The Treatment

  They removed the knots first. Krishnamurthi severed the rope with painstaking attention, more than two inches from the knot: the ligatures could be tested not only for DNA, but also by forensic knot analysts, and he was careful to preserve their shape as he put them into an exhibits bag. The photographer moved around the table, working from every angle as the exhibits officer sealed and initialed the bag, put it on his trolley.

  The process was repeated until all the ropes were removed, and Rory looked quite different. He lay curled up, like a young spider in defense mode, deep, swollen furrows made by the ropes on his arms, knees and ankles. Krishnamurthi gently tested the thin legs. When they uncurled obediently he hesitated, an odd look on his face. For a moment no one dared breathe. Krishnamurthi looked quickly up at the clock on the wall and carefully flexed Rory Peach's feet, then examined the boy's hands and face.

  “There's—uh, yes.” He flipped up his plastic visor and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “There's rigor mortis present only in the face and upper torso. I'm … going to …” His pause was almost imperceptible. Only those with their antennae quivering, like Caffery, would have noticed the brief blush of emotion. Those flexible feet had started the pathologist thinking the unthinkable. “I'm going to take a liver temperature.”

  Caffery turned away. He had seen hundreds of postmortems, most less recognizable as human beings than Rory was. He'd seen a forty-year-old man, reduced by faceless business associates to nothing but a one-and-a-half-stone cut of torso, rolling on the dissecting table. He'd seen a fifteen-year-old girl eaten by foxes from her eyes down to her shoulders. He didn't kid himself that he had a right to feel horror more deeply than anyone else, but like Krishnamurthi, he knew the mechanics of rigor—he knew what that stiffness in the facial muscles, what the flexibility in the feet said about Rory's death. He didn't want to think about it. For the first time in his life he had to step out of a postmortem.

  He was standing in reception, pressing Altoid mints into his mouth, rubbing his hands together hard, the smart of blood clearing his thoughts, when the door opened. Souness came in, brushing her jacket as if she'd walked through a cobweb.

  “Fucking press all over me.” She shuddered. “Talk about quick off the mark.” She pressed the door closed behind her, pushing her foot against it to check that it was properly shut, turned and saw instantly that Caffery was trying to avoid her eyes, was trying hard to find somewhere to hide his attention. Her voice softened. “Ye all right?” She came a little bit nearer. He was slightly cyanosed around the mouth. “No, ye're not. Ye're crapping it, aren't ye?”

  “I'm fine. Mint?”

  “No thanks.” She chewed her thumbnail, looked toward the dissecting room and back at him. “Funny. I suppose if it was me I might be just a wee bit jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Rory's been found. He's dead, but at least he was found—Mum and Dad can start grieving now.” She rested her hand affectionately on his arm. “And where does that leave ye, ye poor wee soul?”

  Caffery didn't answer. He didn't dare speak or even reach into his pocket for cigarette papers in case his hands were shaking. He turned for the door to the autopsy suite. “I—uh—I think we've got a time of death. Just guessing from the rigor.”

  “And?”

  “Uh—look, let's go back inside, shall we?”

  Back in the dissecting room Krishnamurthi had moved on. He had taken nail cuttings, putting the scissors he used into the exhibits bag with the last cuttings and passing them all to the exhibits officer. He had removed the packing tape from Rory's face. DS Fiona Quinn was hopeful: in evidence bags on a separate gurney were five white fibers Krishnamurthi had removed from the ligature furrows on Rory's wrists with a strip of low-tack tape. She could run them through mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to find chemical composition and color—hopefully match them to a suspect's clothing. Now Krishnamurthi was carefully breaking the rigor mortis in Rory's upper body and gently straightening him out on the table.

  Caffery and Souness stood against the wall, Caffery sucking mints, still fighting the impulse to leave the room, Souness jiggling her finger in her ear as if she was embarrassed to be watching this.

  Rory measured 127 centimeters from his left heel to his crown. He weighed 26.23 kilos. A Tanner scale reading would mark him down as slightly bigger than an average eight-year-old. A bloody paper towel with pale blue flowers around the edge had been scrunched against his shoulder and it clung there, pressed under his back when he was straightened.

