The Treatment

Five.

The artist's impression on the hoarding outside the Clock Tower Grove Estate, a Hummingbird Houses development overlooking the eastern flank of Brockwell Park, showed trees in blossom, blue skies. Professionals with suitcases walked along pavements bordered by shrubs and glass-globed street-lights. The skies were blue and there were no biscuit-brown machinery tracks on the roads, no windows marked with taped Xs. The girls in the marketing suite would protest "It's not finished yet, not till autumn, three months to go' and they'd direct any enquirer up a side entrance, along a brick herring boned street and into Clock Tower Walk, to a collection of four-storeyed terraced townhouses at the rear of the development, overlooking Brockwell Park: own back gardens, own garages, 295,000 a pop and completed three months ahead of schedule. An exclusive street for the middle-management classes who couldn't quite reach Dulwich village even on financial tiptoe.

One family had already moved in, just in time for the summer holidays. Number five's railings and woodwork were painted glossy black and two small bay trees, topiaried into cones, stood on either side of the small flight of steps. On the building site a workman often sat on a pile of RSJs in his lunch hour and watched the blonde as she ferried her son back and forth in the lemon-yellow Daewoo. The workman looked after his body at the moment he was on a high-protein diet and whenever he needed inspiration he'd look at the blonde. She was very pretty, but in his opinion her weight spoiled her beauty. In fact, when he thought about it, the whole family could have done with dropping a few pounds. They didn't look healthy. The shiny hair, the sun-brushed skin, the good clothes none of it could make up for those extra pounds, he'd think, as he munched his tuna and whole meal sandwiches.

That July afternoon he had spent a good part of the day watching the search teams in and around the park, and had even given a statement to the plain-clothes officer who had appeared on the building site. He was packing up to go home when he spotted a dark-haired man in his thirties on the doorstep of number five. The workman supposed he could have been another police officer, but looked more like a City type, with his well-cut hair and well-cut suit. The blonde answered the door.

"Hello." She had a tidy little face, a sweet crescent of pale skin under honey-blonde hair. She was wearing white trousers and a fisherman's striped T-shirt. An old black Labrador stood next to her. Caffery knew instantly that he had wandered off the track and into classier waters.

"Afternoon." He showed his warrant card. "Name's DI Jack Caffery."

"Like the beer?"

"Like the beer."

"Is it about the little boy?" She had very large, almost silvery eyes. He imagined if he stood any nearer he'd be able to see a perfect reflection of himself. "Little Rory?"

"Yes."

"You'd better come in, then." Bending over to take the old dog by its collar and turn it round, she beckoned Caffery in with the other hand. "Come through kick the door closed. My son and I are making chocolate truffles. We're past the crucial point but you'll have to let me just clean up a bit." She paused in the hallway to open a cloakroom and switch on the extractor fan. "Sorry, there's a bit of a smell in here. Can you smell it?"

"No."

"My husband says it's my imagination."

"Women have a better sense of smell, you know."

"Ah, yes all the better to detect a dirty nappy."

"Your husband here?"

"Still at work. Come through."

She led him to the back half of the house, a single huge space, divided into two areas by waist height cabinets. On the right an airy modern kitchen, light-filled: Scandinavian lines, skylights and raw wood, recessed lighting and heavy glass jars in rows. On the left a spacious family room with sea grass floors and sunlight streaming through huge clean windows. Designed so that one could cook a meal, hold a conversation and watch television all at the same time. Modern living.

"Oh, hi," Caffery said.

"Hi." In the kitchen a boy of eight or nine, slightly sloping eyes, nose rather pointed like an elf's and shortish hair sticking up from a tanned forehead as if he'd just come in from a beach volleyball match, stood to attention, hands at his sides, pretending he hadn't been doing something punishable while his mother's back was turned. He was wearing flip-flops and a

T-shirt over blue swimming-trunks and had chocolate smeared around his mouth.

"Oh, yes, sorry about him he's the hound." She smoothed back the hair from her son's forehead. "My little boy, Josh."

Caffery extended his hand. "Hi."

