The Treatment

Four.

(18 July)

Mrs. Nersessian's house, with its modern leaded windows and carefully painted wagon-wheel on the front wall, gleamed like a polished stone. It took her several minutes to unlatch all the chains on the front door. Caffery realized that he must have had a vague image of the person who would be Carmel Peach's friend, and it wasn't Bela Nersessian: she was a short, red-haired woman sepia skin, long earrings, ruched black blouse embellished with gold necklaces. As soon as she saw Caffery's warrant card she gripped his wrist with varnished fingernails and pulled him into the house.

"She's in the bedroom, the poor love, having some quiet time. Come on." She beckoned him. "Come with me."

They went upstairs, past framed family photographs, pictures of the Virgin Mary in mother-of-pearl frames, a glass chandelier pinging with cleanliness. Bela Nersessian went slowly, clutching the banister and turning slightly sideways in her tight knee-length skirt. Every few steps a new thought came to her and she would pause and turn to him. "Now, if I was the police I'd be searching those lakes in the park." Or: "I've had an idea. Before you leave we'll say a little prayer for Rory, Mr. Caffery. Shall we do that?"

On the top landing Mrs. Nersessian switched on a small crystal-based lamp, plumped up a yellow silk cushion on a small chair, then stood at the bedroom door, smoothing her blouse and taking a deep breath.

She knocked on the door. "Someone to see you, Carmel lovey." She pushed open the door and stuck her nose inside. "There you are, love. I've got someone to see you, OK?" She stepped back out of the room and stood on tiptoe to whisper in Caffery's ear: "Tell her I'm praying, darling, tell her we're all praying for Rory."

The bedroom smelt of perfume and smoke. It was full of pink satin on the bed, the radiator, the dressing-table, like the inside of a jewellery box. It was at the back of the house: had the curtains been open the park would have been visible, but maybe the neat little WPC sitting on a pink chair near the window, her hands crossed on her lap, had worried about Carmel seeing the park, because they were firmly closed.

When the WPC saw Caffery she half stood, "Sir," and sat down, nodding at the bed. On the bed, facing away from the door, wearing a large T-shirt with a 1998 World Cup motif on the back and a pair of white leggings, lay Carmel Peach, a raw-skinned woman with thin limbs and chapped red arms. In front of her rested a packet of Superkings, a lighter and a crystal ashtray. He couldn't see her face but he could see that both her wrists were bandaged: Carmel Peach, everyone knew, had tried hard to pull her own hands off in order to escape from the handcuffs and reach her son.

He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment. You've been here before, Jack, haven't you? He remembered standing uselessly in the doorway while his mother lay on the bed and cried her heart out for Ewan. And if she thinks about you at all it's only to wish that you'd piss off.

"You're the CID, aren't you?" She didn't turn to look at him.

"Yes. I'm with AMIT. Do you feel a bit better now?"

She stared resolutely at the curtains. "Have you -you know?"

"Mrs. Peach '

She lifted her hands briefly as if to stop him speaking, then subsided. "Just tell it me straight."

"I'm sorry." He looked around the room, shaking his head for the benefit of the WPC, glad Carmel couldn't see his face. "I'm sorry. There's no news yet."

She didn't respond at first. Her bare feet stiffened briefly, but that was all. Then, just as he was about to continue, she suddenly, violently, jackknifed her body on the bed and hammered fists into her stomach, groaning and writhing, rucking the cover into pleats. The WPC stepped forward. "It's all right, Carmel love, it's all right." She gently caught Carmel 's hands and stroked the backs of them with her thumbs. "There we go. There we go." Slowly she subsided. "There we go. We know you're upset, but you don't want to hurt yourself, too, do you, love?"

The WPC looked up at Caffery, who stood in the doorway, appalled, rooted to the spot. He should have stepped forward, should have grabbed Carmel's hands like that, but all he could do was remember stop thinking about it remember his mother biting her arms as the police searched Penderecki's house across the tracks, actually chewing her own arms to relieve what was inside. He realized he was as helpless now as he had been then to deal with female grief.