  Krishnamurthi, the photographer and the morticians moved around the table in a complex, calm ritual, each anticipating without word or signal when it was time to step in. Caffery and Souness watched in silence—they had the same two questions in their minds: Was the paper towel hiding the source of the blood in the kitchen? And: Had Rory Peach been sexually assaulted?

  “I'm looking at an averagely nourished body of a child,” Krishnamurthi said softly, into the headset. His voice echoed in the scrubbed-down room. “The face shows marked turgor, and what appears to be multiple aspects of Hippocratic facies, the ocular orbits are prominent, while the globes are sunken. Cheekbones and mandibles prominent. Mouth and nose appear …” he bent in and squinted at the child's face “… dry. Crusted. Skin is tight to palpation so flag histology to look for hyperkalemia and I want sodium counts, antidiuretic hormone levels and plasma volume.”

  “Harsha?”

  Krishnamurthi looked up at Souness. “Yes, yes. When the microscopics are back I'll tell you more.” Krishnamurthi had a reputation for denying the police the immediate answers they wanted. “And when I've looked at the liver, the kidneys.”

  “What are you expecting?”

  “Dry, tacky organ capsules, maybe bleeding.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I'll tell you when I've had a look.” He narrowed his eyes at her, making a disapproving clicking noise in his throat. “OK?”

  “Fair enough.” Souness held up her hands. The last thing they needed was to alienate him. “That's fair enough.”

  “Right.” Krishnamurthi bent nearer to look at Rory's throat. “There is a poorly defined mark overlying the larynx indicating some sort of, uh, occlusion of the carotid and jugular, some sort of ligature strangulation, but no petechiae in the eyes. Some scratch marks and bruising to the neck.” He looked up at Souness. “But it's not the cause of death.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Yes, really, Danni. Caffery looked at his shoes. That's not how Rory died. I think I already know how he died. He didn't say it out loud because he didn't think he could even form a sentence.

  “I'd like later,” Krishnamurthi continued, “to get some alternative light sources on these marks, photograph the area and see if we can see anything else. Right.” He stepped back and allowed the mortician to turn Rory's body—expertly, efficiently, not looking at the child's face. The dissecting room was absolutely silent. Lying on his face the little lumps of Rory's spine protruded through the thin skin; the paper towel stayed stuck in place. Krishnamurthi didn't look at anyone as he peeled it away, dropping it in an evidence bag. He peered down at the wound on Rory's shoulder and after a breathless pause he stepped back and looked up.

  “Yes,” he said to the assembled team. “Yes. Someone have a word with the coroner. Need to have a dentist look at this.”

  Out in the high blue midday furnace Josh was in the paddling pool in his Darth Maul trunks, his back to the woods, intense concentration on his face as he plunged Thunderbird Four to the bottom of the pool and let it bob back up to the surface. Sunlight flashed on the water, and over the fence in the park gnats hummed in the shade of the Spanish chestnuts.

  Hal stood on the veranda with a cold bottle of Coke, staring at those trees. He could see flashes of white and blue out there where a police team had congregated in a small area—fluttering crime-scene tape had appeared, draped around bushes. They must have found something. He sipped his C
oke thoughtfully—he had been so happy to be out of central Brixton, out of the cramped flat above an off-license on the Front Line, but now Brixton's problems seemed to be chasing them up the hill.

  The Front Line. At one time they had been proud of the cachet of the address, and life for them was Hoy Hoy cockroach traps under the sink, tuna and scotch bonnet sandwiches in the Phoenix cafe, Hal forever tracking down and arguing revisionism with Darcus Howe. Life on the Front Line. He liked that—him and Ben frontiersmen, living down with the real people. They'd been there for the '95 Wayne Douglas riots—he had stood in the street, holding his door keys in one hand, library books in the other, and watched the Dogstar go up in flames. Whoomp! Up into the sky. And everyone looked out their doors and windows to see burning, curling, crisp packets floating down from the clouds.