"It's OK," Josh said sombrely, shaking his hand. "I'm mad, not bad."

Caffery nodded. "Sometimes the mad ones are worse."

"And I'm Benedicte Church." She smiled sweetly and shook Caffery's hand. "Ben for short." She bent over her son, hands on his shoulders.

She was not the average middle-class housewife. She was enormously pretty, Caffery thought, with rather short legs and a round bottom. He imagined it would take a long time to tire of a bottom like that. He caught himself staring as she pulled her hair from her face and murmured to her son, "Tadpole, go and wash your face, OK? Then we can all have a chocolate."

Josh went into the cloakroom and when she could hear the tap running she dropped her chin and leaned a little closer to Caffery, her smile gone. "It's horrible, isn't it?" she whispered. "The TV's really vague. I mean, do we need to worry?"

"There's no harm in being aware."

"Heard the helicopter last night." She jerked her chin in the direction of the park. Only a few feet beyond the back-garden fence the trees started, as immediately thick and dark as if this was the dense heart of a forest. "Whenever I hear them looking for someone I always think of the Balcombe Street siege. Convinced the police are going to chase them through my front door and then we'll be kept hostage for days on end. But there you go." She smiled. "Paranoia can be a beautiful thing for the easily bored. Coffee?"

"Please."

"And I'll bring you a, uh…" She gestured at the tray of chocolates. "A truffle, if you can bear it." She poured coffee from a cafetiere into two Isle of Arran mugs, spooned sugar into an earthenware pot and set it on a tray. "Go through and sit down. Make yourself at home."

He went into the family room. Here the walls were a fresh, cantaloupe colour, the sofas in pale, glazed linen and other things told him this family was doing well the gleaming wide-screen TV still with a piece of polystyrene packaging clinging to its shoulder. He sat down on one of the sofas facing out of the window. The dog, which had curled up in a patch of sun, blinked sleepily at him. Everywhere Pickfords boxes lay half unpacked.

"Just moved in?"

"Four days ago." She took milk from the fridge and filled a small glass jug. "The first ones on the estate. And I mean, how crazy is this} Sunday we're straight off to Cornwall for ten days."

"Nice."

"Absolutely lovely, if you haven't already been living out of boxes for weeks. This place was finished early so we went for it. And we couldn't cancel our holiday." Josh reappeared from the cloakroom and scampered over to the tray of chocolates. "We couldn't cancel Helston, could we, tadpole? The seals?"

"Nope." He stood on a stool and pulled the chocolates nearer. "Seals out of the sea."

The dog limped over to Caffery, looked up at him mournfully and rolled on to her back. "Hello." He began to scratch her, when something just above his field of vision, something in the woods, moved suddenly. He stared out of the window. For a moment he had thought he saw a shadow racing in there, but now whatever he'd seen was gone, an animal, a trick of the light, or one of the search team, and Benedicte was coming in with the coffee and he had to cool his imagination.

"Thanks." He took the cup and sat back, his eyes straying to the window. The trees were silent. Nothing out there. Nothing at all. "You're close to the park here," he said. "Very close."

"I know'

"Where did you move from?"

"Brixton."

"Brixton? I thought this was Brixton."

"I mean the centre Coldharbour Lane. I don't know what we wanted to escape from most the drugs or the trendies. But I don't really know Donegal Crescent and that side of the park." She stopped herself and looked back to the kitchen where Josh was using a knife to lever the chocolates from the baking tray. "Tadpole, bring that little saucer through and then you can go in the paddling-pool." "Snot a paddling-pool. It's a '

"I know, I know. It's a secret location in the Pacific Ocean." She shot Caffery an amused look. "OK," she told Josh. "Bring the saucer through and you can go to Tracy Island."

"Kay." Pleased, Josh slipped off the stool and padded through carrying a saucer with four newly dipped chocolate truffles, as shiny as if they were still wet.

"That's it." She settled down with her coffee. "Pass them round. Then you can go out."

"Thank you." Caffery took a chocolate.

"That's OK." Josh still had a smudge of brown on his chin and a crumbly fingerprint of drying chocolate on his thigh. He leaned forward a little, his face serious, his brows drawn together in adult concern. "You do know it's the troll, don't you?"

