The Treatment

Three.

Protocol at the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit in King's Hospital kept all head-injury victims on a Codman inter cranial pressure bolt and a ventilator for the first twenty-four hours, whether the patient could breathe unaided or not. Even without the heavy dose of medazolam sculling through his veins, AMIT's key witness, Alek Peach, wouldn't have been able to speak with the endotrachial tube down his throat. His wife, Carmel, was still sedated but Caffery would have gone to the hospital and paced the corridors like an expectant father all night, had DCI Souness not pulled rank.

"They'll never let you near while he's on that thing, Jack." She respected this in Caffery, this hungry, stray-dog determination, but she knew her hospital consultants well. She knew not to push it. "If he needs blood they've promised us a pre-transfusion sample. We've got the consultant's statement, and that's the most we can ask."

It was 1 a.m.: now that the team knew their parameters for the search, overtime had been assigned and the Brockwell Park area was secured, Souness and some of the other officers went home to catch a precious hour or two's sleep before sun-up. Caffery had now been awake for twenty-five hours but he couldn't relax. He went into the SIO's room found a bottle of Bell's under the desk, slugged some into a mug and sat at the desk, jiggling his knees and tapping his fingers on the phone. When he couldn't stand it any longer he picked up the receiver and got through to the I.C.U.

But the consultant, Mr. Friendship, was losing patience. "What part of "no" don't you understand?" And he hung up.

Caffery stared at the dead receiver. He could redial spend twenty minutes bullying the hospital staff -but he knew he was up against a brick wall. He sighed, put down the receiver, refilled the mug, put his feet up on the desk and sat with his tie undone, staring blankly out of the window at the Croydon skyscrapers lit up against the sky.

This case might be the one he'd waited his life out for he already knew that because of what had happened to his own brother, more than quarter of a century ago.

Quarter of a century? Is it really that long, Ewan? How long before they can't get any DNA at all? How long before a body disappears into the surrounding soil? Becomes silt…

he knew that he was going to have problems with it. He had felt them already, in the quiet interludes of the day, multiplying like bacilli.

Ewan had been just nine. The same age as Rory. There'd been an argument two brothers in a tree-house arguing about something unimportant. The older boy, Ewan, had shuffled down out of the tree, walked off in a sulk down the railway cutting. He was dressed in brown Clark 's sandals, brown shorts and a mustard yellow T-shirt (Caffery knew these details were true he remembered them doubly: once directly and once from reading them later on the police appeal posters). No one ever saw him again.

Jack had watched the police search the railway cutting, determined one day that he would join them. One day, one day, I'll find you, Ewan… And to this day he lived in the same little South London terraced house, staring out across the back garden and the railway tracks to the house still owned by the ageing paedophile whom everyone, including the police, suspected of being responsible for Ewan's disappearance. Ivan Penderecki. Penderecki's house had been searched but no trace of Ewan was found, so there they lived, Penderecki and Jack Caffery, like a bitter married couple, locked in a wordless duel. Every woman Caffery had ever slept with had tried to prise him away, tried to loosen the complex fascination between him and the big Polish paedophile, but Caffery had never wasted a moment considering the choice there was no competition. Even with Rebecca? Rebecca, too, wanted him to forget all about Ewan. Is there no competition with her?

He swallowed the Scotch, refilled the mug and took the Time Out from his tray. He could call her he knew where she'd be. She rarely slept at her Greenwich flat "Don't like to be with the ghosts." Instead she often came late to his house and simply went to bed, her arms wrapped round a pillow, a Danneman cigarillo smouldering in the ashtray next to the bed. He checked his watch. It was late, even for Rebecca. And if he called he'd have to tell her about the Peach case, about the similarities, and he knew what her reaction would be. Instead he tipped the chair forward and opened Time Out.

On the now infamous sexual assault last summer, Morant says: lYes, the experience informed my work, I suddenly realized that it's easy to look at fictionalized rape in a film or in a book and think you've understood. But in fact these are mere representations and act as safety nets against the brutality. I decided it was patronizing to give mocked-up representations." Adopting this mantra, in February she stoked controversy and media frenzy when it was revealed (strategically leaked?) that the moulds of battered and mutilated genitalia in her "Random" exhibition (inset) were casts taken from genuine victims of rape and sexual abuse.

In private Rebecca would never talk about what had been done to her a year ago. Caffery had been there, had seen her close-up, unconscious and displayed, suspended from a ceiling: a killer's bloody, valedictory exhibit. He had sat patiently through her statement for the inquest of her dead flat mate Joni Marsh, in a little hospital room in Lewisham. It had been a rainy day and the maple tree outside the window dripped steadily through the interview.

"Look, if you find this difficult…"

"No no, it's not difficult."

