The Treatment (35 page)

Peach's eyes fluttered. His head moved and a small groan escaped him.

“I don't give a shit if you're not well enough to talk to me, I don't give a shit.”

Above the bed the heart monitor began to stammer. Somewhere, in some distant nurses' station, Caffery could hear it trigger an alarm. He moved even closer until he felt he was almost inside Peach's ear. “If it's you and you've got someone else, you're going to tell me who. I don't care if
you
die but I'm
not
going to let it happen to someone else.”

Peach's face suddenly changed. He licked his lips with a pale tongue. He blinked once or twice then snapped his eyes open, rolling them sideways. Caffery almost took a step back, there was such anger, such empty malice in his eyes. Then Peach's mouth began to move. His voice was whispery—too low to be heard above the machines.

“What? Say it again, you little shit.”

A nurse, summoned from the coffee room by the monitor alarms, appeared, shocked-faced, in the doorway. “Sir! Please, we have to ask you to leave—” In the ward outside someone was shouting about getting Security. “Sir—please!” But Peach's mouth was still moving, and Caffery bent nearer, straining to hear what he was saying.

“What? Say it again.”

Just as the unit manager arrived, just as Caffery knew he was going to be thrown out, Peach opened his mouth one more time, and this time was loud enough to hear: “Fuck you,” he was saying. “
Fuck you
.”

The slit in the pipe was weeping, not even a trickle, more a slow, barely perceptible ballooning—a single drop seemed to take several minutes to form. Nevertheless Benedicte fastened her mouth to it and sucked. It was only enough to wet her tongue and leave its metallic taste in her mouth, but she pressed her cracked lips to it with the desperation of a baby, forming a vacuum, and slowly, painfully drew another weak drop onto her tongue. She pushed her body nearer, hugging the radiator with one arm, working it, working it, but after twenty minutes, and less than a thimbleful of water, she was exhausted. She dropped on her back, panting. “Oh, shit.”

It took a long time to get her breath back. When she had, she brought Smurf to the pipe and tried to encourage her to drink, but the Labrador just turned her head away and sighed. “Okay, Smurf, you stay there.” It hadn't been much water, but Ben felt stronger, knowing what she'd achieved. “Won't be long now.”

She turned her attention back to the boards. In the planks between her hands there was a join, a knothole on the inner edge of one. She could widen it enough to get her fingers in. And if that didn't work she'd already made up her mind: she was going to use the grip rod to saw through her ankle. The thought didn't even make her feel ill.

The incident room was buzzing. The team was rested, and now that they had new leads they were ready to roll. Caffery
had been home for a shower and a change of clothes—no sign, he noticed, that Rebecca had been there. Now he was refreshed, feeling clean under his arms and in his hair. He was determined to speak to Peach again, get some space, get a little leverage going. If Mr. Friendship wouldn't listen to him, maybe he'd listen to Souness.

He arrived in the incident room just as Kryotos's phone was ringing. She leaned over and hooked up the receiver on one finger. “Yup?” She tucked it between her chin and her shoulder, and put both hands on the desk, staring down at a pile of forms as she listened. Caffery came and stood next to her, looking at her face. “For you,” she mouthed.

“OK. In my office.”

She put the call through. In the SIOs' office he nodded at Souness and caught up the phone.

“DI.”

“Jack,” Fiona Quinn was breathless, “wanted you to be the first to know. That DNA's come back.”

“Jesus.” He closed the door and pulled the chair up to the desk, his heart pounding. “And?”

“And we got a full male profile.
Full
. Came up as bright as the Oxford Street Christmas lights.”

Caffery clicked his fingers frantically at Souness. She looked up in surprise.

“
What?
”

“
DNA,
” he mouthed, his hand over the receiver.

She used her heels to rodeo the chair over to his desk. She sat close to him, trying to overhear the conversation. He almost had to keep her from grabbing the phone.

“What've we got, Fiona?”

“You're not going to believe it.”

“I might. Try me.”

The sky over Brockwell Park was a calm, pearly blue, only a few clouds strung along the horizon, as if they were heavier than the blue color and had sunk down to the edges. Roland Klare could have seen the sky through his window, but at the moment he wasn't interested in patterns in the sky: he was farther back in the flat, in the
cupboard, bathed in red light, tongue between his teeth as he cut the negatives and placed the first in the enlarger.

He knew he was getting close and had to stop his knee from jerking in a nervous tic as he moved the lamphouse up and down, trying to get the print to fit on the paper. He adjusted the focus, switched off the red bulb and flicked on the enlarger light. A triangle of white flooded down onto the paper, perfect against the blackness of the cup-board—just as it appeared in the book. The timer was broken but Klare was ready—he had read somewhere that the word “photography” equaled one second, so he sat on the stool, staring down at the paper, his hands between his knees, and muttered the words out loud: “One photography, two photography, three photography.” When the twenty seconds he'd calculated were up he switched off the enlarger light and, illuminated only by the red safelight, carried the paper over to the litter tray, where he'd prepared the developing solution. He stood over it, swirling the paper around, keeping count in his head, peering down at the magical picture creeping across the paper.