Caffery paused, the truffle half-way to his mouth. "Sorry?"

"Come on, brat." Benedicte pulled Josh by the T-shirt to where she sat. "Let me have a chocolate."

Josh dropped his head. "It's the troll," he murmured.

"Of course, darling." She took a chocolate and put it into her mouth, rolling her eyes in amusement at Caffery.

But Josh was suddenly determined. "The troll climbed in the window and stole that kid out of his bed." He put the saucer on the floor and stood, crunched up like a gnome, his face contorted, hands in front of his face like claws. Make-believe climbing. "Up the drainpipe, probably." He dropped his hands and looked seriously at his mother. "He eats kids, Mum, honest."

"Josh, really." Benedicte met Caffery's eyes, her face colouring with embarrassment. She leaned forward and slapped her son lightly on the legs. "Now, come on, enough of that. We don't want Mr. Caffery to think you're a baby, do we? Go and put the saucer in the sink."

The troll.

The more Caffery tried to question Josh about it, the more outlandish and garbled the ideas got until they were back to one central fact: the troll lived in the woods and had a habit of eating kids. Benedicte Church was embarrassed that her son was taking a local kids' story as fact. "They just like to scare each other," she said. "They're so impressionable at this age."

At what age? He wanted to say. At thirty-five, like me? Because a picture of the troll had already begun to impress itself on the underside of his mind -spreading like a stain. At the end of the day, when he left Clock Tower Grove, he had an overpowering urge to get away from the park, with the sun running all over the horizon, the silhouettes of a tired and disillusioned search team dotted against it. A feeling was creeping up on him. He didn't know where it was coming from, and he didn't know how to put it into words. But that would come, he was sure of it. It would come.

"Troll?" he asked Souness later, in the SIO's office. "Does that mean anything to you? A troll?"

"Eh?" Souness ran the palm of her hand over her bristly number-two cut and frowned. She was back from the press interviews, a line of makeup on the collar of her blouse, and was sitting at her desk staring down at the screen of her new mobile, pressing buttons with her thumb, trying to make sense of it. "Eh?" She looked up at him. "What're you talking about?"

"The kids in Brixton were rabbi ting on about a troll everywhere I went."

"The only troll I know is San Francisco slang an old queen who likes gorgeous young meat. A tree jumper. A dirty, ugly old gay guy who only wants to have sex with cute young thangs."

"So it just means a nonce?"

"In my world, aye."

He sat, chin resting on his hand, and stared at his reflection superimposed over the long strings of London lights.

"You got the message about the photos?" he said after a while. " Carmel thought he took photos while he was there."

"Yeah." She looked up. "I've got some of the lads on to it already."

"If there are photos somewhere out there shit." He shook his head.

"I know. Wouldn't you love to see them?"

"What do you think?" It was nearly midnight -they'd had to call in the teams. They'd found nothing. There was no sign of Rory in the park so Souness had extended the parameters to include every street that backed on to it. Tool sheds were searched, garages, empty property. Still no Rory. Every resident was questioned carefully but no one had seen anything. Rory Peach, it seemed, had disappeared in one of the most densely populated areas of the country and no one had seen a thing. Not a soul in Donegal Crescent had heard the glass shattering on the Friday evening; nor had anyone heard the intruder leaving the house. The media spent the day pestering AMIT for news but there was none. They knew about as much as they had this time last night. What kept drilling through Caffery's tired mind was a sentence an officer had said to his mother twenty-eight years ago: "You'll have to accept that you may never know." Nor were any of the team taking it easily an eight-year-old child had been separated from his family for the second night in a row: he'd already had to talk two of the younger ones out of a nose-dive depression.

"And funnily enough," Souness switched off the mobile and put it into her pocket, "I think I know exactly what's worrying ye."

Caffery who had pushed back his chair and was considering unzipping the Nike holdall in which they kept their Scotch straightened. He put his hands on the desk and paused, almost as if he hadn't heard. Then he looked at her sideways. "What?"

