The Treatment (8 page)

“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 somberly, 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 pushed 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 were 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 Aran 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 color, 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 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 onto her back. “Hello.” He leaned over and began to scratch her, when something just above his field of vision, something in the woods, moved suddenly. He half sat up. 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 center—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 Tracey 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 halfway 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 coloring 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 kid's 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 SIOs' office. “Does that mean anything to you? A troll?”

“Eh?” Souness ran the palm of her hand over her bristly buzz 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 kept going on about a troll— everywhere I went.”

“The only troll I know is San Francisco slang—an old queen who likes his chickens. His babies. 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.”

“You got the message about the photos?” he said. “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?” He sat, chin resting on his hand, and stared at his reflection superimposed over the long strings of London lights. 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 onto it. Toolsheds were searched, garages, empty property. Still no Rory. Every resident was questioned carefully but no one had seen anything. Rory Peach, it seemed, had disap
peared 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 eas-ily—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 nosedive 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 unpopped the top button of her trousers, getting her stomach comfortable for the first time that day. “What I meant 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 Pen-derecki—when he—well, let's not go into
that
now, eh? But Paulina still gets little bits of intelligence on him coming through the pedo 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-eight-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 toward him. “Welcome to my nightmare, DCI Souness. It's nice to know you've been enjoying it for so long.”

“Ah, 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,
Deee
tective Caffery.”

“Yeah.” He stared into the mug. There was a driedcoffee rim halfway 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, Jack, 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, yaddayadda.”

“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 bampot, 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 SIOs' 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 col-lator'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, coloring, and turned away. “CRIS and the collators. A fifty/twenty on its way.”

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
looove
it! I'm getting laid by the Met's pinup 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? ’ ”