At that point he was already half in love with Rebecca. Seeing her bent head, those slender hands fidgeting in her lap as she tried to put it into words, tried to explain the indignity performed on her, he took pity and prompted her through the statement, broke every rule in the book to lessen the ordeal. Fed her what he knew so that all she had to do was nod. She remained shaken at the inquest she dried during her testimony and couldn't start again, and eventually the coroner had to allow her to step down from the witness stand. Even now, if Caffery tried to coax her into talking about it, she would pull up the drawbridge. Or, more infuriatingly, laugh and swear it hadn't affected her. In public, however, she used it almost as an accessory, like part of her wardrobe:

Cue outraged women's groups, salivating glee from the tabloids and schizophrenic cat and mouse, press-dodging games from Morant. On future ambitions? "Being banned by Giuliani -that would be quite fun." And most oft-repeated hack question? "When are you going to chuck in the art and do what you really want to do -model?" Random 2 opens at the Zinc Gallery, Clerkenwell, 26 August-20 September.

As long as the world thinks she's resilient, that's all she cares about. He closed the magazine, rested his face for a moment in his hands and tried not to think about her. Out of the window London 's midnight lights sparkled like luminous-spined sea creatures. He wondered if Rory Peach was looking at the same lights.

"Coffee?"

He jerked a little where he lay. Opened his eyes. "Marilyn?"

Marilyn Kryotos, the manager the 'receiver' of the cumbersome HOLMES murder database, stood in the doorway staring at him. She wore pink lipstick and a navy-blue dress, one lapel pinned with a mother-of-pearl brooch in the shape of a bunny. "Did you sleep here?" She sounded half impressed, half disgusted. "In the office?"

"OK, OK." He straightened from the desk, pressing knuckles into his eyes. It was a little before dawn and the night was pink around the bottom of the Croydon skyscrapers. A fly floated feet up in the mug of Scotch. He checked his watch. "You're early."

"First light. Half the team are here already. Danni's on her way to Brixton."

"Fuck." He groped for his tie.

"Do you want a comb?"

"No, no."

"You need one."

"I know."

He went to the twenty-four-hour filling station opposite the office, bought a sandwich, a comb, a toothbrush, and hurried back, past the area maps lining the corridor, stopping to pick up the spare shirt he kept in the exhibits room. In the men's he- stripped off his shirt, splashed water across his chest, under his arms, and bent to put his face under the tap, wet his hair, then went to the air dryer, lifting his arms, pushing his head under it to dry his hair. He knew he was in the silent eye of the storm. He knew that as the country woke, as televisions came on and the news spread, the incident-room phone would begin to ring. Meanwhile there was red tape to wade through, community-impact assessment meetings to be arranged with the borough commander, and case reviews to think about. The stopwatch had started and he had to be ready.

"Did you get that thing about Rebecca?" Kryotos stood in the incident room, holding a coffee mug and a cake tin.

"The Time Out, you mean?" He took the coffee and together they went back into the SIO's room.

"She looked lovely in it, didn't she?"

"She did." He put the coffee on the desk and picked up the new murder manual the blue and white loose-leaf file that had appeared on the window-sills of every police station since the Lawrence inquiry and leafed through it, running a mental check list of all the tasks he should complete today.

"I called the hospital," Kryotos said. "Alek Peach made it through the night."

"Seriously?" He looked up. "Can he talk?"

"No. He's still got that tube thingy down his throat, but he's stable."

"And Carmel?"

"Came out of her sedation and she's busy getting herself discharged."

"Jesus, I wasn't expecting that."

"Relax. There's a wooden top with her. She's going to a friend's."

"OK. Speak to the uniform and tell him to call when she's settled."

"Her. It's a WPC

"Her. Tell her to call when Carmel 's settled and say I'll be on my way, and then, Marilyn, can you get a Quest Search off to Hendon for me?"

"Yup." She put down the tin, found a pen in his desk-tidy, sat down in Souness's chair and jotted down the key search words he gave her. "Abduction', 'intruder', 'handcuff, and 'child', with an age range of five to ten. He didn't have to be careful what he said to Kryotos she was probably the most level headed member of the team no matter what the crime, she handled the details that passed through her hands with a calmness he sometimes envied.

"Is that it?"

"No." He thought for a moment, closing the murder manual and putting it back on the window-sill. "Let's see, sex offenders. Include that, OK? And do the usual check of the nonce register."

"Right." She recapped the pen, pushed herself to her feet and picked up the tin. She paused, smiling at his hair, which was still slightly rumpled. If anyone suggested she had an unprofessional fondness for DI Jack Caffery, who was two years her junior anyway, she would develop a high colour and abracadabra a healthy marriage out of her hat with two robust children, Dean and Jenna proof that she and Jack Caffery were colleagues and friends, and that was all. The only person utterly convinced by her argument was Caffery himself. "Banana bread." She tapped the lid of the tin. "Me and Dean made it. I know it sounds a bit bonkers but you can stick it in the toaster, put some butter on it and, oh, God, even though I say it myself, it is to die for."

"Marilyn, thanks, but '

"But you'll get your own breakfast? Something not so sweeeet?"

He smiled. "I'm sorry."

"You do know, of course, that other people are falling all over themselves for my banana cake?"

"Marilyn, I don't doubt that for a moment."

"You wait, Jack." She lifted the tin on one palm like a waiter and turned for the door, her nose in the air. "One of these days I'll break you."