The WPC sat down and Carmel subsided. She seemed to be concentrating on her breathing. Then she took four deep breaths, wiped her forehead and shook her head. "And Alek? What about AlekV

"I he's he's still at King's. They're doing everything they can for him."

"But they can't save him."

"Look, Carmel, I would be failing in my duty if I didn't advise you to expect the worst."

"Oh, just shut up for fuck's sake, shut up, can't you?" She put her face in her hands. "Get the doctor back," she demanded. "Get him to give me something more. Look at me, for fuck's sake, I need something stronger than what he's given me."

"Mrs. Peach, I know it's difficult for you. But it's important that you tell us everything you can remember. As soon as I've taken an initial statement from you I'll get your GP back '

"No now! Get me something to make it stop."

" Carmel, the doctor's given you something and we're doing everything we can." He took a step inside the room, looking for somewhere to sit, finding a pink cane chair with a teddy on it. He put the bear on the floor, propped up against the skirting-board, and sat down, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward to look at Carmel. "I've got fifteen of my own men out there, another twenty uniformed officers and I don't know how many volunteers. We're taking it very seriously, putting everything we've got into it. When we've gone through what you can remember I'm going to have an officer come over and talk to you he's specially assigned to you, OK? He'll be available to you whenever you want."

"But I don't…" her body twisted with anguish '… I don't remember what happened." She dropped her face into her hands and began to sob softly. "Oh, God, my little boy's gone and I don't even remember what happened?

It was a long time since the Amateur Swimmers' Association had changed its code of conduct: in response to changing awareness of child abuse it now recommended that teachers minimized physical contact with children and taught lessons from the pool edge. Not all swimming-pools enforced the recommendations, and often the choice of whether to get in the water or not varied according to the teacher, but there was one teacher at the Brixton Recreation Centre who adhered rigidly to the recommendation. Relatively new to the pool, it hadn't escaped anyone's attention that Chris "Fish' Gummer always kept a distance from the children he taught. In fact, he sometimes appeared positively to dislike them.

"Almost as if he's nervous of them," the lifeguards would say to each other, watching him in his baggy red drawstring swimming-trunks, wearing his red bathing cap although he wouldn't get into the water (he insisted upon the cap, with its under-chin strap fastening, maybe because his hair was so thin that he looked bald from a distance). "You wonder why he puts himself through it."

They traded ideas for what Gummer reminded them of a penguin, a fish, a flying bomb. Most of the names fitted, but Fish was probably the best: his smooth body with its rather small, triangular head, the ovoid weightiness in his middle, his legs big above the knee, tapering at the ankle, and then, comically tacked on to those slender ankles, overlarge feet, which he held turned out at forty-five degrees. The fine hair on his chest and legs slicked down to nothing when wet. "You must've got webbed feet," people told him. But he didn't: he examined them and found that his toes, instead of being flat and spatulate, were rather long and slender. But, fish or not, he made an unlikely swimming teacher. For one thing he was older than the other teachers.

"Probably a per ve

"Nah, he'd never've got the job."

They had had it drilled into them this post is exempt from section 4 (2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. As far as the recreation centre personnel officers were concerned no criminal offence expired. Ever. It didn't matter how many years ago it had happened.

"Unless he ain't got a record," one of the lifeguards muttered. "Because he never got caught."

"Or cos he changed his name."

"He couldn't change his name if he had a record, could he?"

"Couldn't he?" One of the older lifeguards cracked his knuckles and stared out at Gummer, who stood on the poolside waiting for two of the girls to pull on their Rollo swim-belts. "Why not?"

At that the lifeguards all fell silent and turned to look at Gummer. He seemed particularly harried today. It was the turn of the 'squids', the six and seven-year-olds, and the two girls seemed to be having problems getting into their belts.

But Gummer wasn't about to crouch down and help. "You're all a bit slow today, aren't you? What's going on?"

