Mo Hayder - The Treatment

"Zeus was a baby in a tree." Rebecca dangled her feet over the edge and smiled. "He was hung in a cradle and fed by the bees. Stop thinking about him." She grabbed his hand suddenly. "Come on, stop it. I know you're thinking about Ewan."

Caffery didn't answer. He pulled his hand from her and looked across the railway cutting.

"Jesus." She shook her head and looked up at the stars. "Can't you see what's happening? Penderecki's got you so wound up that you carry it everywhere -the more he pushes the tighter you get. You're being eaten alive by it all, by Ewan, by that…" she nodded over the railway cutting, 'that pervert."

"Not now, Rebecca '

"I mean it. Look at you a fucked-up, hunched-up, shrivelled-up miserable git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backwards through Hades by his heels and it's all because of Ewan. You're carrying him, Jack, carrying him everywhere. The smallest thing makes you explode. And now you've got a case at work that's similar '

"Rebecca '

"And now you've got a case at work that's similar and God alone knows what'll happen. How will you control yourself? Someone'll get hurt might even be you. You might even end up like Paul."

"That's enough." He held his hand up. "Enough." He knew where they were going. He knew that Paul Essex, the DS who had been part of the frantic hunt for Malcolm Bliss, stood for all Rebecca's fears about the job. Essex had died, on his back in a Kent forest, his blood soaking like bitumen into the ground, and all that Caffery had left of him was his driving licence. He'd removed it from Essex 's wallet before handing it over to his parents. Maybe Rebecca imagined that was how he, Caffery, was going to end.

"He's got nothing to do with this."

"Yes, he has." She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Because it might happen to you if you don't calm down if you can't get Ewan off your back. And you know it. You know that if you get pushed on this it might even go as far as it did last time."

He looked up. "What? What last time?"

"Ah that made you listen."

"What are you talking about?"

"He knows what I'm talking about." She smiled out into the darkness. "He knows to whom I allude."

"Becky '

"Mark my words, Jack, you'll do it again. It's like a little thing growing in you, right about…" She put a finger on his chest '… there. And it'll keep growing and growing, and if you don't get away from this house, if you don't get away from that sad old pervert over there, if you're stuck on a case that's pushing all your buttons, then bam!" you'll do it again and '

"Stop it." He pushed her hand away from his chest. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I know, Jack. I can see it in you. I know what happened in that wood."

He stared back at her, speechless. Scared to ask her what she knew. In case she said it: I know you killed Bliss. I know it wasn't an accident like everyone thinks. For a long time he was silent.

Rebecca tipped her head on one side. "Why won't you talk about it, Jack?"

"No, Rebecca," he said, pinching out the cigarette and dropping it out of the tree. His hands were shaking. "The real question is why you won't talk about it."

"Oh, no." She held up her hand. "We were talking about you."

"No. If we're going down this road then we talk about everything that happened. Those are the rules." He began to climb down out of the tree.

"Where are you going?"

"Inside. To have a run. To get away from you."

"Hey," she called, watching him walk back up the lawn in the moonlight, 'one day you'll see I'm right."

(19 July)

In the morning, the note from Penderecki was skewered on his gate, wet with dew. Penderecki had taken the time to write more than was his habit and Caffery, who would ordinarily have crumpled it and binned it, stood in the street, attache case in hand, and read.

Hello Jack.

Eerie reminders of the Yorkshire Ripper tape. It made Caffery shiver only feet from his own home on a leafy summer day with joggers, the postman and the milk float creeping along the road towards him as if someone had breathed on the back of his neck.

And now I truly know your name. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. The LORD and not YOU will call me, when it is His will and not YOURS and grant HIS healing, that the soul of His servent, at the hour of its departure from the body, may by the hands of His holy Angels be presented without spot unto Him. The sheep belong on gods right, Jack. The goat's go to the

LEFT. The sheep will receive heaven the goat's will receive hell. And from your ignorance YOU look into MY eyes and you think you see a goat. Dont you? You think I am a goat. But, GOD says the stripe of the goat is to look into the eyes of other's – (the good and the pure) and see itself looking back, think about it jack.

Caffery got into the Jag and sat breathing in the smell of leather already warm even this early in the morning. The stripe of the goat? A little something growing in him that would one day explode? Rebecca had shaken him up last night with her gloomy prognosis. He wondered if everyone could see it in his face. Could everyone see the word 'killer' scrawled in his eyes? Was he so transparent? He rubbed his temples and started the car, adjusted the mirror and put it into gear.

In Brixton the day dragged. By late afternoon he was standing outside the Lido at the edge of Brockwell Park, drinking McDonald's coffee and smoking a roll-up. He was tired and immensely depressed. The blood on the trainer matched the DNA from Rory Peach's underwear, but there was still no sign of Rory. The search team had exhausted the possibilities in and around the park; they kept going but everyone knew that the current parameters were redundant. Rumours swept among the search teams every hour or so: "They're sending us to Battersea, someone saw a lad like Rory down there, next to the river." Or "There's a nonce over at Clapham who lives right above an empty factory, half of us are going to be sent over there." The operation was now costing twenty thousand pounds a day, but the reality was that none of the hundred or so calls that had come into the incident room had given Caffery and Souness any new leads. They were walking blind, and everyone knew it.

And then, at 5.30 p.m." Souness had news. "Peach is going to make it." She came chugging along the road towards Caffery, waving her mobile in the air. "He's off the ventilator and they're letting us talk to him."

"I thought he was dying."

"I know. We're getting twenty minutes, so let's make it count."

Caffery let Souness drive his Jaguar. She did it with a wry, self-conscious smile on her sunburnt face. It wasn't a show car, nothing like the red two-seater BMW she had bought for Paulina ("She drives it like a typical bird, Jack, just like a bird. The rear-view mirror it's not for checking the traffic behind, oh, no, no, no, no! It's for having a wee deek at your lippy. Bet you never knew that.") The upholstery in the back of the Jaguar was mended with Sellotape and both front wings were retouched fibreglass filler. It wasn't something he'd aspired to owning, it was just the only car he'd been able to afford ten years ago, but Souness treated it with a touching reverence all the way to Denmark Hill.

King's Hospital's face-lift was well under way: every conversation, every exchange was overlaid with the noise of construction. Inside the hospital it was a city a law unto itself with a Forbuoy's outlet, a travel agent, a bank and a post office. The corridors were polished to a squeak, and people moved with a Fritz Lang robotic ease, smooth and determined. The consultant, Mr. Friendship, tall, in a blue shirt and patterned red tie, met them outside the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit.