The Treatment

Six.

(19 July)

In the morning, the note from Penderecki was skewered on his gate, wet with dew. Penderecki had taken the time to write more than was his habit and Caffery, who would ordinarily have crumpled it and binned it, stood in the street, attache case in hand, and read.

Hello Jack.

Eerie reminders of the Yorkshire Ripper tape. It made Caffery shiver only feet from his own home on a leafy summer day with joggers, the postman and the milk float creeping along the road towards him as if someone had breathed on the back of his neck.

And now I truly know your name. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. The LORD and not YOU will call me, when it is His will and not YOURS and grant HIS healing, that the soul of His servent, at the hour of its departure from the body, may by the hands of His holy Angels be presented without spot unto Him. The sheep belong on gods right, Jack. The goat's go to the

LEFT. The sheep will receive heaven the goat's will receive hell. And from your ignorance YOU look into MY eyes and you think you see a goat. Dont you? You think I am a goat. But, GOD says the stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of other's – (the good and the pure) and see itself looking back, think about it jack.

Caffery got into the Jag and sat breathing in the smell of leather already warm even this early in the morning. The stripe of the goat? A little something growing in him that would one day explode? Rebecca had shaken him up last night with her gloomy prognosis. He wondered if everyone could see it in his face. Could everyone see the word 'killer' scrawled in his eyes? Was he so transparent? He rubbed his temples and started the car, adjusted the mirror and put it into gear.

In Brixton the day dragged. By late afternoon he was standing outside the Lido at the edge of Brockwell Park, drinking McDonald's coffee and smoking a roll-up. He was tired and immensely depressed. The blood on the trainer matched the DNA from Rory Peach's underwear, but there was still no sign of Rory. The search team had exhausted the possibilities in and around the park; they kept going but everyone knew that the current parameters were redundant. Rumours swept among the search teams every hour or so: "They're sending us to Battersea, someone saw a lad like Rory down there, next to the river." Or "There's a nonce over at Clapham who lives right above an empty factory, half of us are going to be sent over there." The operation was now costing twenty thousand pounds a day, but the reality was that none of the hundred or so calls that had come into the incident room had given Caffery and Souness any new leads. They were walking blind, and everyone knew it.

And then, at 5.30 p.m." Souness had news. "Peach is going to make it." She came chugging along the road towards Caffery, waving her mobile in the air. "He's off the ventilator and they're letting us talk to him."

"I thought he was dying."

"I know. We're getting twenty minutes, so let's make it count."

Caffery let Souness drive his Jaguar. She did it with a wry, self-conscious smile on her sunburnt face. It wasn't a show car, nothing like the red two-seater BMW she had bought for Paulina ("She drives it like a typical bird, Jack, just like a bird. The rear-view mirror it's not for checking the traffic behind, oh, no, no, no, no! It's for having a wee deek at your lippy. Bet you never knew that.") The upholstery in the back of the Jaguar was mended with Sellotape and both front wings were retouched fibreglass filler. It wasn't something he'd aspired to owning, it was just the only car he'd been able to afford ten years ago, but Souness treated it with a touching reverence all the way to Denmark Hill.

King's Hospital's face-lift was well under way: every conversation, every exchange was overlaid with the noise of construction. Inside the hospital it was a city a law unto itself with a Forbuoy's outlet, a travel agent, a bank and a post office. The corridors were polished to a squeak, and people moved with a Fritz Lang robotic ease, smooth and determined. The consultant, Mr. Friendship, tall, in a blue shirt and patterned red tie, met them outside the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit.

"He's off the Hickman line and the Gambro. I've kept him on a little pain relief but I'm surprised, and very encouraged, by his response. He was hardly even dehydrated after three days without water. As a matter of fact, since we took him off ventilation," he paused at the door and swiped his card, 'he's done so well we've moved him to this progressive care section." He led them into the front of the unit, where five empty beds were ranged along the walls. "We're getting him set for a move to another ward or even discharge. Amazingly resilient. There you are." Alek Peach sat in profile near the window. "Strong as an ox, that one. Strong as an ox."