Behind him one or two of the children whispered something. He turned. "What? What's got into you all?" No one spoke. There were more parents than usual today in the viewing gallery, he'd noticed, and some members of the class were absent. "Something's going on," he said, turning back to the two girls. "Isn't anyone going to tell me?"

"Rory," the taller of the two said suddenly. She was a solemn girl from Trinidad, whose hair was beaded in rows, and she wore a pink Spice Girls swimsuit. Her toenails were painted the same colour. "It's cos of Rory."

"Rory?" He raised his eyebrows. "What are you talking about?"

"Rory off Donegal Crescent."

"What about him? What happened to Rory?"

Neither girl spoke. The little one, a smaller, darker-skinned girl in a green two-piece, put her finger in her mouth. "We saw the police."

"And did the police tell you what happened?"

The two girls looked at each other, then back at him.

"No? No one told you what happened?"

"No." The bigger girl shook her head. "But we know what happened anyway."

"You know what happened? Well, that's very clever of you, isn't it?" He put his hands on his knees and bent a little, his eyes narrowed. He was conscious of being monitored from the viewing gallery the parents were all sitting together with their wary, watchful expressions, little glittering eyes on him as if they suspected him of something. "Well? Come on, then, what happened?"

"It was the troll."

"Ah, yes." He had wondered when this would come up. He straightened, picked up a pile of frog floats, threw them into the pool and stopped for a minute to watch them bob off. He rubbed his hands on his T-shirt and turned back to the girls. "The troll."

The smaller girl looked down at her feet.

"Have you ever seen the troll?"

"No," said the taller girl.

"So how do you know all this? Have any of your friends seen the troll?"

She shrugged. She turned her toes inwards and tugged at the legs of her swimsuit, jiggling a little as if she wanted the toilet.

"Did you hear me? I said, have any of your friends ever seen the troll?"

She nodded, not meeting his eyes.

"Which friends have seen him?"

"Some of them," she said, looking away casually at the water, and he knew she was lying. "He lives in the trees in the park."

"Yes?"

"And he climbed up the drainpipe of that house. The drainpipe of Rory's house."

"I see."

"Climbed up the drainpipe and murdered them. Ate them in their beds."

At this the little girl in the green two-piece began to cry. Tears slipped over the lower lids and on to her knuckles.

"OK, OK." Fish straightened up, nervous now that there were tears. "I think we're jumping to conclusions a bit here. No one knows what happened." Anxious that the parents didn't see what was happening, he positioned himself so that the child was hidden from the gallery. "No one knows if it was the troll yet, do they? Do we? Eh? Do we?"

Eventually he got her to nod her agreement, but she didn't stop crying, her finger still stuck in her mouth. "Right." He turned and clapped his hands at the others. "Come on, nothing to get excited about. Let's have you in the pool. Take a float if you need one."

Later, walking home with his swimming kit in his battered red holdall, he passed four of the gates into the park and found that they were all closed, police notices propped in front of them. He continued on his way, unusually agitated, and when he got home he swallowed his pills immediately, washing them down with black coffee. Then he went to the window, his hands shaking.

A number of windows in Brixton had a view directly over the park. Some belonged to the twin towers at the north, some to the half-built houses on the Clock Tower Grove Estate, and some, like Gummer's, belonged to the council flats above the row of shops on Effra Road. He opened the window and put his head out tentatively. From here Donegal Crescent was almost a mile away and he couldn't see the police tape or the small gathering of journalists and onlookers at the Tulse Hill end of the park, but he did notice the quietness. On a summer's day like this the park was usually spotted with bright dresses and children, but today the great expanse of wood was silent, only the dull click-click of insects and the sound of a car radio coming from Effra Road. Beyond the treetops he got a glimpse, in the distance, of empty lawns stretching up to the top of the hill. He closed the window and drew the curtain.

