

Souness took a deep breath. She pocketed her mobile, handed Caffery his jacket and keys, and stepped across the threshold. From somewhere inside, somewhere in the darkness, came a stale smell. She hesitated, felt in her pocket for the sturdy torch she'd bought. "You sure he's not here?"

"I'm sure." But his voice was low. Cautiously he flicked on the light and they both stood, looking into the hallway. It was an unremarkable, council-block hallway, ending a few feet ahead in a doorway. No carpet on the floor, the boards were bare. The walls were wood chip and on either side of the hallway were two painted doors. "Hello?"

Silence.

"This is the police, Mr. Klare."

Silence.

From the landing behind them came the creak of another letterbox opening. "Nosy wee fuckers." Souness closed the battered door with her foot and turned back to Caffery, who was standing at the first door, his hands up, palms facing the door, an odd softness in his expression as if there was warmth coming from it.

"Jack?"

He didn't answer. The hair on his arms prickled, standing straight up against his shirt. In biro, in tiny, almost invisible letters, someone had written very plainly the word Hazard.

He turned to Souness and smiled.

Outside it was getting dark. From the window in the living room they could see the weather rolling in for miles around clouds as big as cathedrals stalked above the park, pink evening light prismed up from the horizon. Souness put some calls in to mobilize the locals, to get a bulletin out to the area cars, to mount surveillance on the flat and to get the SSCU over to Arkaig Tower to see if they could pick up some DNA to match to their target. "Right," she said. "Let's give the place a wee spin, then. Before the cavalry arrive." They brought the lifts to the top floor, jammed them and propped open the door to the staircase if Roland Klare decided to come home between now and the time new officers arrived, they wanted to hear his footsteps on the stairs. They zoned the flat roughly between them: Souness wrapped polythene freezer bags around her hands and took the living room and bathroom while Caffery did the kitchen and the bedroom. They used lights only in the rooms that didn't have windows; in the others they relied on what daylight remained. Klare's flat, they soon found, was a warehouse: every imaginable object was hoarded here, from a collection of vacuum-cleaners to a tawny owl in a glass dome. Some areas were filthy the smell of the bathroom made Souness put her hand over her mouth and the fridge was full of rotting food: they could well imagine Klare was responsible for the mess in the Peaches' attic. But in erratic ways the flat had been kept scrupulously clean. The kitchen had been scrubbed: in some places the work top had been so manic ally scoured that small scoops of the Formica had worn through and showed chalky white. Cloths sat in a large boiling-pan on the hob. The floors, none of which had carpets, were obsessively clean.

With the first stone Souness turned she found something of interest. "Hey, Jack," she called, 'have a deek at this."

He went into the living room and found her standing at a metal-framed desk, silhouetted against the sunset, staring into an opened drawer. "What's that?"

"Fuck knows." She picked it up and they both peered at it. It was a battered notebook, a rubber band around it. "What d'you make o' that, then?"

He took her elbow and lifted it higher, tilting it towards the window so he could see better. The words "The Treatment' had been carefully stencilled in a box on the front cover, and the curling pages were covered with detailed drills and formulae, all written in a tiny, hectic scrawl. Newspaper clippings had been pasted inside, articles on the Rory Peach case. Caffery's skin tingled. "Grab it, then."

"Right." Souness slipped the notebook into a freezer bag, put it inside her jacket and turned back to the living room. "Come on, snap-snap."

They worked for another ten minutes, neither sure exactly what they were looking for. In a magazine rack Souness found a card picturing a toddler in a nappy with the caption: 'i HATE TO BOTHER YOU WITH A personal problem…" She opened it and read the punchline: 'but i'm horny." In the bedroom, deflated and tucked into a drawer, Caffery found a blow-up doll of a male child, a tag in Japanese attached on the seam at the ankle. They were definitely in the right place, and it was all so weird, he thought, like an out-of-hours museum, all Klare's collection neatly ordered on fold-out tables metal, the sort you might see at a jumble sale. Caffery noticed that none of the collection touched the floor, everything rested on these tables it made him think about how Rory Peach had been stored, off the ground, the way a big cat would drag a carcass into a tree.

He was still wondering about this when, ten minutes later, he pushed open a cupboard door in the bedroom and found what he knew they were looking for. "Hey, Danni," he called, 'got a moment?"

"What?" She came in from the living room, puffing, holding her arms above her head and squeezing past the tables to get to him. "What you got?"

"I don't know." He reached inside and switched on the light.