"What I mean is She leaned back in her chair and un popped the top button of her trousers, getting her stomach comfortable for the first time that day. "What I mean is that I think it all sounds a little bit too much like what happened to Ewan." She raised her eyebrows. It wasn't a statement and she was neither smirking nor reproaching him. She was asking him to talk about it. "That's what I meant."

"OK." He held up his hand. "You can stop there." Any reference to Ewan always felt like something moving slyly around in the folds of his brain, digging fingers into the most private clefts. He rarely even said his brother's name and to hear someone else borrow it calmly like this, like it's a name no different from Brian, say, or Dave, or Alan or Gary, it's Jesus, it's like finding a strange hair in your mouth. "I suppose at this point I'm supposed to ask you how you know about it."

"Everyone knows."

"Great."

"Half of B team were at your party when Ivan Penderecki when he, well, let's not go into that now, eh? But Paulina still gets little bits of intelligence on him coming through the paedo unit from time to time. Between getting her nails done and putting another zero on my Barclaycard statement, she did a bit of digging and, oooh, an interesting little fact pops up. Penderecki is linked to a twenty-five-year-old missing-persons case. And the name? Ewan Caffery. Just so happens that the name DI Jack Caffery is in every newspaper at the time and, well, it don't take much for a suspicious dyke to jump to conclusions." She bent over and scooped the bottle of Bell 's from the holdall, opened it and dropped large doubles into each of two mugs. "Here." She pushed one across the desk and settled back. "I've known since before I started in AMIT. Before I even met ye."

"Well." Caffery slumped into the chair, pulling the Scotch towards him. "Welcome to my nightmare, DCI Souness. It's nice to know you've been enjoying it for so long."

"Ahh, now, ye see, you're being a bit of a wee girly about it, aren't ye? There ain't no law says you can't see this as genuine friendly concern, Deeetective Caffery."

"Yeah." He stared into the mug. There was a dried coffee rim half-way down.

"Och, come on, Jack, I'm trying to help. In my clumsy way."

"I know, look, I'm sorry. I get a bit…" He put a fist to his chest.

"A bit tight here about it, eh?" She downed her whisky and refilled her mug. "I know, I do know. But if you made an allegation against Penderecki?" She paused for a response. "Jack? Make an allegation, and the case'd be reviewed and someone else could stay up all night and worry about it."

He shook his head wearily. "Nah. That's OK."

"Been suggested before?"

"I've lost count of how many times. He's too clever. He'd turn it around and before you know it I'd be the one in the frame malicious allegations, harassment, yadda-yadda."

"And not because you know you'd never be allowed near the case?"

"There is that, yes. That detail hasn't escaped my attention."

"You're a wee barn pot if you don't mind me saying."

"Thank you. I'm going to assume that's a compliment."

Souness smiled, a small smile. "I just don't want this Peach thing bollixing with ye more than it has to. Don't want it touching your personal life. That's my small concern."

Caffery tried to smile back. This was the time he should say it that he probably shouldn't be on the case at all, that she was right, that already it was spilling over and getting out of control. Instead he wiped his forehead, finished his drink and said, "Ewan was nine, Rory is eight I hadn't even made the connection." He stood, went to the door and called DC Logan into the SIO's room. Logan came in, raising an eyebrow when he saw them sitting together.

"Sorry." He coughed pointedly, as if he'd interrupted something.

"I want to add something to the intelligence search you know how to use CRIS, don't you?"

"Sir."

"And tomorrow get the locals to go back into the collator's records for ten years with the same key word. "Troll". Find out if anyone knows anything about a nonce in Brockwell Park called the troll." He stopped. He'd only just seen it. Logan was trying to hide a smile. "Hey?" He put his face closer to Logan 's. "What is it?"

"Nothing, sir." But before he dropped his eyes Caffery saw him glance briefly at Souness at the top buttons of her shirt undone, at the opened bottle of Scotch. Caffery's tie was off and Souness's boots were on the floor. "Nothing," Logan said again, colouring, and turned away. "CRIS and the collators. Right away."