  But with Josh it all changed. Responsibility kicked at them. The schizophrenics screaming, the muggings, the rich young clubgoers and the sinister followers of Louis Farrakhan—impossibly handsome black men in razorsharp suits, standing on street corners with hands folded piously, terrifying plans darting behind their eyes—sud-denly none of it was glamorous, it wasn't funny. One day Josh came screaming through the room with Buzz Lightyear, Buzz en garde with his scorching new weapon: a syringe, the words “Single Use Only for U 100 Insulin” printed on it. After that Hal decided to work himself lame to get his family out of central Brixton. But the lifebelt, when it came, was from Benedicte's family: an inheritance from her aunt in Norway had put them in this new house, just far enough out of the center to keep them safe. There was lighting and security fencing, there was a bus ride separating them from the Fridge, and life was, well, really rather cushiony.

  “Hal!” From a window above him Benedicte was calling. He put the Coke bottle on the veranda. “Josh—stay there, OK?” He went inside, climbing the stairs two at a time. She was in the bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah.” She was wearing a T-shirt, pink knickers and sheepskin slippers, as if she'd been in the middle of changing. One side of her hair was set in rollers, the other loose. “I'm OK, but look—look at the bed.”

  Hal could see that the whole length of her side of the bed was wet. As if Smurf had tottered up and down the bed peeing as she went. “Christ.”

  “Oh God.” Ben rubbed her face. “I'm sorry I yelled. I suppose it's not Smurf's fault. She's old.” She sighed and began to remove the saturated duvet cover. “She gets onto the bed and she can't always get down quickly enough when she needs to.”

  He shook his head. “Should have seen her this morning. Dragging. Her back legs—you know. She started peeing before she'd even stopped walking. Walking along and peeing all down her legs. It's pathetic.”

  “She took her pills this morning but, oh, Hal, you know I still think we should get the name of a vet in Cornwall, just in case. Yeew-eee!” Ben puffed air from her mouth and slotted her hands under the pillow to pull back the sheets. “I thought my days of changing pissy sheets were over.”

  “It's probably all that excitement at the shop today.”

  “Oh, yeah, getting your bits examined by a total stranger makes you pee with excitement. Only a man could say that.” She piled up the bed linen. “We're going to have to stop her coming up the stairs, Hal, OK? Keep her shut in the kitchen.”

  He sighed. “I suppose when we get back we're going to have to face it.” He pressed two fingers to her temple and clicked a trigger with his thumb. “Poor old girl.”

  “Oh, for God's sake, please don't.” She wiped her face on the shoulder of her T-shirt. She didn't think she could face losing Smurf. Secretly they hadn't expected her to survive this far—on her ID disk, after “My name is Smurf. If you find me please call,” their old telephone number was still given. They hadn't thought it was worth changing. Even so, Ben hadn't really accepted that the end was near. “Can't we think of something better to talk about?” She turned to the door, the bundle of sheets in her arms, and left the room.

  It was a bite. As if Rory had been snapped at by a meat eater. There were four or five less violent marks in the same area, but Krishnamurthi couldn't find any on the other places a male victim is typically bitten—the axillae: the armpits, face and scrotum. Only the shoulders. Wounds on the shoulders—it was a method a predator often uses to subdue his victim. And when Krishnamurthi did the anal swabs he found something else. “Yes.” He cleared his throat and straightened up. “There's a contaminant.”

  No one spoke. Souness and Caffery exchanged a glance.

  “Do you know what the contaminant is?”

  “You can't tell just looking at it in this light—not until you get it in the lab—but I suppose we can hazard a guess—”

  Souness nodded. “I see.” She looked at Caffery. He met her eyes, nodded tightly, put his hands in his pockets and turned back to watch Krishnamurthi working.

  No one in the room spoke for a moment. They were all thinking about what this meant, all imagining—or trying not to imagine—what Rory Peach had gone through.

  It was the photographer who broke the silence. He cleared his throat and fitted film into a Kodak 1 to 1 fingerprint camera, fishing a pale blue right-angled ruler from his kit. When Krishnamurthi stepped away he placed the ruler next to the wound and began to focus the cam era. Souness and Caffery watched in silence, shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the autopsy suite, as the photographer recorded every mark on Rory Peach's shoulders. He was finishing just as the odontologist was arriving from King's.