"Red bulb," Souness muttered, peering suspiciously into the cupboard. "Freaky."

"It's a darkroom."

"Eh?"

"It's a darkroom look." He pointed to a small plastic table covered in equipment: bottles of chemicals, a pair of rubber gloves, trays, a lamphouse mounted on a stand that he guessed was for printing film. Set aside from the clutter, at the far end of the table, was a biscuit tin, sealed with brown tape. "Darkroom equipment." He reached in his pocket for his Army knife, slit the tape on the tin, popped the lid off and looked at what was inside. "Oh, shit."

"What?"

"Here we go." He handed the torch to Souness and started pulling out prints. "Photos."

"What?"

"Look."

Souness came into the cupboard and shone the torch onto the photos. Human faces stared up at her. "Oh, God," she said, tipping back a bit on her heels. The images were blurred but she thought she knew what she was looking at. She recognized the cross-hatched lino on the floor. "Rory Peach?"

"I think so."

"Jesus." She picked up the top photograph and stared at it. "Poor wee mite." She had Alek and Rory, and the truth of what had happened to them in number thirty Donegal Crescent, in her hand, and it made the blood go from her face. "Not enough that he's dead," she said quietly. "He had to go through that first."

"I know." Caffery was rummaging in the tin. Underneath the pictures of Rory Peach he found an old Polaroid of a child wrapped with torn sheets, a gag on his face, his hands placed across his chest like a pharaoh. He knew what this was. He recognized the wallpaper. And the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster. "He was right," he said, handing the photo to Souness. "He was fucking right it wasn't a hoax."

"Who was right?"

"DI Durham." There were more pictures of the same child underneath. "See? It's the Half Moon Lane family."

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, what the fuck ever happened to them then?"

"I don't know. I just don't know." Further down, under the Polaroids, he found a photograph of a boy face down in a scatter of dead leaves, his trousers and underwear pulled down to his knees. This, he felt sure, was Champaluang Keoduangdy twelve years ago one of Roland Klare's earliest victims. "Jesus," he muttered, 'it's all here." He lifted the tin and found underneath it four more Polaroids. These pictured a boy tied to a radiator, a white radiator against a tangerine-coloured wall. The boy, it was clearly a boy, lay on his side. He was white, he looked about Rory Peach's age and he wore sandals, a blue T-shirt and shorts just like the child in the Half Moon Lane photograph. The child's face was half hidden; there was a glimmer of brown tape on the side of his cheek where he'd been gagged and his shorts had been half unzipped to show his underwear. It wasn't Rory Peach and it wasn't the Half Moon Lane child. This time when she saw it Souness began stamping her feet. "Oh, my God," she muttered. "Oh, my God, I smell trouble. My God, I think you were right '

"The next family?" He looked up at her. "Do you think that's the next family?"

"Aye, aye I wouldn't be surprised. Come on let's get them back to Shrivemoor." She tucked the torch into her waistband and started gathering up the photos, stuffing them into the tin. "Come on."

She squeezed her way back past the tables to the bedroom window and glanced out. In the street below cars were arriving subtly as ants from a nest, clustering around the foot of the building. "Good, they're here."

"Right." He closed the door and came out from behind the tables. "I want to look in the cupboard in the hall."

"I thought you'd done it."

"Nope. Come on."

In the hallway he stood for a moment, his hands resting on the door. Logan had been up here on the first day of the investigation, Caffery remembered seeing Roland Klare's name in his statements, but this writing "Hazard' was so small Logan could easily have missed it. He tried now to picture the size of the room beyond. Another bedroom? No door handle just a brass knob, so maybe a cupboard? Just like Cartnel Peach, sealed away in a cupboard, a warning scrawled across it.

"Come on, Jack," Souness stood next to him, clutching the tin to her stomach. "We haven't got all '

"OK." He pushed the door. It opened smoothly and he found he was looking at another small cupboard. The bulb was out and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to the light, but when he did he put his hands on the edges of the doorframe to keep his balance.

"What is it?"

"Uh." He wiped his mouth. "I don't know. Give us the torch."

Souness passed the torch to him. He clicked it on and let the beam play around the small area. At the back of the cupboard was a waist-high glass tank. Like a fish tank. "There's something at the back of the cupboard."

"Then go and have a look."

"Yeah." Yeah, sure, no problem. The tank was about two-thirds full of liquid, semi-opaque, and near the surface something clogged floated. Sure, something's fucking floating in it but that's no problem

"Come on, Jack, let's get on wi' it."