An ox indeed. If a bull had ever sat back on its haunches in a chair with a blue hospital blanket tucked over its lap it would have looked a little like Alek Peach. In spite of his defeated posture the real sense of Peach was of his size: his bones must have been massive, as dense as iron bars, to support that height and muscle. His dyed black hair was worn slightly long, he was dressed in checked green pyjamas, and under his chair was hooked a black re breath rubber balloon and a catheter bag. He didn't respond when the two detectives approached.

Souness moved a chair to sit down and Caffery drew the pastel-green curtains around the bed. He cleared his throat. "Mr. Peach. Are you sure you feel up to this?"

Peach turned slowly to them. His black Elvis sideburns were growing out and needed redyeing. When he tried to nod, his head seemed to droop, as if he was having problems holding up its enormous weight and it might flop forward on to his chest.

"Right." Caffery sat next to Souness, looking carefully at him. "First of all we're sorry about Rory, Mr. Peach, very sorry. We're doing everything. Keeping positive."

Hearing Rory's name Peach squeezed his eyes closed and wiped his huge hand across his face, the thumb on the bridge of the nose, the palm covering his mouth. He sat like this for long seconds, not breathing. Then he dropped his hand and moved it in a convulsive circle on his chest, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling.

Caffery glanced at Souness and said, "Alek, look, we won't take long, I promise. I know it's difficult for you but it would help if you could tell us anything you can remember what he did while he was in the house, where he kept you, whether he left the house at any point."

Peach's hand stopped circling. His face tightened a little. He dropped his eyes and stared fixedly at the pulse-oximeter clip on his thumb, as if he was trying to focus his strength and will. Caffery and Souness waited expectantly, but Peach didn't speak for some time. They weren't going to get much for their twenty minutes. Shit. Caffery sat back and pressed a knuckle to his forehead. "Look, can't you even tell us how old he was? If he was white or black? Anything?"

Alek Peach turned to look at him. His eyes drooped, showing tired inner rims. He lifted his hand, shaky, bruised and swollen from IV needles, and pointed a finger at Caffery. His expression was ferocious, as if the I.C.U ward was his living room and Caffery was a stranger who had just swung in casually off the street and sat down on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.

"You." His chest shook, straining against the cotton pyjamas. "You."

Caffery put a finger on his chest. "Me?"

"Yes, you."

"What about me?"

"Your eyes. I don't like your eyes."

In the men's, Caffery stood on the toilet and stuffed a paper towel inside the ceiling smoke alarm. He locked the cubicle, rolled a cigarette, leaned his head against the wall and smoked slowly, only relaxing when he felt the welcome thump of nicotine against his heart. Instead of recognizing Peach's distress he had instantly grown angry at the hostility. His blood pressure had risen and he had shoved his feet out across the floor, preparing to spring up. It was only the cough and warning look from Souness that had straightened him out, prevented him slamming the door as he left the ward.

"Right," he muttered to the cubicle wall. "So Rebecca's nailed it. You are a fucked-up, hair-trigger little time-bomb." He flicked ash into the toilet pan and scratched the back of his hand. She couldn't have worked it better. As if everything was conspiring to back up her diagnosis of him. As if she'd paid them -Penderecki, Peach to say it: "The stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of other's and see itself looking back."

Your eyes. I don't like your eyes.

No one would ever know or guess just how far he had been pushed. They would never know how, in the hot centre of an estuary wood, panting and tangled in blood and wire, Malcolm Bliss had sworn to Caffery's face that he'd left Rebecca dead in a nearby house. '7 fucked her first, of course."

For that Caffery had killed him, a quick turn of the wrist. The barbed wire had punctured the carotid artery and irreparably damaged the jugular. "Christ," he'd murmured to himself when he read the postmortem protocol. "You must have tightened it harder than you thought." But that was all. He was still waiting, in a sort of numb suspension, a year later, for remorse to kick in. He thought he'd covered himself. He thought everyone believed Bliss's death had been an accident. He'd never guessed that people could look at him and see the killer, the liar, looking back out of the holes in his face.