When Caffery closed the door and turned round, Souness had her elbows on her knees, her face dropped in her hands, and was laughing so hard her shoulders were shaking. "Can ye believe it?" She looked up, her face shiny. "Och, I love it I hoove it! I'm getting laid by the Met's pin-up boy." She wiped her face. "Look at me! Diesel dyke stamped all over me, but they still need a compass and map. It's like a giant panda walked into the room they'd go, "Yeah, looks like a giant panda, smells like a giant panda, but it can't be a giant panda, I mean what the fuck would a giant panda be doing here?" '

In spite of himself Caffery caught himself smiling. Later, he stopped her before she left the office: "Danni, thank you. I know I've made you late for Paulina, so thank you for talking to me."

Caffery's little Victorian cottage was quiet. He parked his battered old Jaguar carefully next to Rebecca's black VW Beetle and went inside, un knotting his tie. She was still awake in spite of the hour there was warmth and noise coming from the living room at the back of the house and in the hall a pair of green metallic sling backs scuffed heels, lay toppled over, the words Mill Mill fading and worn on the inside. He paused, as he always did these days, wondering what mood she would be in, before he opened the door.

She was doing a shoulder stand on the sofa, giggling as she watched her bare toes wriggle. She wore khaki shorts and one of his grey T-shirts: a bottle of Blavod leaned drunkenly against the cushion and a cigarillo smouldered in trie ashtray.

"Happy?"

"Oooops!" She dropped her legs with a bang and twisted round, grinning up at him. He saw with relief that she was calm. Flushed and tipsy but mellow.

"You look happy."

"Uh-huh." A CD played in the background something smooth, Air or someone like it. "Drunk."

"You lush." He bent over and kissed her. "I've been calling you all day." He went into the kitchen, hung his jacket on the back of the door and got his Glenmorangie and a glass.

"I've been in Brixton with some Slade finalists. They think I'm God or something."

"Shameless." He pulled off his shoes and collapsed on the sofa, uncorking the whisky. "Egotistic little tart."

"I know." She coiled her hank of spice-coloured hair into a long snake, laid it over one shoulder, and clambered across to him. Good gymnast's legs she had always lightly tanned, the colour of sesame oil. "Ouch," Souness once admitted, after half a bottle of Scotch. "She's the sort of woman you feel right here. In your groin."

"I saw someone I knew on the news." Rebecca rested her arms on his shoulders and kissed his neck. "Just from behind. I knew it was you from your backside. And because you looked pissed off, even from a distance."

He downed a glass, refilled it and linked his fingers through hers. In the last three days they hadn't had time together he'd realized it that morning when the sound of one of the indexers crossing her legs in her fawn Pretty Pollys had popped a sweat on his forehead.

"You must be knackered."

"I've got a four-hour turnaround. Back to the office by five."

"It's a little kid, isn't it?"

"Mmmm. Yes." He held up her hand and studied her fingers. Her pearly clean nails against his. The thumb on his left hand was black, it was a bruise that wouldn't grow out. His own stigmata injured the day Ewan went missing, never changing in twenty-five years. "Let's not talk about it, eh?"

"Why not?"

Why not? Because already Ewan was wilfully superimposing himself over a picture of Rory Peach and you've spotted that, Becky, I know you've already spotted the resemblance and if we start, if I let you, we'll be talking about Ewan before I can put the brakes on, and then the mood will change and I'll say something about you, maybe, and Bliss, and… "Because I'm tired. I've had it all day."

"OK." She bit her lip and thought about this. "Well," she tried, working her fingers inside his shirt and smiling. "How about this? Are you horny?"

He sighed and put down his glass. "Of course."

She giggled. "Yeah, stupid question. I mean, when are you not?"

"I thought I was constantly pissed off?"

"No. You're constantly randy is what you are. Pissed off is what you do between having hard-ons."

"Come here." He pulled her astride his lap and worked his hands up her T-shirt. "Did you see Time Out?"

"I know." She began to unbutton his shirt, closing her eyes when he found her nipples and worked them between his thumb and forefinger. "How ace am I, then, eh?" she murmured dreamily, her head back. "Oh, God, that's nice. Did you read it, then?"