"It stinks sure you don't want to do it?"

"Ye wee coward."

"You do it, then."

"No fucking way that's a man's job."

"Right." He took a deep breath and stepped inside. "First off, there's something on the floor here." He let the torch play across the wall to the right. "Clothes," he said. "A pile of clothes on the floor." He could come back to those later. "And, uh, then, this tank…" He stepped nearer, let the light play over it, and immediately saw that the object floating in the yellowish fluid was a tangle of clothes. Clothes floating in he bent nearer clothes floating in "Jesus." He took an involuntary step back.

"What?" Souness said. "What is it?"

"Piss. It's only about a hundred gallons of piss."

"Jesus-'

"Crazy fucking bastard." Caffery shone the torch into the tank. Men's clothes, a nylon zip-up top, a hooded tracksuit, three pairs of trainers. Roland Klare had been storing clothes in two feet of urine. "Crazy, crazy fucking bastard '

Benedicte was fevered, lightheaded. Her skin was scratchy, there were sores inside her mouth from her manic suctioning of the copper pipe, and her finger-pads were raw from digging into the floor. It had been a day's work to push Smurf's corpse as far away as she could. She had covered her with Hal's shirt, but the bluebottles had managed to find their way under it and were feeding on the lush est choicest food they had ever known. They proliferated, doubling their numbers it seemed, in her fever, every time she opened her eyes.

Sometimes she knew she was awake, and sometimes she wasn't sure. Her eyes raced around inside their sockets, lights floated in and out, and sometimes she could see her life before this flickering along so happily, so happy and smooth, only soft edges and milky comfort and, look, there she was with Josh and Hal and Smurf, the whole family, sitting on the lawn. It was summer time they were wearing shorts, Josh's Pocari Sweat canister was on the steps, a radio played, fresh cut grass stuck to the back of Josh's legs when he got up to jump into the paddling-pool. Then she could hear Josh downstairs crying. Josh? Was that really Josh? And the other noise? What was that? An animal grunting. Or was it a man? Sobbing?

Ben come on now, come on wake up.

Josh? Sweating, her heart thudding, she opened her eyes in the dark room. Moonlight on the ceiling. Over in the corner the grey shape of her poor dead puppy. She was awake. Really awake. Had that been Josh, crying? She rolled on to her side so that her ear was pressed against the floorboards and listened to the house under her. Silent.

She'd imagined it.

She crunched up her eyes and tried to go back to the picture of Josh and Hal sitting on the grass. But her brain seemed swollen, as if it was pressing against her eyes, and she just couldn't do it. She couldn't see their faces. In just five days her son and her husband had been reduced to a few blurry images Josh a tiny, defenceless shadow with grasping hands, and Hal a dark landscape in bed next to her at night.

"Oh, Josh," she whispered. "Hal, Josh, I love you."

The house was silent as she closed her eyes again. Over the roof she could hear a plane. She had a sudden image of the light in the cabin, the lovely rosy light of sunset racing around the cabin Hal and her on the way to Cuba in the days when no one went to Cuba, a travel agent would laugh if you asked to go to Cuba, and you had to fly through any number of Caribbean islands just to get there. And he had wanted to go because he wanted to see the furniture factories in Holgufn. She held her hands across her face and imagined a sea she had always wanted to visit a magical sea, the sea of Cortez maybe a mysterious sea where whales come to mate and strange singing could be heard coming across the water at dusk…

As she dreamed she twitched, lying on the floor, chained to the radiator, the flies landing on her eyes.

Coming down the front steps of Arkaig Tower Souness started to walk more slowly. In the lift she had been flipping through "The Treatment', the odd little vade me cum from the desk drawer, shaking her head in amazement, and now she was so absorbed in it she almost came to a halt. Caffery stopped and turned to look at her: "Danni?"

"Fucking beautiful." She shook her head and gave a low whistle. "Fucking beautiful."

"What is?"

She looked up. "It's all here everything."

He came to stand behind her, leaning over her shoulder to read: "Exposure to female hormones" what the fuck is that?" He tried to pull it away from her but she shrugged him off.

"Get off." She held it nearer, reading carefully. "Milky smells offensive. Prolactins are heavy " '

"What're prolactins?"

"I don't fucking know, do I?" She closed the book, put it in her pocket. "We'll get it back to Shrivemoor and have a proper look. It might tell us where those poor wee fuckers are." She looked around the deserted streets. "Now. Where did we put the car?"