No, fuck it. You're letting her get to you. He slung the cigarette in the toilet pan. If Rebecca wasn't ready to talk to him about what had happened last year -talk to him and not to the press then he wasn't going to let her run around excavating his feelings and making crazy connections between Ewan and his own inability to stay in control.

When Souness came out of the unit Caffery's heart sank. She was tight-lipped and sat in the passenger seat on the drive back to Shrivemoor in silence. From time to time she gingerly touched her face and scalp where the sun had burned them for two days in the park. They had hoped Peach would be able to tell them enough about the behaviour of the intruder for DS Quinn and the forensics team to focus on hot areas in the house, areas where the attacker had lingered, shedding hairs or fibres. But Souness's face said that hadn't happened. Neither spoke until they got to Shrivemoor.

"Not good news, I take it."

Souness sighed and dropped the bundle of papers on her desk. "No." She flopped into the chair, leaning back, her mouth open, her palms pressed against her burning cheeks. She stayed like this for a long time, staring at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts. Then she dropped forward, feet planted wide on the floor, elbows on knees, and looked at Caffery. "We're sooooo fucked, mate. So fucked."

"No leads?"

"Oh, we've got one lead a great lead. The guy wore trainers, Peach thinks."

"He thinks?"

"Yeah." She nodded at his disappointment. "He's not sure what make, but he thought maybe they were cheap ones and suggested Hi-Tec'

"Hi-Tecs? Magic. As if we've never seen that on a witness statement before."

"Good, eh?" She scratched her chin. "I pushed him for all he could give me. He co-operated I believe him. I don't think there's more." She swivelled the chair, fired up her PC and began to type up the report for Kryotos to enter in HOLMES:

On the 14th July I was at home at number 30 Donegal Crescent. My son Rory and me were playing on the Play Station in the basement. We were supposed to be going down to Margate the next day for a long weekend. No one else was in the room. I believed at that time that my wife, Carmel Peach, was upstairs, but I hadn't seen or heard from her for some time, so at about 7.30 (p.m.) I came upstairs to see where my wife was. I had not heard anything suspicious and all the doors were locked, the windows closed.

I came into the hallway and turned to face the stairs at which point I believe I was hit from behind. Nothing was said

Caffery, standing over Souness as she typed, pointed at the screen. "Didn't he hear the window breaking in the kitchen?"

"Says not."

"So this guy just drops into their hallway? Like Santa Claus?"

"That's how it sounds."

He frowned. He put his hand on the monitor and leaned over to read the rest of the statement:

Nothing was said and from that point on I remember nothing until I woke up later with a headache and a sore throat. I do not know how long I had been unconscious. I was handcuffed to something and blindfolded and gagged. After a while I realized it was the radiators I was handcuffed to. I didn't know which room I was in, but I could hear my wife crying and it sounded as if she was in the landing which seemed to be above and behind me, so I guessed I was in the living room. And I recognized the carpet because it's new. I didn't know what time it was because it was dark, but when the sun came up I could see the light through the blindfold and I thought it was coming front the direction of the kitchen at the rear of the house. I stayed in this place for three days, during which time I did not see or hear my son, although I could hear my wife crying on and off. I do not know what happened to my son. I glimpsed the man once only under the bottom of the blindfold. I think he was very tall, even taller than I am maybe. I would say in his late twenties, maybe thirty, because he seemed strong and he must have been strong to have dragged me from the hallway into the living room. He was wearing a pair of dirty white trainers, I couldn't see the make, but they looked like old Hi-Tecs or something. He had very large feet. I heard him moving up and down the wall and at one time he stayed in the corner of the room, crouched down -I could tell that from the sound of his breathing like he was going to pounce, but he didn't. All I remember is that he sniffed a lot as if he was smelling something. It's the way my wife is sometimes she was always thinking she could smell something. On, I think, Monday morning I lost consciousness. Knowing my son I do not believe that he would have voluntarily left the house with anyone. I do not know the man who was in my house and there is no one that I know of who has any grudge against me or against my family.