"Yes. I'm proud of you."

But he was lying. He shuffled down the sofa a few inches and moved his hands across her skin, like oil against his hard fingers, down the whole width of her pelvis, and the long fierce muscles of her stomach. Rebecca had told him that her body had changed since her artwork had taken off she said her skin was smoother, her waist thinner; that she didn't get calluses on her feet any more and that these days she walked more slowly. But what Caffery saw was the opposite: a hardening, a quickening. And he knew it dated back to the assault. To Bliss.

Reflecting this switch came the new artwork, the sculptures. Before the assault Rebecca's work had been something quite different. Now the colours had disappeared and her work was sharper.

Something in her had shifted, but she still wanted Jack and here he was, still hopelessly and helplessly attracted to her, in love with her in spite of how she had changed she was the sweet weight in his heart and in his cock. Just the smell of one of her cigarillos in an ashtray could give him a hard-on.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her face above him, eyes closed, a calm, distant smile on her face. I should close the curtains, he thought distantly, looked at the dark window, and saw the white smudge of a face, a snout-like impression and the telltale frosting of excited breath on the panes

"Shit!" He pulled Rebecca's T-shirt down.

"What?"

"Move it. Quick."

Rolling her away, he sprang to his feet, and slammed open the french windows. Penderecki had reached the foot of the garden, running for the back fence. Caffery sprinted the forty feet in seconds, but Penderecki was prepared: he had brought a green plastic milk crate that he used to hike himself over the back fence, and scurried away into the undergrowth of the railway cutting, leaving behind just the crate and the sound of his wheezing trailing in the air. Caffery, shoeless, shirt undone, picked up the crate and threw it after him.

lDo that again and I will kill you." He stood in the garden his mother had planted, watching the larval shape of the old man scuttling away through the undergrowth. "I mean it I've got your blood in my mouth, Penderecki." He dropped his hands on the wire fence, letting his breathing slow, trying not to be drawn, trying to pull his anger back in. "I've got your blood."

It's just a new way of him disturbing the silt. Ignore it. Ignore it

He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbour's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you. Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them.

Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan had survived and lived as Penderecki's lover until he had suddenly, spontaneously stopped breathing one night; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a paedophile himself, operating from Amsterdam… Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will. It was his work to ignore them all.

Someone touched his shoulders. He started. "Rebecca." He shook his head. "I'm sorry." He was still shaking with anger.

"Not your fault. He's a little shit."

"He's baiting me."

"I know." She kissed his back. "He makes it difficult."

"Yeah, well." He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. "He's always made it difficult."

She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in

Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep:

Dear Jack

After 27 years it is now time to tell you the truth what happened with you're brother and you will know when I tell you that I am teling you the TRUTH, the most truthful thing not because I am sorry for you no but because I have 'remorse' and because you deserve to have the truth told you.

He was not in pain Jack and not sc aired because he wanted it. When I depuced him and when I told him to suck on my cock he did it because he wanted it. He told me he would do anything for me, even would eat my doings if you know what I am saying because he loved me so much. This sounds crude to you and to me but it is the words of you're brother jack you're only brother and so I know you will see these words are SACRED and not think that I invented them. And anyway I should tell you the end came because it was an acident and no more than an ACIDENT and not because I wanted a bad thing for you're brother but because it was an acident. He is at peace now. GOD BLESS US ALL.

And now this spying, this creeping around his garden. Caffery rolled a cigarette. He hated Penderecki for keeping up the pressure, hated him for the constant reminders. Rebecca kissed his back again and wandered away, over to the old beech at the foot of the garden. She pressed her palms against the trunk. "This is where the tree-house was, am I right?"

"Yes." He lowered his head and lit the cigarette.

"Then…" She rested her ear against the tree-trunk, as if listening for a pulse, and looked upwards, into the spreading branches. "How did you oh, I see."

