The Treatment (2 page)

“What?”

“We've got something screwy.”

“What?”

“The guy stayed with them first.”

Souness frowned, tilting her chin down as if she wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. “Stayed with them?”

“That's right. Just … hung around. For almost
three days. They were tied up in there—handcuffed. DS Quinn thinks another twelve hours and one or other of them'd be dead.” He raised his eyebrows. “Worst thing's the smell.”

Souness rolled her eyes. “Oh, lovely.”

“Then there's the bullshit scrawled all over the wall.”

“Christ.” Souness sat back a little, rubbing her stubbly head with the palm of her hand. “Is it sounding like a Maudsley jobbie?”

He nodded. “Yeah. But he won't be far—the park is sealed now, we'll have him before long.” He stood to leave the van.

“Jack?” Souness stopped him. “Something else is worrying ye.”

He paused for a minute, looking at the floor, his hand on the back of his neck. It was as if she'd leaned over and peered keen-eyed through a window in his head. They liked each other, he and Souness: neither was quite sure why, but they had both fallen comfortably into this partnership. Still, there were some things he didn't choose to tell her.

“No, Danni,” he murmured eventually, reknotting his tie, not wanting to hear how much she guessed of his preoccupations. “Nothing else. Come on, let's have a shufti at the park, shall we?”

Outside, night had come to Donegal Crescent. The moon was low and red in the sky.

From the back of Donegal Crescent, Brockwell Park appeared to ramble away for miles into the distance, filling the skyline. Its upper slopes were mostly bald, only a few shabby, hairless trees across the backbone and at the highest point a clutch of exotic evergreens. But on the west slope an area about the size of four football pitches was thick with trees: bamboo and silver birch, beech and Spanish chestnut, they huddled around four stinking ponds, sucking up the dampness in the soil. There was the density of a jungle among those trees—in the summer the ponds seemed to be steaming.

At 8:30 P
.
M
.
that night, only minutes before the park
was sealed off by the police, one solitary man was not far from the ponds, shuffling among the trees, an intent expression on his face. Roland Klare's was a lonely, almost hermitic existence—with odd tempers and periods of lethargy—and sometimes, when the mood was on him, he was a collector. A human relative of the carrion beetle, to Klare nothing was disposable or beyond redemption. He knew the park well and often wandered around here looking through the bins, checking under park benches. People left him alone. He had long, rather womanly hair and a smell about him that no one liked. A familiar smell—of dirty clothes and urine.

Now he stood, with his hands in his pockets and stared at what was between his feet. It was a camera. A Pentax camera. He picked it up and looked at it carefully, holding it close to his face because the light was fading fast, examining it for damage. Roland Klare had three or four other cameras back at his flat, among the items scavenged from skips and Dumpsters. He even had bits and pieces of film developing equipment. Now quickly he put the Pentax in his pocket and shuffled his feet around in the leaves for a bit, checking the ground. There'd been a heavy summer cloudburst that morning but the sun had shone all afternoon and even the undersides of the long grass were dry against his shoes.

Two feet away lay a pair of pink rubber gloves, large ones, which he slipped into his pocket with the camera. After a while he continued on his way through the fading light. The rubber gloves, he decided, when he got them under a streetlight, were not worth keeping. Too worn. He dropped them in a skip on the Railton Road. But a camera. A camera was not to be discarded lightly.

It was a quiet evening for India 99, the twin-engined Squirrel helicopter out of Lippits Hill air base. The sun had gone down and the heat and low cloud cover made the Air Support crew headachy: they got the unit's twelve fixed tasks completed as quickly as possible—Heathrow, the Dome, Canary Wharf, several power stations including
Battersea—and were ready to switch to self-tasking when the controller came through on the tactical commander's headset. “Yeah, India nine-nine from India Lima.”

The tactical commander pulled the mouthpiece nearer. “Go ahead, India Lima.”

“Where are you?”

“We're in, uh, where?” He leaned forward a little and looked down at the lit-up city. “Wandsworth.”

“Good. India nine-eight's got an active, but they've reached endurance, grid ref: TQ3427445.”

The commander checked the map. “Is that Brockwell Park?”

“Rog. It's a missing child, ground units have got it contained, but look, lads, the DI's being straight with us, says you're a tick in the box. He can't promise the child's in the park—just a hunch—so there's no obligation.”

The commander pulled away his mouthpiece, checked his watch and looked into the front of the cockpit. The air observer and the pilot had heard the request and were holding their thumbs up for him to see. “Good.” He noted the time and the Computer Aided Dispatch Number on the assignment log and pulled his mouthpiece back into place.

“Yeah, go on, then, India Lima. It's quiet tonight— we'll have a look. Who are we speaking to?”

“An, um, an Inspector Caffery. AMIT—”

“The murder squad, you mean?”

“That's the one.”

T
HERE WERE MARKS ON
the camera casing where it had been dropped and, later, at home in his flat on the top floor of Arkaig Tower, a council block tower at the northerly tip of Brockwell Park, Roland Klare discovered that the Pentax was damaged in other, less visible ways. After wiping the casing carefully with a tea towel he attempted to wind on the film inside and found the mechanism had jammed. He fiddled with it, tried forcing it and shaking it, but he couldn't free the winder. He put the camera on the sill in the living room and stood for a while looking out the big window.