It took Carmel a long time to stop crying. Caffery and the WPC had exchanged one embarrassed glance, then gone back to staring at separate patches of wallpaper until the Ativan began to work: something softer crept through Carmel 's veins and she stopped crying. She reached over and patted the bed, feeling around for the Superkings. Slowly, falteringly, she lit a cigarette, pulled the ashtray towards her, and began to speak. "Even though I told them all this already? In the ambulance?"

"I'd like to hear it again, in case there's something we missed."

But it amounted to little more than a rehashing of the statement she'd given the divisional CID officer. There were few new clues to hang on to. She recalled feeling unwell after eating dinner and that she had sent Rory downstairs to play on the Play Station with

Alek before going to the bedroom to lie down. She had been concerned because they were planning to drive to Margate the following day and she didn't want to be ill. That was all she remembered until she woke up in the airing cupboard. There had been no noises, no one suspicious in the neighbourhood and, apart from the illness, nothing unusual about the few hours that led up to the attack. "We was supposed to be going on holiday the next day. That's why no one come for us. They must've thought we was away."

"You told the CID officer you heard something that sounded like an animal?"

"Yes. Breathing. Sniffing. Outside of the cupboard."

"When was this?"

"The first day, I think."

"How often did this happen?"

"Just that once."

"Well, um, do you think there was an animal in the house? Do you think the intruder brought a dog with him?"

She shook her head. "I never heard nothing else, no barking or nothing, and it weren't no dog. Not unless it was standing up on its, you know…" She tapped the backs of her calves. "Standing up on its back legs."

"What do you think it was?"

"I don't know. I ain't never heard nothing like it."

"Did you hear Rory or Alek at all in that time?"

"Rory." She squeezed her eyes closed and nodded. "Crying. He was in the kitchen."

"When was this?"

"Just before you lot come." The words dragged a little jerk out of her as if the effort hurt her. She tamped out her cigarette, lit another from the carton and started to cough. It took her a long time to regain her composure. She wiped her eyes, then her mouth, pushed her hair out of her eyes and said:

"There was something I never told them last night."

Caffery looked up from his notes. "I'm sorry?" The WPC was looking at him in surprise, her eyebrows raised. "What did you say?"

"Something else."

"What was that?"

"I think he took photographs."

"Photographs?"

"I saw the flashbulb under the cupboard door. I could even hear it winding on. I'm sure that's what it was photographs."

"What do you think he was photographing?"

"I don't know. I don't want to know." She started to shake again, rubbing her arms convulsively. "It was so fucking horrible. I was soft so bleeding soft that I just sat there like a fucking frightened mouse for them three days. I never knew he was going to take Rory. If I'd of known what he was going to do…"

"You weren't a coward, Carmel. Just look what you did to your arms trying to get out. You tried as hard as anyone could have been expected Caffery stopped, suddenly self-conscious. Don't you'll only make things worse. Quickly he found his attache case on the floor. "Look, I know how difficult this is but we need you to sign something. It's not a statement, just a couple of release forms. We found a picture of Rory, a school picture, and we'd like your permission to reproduce it to show people. And I've taken some of Rory's clothes and his schoolbooks."

"His clothes? Schoolbooks?"

"For the dogs. And '

"And?"

And to scrape. For his own DNA so we have a hope of identifying him. Since, although I'm not going to say it, I think, Mrs. Peach, that your son's probably already dead.

It was one of the hottest Julys London had seen and Caffery knew what could happen to a body in forty-eight hours of this heat. He knew that if Rory wasn't found before tomorrow morning there was no way he would allow a relative to identify him.

"And?" she repeated.

"And nothing. Just for the dogs. You can sign it now, if that's OK."

She nodded and he handed her the forms and a pen.

"Mrs. Peach?"

"What?" She signed the papers and held them limply over her shoulder without turning.

"I'm having trouble getting Rory's age. Some of the neighbours say nine." He took the papers and put them in his case. "Is that right?"

"No. That's not right."

"No?"

"No." She rolled over to look at him. For the first time he saw her face full on. Her eyes, he realized, looked dead, the way his mother's had after Ewan. "He's not nine until August. He's eight. Only eight."

