Mo Hayder - The Treatment

"What're prolactins?"

"I don't fucking know, do I?" She closed the book, put it in her pocket. "We'll get it back to Shrivemoor and have a proper look. It might tell us where those poor wee fuckers are." She looked around the deserted streets. "Now. Where did we put the car?"

They arranged an emergency meeting to hammer out plans for hunting down Roland Klare, and while they waited for everyone to arrive they made coffee, sat in the SIO's room and Caffery called Rebecca to make his excuses "No, honestly, Jack, it's OK. I'm watching Eurotrash repeats anyway." He wanted to kiss her for it. Souness called Paulina with the same story and as she talked Caffery sat, staring at his reflection in the window, listening to the conversation, waiting to hear his name mentioned. But it wasn't, and when Souness put down the phone she immediately turned her attention to the book. He was relieved the silent pact held; Roland Klare was all they were going to talk about tonight.

They sat, shoulder to shoulder, like children at school, and read "The Treatment' from cover to cover, hardly exchanging a word. They knew they were looking at the minute cataloguing of Klare's mind, his reasoning scraped out on paper. For the amount "The Treatment' told them about his motives and compulsions, Souness could have opened the drawer and discovered, nestled among bits of paper and elastic bands, Klare's naked, beating heart. It told them about his rituals and fears, about his love for shadowy air pockets high above the ground, about the manner in which he'd subdued Carmel Peach. It told them about his impotence, it told them why he'd wanted to watch Alek Peach rape his own son, it told them about his compulsion to use his urine to 'purify and neutralize'. It even told them why he'd worn gloves, and it wasn't because he was clued up about forensics as they'd assumed. Then, on one of the final pages, Caffery saw something that woke him up like an adrenaline jag:

Identification of new sourse/family achieved……… check and nuetralize all places habituated by female (done!)

He grabbed the book.

New family: Child observed good, Father good, Problems: 1. Wife. 2. Dog is female.

"It's nae the Peaches he's talking about, is it? They didn't have a dog."

"No. It's the next ones." Caffery sat quite still, feeling his memory dilate towards something. A dog -where did that fit in? And these photos of a boy against a radiator the walls, a pale tangerine colour, the radiator, modern, straight-lined, white and there was a shape in this memory too. A hill out of a window? Trees? He didn't know how many doors he'd knocked on in the first days, and either the two specially assigned DCs or Logan had revisited them all since they had all checked out but his memory kept on pushing. Then, just when he thought it might nudge up a name, the lift bell pinged in the corridor and he lost his train of thought and was back to looking at a simple photograph of a nameless child in a nameless room and a notebook filled with scribble. "Fuck."

Fiona Quinn and two exhibits officers appeared in the doorway, looking around the deserted incident room as if they'd expected a welcoming committee. "Are we the first ones?"

"Yes." They both stood. "Come in."

Caffery and Souness made everyone coffee, then they sat Fiona down. "Was Carmel Peach tested?" they wanted to know. "Did you test her?"

She frowned. They made her nervous, these two senior detectives with adrenaline on their breath. "Tested for what?"

"Drugs? A sedative? GHB?"

"No one told me to. By the time I got the statements I '

"Have you still got a blood sample?"

"Yes there's still a sample. I'll get it tested."

"And did we get any urine from the Peaches' house? Had he pissed on stuff in the house?"

"There was piss everywhere don't you remember?"

"Did you get any?"

"We were at the mercy of your statements. No one told us he'd pissed on things."

"But you said it was everywhere."

"We thought it was them the Peaches." Caffery and Souness both sat back with their fingers to their foreheads.

"Well, I didn't know, did I?" "No. It's OK it's not your fault."

The emergency strategy meeting took until 2 a.m.the DAC attended and the borough commander cut short a golf club dinner to come to Shrivemoor. All the way through the meeting Caffery couldn't stop staring at the Polaroids, at the child crunched up against the white radiator. Tangerine walls. Where did he know those walls from? And when he switched his attention to the blurred face of the man in the Half Moon Lane photos again he felt that tickle in his memory. There was something about the shape of his head, the position he'd been bound in, his arms folded across his chest. If he was less tired, if he'd been sleeping better recently, he might be able to remember. But he couldn't. After the meeting he drove back to Brixton, to Arkaig Tower, and tapped on the window of the blue Mondeo parked just in view of the entrance. The surveillance team leader let him in and they all sat in silence, Caffery in the back, smoking, swallowing mints and pain-killers and staring out at the empty streets, listening to his memory ticking away. The dog the dog goes somewhere too where the fuck does the dog go? It was 5 a.m. when he finally fell asleep, his glasses on, his head tipped back on the seat, a roll-up between his fingers.

(28 July)

Tracey Lamb hadn't slept much last night. She had lain awake on her bunk in the reception-wing dorm annoying the three other inmates by sucking on her raw cuticles and lighting the same roll-up every ten minutes, taking carefully rationed puffs, then pinching it out. She was regathering her confidence. She was going to be bailed in just under six days and then she wanted to make her getaway. That would mean another bid to DI Caffery there had to be a way of cracking that little nut.

She had convinced herself that Steven would still be alive that the Cokes, the chocolate and the bottle of water under the sink would be enough if he had been unable to get out of the ropes, and by the morning she'd got the confidence to make the next move. The screws had decided that she wasn't high risk that if she was allowed a phone card she wouldn't snap it in two and use it to carve up the inside of her arms so as soon as bang-up was over she went to the phones and used two units on her card to call Caffery. She'd left his mobile number at home and all she had was his home number from directories. It was early but his answer phone picked up. She paused for a moment, then began to mumble into the receiver. "It's me Tracey…"

It was raining. Caffery woke to the steady beat of it on the car roof and the low, bored whistling of the surveillance officer in the driver's seat. He sat up, yawning, moving his head from side to side. The radio was on low and the dashboard clock said a quarter to ten. Shit. He pressed knuckles into his eyes. He had slept longer than he'd meant to.

Outside it was dull. Rain drifted down the steamed-up windows and the dashboard air vents had blown a clear silver hole in the windscreen. The second officer was asleep, her head crunched down sideways on her shoulder, her earring stuck into the flesh of her cheek. Maybe because she was the only woman in a car with two men, in her sleep she had instinctively crossed her hands protectively over her chest.

Caffery leaned forward to look out of the windscreen. "Nothing moving out there?"

The officer met his eyes in the rear-view. "Nothing."

"Right." He began searching his pockets for tobacco, blinking, trying to crank his mind forward. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and was about to settle back when the posture of the sleeping woman suddenly tilted off a thought.

He stopped, the cigarette half-way up to his mouth, and stared at her at those hands crossed pharaoh-like across her blouse, as if she should be holding an amulet. He was so silent and naked in his fascination that, after a while, the other officer began to get irritated.