Mo Hayder - The Treatment

"Could they?" He fiddled with the fraying cuff of his shirt and stared at the chocolate. "Could they have stopped her going? Could they have stopped her taking my son away?"

"I don't know," Caffery said. "I don't know."

"She took him away she couldn't bear me to get near him afterwards. I don't know where they are now." He reached inside his zip-up holdall and pulled out a photograph. It was battered and had been mended with Sellotape. He pulled his shirt down over his hand, carefully rubbed clean a small area of the table and put down the photograph, lovingly, smoothing down the edges.

"Your son?"

"My son. Nine. I've got more pictures at home but this one's my favourite. Look at it." He tried to hold the edges down with his long white fingers. "It's in a mess.

I try, but I can't help it getting in a mess after all this time. She's wrong about me, my wife. I'm not a paedophile, you know, I'm not a paedophile. Just because a person does something like that doesn't mean he wanted to or wants to again. I'm not a paedophile."

"But the kids…" Caffery nodded over his shoulder at the swimming-pool. "Why do you work here?"

"I don't touch them! Not ever. But I love them, you see I do they're the only contact I have she took my He shook his head. "I'm not a paedophile."

"I know that. I know you didn't have a choice." He watched Gummer's nearly motionless head. He wasn't enjoying this he didn't like making people cough out their pain like this. "He said he'd kill your boy if you didn't am I right?"

He nodded. A milky tear dropped out of his eye on to the table. Caffery edged a little nearer. "That's what he did, isn't it Chris? He said he'd kill your boy?"

"He was going to crush his head with a paving-stone. A paving-stone out of the back garden if I didn't. Oh, God He suddenly reached inside the holdall and pulled out a bottle of pills, tapped out two on to the palm of his hand and swallowed them.

"What's that?"

"Calms me down." He stuffed the bottle back in the bag, then sat forward and turned his hands over, showing Caffery the insides of his wrists. He looked up. His eyes were red and swimming in tears as if they were bleeding. "It's wrong, I know, it's wrong to give up. But sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time."

The boys at the vending machine had noticed that Gummer was crying. One by one they turned to stare. Caffery leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Chris, I think we should take this somewhere else, don't you? Will you come to the station with me?"

He nodded and gazed out of the window at the rainy streets, biting his lip. "Is it what happened to that family? The Peaches?"

Caffery didn't answer. He got to his feet, put his hands on the table, and spoke in a low voice. "I wish you'd talked to someone back then."

"The world was a different place back then."

Champaluang's attack had happened a few days after Gummer's wife had left. Gummer had read about the attack in the South London press and was seized with the notion that the man Champ called 'the troll' was the same teenager responsible for destroying his life. He watched the papers like an owl after that, but until the intruder at Donegal Crescent he hadn't seen one incident with the hallmarks of the troll on it. When he and Caffery got to Shrivemoor they found out why.

Klare had been in high-security psychiatric facilities for eleven years. Kryotos had the file on her desk and was photocopying pages from it. "Stabbed a WPC in Balham in 1989. He'd tried to abduct a little boy from outside a supermarket." This was his 'index offence', the offence that first put him into the mental-health system. It had happened when he was just eighteen. The WPC had cornered him in a stairwell on a council estate and he'd jumped at her with a penknife. The child was unharmed but the WPC had suffered severe cuts to her hands.

"The abduction charge fell through." Kryotos spoke quietly. Gummer was sitting on a chair next to the SIO's room, just out of earshot. He looked as if he might cry. The boy's parents didn't press charges, didn't want to put him through the trial, so they charged him with the assault on the WPC." For this he had been convicted and held for over ten years under

Section 41 of the Mental Health Act, until fifteen months ago when he was considered stabilized on clozapine, and the home secretary lifted the restriction order, sending him for a year to a halfway hostel before, in April, releasing him back into the community. "Even if I'd had time to feed all the house-to-house interviews into HOLMES and seen his CRO She shook her head. "It was for assault. It never went down as an abduction. He'd've still slipped through." She paused, and looked at him, standing there in front of her all dishevelled. "You stink, Jack. You smell like a swimming-pool."

"Thanks, Marilyn."

"That's OK. Want some shortbread?"

"No thanks, Marilyn."

"One day I'll stop asking."

"No, you won't."

Souness and the rest of the team were in Brixton so Caffery took Gummer into the SIO's room, sat him down and got the story from the beginning.

It had started in 1989. The Gummers had planned their holiday quite openly and none of their friends ever found out that they hadn't made it to Blackpool, that they had never even left Brixton. But something went wrong on that holiday, everyone agreed, they were never the same afterwards. No one knew about the tall youth who had appeared out of thin air in the hallway of the little terraced house. No one knew how he'd tied Gummer's wife in an upstairs bedroom, "X' spray-painted on the door. No one knew about the act Gummer was forced to perform on his own son, nor that afterwards, curled up in the corner and crying, he'd had to watch Klare make his own attempt on the nine-year-old. Klare had been impotent. Frustrated, full of rage, he had bitten a hole in the boy's back.

"Did he use a belt?" Caffery felt sorry for Gummer, who sat with his arms wrapped around his knees as if it was cold, his shoulders hunched up, staring blankly out at rainy Croydon. But he knew he had to ask. "Did he use a belt? Around your son's neck?"

"No. Not a belt. But he beat him. And he bit him."

So that's a skill you learned later, in prison, you bastard. "Anything he said? Anything in particular you remember?"

"No. I've gone through it a hundred times. Oh, I mean of course there were excuses, you can imagine the sort of thing, said he didn't mean it that he had to do it etcetera, etcetera."

"He had to do it?"

"Oh yes." Gummer twisted his mouth up as if the memory was a sour spot on his tongue. "Oh yes. A few times he said it said he couldn't help it had to treat himself it was all madness to me, all just an excuse '

"The Treatment."

Gummer paused. "What?"

"The Treatment," he said softly, thinking about the little notebook in Souness's drawer. He looked up at Gummer. "I'm sorry it's nothing he's schizophrenic, we think. He's '

"He's mad that's what he is."

"Yes. Maybe." Caffery tapped his fingers on the desk. "Anyway go on, Chris, go on."

After the attack Gummer had tried to persuade his wife to go to the police but she had resisted and, in a few bitter and well-chosen words, spelled it out to him: if he went to the police then the rest of the world would know he was a child molester. A child molester! Never ever ever let anyone know. It will stay with us until the day we die. But keeping the secret eventually got too much and she had packed up her records, her Jane Fonda workout videos and her son, and left, leaving Gummer in London with nothing: no pillows, no sheets, no towels just a sticky bottle of tomato ketchup in the fridge and the round conviction that he was a pervert because of what he had managed to achieve. "With my son, my own son, I wouldn't have thought it possible, if it hadn't happened."