The Treatment (25 page)

She put down her coffee and came over. “What's up?”

“Marilyn,” he murmured, “you got any Advil?”

“You look like you need it—stay there.”

She went back to her desk and began rummaging in the drawers. An unnoticed window in the corner had been left open and the desk beneath was being sprinkled with the rain. He turned to go back into the SIOs' room, scratching his neck with a ballpoint, when suddenly, as if someone had called his name from behind, he stopped. He turned slowly to stare at the opened window. When Kryotos found the Advil and straightened up she saw that he had come back into the incident room and was standing in the corner, staring at the water-damaged paper.

“Ooops,” she said, hurrying over to close the window and look through the papers. “Nothing serious—no lives lost. Here.” She held out the painkillers.

He took them from her, then put his hand on her arm and led her into the SIOs' room, sitting her down opposite him. “Marilyn.”

“What?”

“How many cloudbursts do you think we've had this week?”

“God knows. About a hundred.”

“When was the really bad one? The one with the thunder?”

“The day before yesterday, you mean?”

“No—before that.”

“Last weekend—it rained all weekend. And Monday.”

“Monday too. Yeah. I remember.” It had been an almost tropical storm. Afterward London smelled of the sea. “The day we found the Peaches.”

“That's right. Why?”

“Oh …” He chucked the tablets into his mouth and swallowed, rubbing his forehead, not certain himself. “Oh, nothing. Nothing.”

Caffery went to Donegal Crescent to speak to the Gujarati shopkeeper who had raised the alarm. He asked for tobacco, then showed his card—“Remember me?”—and started to ask questions. He wanted to know what had made the dog start barking.

“I told you, the dog saw something running away. From the back of the house.”

“But you were walking in the opposite direction and you were more than a hundred yards away. That's good hearing by anyone's standard.”

The man blinked a couple of times then turned and fumbled for the tobacco. Even from the back Caffery could see he was trying to think what to say.

He tried again. “Maybe something made the dog turn round.”

The shopkeeper turned back. He put the tobacco down and straightened the pile of
Evening Standards
on the counter, shaking his head. “You won't confuse me. You won't. I was walking away and the dog looked round.”

“Why?”

“Maybe there was a noise.”

“It must have been a loud noise. You were a good distance from the Peaches' house so it must have been louder than just the sound of someone running.”

The shopkeeper nodded. “Something louder than that.”

“Maybe it was glass breaking?”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Maybe something like that. I didn't hear it, but the dog did. And then he started barking. That's all.”

“That …” Caffery found change in his pocket and paid for the tobacco. He might have smiled but the Advil wasn't working yet. “That's what I thought.” Now he knew what was bothering him.

Benedicte was in a room, the spare room on the first floor, her room—she recognized the curtains and the scalloped light shade and the smell of new carpet. Her heart was pounding so hard it seemed to be throwing her brain around her skull.

“Hal?”

Is there someone in here?

“Hal?”

No answer. She tried to sit up but the room jolted to one side, moving in a rolling, maritime gait, and she toppled forward onto her face, slamming her shoulder on the floor, grazing a sheet of skin from her cheek. For a moment she lay panting, her eyes rolling around in her head.

“
HAA-A-L! Hal, for Christ's sake, Hal!
”

There was blood on her tongue. “HAL!” She tried to crawl toward the door and realized something was stopping her. She whipped round, her heart hammering, and saw that her ankle was attached to the radiator by a silver cuff. Handcuffs?
Someone's been in the house. It isn't a dream. Someone's been in the house. That dark thing I saw
—And then, with a sick rush she understood.
Oh, God;
a frantic thump in her stomach, the Peach family, the police detective—
No harm in being aware
—Josh screaming that there was a troll in the garden—
the Peach fam-ily—and that meant
…

“Josh?” She jerked forward, clawing in the direction of the door, yanking at the handcuff. “JOSH! Oh, my God,
Josh—Hal!
” She wrenched her foot, shaking it, tugging it, jamming her free foot into the skirting board and pushing back. “
Josh!
” And then, when she couldn't move from the radiator, she lost all sense of logic and began to throw her
weight against the floor, volleying off it, ramming her fists blindly into the floor. “
JO-SH!!!
”

In the silvery, brand-new millennium, where everything was freshly stamped and newly named, and no one went to sleep safe in the knowledge he'd have the same job title by morning, AMIT, which had once been known as the murder team, was under new management: now part of the Serious Crime Operations Group, their chain of command was direct from the deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard and Souness had gone up to Victoria for a meeting with him—“Prayers” she called it, for the reverent expression she had to wear in his presence. She always had a lot to gripe about after a meeting with the DAC. Today she arrived only a few minutes after Caffery got back from Donegal Crescent. She came in carrying a pile of dockets, her mobile phone and a McDonald's coffee balanced on top. She put it all down on the desk and was starting on her gripe, when she noticed how Caffery was watching her—tipped back in his chair, arms crossed, waiting for her to finish so he could speak. “Oh,” she groaned, seeing his expression, “what now?”

“Doing anything tonight?”

“Uh …” She pulled off her jacket and plugged in the mobile to charge it. “Let me see, do you mean was I doing anything before I saw the look you've got on your face?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“I was taking Paulina to the fair on Blackheath.”

“Will you come over to Donegal Crescent with me? I don't want to screw up things at home for you, but I think it's important.”

“Uh …” She looked at him sideways, thinking about this, clicking her tongue and scratching her head. After a while she sighed and hitched up her trousers. “See me— ever the professional. Come on, then—let me go for a quick piss and call Paulina, then I'll be with you.”

Benedicte lay exhausted and shivering, unable to believe that she was still breathing in and out. Tears ran off her
face, into her hair. She had flung herself so hard against the floor and the radiator that she'd cut her arm—there was blood on the radiator, the walls, the carpet.

“Josh.” She wept. “Hal.” Any number of awful eventualities she could brew up in a second—Josh already dead, Josh wedged into the branches of a tree, Josh ambushed by that creature of his imagination: the troll. “Stop it,” she muttered, dropping her hand over her eyes. “There is no such thing as a troll.… Just get yourself together.”

But how did he get in? Was the front door open? The front door must have been open—and Hal? What happened to you?
But from the color of the light beyond the curtain, the sulfur-yellow of street lamps, and the silence, Benedicte knew it was night. Although it had seemed like only a few moments of unconsciousness she had, in fact, been here all day. And if it was night, and if Hal still hadn't come to get her, she knew it was because he couldn't come to get her.

She wriggled onto her back and pushed her hand inside her capri pants, creeping them inside her knickers to feel herself. Normal. Not sticky or wet. She squeezed her inner thighs. No bruises, no pain. She touched the soft flesh around her armpits and found it was bruised. Aching. Someone had dragged her up here—all the way up the stairs. Now she remembered her shoulders banging on the hard floor—
and that's exactly what he did to Carmel Peach: she was taken upstairs and Rory and his dad were kept downstairs, that's what the papers all said.

“Hal?” She turned her face to the floor and cupped her hands around her mouth. “
Hal? Josh? Can you hear me?
”

Silence.

She pressed her ear to the carpet, straining to hear a flicker of her child in the house below. The same way she had once held her breath and waited to feel his movement in her womb—just a small movement would be enough.

“JOSH?”

Silence.

Oh. God.
—Nothing but silence. She wiped her eyes.

“JOSH!” Her voice was hollow, she yelled like an abandoned child. “JOSH? HAL?”

Caffery, pulling off the main road and into Donegal Crescent, suddenly braked. He unwound the window and looked up into the evening sky.

“What was that?”

“What was
what
?”

“Didn't you hear something?”

Souness opened the window and put out her head. It was almost dark but kids were still out with their bikes, playing under the streetlights. “What was it?”

He shook his head. “I dunno.” He listened again. But now all he could hear was the
thump-thump-thump
of speed garage from an open window on the main road, the children with the bikes shouting to one another and the distant
peep-peep-peep
of crickets in the park.

Your imagination's on fire
—

“Jack?”

“No. I'm imagining things.” He closed the window. “Nothing.” He parked the old Jaguar next to a Lambeth Council Dumpster, reached across Souness into the glove compartment, pulled out a flashlight and showed it to her. “In case the 'lectricity is on a key.”