"And that's it." Souness opened a new document and began the witness assessment attachment her observations of Peach's state of mind, intelligence, ability with the English language, his emotional state (poor: Peach had been clearly confused during the interview, becoming tearful and agitated, particularly when his son was mentioned).

"What about the photos? The camera?"

"No." She shook her head. " Carmel must have imagined it I asked him, he definitely doesn't remember photographs."

"He's sure."

"Oh, aye I double-checked."

"Shit." While Souness typed, Caffery went to his desk. He sat down and picked off the Post-It notes Kryotos had stuck to his monitor. Messages: Rebecca had called, a few journalists wanted an interview, Kryotos wanted him to know she'd received the Quest Search disk from Registry, and that she had made a call to Missing Persons. After a period of forty-eight hours the Horseferry Road coroner's office would receive any unidentified bodies found in the Metropolitan area, but Caffery knew the call was a token gesture futile: the whole of London was burning over Rory Peach he wouldn't have made it as far as Missing Persons without someone speaking to Shrivemoor. He stuck this last Post-It to his finger and stared at it blankly. Where was Rory Peach? And were there photographs of the whole event somewhere? A camera flash. The sound of a wind-on mechanism.

These weren't easy things to imagine. Had Carmel invented it? If not, and if Alek hadn't heard it in the living room, they must have been taken in the hallway. What the fuck do you want with photographs of the poor bastards' hallway?

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. He was out of ideas. "If we had just had some DNA we could start a screening locally."

Souness looked up. "Aye, and if we had a body we could get some DNA."

"So what's our next step?"

"Och, ye know the answer to that, Jack. More in-depth interviews with the Peaches, doctors allowing, get a victimology sketched out, widen the parameters, and uh…" She paused. "Drop the area around the park Before she could hold up her hand Caffery had sucked breath in between his teeth. "I know, I know ye don't like it '

"No, I don't like it I still think he's in there. How could someone have left that park carrying a struggling kid and no one see him?"

"Maybe the hairn was walking."

"No one saw him. Anyway, none of Rory's clothes are missing. He would have been naked."

"Maybe the intruder brought his own clothes."

"Rory was bleeding, he was probably in shock I just don't buy it."

"Well, he's not in the park now, is he?"

"No," Caffery admitted, ferreting under the desk for the holdall. He needed a drink. "Doesn't look that way." He held up a bottle of Scotch but Souness shook her head.

"Nah." She clicked, sending the report to the printer in the incident room, and stood, stretching, looking at her watch. "Nah, it's late. I need a kip."

She went into the incident room to distribute the statement in the team's pigeon-holes and for a few minutes Caffery was alone. He stood, holding the bottle, looking at his eyes reflected in the window, superimposed over the Croydon skyscrapers. What if Rebecca was right? What if people saw the naked teeth of a killer every time they looked at him?

"A little thing inside you that just keeps growing and growing and if you don't get away from this house, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then bam! you'll do it again."

He half filled a mug with Scotch, knocked it back and stared at his face, green tie unknotted and hanging loose around his neck.

It might go as far as it did last time

She was wrong, he decided. She was making it up to get him away from the house. When Souness came back he turned and looked at her. "Danni?"

"Mmmm?"

"What do you think that was all about, before? You know, Peach giving me the old treatment about my eyes."

"Och Christ knows." She shrugged and bent over the workstation, closing down the computer for the night. "Ye know how they get he's probably got post-traumatic stress. Probably felt more comfortable talking to a woman, even an ugly old dyke like me." She straightened, pulled on her jacket, looked at him and smiled, clapping him on the back. "There's nothing wrong with your eyes, Jack, believe me. Ask any of the lassies in the team if there's anything wrong with your eyes and you'll get the answer." She coughed and straightened her back, running her palms down her lapels. "Except me, of course. I don't count."