Mo Hayder: The Treatment

"What things?"

"It isn't a custody kidnap. He's their child no exes involved."

"A tiger, then?"

"Not a tiger either." Tiger kidnaps meant ransom demands and the Peaches were not in an extortionist's financial league. "And, anyway, when you look at what else went on you'll know it's not bog standard."

"Eh?"

Caffery looked around at the journalists at the neighbours. "Let's go in the van, eh?" He put his hand on Souness's back. "I don't want an audience."

"Come on, then." She hefted herself inside the SSCU's van and Caffery followed, reaching up to grip the roof rim and swinging himself inside. Spades, cutting equipment and tread plates hung from the walls, a samples refrigerator hummed gently in the corner. He closed the door, hooked a stool over with his foot and handed it to her. She sat down and he sat opposite, feet apart, elbows on his knees, looking at her carefully.

"What?"

"We've got something screwy."

"What?"

"The guy stayed with them first."

Souness frowned, tilting her chin down as if she wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. "Stayed with them?"

"That's right. Just hung around. For almost three days. They were tied up in there handcuffed no food and water. DS Quinn thinks another twelve hours and one or other of them'd be dead." He raised his eyebrows. "Worst thing's the smell."

Souness rolled her eyes. "Oh, lovely."

"Then there's the bullshit scrawled all over the wall."

"Christ." Souness sat back a little, rubbing her stubbly head with the palm of her hand. "Is it sounding like a Maudsley jobbie?"

He nodded. "Yeah. But he won't be far the park is sealed now, we'll have him before long."

He stood to leave the van. "Jack?" Souness stopped him. "Something else is worrying ye."

He paused for a minute, looking at the floor, his hand on the back of his neck. It was as if she'd leaned over and peered keen-eyed through a window in his head. They liked each other, he and Souness: neither was quite sure why, but they had both fallen comfortably into this partnership. Still, there were some things he didn't choose to tell her.

"No, Danni," he murmured eventually, re knotting his tie, not wanting to hear how much she guessed of his preoccupations. "Come on, let's have a shufti at the park, shall we?"

Outside, night had come to Donegal Crescent. The moon was low and red in the sky.

From the back of Donegal Crescent, Brockwell Park appeared to ramble away for miles into the distance, filling the skyline. Its upper slopes were mostly bald, only a few shabby, hairless trees across the backbone and at the highest point a clutch of exotic evergreens, but on the west slope an area about the size of four football pitches was thick with trees: bamboo and silver birch, beech and Spanish chestnut, they huddled around four stinking ponds, sucking up the dampness in the soil. There was the density of a jungle among those trees in the summer the ponds seemed to be steaming.

At 8.30 p.m. that night, only minutes before the park was sealed off by the police, one solitary man was not far from the ponds, shuffling among the trees, an intent expression on his face. Roland Klare's was a lonely, almost hermitic existence with odd tempers and periods of lethargy and sometimes, when the mood was on him, he was a collector. A human relative of the carrion beetle, to Klare nothing was disposable or beyond redemption. He knew the park well and often wandered around here looking through the bins, checking under park benches. People left him alone. He had long, rather womanly hair, and a smell about him that no one liked. A familiar smell of dirty clothes and urine.

Now he stood, with his hands in his pockets, and stared at what was between his feet. It was a camera. A Pentax camera. Old and battered. He picked it up and looked at it carefully, holding it close to his face because the light was fading fast, examining it for damage. Roland Klare had four or five other cameras back at his flat, among the items scavenged from skips and dumpsters. He even had bits and pieces of film-developing equipment. Now quickly he put the Pentax in his pocket and shuffled his feet around in the leaves for a bit, checking the ground. There'd been a summer cloudburst that morning, but the sun had been out all afternoon and even the undersides of the long grass were dry against his shoes. Two feet away lay a pair of pink rubber gloves, large ones, which he slipped into his pocket with the camera. After a while he continued on his way through the fading light. The rubber gloves, he decided when he got them under a street-light, were not worth keeping. Too worn. He dropped them in a skip on the Railton Road. But a camera. A camera was not to be discarded lightly.

It was a quiet evening for India 99, the twin-engined Squirrel helicopter out of Lippits Hill air base. The sun had gone down and the heat and low cloud cover made the Air Support crew headachy: they got the unit's twelve fixed tasks completed as quickly as possible Heathrow, the Dome, Canary Wharf, several power stations including Battersea and were ready to switch to self-tasking when the controller came through on the tactical commander's headset. "Yeah, India nine nine from India Lima."

The tactical commander pulled the mouthpiece nearer. "Go ahead, India Lima."

"Where are you?"

"We're in, uh, where?" He leaned forward a little and looked down at the lit-up city. "Wandsworth."

"Good. India nine eight's got an active, but they've reached endurance, grid ref: TQ3427445."

The commander checked the map. "Is that Brockwell Park?"

"Rog. It's a missing child, ground units have got it contained, but look, lads, the DI's being straight with us, says you're a tick in the box. He can't promise the child's in the park just a hunch so there's no obligation."

The commander pulled away his mouthpiece, checked his watch and looked into the front of the cockpit. The air observer and the pilot had heard the request and were holding their thumbs up for him to see. Good. He noted the time and the Computer Aided Dispatch number on the assignment log and pulled his mouthpiece back into place.

"Yeah, go on, then, India Lima. It's quiet tonight -we'll have a look. Who are we speaking to?"

"An, um, an Inspector Caffery. AMIT '

"The murder squad, you mean?"

"That's the one."

There were marks on the camera casing where it had been dropped and, later, at home in his flat on the top floor of Arkaig Tower, a council block at the northerly tip of Brockwell Park, Roland Klare discovered that the Pentax was damaged in other, less visible ways. After wiping the casing carefully with a tea-towel he attempted to wind on the film inside and found the mechanism had jammed. He fiddled with it, tried forcing it and shaking it, but he couldn't free the winder. He put the camera on the sill in the living room and stood for a while looking out of the big window.

The evening sky above the park was orange like a bonfire and somewhere in the distance he could hear a helicopter. He scratched his arms compulsively, trying to decide what to do. The only other working camera he had was a Polaroid. He'd acquired that, too, in a not totally honest fashion, but Polaroid film was expensive, so this Pentax was worth salvaging. He sighed, picked it up and tried again, struggling to un jam the mechanism, putting the camera between his legs to hold it still while he wrestled with it, but after twenty minutes of fruitless struggle he was forced to admit defeat.

Frustrated and sweating now, he made a note of it in the book he kept in a desk next to the window, then placed the camera in a purple Cadbury's Selection tin on the window-sill where, along with a neon-pink-handled screwdriver, three bottles of prescription pills, and a plastic wallet printed with a Union Jack that he'd found last week on the upper deck of the number two, it would remain, its evidence wound neatly inside, for more than five days.