“Aye, you should have been in the Special Service, son.”

The houses in Donegal Crescent were curiously som-nolent—curtains drawn, windows closed, as if even on this hot night the residents were trying to close out the truth, pretend the witness-appeal signs weren't lined up the road. Number thirty was different from the others. It wasn't the blue-and-white police tape, it wasn't the fact that there was a couple standing, arm in arm, looking at it like solemn tourists paying respect at a military grave. It was the simple, bald fact of what had happened here. The Property Services Department had cleaned up, put a new lock on the door—the Met would try to claim the expenses from the Peaches' insurance, if they had any—but the Peaches had not been back to the house, not even to pick up belongings, and now kids had graffitied the walls. On
the left of the door, just above a purple hebe, two words were written in black spray: TROLL'S HOUSE.

When Souness, standing on the doorstep, saw the words she began to stamp her feet as if they were cold.

“What's the matter?”

“Uh—nothing.” She rubbed her nose. “Really, I'm fine.”

“You ready?”

“Of course. Of course I'm ready.”

He broke the seal and used DS Quinn's padlock key. Neither of them spoke. The hallway was dark. To their left, in the living room, the dull glow of streetlights came through a gap in the curtains and lay in a faint stripe across the sofa. Caffery felt for the light switch, but it clicked up and down emptily. The light was dead and somewhere in the darkness ahead the key meter bleeped.

“Told you.”

“Aye, you did.”

He shone the torch into the hallway, playing the beam up the stairs and around the walls.
This is where it happened
. His neck prickled suddenly as if the air had moved and he had to resist the urge to shine the torch into the living room to check that they were alone in the house. The hallway was small, walls pale, decorated with two seascape prints, both knocked off center. He was aware of his face momentarily reflected in the glass as he moved down the hallway to the kitchen, the torch playing in front of him.

The meter was next to the cooker. He pulled out the key, pushed it back in, and with a sudden
whump
and whir the house came alive. The fridge started, the light in the hallway came on and Souness appeared in the doorway blinking, disoriented, looking around this normal, yellow-and-white kitchen with the toaster on the worktop and the opened packet of Coco Pops on the fridge. The SSCU's fingerprint dust was everywhere—on the fridge, the door, the window frame: purplish puffs of ninhydrin on the wallpaper, silver nitrate on the cupboards. The scent of pine from the board on the window partly masked the smell of old blood. Souness and Caffery stood silently
in the kitchen, their faces odd, embarrassed to be here, thinking of what the Peach family had gone through in this house.

Benedicte was shaking, exhausted from screaming, blinking at her cuffed foot in the navy canvas deck shoe. Now that she had stopped struggling, now that the room and the house were silent, she was aware of a new sound. A strained, rasping sound that she hadn't noticed in her panic. It was coming from the wardrobe.

Oh, Jesus,
she shivered,
what the …?

She crawled as far as the cuff would allow then dropped onto her stomach and snaked her body forward, like a landed eel, moving in silence, just the hush and shush of the carpet against her trousers, until she could reach the bottom of the wardrobe door with her fingertips. She scrabbled at the door with her fingernails, straining forward until the door swung open.

“Oh—” Something was propped inside the cupboard. One crabbed shape against the far wall. Benedicte recoiled, pushing herself back against the radiator. “
Smurf ?
” In the cupboard the dark thing moved a little.

“
Smurf ?
”

The old Labrador struggled feebly to her feet, the air in her lungs whistling noisily, her claws tapping at the floor of the wardrobe. She came hobbling out, wheezing and whimpering, careful not to put weight on the right front paw. Benedicte saw instantly that the leg was swinging, like a pendulum, from a point above the knee. The Labrador limped across the room and dropped with a sigh into the curled crook of Ben's body.
Oh, my God, Smurf, what's he done to you?
She raced her hands across the dog's coat, down the knobbly legs with their tired old tendons, the little horny dewclaw at the back of the ankle, until she found the reflective glimmer of wet fur—a soft, hot area. The bone must have cracked, pierced the skin and re-tracted—when she touched it Smurf whimpered and tried to pull away.