“A hundred and two photography, a hundred and three photography, a hundred and—” He stopped counting. The print was taking shape. It was still blurry, and it was too dark in this light to see properly, so he quickly splashed around some stop bath and fixer—hardly able to keep still as he waited for the allotted time—then carried the dripping print into the kitchen, ran it under the tap and peered at it. The picture was a little hazy, either from the damaged enlarger or maybe because the original hadn't been properly focused. Heart thumping now, Klare took it to the living room window and held it up to the sunlight.

T
HE WARD HAD SETTLED NOW
and was quiet, the only noise the whir of syringe drivers, the occasional equipment alarm. It was a warm day and the window in the nurses' room was open a crack, the curtains lifting as a mild summer breeze moved through the ward. Ten minutes before lunch one of the staff slipped silently along the ward. She stopped outside the private room, as if something had just struck her, and stood for a moment, one foot stretched out slightly behind the other, then turned the handle and went in, closing the door behind her. Less than a minute later the door opened and the same woman came out. She headed quickly away from the room, her body stiffer than before, her pace suddenly abrupt.

Ayo thought herself a good nurse: a nurse of the critically ill, she rarely had a problem finding the human vibration in everyone, never had any problem reaching under the wires and tubes and finding the warm, pulsing soul. But when she had pushed the door open and looked at Alek Peach lying on the bed—
well, Alek Peach was like no one I've ever seen
… it was as if there was a shell lying on the bed, an empty husk. He breathed, his heart moved, his vital functions were good, sound—but the warmth had gone from him. It had all leaked away.

Ayo wondered where her compassion had gone. When
he opened one eye and fixed it on her she instinctively took a hurried step backward. He frightened her. Quickly, before he could speak, she had left the room, and now, as she marched up the ward, she decided she was going to ask Detective Inspector Caffery what he wanted with Peach, exactly why they needed an armed officer at the end of the ward, why he had lied to her just to get into the private room. The police usually only mounted a guard if the patient was the victim of a drugs feud and needed protection. Or if he was a suspect.

That thought made her stop and turn to look back to Peach's room. Beyond the glass door a shadow moved. It was just a nurse in there, changing drips, but still it made Ayo stiffen.
Bloody hell, Ayo, apologize to that detective— say you're sorry about the business this morning, that you had to take orders from above, and then maybe you should tell him about your mad brain and how it's run away with ideas.

Yes—that would give her something to tell Benedicte when she got back: “
I only went and told the bloody police, didn't I?
” She could picture it: the Churches, exhausted from the journey, pulling up in the driveway, the car covered in sand, looking up and seeing their front door kicked in, police tape all over the place. “
I'm so embarrassed, Ben, but I'd found out something weird, I found out that Rory Peach had been peeing on things in the house—you know, like Josh did. God, Ben, I'm such a drama queen—I'm sorry.
”

She tried to shake it off, clear her mind—
for God's sake, girl, get a grip, your poor child is going to have a wild woman for a mother
—but she couldn't escape the feeling that Peach's eyes were following her, could reach her, even out here.

“Oh!” The photograph Roland Klare was holding up to the window showed a man having intercourse with a boy. In fact the man was forcing intercourse on a young boy— that was clear from the child's expression, and from his posture. The man's face was blurred, slightly tilted on one
side, but it was a face that Roland Klare had seen a lot of recently. It had been all over the news this week. It was Alek Peach's face.

At that moment, hundreds of feet below, a policeman on his beat walked along the front of Arkaig Tower and, suddenly nervous, Klare closed the curtains. He couldn't be seen all the way up here in the sky, he knew that, but nevertheless he felt safer taking the photograph to the sofa, where he sat and stared at it, his heart pounding.

The team was amazed. The DNA found on Rory belonged to his father, Alek. And there was more: the fibers that had fluoresced under the CrimeScope light in Rory's wounds had been identified: they had come from the T-shirt Peach had been wearing during the supposed attack on his family. Although he had claimed not to have seen or heard his son the entire time they were kept in the house, somehow fibers from his T-shirt had got underneath the ropes binding his son. And now that the team was starting to ask questions about him, they had weeded out a couple of people who had always wondered—
just a suspicion, mind
— whether Mr. Peach hadn't been in the habit of clouting Rory once in a while.

“The clanging of things falling into place is deafening.” Souness was at her computer, firing off e-mails, sucking on a can of Dr Pepper. She looked up at Caffery standing in the doorway of the SIOs' room. “What? You got nothing better to do than stand around wi' a gob on?”

“Danni.” He closed the door and came in. “Look—”

“Oh God,” she sighed, “I know you so well—you want something, don't you?”

“I want you to speak to that prick down at King's for me. Friendship. He won't give me the time of day, won't let me speak to Peach.”

“Don't worry about that, Jack. Give Alek time to get better, then we'll come down on him.” But she saw that that wasn't going to be enough for him, so she pushed away the keyboard, leaned back in her chair, her hands
folded across her stomach. “Jack? You've not
arrested
him, have you? Before he went into hospital?”

“No.”

“So we're not eating into our detention time?”

“No.”

“And he's under guard and not going anywhere?”

“That's right.”

She opened her hands. “Then what's up? Why the urgency? Let the consultant take his own sweet time.”

“Oh, God …” He fell into his seat and rubbed his eyes. “Look—I don't know
how
I know, but I promise you it's not that simple.” He sat forward, steepling his hands and pointing them at her. “I am so sure he's got someone else, Danni. Once he's safe inside a house, got everyone safe and gagged, he can come and go as he likes—”