Mo Hayder - The Treatment

"I thought I was constantly pissed off?"

"No. You're constantly randy is what you are. Pissed off is what you do between having hard-ons."

"Come here." He pulled her astride his lap and worked his hands up her T-shirt. "Did you see Time Out?"

"I know." She began to unbutton his shirt, closing her eyes when he found her nipples and worked them between his thumb and forefinger. "How ace am I, then, eh?" she murmured dreamily, her head back. "Oh, God, that's nice. Did you read it, then?"

"Yes. I'm proud of you."

But he was lying. He shuffled down the sofa a few inches and moved his hands across her skin, like oil against his hard fingers, down the whole width of her pelvis, and the long fierce muscles of her stomach. Rebecca had told him that her body had changed since her artwork had taken off she said her skin was smoother, her waist thinner; that she didn't get calluses on her feet any more and that these days she walked more slowly. But what Caffery saw was the opposite: a hardening, a quickening. And he knew it dated back to the assault. To Bliss.

Reflecting this switch came the new artwork, the sculptures. Before the assault Rebecca's work had been something quite different. Now the colours had disappeared and her work was sharper.

Something in her had shifted, but she still wanted Jack and here he was, still hopelessly and helplessly attracted to her, in love with her in spite of how she had changed she was the sweet weight in his heart and in his cock. Just the smell of one of her cigarillos in an ashtray could give him a hard-on.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her face above him, eyes closed, a calm, distant smile on her face. I should close the curtains, he thought distantly, looked at the dark window, and saw the white smudge of a face, a snout-like impression and the telltale frosting of excited breath on the panes

"Shit!" He pulled Rebecca's T-shirt down.

"What?"

"Move it. Quick."

Rolling her away, he sprang to his feet, and slammed open the french windows. Penderecki had reached the foot of the garden, running for the back fence. Caffery sprinted the forty feet in seconds, but Penderecki was prepared: he had brought a green plastic milk crate that he used to hike himself over the back fence, and scurried away into the undergrowth of the railway cutting, leaving behind just the crate and the sound of his wheezing trailing in the air. Caffery, shoeless, shirt undone, picked up the crate and threw it after him.

lDo that again and I will kill you." He stood in the garden his mother had planted, watching the larval shape of the old man scuttling away through the undergrowth. "I mean it I've got your blood in my mouth, Penderecki." He dropped his hands on the wire fence, letting his breathing slow, trying not to be drawn, trying to pull his anger back in. "I've got your blood."

It's just a new way of him disturbing the silt. Ignore it. Ignore it

He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbour's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you. Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them.

Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan had survived and lived as Penderecki's lover until he had suddenly, spontaneously stopped breathing one night; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a paedophile himself, operating from Amsterdam… Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will. It was his work to ignore them all.

Someone touched his shoulders. He started. "Rebecca." He shook his head. "I'm sorry." He was still shaking with anger.

"Not your fault. He's a little shit."

"He's baiting me."

"I know." She kissed his back. "He makes it difficult."

"Yeah, well." He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. "He's always made it difficult."

She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in

Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep:

Dear Jack

After 27 years it is now time to tell you the truth what happened with you're brother and you will know when I tell you that I am teling you the TRUTH, the most truthful thing not because I am sorry for you no but because I have 'remorse' and because you deserve to have the truth told you.

He was not in pain Jack and not sc aired because he wanted it. When I depuced him and when I told him to suck on my cock he did it because he wanted it. He told me he would do anything for me, even would eat my doings if you know what I am saying because he loved me so much. This sounds crude to you and to me but it is the words of you're brother jack you're only brother and so I know you will see these words are SACRED and not think that I invented them. And anyway I should tell you the end came because it was an acident and no more than an ACIDENT and not because I wanted a bad thing for you're brother but because it was an acident. He is at peace now. GOD BLESS US ALL.

And now this spying, this creeping around his garden. Caffery rolled a cigarette. He hated Penderecki for keeping up the pressure, hated him for the constant reminders. Rebecca kissed his back again and wandered away, over to the old beech at the foot of the garden. She pressed her palms against the trunk. "This is where the tree-house was, am I right?"

"Yes." He lowered his head and lit the cigarette.

"Then…" She rested her ear against the tree-trunk, as if listening for a pulse, and looked upwards, into the spreading branches. "How did you oh, I see."

"Rebecca '

But before he could stop her she was monkeying up the trunk using the iron hand-holds his father had nailed into it for his two sons. She crouched like a gnome in the elbow of a branch. Astonishing how a tree can cup a human body, he thought, looking up at her. Strange that we ever crawled down, traded the leaves and nooks for the wide uncertainties of the prairie. "Come on," she called. "It's great up here." He put the cigarette between his teeth and followed reluctantly, feeling the familiar irregularities of the iron loops against his palms. The night was clear, the sky sprinkled with stars. When he came level with Rebecca he leaned back against the branch, facing her, his feet braced against the trunk, the bark husky and warm against his soles. Behind her, above the houses, the green millennium laser on Greenwich Park sliced the great dome of black.

"Good, isn't it?"

"Maybe…"

He rarely came up here. Once a year, maybe, and not at all since Rebecca. He thought that she wouldn't want him sitting up here dwelling on everything. The view didn't change much. Still the long scar of the railway. Still Penderecki's house on the other side: unpainted for years, the guttering hanging so that the back of the house was coated in moss: as incongruous in the terrace of cared-for houses as the boarded-up house next to the Peaches'.

OK, he stopped himself, no more connections like that. Rory isn't Ewan and Ewan isn't Rory. Get it straight.