Downstairs Caffery paused to thank Mrs. Nersessian. "It's my pleasure, darling. Poor thing, don't even ask me to imagine what she's feeling."

The tiny living room was immaculately clean and choked with possessions a silver punch bowl on the polished table, a collection of Steuben glass animals on the glass shelves. On the plastic-covered sofa a dark-eyed girl of about ten, in shorts and red-striped T-shirt stared mutely at Caffery. Mrs. Nersessian clicked her fingers. "Annahid, go on. Get your little dvor upstairs. You can watch your videos but keep the sound down. Rory's mama's asleep." The child slowly peeled her thighs from the plastic and disappeared from the room.

Mrs. Nersessian turned to Caffery and put her hand on his arm. "Nersessian. That's an Armenian name. Now, you don't meet an Armenian every day and you need to know before you come into an Armenian household that you got to be prepared to eat." She slipped into the kitchen and began fussing around, opening the fridge, getting her good crockery from the shelves. "I'm going to get you a little pistachio loukoum," she called through the door. "And some mint tea, and then we'll say a little prayer for Rory."

"No I – I just came to thank you, Mrs. Nersian '

"Nersessian."

"Nersessian. I'll pass on the tea if that's OK, Mrs. Nersessian. We're trying to beat the clock on this."

She reappeared in the doorway holding a tea-towel. "Come on, darling, you need to eat. Look at you no fat on you. We all need to eat at a time like this keep our spirits up."

"I promise I'll come back and have some tea with you when we've found Rory."

"Rory." She pressed a hand over her heart. "Just the mention of his name! Poor soul. But God is protecting him. I feel it in my heart. God is watching him and -Annahid!" she said suddenly, her eyes fixing on the doorway behind him. "Annahid! I said '

Caffery turned. "The troll did it." The little girl was standing in the doorway, addressing him directly, as vehement as a resistance messenger, her brown eyes huge and serious. "The troll climbed out of the trees and did it."

Mrs. Nersessian made tut-tut ting noises and shooed Annahid away, flicking the tea-towel at her. "Go on, go on." She turned to Caffery, her painted eyes half closed, pressing her hair lightly into place. "I'm sorry, Mr. Caffery, I am truly sorry about that. The things the kiddiwinks dream about, these days."

There are vortexes and whirlpools in Brixton like nowhere else in London. Hot, funky Caribbean blood finds a home under the austere ceilings of cool nineteenth-century houses, and since the nineties the new breed had been moving to town: the art crowd. Primarily white. Primarily trendy. They moved here for the local 'colour' and then slowly, insidiously, pushed it off the streets. Gentrification writ big. On the station platform a statue of a Windrush boy, like a latter day Dick Whittington bandanna around his neck, tiny bag at his feet stood with arms folded, one foot bent back against the wall, ignored by the trendy new Brixtonites pushing and shoving to get on the train with their Gucci briefcases.

On this school summer holiday the streets were steaming. Lambeth Council cleaners had been through, hosing last night's jittery ravers back down into the underground station and the sun was burning the water off the pavement. Over the park another helicopter circled, sun glinting from it. A TV news team, drawn by the noises coming from South London, had cruised over to see if there was something to which it could turn its jaw. The team could look down and see the odd, piston-like movement of the search and investigation officers at work: the Police Search Advisory team moved in formation across the park, and other dark figures, detectives, radiated out through the surrounding streets.

Good morning, madam, sorry to bother you, I'm with the CID

Is this about what was on the TV this morning? The little kiddie?

In and out of houses: down the front paths like morning rush-hour businessmen and back up the next path:

There was an incident last night. Do you remember where you were?

Never liked that park. See them trees over there? All sorts of things is coming out of them trees. It worry me some, know what I is saying?