The evening sky above the park was as orange as a bonfire and somewhere in the distance he could hear a helicopter. He scratched his arms compulsively, trying to decide what to do. The only other working camera he had was a Polaroid. He'd acquired that, too, in a not totally honest fashion, but Polaroid film was expensive, so this Pentax was worth salvaging. He sighed, picked it up and tried again, struggling to unjam the mechanism, putting the camera between his legs to hold it still while he wrestled with it. But the winder wouldn't budge. After twenty minutes of fruitless struggle he was forced to admit defeat.

Frustrated and sweating now he made a note of it in the book he kept in a desk next to the window, then placed the camera in a purple Cadbury's Selection tin on the
windowsill, where, along with a neon-pink-handled screwdriver, three bottles of prescription pills, and a plastic wallet printed with a Union Jack that he'd found last week on the upper deck of the number-two bus, it would remain, its evidence wound neatly inside, for more than five days.

All prisons in London insist on being informed about any helicopter that passes. It keeps them calm. India 99, seeing the familiar glass-roofed gym and octagonal emergency control room ahead on their right, got on to channel eight and identified themselves to HMP Brixton before they continued toward the park. It was a warm and breathless night; the low cloud cover trapped the orange city light, spreading it back down across the roofs so that the helicopter seemed to be flying through a glowing layer of heat, as if its belly and rotor blades had been dipped in hot, electric orange. Now they were over Acre Lane—a long, spangled, untangled row of pearls. On they went, out over the hot, packed streets behind Brixton Water Lane, on and on, over a warren of houses and pubs, until suddenly, on a tremendous rush of air and aviation fuel—
flak flak flak FLAK
—they floated out into the clear darkness over Brockwell Park.

Someone in the dark cockpit whistled. “It's bigger than I thought.”

The three men peered dubiously down at the vast expanse of black. This unlit stretch of wood and grass in the middle of the blazing city seemed to go on forever—as if they'd left London behind and were flying over an empty ocean. Ahead, in the distance, the lights of Tulse Hill marked the farthest borders of the park, twinkling in a tiny string on the horizon.

“Jesus.” In the little dark cockpit, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, the air observer shifted uncomfortably. “How we going to do this?”

“We'll do it.” The commander checked the radio frequency card in the plastic leg pocket of his flying suit, adjusted the headset and spoke above the rotor noise to Brixton Divisional Control. “Lima Delta from India ninenine.”

“Good evening, India nine-nine. We've got a helicopter over us—is that you?”

“Roger. Request talk through with search unit on this code twenty-five.”

“Roger. Use MPS 6—go ahead, India nine-nine.”

The next voice the commander heard was DI Caffery's. “Hi there, nine-nine. We can see you. Thanks for coming.”

The air observer leaned over the thermal imaging screen. It was a bad night for it—the trapped heat was pushing the equipment to its limits, making everything on the screen the same uniform milky gray. Then he saw, in the top left-hand corner, a luminous white figure holding up its hand into the night. “OK, yes. I've got him.”

“Yeah, hello there, ground units,” the commander said into his mike. “You're more than welcome. We've got eyeball with you too.”

The observer toggled the camera and now he could see them all, the ground units, glimmering forms strung out around the perimeter of the trees. It looked like almost forty officers down there. “Jeez, they've got it well contained.”

“You've got it well contained,” the commander told DI Caffery.

“I know. Nothing's getting out of here tonight. Not without us knowing.”

“It's a large area and there's wildlife in there too, but we'll do our best.”

“Thank you.”

The tactical commander leaned into the front of the cockpit and held up his thumb. “OK, lads, let's do it.”

The pilot put the Squirrel into a right-hand orbit above the southern quarter of the park. About half a mile to the west they could see the chalky smudge of the dried-out boating lake, and from among the trees the basalt glitter of the other four lakes. They took the park in zones, moving in concentric circles five hundred feet in the air. The air observer, hunched over his screen, steeled against the deafening roar of the rotors, could see no hot spots. He toggled the controls on his laptop. The ground crews had been easy, hot and moving and outside the trees, but tonight the
thermal return was as poor as it got and anything could be hiding under that summer-leaf canopy. The equipment was virtually blind. “We'll be lucky,” he murmured to the commander, as they moved on through the rest of the park. “Peeing in the wind.” Peeing, not pissing, careful what he said—everything up here was recorded for evidence. “Peeing in the wind is what we're doing.”

On the ground, next to the TSG's Sherpa van, Caffery stood with Souness and stared up at the helicopter lights. He was relying on the air unit to crack this—to find Rory Peach. It was an hour now since the alarm had been raised. It had been the Gujarati shopkeeper who had dialed 999.

Most of the Peaches' dole money went on Carmel's Superkings—by the weekend the money had run out and there was usually a tab to be settled at the corner shop. This weekend nobody had paid off the bill so on Monday evening the shopkeeper went down Donegal Crescent to demand his money. It wasn't the first time, he'd told Caffery, and no, he wasn't afraid of Alek Peach, but he had taken the Alsatian with him anyway, and at 7:00 P
.
M
.
had rung the Peaches' doorbell. No reply. He knocked loudly but still there was no reply. Reluctantly he continued into the park with the dog.

They walked along the back gardens of Donegal Crescent and were some distance into the park when the Alsatian turned suddenly and began to bark in the direction of the houses. The shopkeeper turned. He thought, although he wouldn't swear to it, he
thought
he saw something running there. Shadowy and wide-beamed. Moving rapidly away from the back of the Peaches' house. His first impression was that it was an animal, because of how furiously and nervously the Alsatian was barking, straining at the lead, but the shadow had disappeared quickly into the woods. Curious now, he dragged the reluctant dog back to number thirty and peered through the letter box.