They arranged an emergency meeting to hammer out plans for hunting down Roland Klare, and while they waited for everyone to arrive they made coffee, sat in the SIO's room and Caffery called Rebecca to make his excuses "No, honestly, Jack, it's OK. I'm watching Eurotrash repeats anyway." He wanted to kiss her for it. Souness called Paulina with the same story and as she talked Caffery sat, staring at his reflection in the window, listening to the conversation, waiting to hear his name mentioned. But it wasn't, and when Souness put down the phone she immediately turned her attention to the book. He was relieved the silent pact held; Roland Klare was all they were going to talk about tonight.

They sat, shoulder to shoulder, like children at school, and read "The Treatment' from cover to cover, hardly exchanging a word. They knew they were looking at the minute cataloguing of Klare's mind, his reasoning scraped out on paper. For the amount "The Treatment' told them about his motives and compulsions, Souness could have opened the drawer and discovered, nestled among bits of paper and elastic bands, Klare's naked, beating heart. It told them about his rituals and fears, about his love for shadowy air pockets high above the ground, about the manner in which he'd subdued Carmel Peach. It told them about his impotence, it told them why he'd wanted to watch Alek Peach rape his own son, it told them about his compulsion to use his urine to 'purify and neutralize'. It even told them why he'd worn gloves, and it wasn't because he was clued up about forensics as they'd assumed. Then, on one of the final pages, Caffery saw something that woke him up like an adrenaline jag:

Identification of new sourse/family achieved……… check and nuetralize all places habituated by female (done!)

He grabbed the book.

New family: Child observed good, Father good, Problems: 1. Wife. 2. Dog is female.

"It's nae the Peaches he's talking about, is it? They didn't have a dog."

"No. It's the next ones." Caffery sat quite still, feeling his memory dilate towards something. A dog -where did that fit in? And these photos of a boy against a radiator the walls, a pale tangerine colour, the radiator, modern, straight-lined, white and there was a shape in this memory too. A hill out of a window? Trees? He didn't know how many doors he'd knocked on in the first days, and either the two specially assigned DCs or Logan had revisited them all since they had all checked out but his memory kept on pushing. Then, just when he thought it might nudge up a name, the lift bell pinged in the corridor and he lost his train of thought and was back to looking at a simple photograph of a nameless child in a nameless room and a notebook filled with scribble. "Fuck."

Fiona Quinn and two exhibits officers appeared in the doorway, looking around the deserted incident room as if they'd expected a welcoming committee. "Are we the first ones?"

"Yes." They both stood. "Come in."

Caffery and Souness made everyone coffee, then they sat Fiona down. "Was Carmel Peach tested?" they wanted to know. "Did you test her?"

She frowned. They made her nervous, these two senior detectives with adrenaline on their breath. "Tested for what?"

"Drugs? A sedative? GHB?"

"No one told me to. By the time I got the statements I '

"Have you still got a blood sample?"

"Yes there's still a sample. I'll get it tested."

"And did we get any urine from the Peaches' house? Had he pissed on stuff in the house?"

"There was piss everywhere don't you remember?"

"Did you get any?"

"We were at the mercy of your statements. No one told us he'd pissed on things."

"But you said it was everywhere."

"We thought it was them the Peaches." Caffery and Souness both sat back with their fingers to their foreheads.

"Well, I didn't know, did I?" "No. It's OK it's not your fault."

The emergency strategy meeting took until 2 a.m.the DAC attended and the borough commander cut short a golf club dinner to come to Shrivemoor. All the way through the meeting Caffery couldn't stop staring at the Polaroids, at the child crunched up against the white radiator. Tangerine walls. Where did he know those walls from? And when he switched his attention to the blurred face of the man in the Half Moon Lane photos again he felt that tickle in his memory. There was something about the shape of his head, the position he'd been bound in, his arms folded across his chest. If he was less tired, if he'd been sleeping better recently, he might be able to remember. But he couldn't. After the meeting he drove back to Brixton, to Arkaig Tower, and tapped on the window of the blue Mondeo parked just in view of the entrance. The surveillance team leader let him in and they all sat in silence, Caffery in the back, smoking, swallowing mints and pain-killers and staring out at the empty streets, listening to his memory ticking away. The dog the dog goes somewhere too where the fuck does the dog go? It was 5 a.m. when he finally fell asleep, his glasses on, his head tipped back on the seat, a roll-up between his fingers.