The search team, with their red coats and black and yellow sticks, were professionals, but they all found something odd about the clump of wood around the ponds. It was high summer but there was a Bavarian darkness in the trees, too thick for London. They tried to keep it light joked about it, swore that at any minute an allosaurus or something was going to come steaming out of the vegetation but no one felt comfortable that day. In the ponds the frogmen did more safety checks on each other than they would ordinarily.

Caffery came out of the Nersessians', rolled a cigarette, and walked for a while along the park perimeter, watching. Woods: he didn't like them, hadn't liked them for almost a year now. It wasn't the sight of the trees, or the sound of the breeze manipulating the branches: it was the smell. Leaf mulch and damp bark. The smell could catapult him back eleven months in a breath back to the attack on Rebecca, back to the day she wouldn't talk about, back to the wall that stood between them, and then the pressure in his chest would suddenly become so great he imagined that if he looked down he'd see his heart poking out through his ribs.

He turned his back on the trees and looked up at Arkaig and Herne Hill Towers. From a distance they looked proud, like Rhine castles above the trees, but closer up the land they stood in amounted to little more than a scrap of balding grass covered in dog shit. Used condoms and syringes decorated it and flyblown derelicts slept in the sun. A pod of AMIT detectives had been assigned there as Caffery lit his cigarette he could see two of them moving along the balconies. He was about to head away, to the east, to join the house-to-house pod working on Effra Road, when something made him stop. The back of his neck prickled. He'd had the brief, unsettling sense that something was behind him. Heart thumping, he swung round. But there was nothing, only the search team moving silently through the park, insects hovering, traffic on Dulwich Road and a few fluffy white clouds low on the horizon. Jesus, Jack he took a few puffs on the cigarette and pushed it through the grating of a drain you think the team is jumpy.

It was a DC Logan of AMIT who visited Roland Klare at his flat in Arkaig Tower. Klare didn't like the police, didn't trust them, and this one seemed particularly dismissive of him: in fact, he seemed more interested in the view over Brockwell Park than in asking any questions. He stood at the window, right next to the Pentax in the biscuit tin, and looked down at the billowy treetops. "Nice view."

"Oh, yes, a very nice view."

"Well." DC Logan tapped his hands on the window-sill so close to the camera and turned, wrinkling his nose and looking suspiciously around the flat, taking in the piles of objects on the tables, the boxes all annotated and arranged one on top of the other.

Klare didn't avoid his eyes: he expected this reaction, knew quite well that his system would seem disordered to someone who didn't understand why he had to scavenge and curate like this. But it was all clean, no one could say it wasn't, and that almost excused the fact that sometimes even he lost track of what it all meant, where and why it had started. "Now, then," Logan sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs and pulled his jacket around his stomach, 'this incident last night."

"Ye-es?"

Klare sat down too. He had decided that there was a way of answering the questions truthfully without giving away anything about the camera. He folded his hands in his lap, tried to stop his eyes flickering and admitted that, yes, he'd been in the park late last night but, no, he hadn't seen anything unusual. Logan asked him again, "Are you sure? Think carefully," and Klare did. He put his head back and closed his eyes. There wasn't anything unusual about the camera, he decided. Technically it wasn't unusual. Nor was there anything unusual about the gloves anyone who kept half an eye open could see all sorts of flotsam and jetsam lying around the park. And the camera was worth money.

"No." He opened his eyes and shook his head decisively. "No, nothing unusual."

And Logan seemed to accept that.

Afterwards Klare stood in the window and watched him leave the building, no bigger than a microbe all that way down on the forecourt. When he was sure the detective had gone he drew the curtains in the living room, blotting out the sun and the fractured, dried-out park, picked up the camera and began in earnest to try to free the film. When he couldn't, upset by the visit and angry with the officer's cold disapproval, he sat down on the sofa, breathing hard, staring at his hands.

Meanwhile, down on Dulwich Road, Logan met the other officers with nothing to report. He held his hands up, as if to say 'empty-handed'. He hadn't even the whisper of a suspicion of how close he'd just come, close as a breath, to the only piece of evidence that could have closed the case for AMIT in hours.