  Mr. Ndizeye, BDS, Ph.D., and Seventh-Day Adventist, wore thick National Health glasses and a Hawaiian shirt under his white coat. His mouth was turned up at the corners like a clown's, as if he were permanently smiling. Sweat ran in rivulets down his forehead, polished like mahogany, as he inspected the wounds, made notes and built up impression trays from dental boxing wax. The morticians exchanged glances behind his back.

  “What do you think?” Souness asked. “Have you got enough to work with?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Ndizeye was waiting impatiently for his assistant to fill a gun with polysilicone. “Some of these were slowly inflicted.” He bent over, looked inside the wax tray molded onto Rory's shoulder and moved his finger above it in a little stirring motion. “Radial abrasions so he's a bit of a suck while he's at it. Typical sadistic marks.” He pulled a tissue from a back pocket and mopped his forehead to stop sweat dropping onto Rory's body. “I can see—um—upper left incisor one, two, three, and upper right one, probably two.” He looked up, his eyes magnified like fish behind the glasses, his clown mouth smiling. “Yes, I'm happy. I think we'll get a perfect cast from this.”

  After the postmortem there were the alternative light source, ALS, photos to be taken. The science unit brought in their mobile blackout blinds and Souness and Caffery left, Souness to a press conference, and Caffery back to Shrivemoor to submit the results of the day's actions to Kryotos's ever-growing pile of documents. When he finally decided to call it a day, late in the night, he realized he hadn't eaten and was shaking. He got a takeaway in Crystal Palace and that stopped the shaking—but back at home he still had to pause in the doorway for a moment, promising himself not to let what he'd just seen show in his face.

  He needn't have worried. Rebecca wasn't in a mood to discuss his work. She was lying on the sofa, dressed in caramel suede trousers and a short white sweater. She had a pink varnished nail in her mouth and was staring blankly at the TV screen. There was a pile of Time Outs on the table in front of her. She didn't look up when he came in— he had to be the first to speak: “How are you feeling?”

  She glanced up at him vaguely, like someone looking at a window that has been left open, someone who can't be bothered to get up and shut it.

  “My head hurts.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  He dropped down on the sofa next to her, his arm around her. “I'm sorry about last night.”

  She didn't shrink
from him or lose her temper. Instead she just shrugged and said nothing, and went on staring at the TV screen. He suddenly felt immensely sorry for what he had done last night, pushing her facedown into memories she didn't want to address. He knew he'd have to move gently with her tonight.

  “Let's go upstairs,” she said, much, much later, and so he followed her up the staircase, still baffled by her odd, silent aura. In the bedroom they hardly exchanged a word. It should have tipped him off—he should have seen the signs. Rebecca liked Jack to go down on her. They'd established that early on in their relationship. “Actually it was the first night,” she'd told her friends, “I didn't even have to ask him—it was a miracle.” He would do it for hours if she wanted, her neatly turned legs hooked up and resting on his back. Sometimes she laughed because he insisted on keeping one foot off the bed or sofa, on the floor, as if he was ready to sprint off at a moment's notice. What do you think's going to happen? A raid or something? This evening she said nothing. She lifted her hips and let him roll down the suede trousers, resting her hands on his head, running her fingers through his hair, looking ruminatively at the ceiling. After she came he straightened, took off his shirt, wiped his face on it and was about to undo his trousers when Rebecca pushed herself past him and up off the bed. She picked up her clothes from the floor.

  “Where you going?”

  “To have a wash.”

  “What?”

  “To have a wash.”

  She walked out of the room, pressing her heels into the boards, and he fell backward on the bed, his hands over his face, his erection painful, he had been so ready. What the fuck is she doing? He listened to the old water pipes creak, listened to her finish, leave the bathroom, go downstairs. She didn't return. The bedside clock ticked on and now his hard-on was dying. He groaned, dropped his hands from his face and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his head throbbing. You've started something now, Jack. This is all about last night.