"Rebecca '

But before he could stop her she was monkeying up the trunk using the iron hand-holds his father had nailed into it for his two sons. She crouched like a gnome in the elbow of a branch. Astonishing how a tree can cup a human body, he thought, looking up at her. Strange that we ever crawled down, traded the leaves and nooks for the wide uncertainties of the prairie. "Come on," she called. "It's great up here." He put the cigarette between his teeth and followed reluctantly, feeling the familiar irregularities of the iron loops against his palms. The night was clear, the sky sprinkled with stars. When he came level with Rebecca he leaned back against the branch, facing her, his feet braced against the trunk, the bark husky and warm against his soles. Behind her, above the houses, the green millennium laser on Greenwich Park sliced the great dome of black.

"Good, isn't it?"

"Maybe…"

He rarely came up here. Once a year, maybe, and not at all since Rebecca. He thought that she wouldn't want him sitting up here dwelling on everything. The view didn't change much. Still the long scar of the railway. Still Penderecki's house on the other side: unpainted for years, the guttering hanging so that the back of the house was coated in moss: as incongruous in the terrace of cared-for houses as the boarded-up house next to the Peaches'.

OK, he stopped himself, no more connections like that. Rory isn't Ewan and Ewan isn't Rory. Get it straight.

"Zeus was a baby in a tree." Rebecca dangled her feet over the edge and smiled. "He was hung in a cradle and fed by the bees. Stop thinking about him." She grabbed his hand suddenly. "Come on, stop it. I know you're thinking about Ewan."

Caffery didn't answer. He pulled his hand from her and looked across the railway cutting.

"Jesus." She shook her head and looked up at the stars. "Can't you see what's happening? Penderecki's got you so wound up that you carry it everywhere -the more he pushes the tighter you get. You're being eaten alive by it all, by Ewan, by that…" she nodded over the railway cutting, 'that pervert."

"Not now, Rebecca '

"I mean it. Look at you a fucked-up, hunched-up, shrivelled-up miserable git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backwards through Hades by his heels and it's all because of Ewan. You're carrying him, Jack, carrying him everywhere. The smallest thing makes you explode. And now you've got a case at work that's similar '

"Rebecca '

"And now you've got a case at work that's similar and God alone knows what'll happen. How will you control yourself? Someone'll get hurt might even be you. You might even end up like Paul."

"That's enough." He held his hand up. "Enough." He knew where they were going. He knew that Paul Essex, the DS who had been part of the frantic hunt for Malcolm Bliss, stood for all Rebecca's fears about the job. Essex had died, on his back in a Kent forest, his blood soaking like bitumen into the ground, and all that Caffery had left of him was his driving licence. He'd removed it from Essex 's wallet before handing it over to his parents. Maybe Rebecca imagined that was how he, Caffery, was going to end.

"He's got nothing to do with this."

"Yes, he has." She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Because it might happen to you if you don't calm down if you can't get Ewan off your back. And you know it. You know that if you get pushed on this it might even go as far as it did last time."

He looked up. "What? What last time?"

"Ah that made you listen."

"What are you talking about?"

"He knows what I'm talking about." She smiled out into the darkness. "He knows to whom I allude."

"Becky '

"Mark my words, Jack, you'll do it again. It's like a little thing growing in you, right about…" She put a finger on his chest '… there. And it'll keep growing and growing, and if you don't get away from this house, if you don't get away from that sad old pervert over there, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then bam!" you'll do it again and '

"Stop it." He pushed her hand away from his chest. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I know, Jack. I can see it in you. I know what happened in that wood."

He stared back at her, speechless. Scared to ask her what she knew. In case she said it: I know you killed Bliss. I know it wasn't an accident like everyone thinks. For a long time he was silent.

Rebecca tipped her head on one side. "Why won't you talk about it, Jack?"

"No, Rebecca," he said, pinching out the cigarette and dropping it out of the tree. His hands were shaking. "The real question is why you won't talk about it."

"Oh, no." She held up her hand. "We were talking about you."

"No. If we're going down this road then we talk about everything that happened. Those are the rules." He began to climb down out of the tree.

"Where are you going?"

"Inside. To have a run. To get away from you."

"Hey," she called, watching him walk back up the lawn in the moonlight, 'one day you'll see I'm right."