"Hader, Mo - The Treatment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hader Mo)

'It's OK. Good evening to you all.'
The commander could see Caffery on the screen waving. He adjusted his headset and switched back to the CAD controller. 'That's a no-trace in the open, so we're complete on scene at grid ref TQ3427445, now routing to India Foxtrot.' He noted the time on his assignment log and the helicopter banked away into the night.
On the ground below, Caffery watched the helicopter disappear across the rooftops, until its light was scarcely bigger than a satellite.
'You know what it means, don't you?'
'No,' Souness admitted. 'No, I don't.
It was late. The TSG had zoned off the area where the air observer had imagined a heat source, got down on their hands and knees and covered every square inch of it. Still no Rory Peach. Eventually they'd given up, and Caffery and Souness had finalized arrangements for a specialized search team to come in the next day: a Police Search Advisory team would start at first light in Brockwell Park.
There was still an emergency team briefing to get through and search parameters to establish before the night was out and so, at 11 p.m., they drove back to AMIT headquarters in Thornton Heath. Caffery parked the car and swung the keys into his pocket. 'If he's in the park and they can't see him then he's not much of a heat source and he's not moving.' In spite of what it meant professionally, part of him secretly hoped, for the boy's sake, that he was already dead.
There are some things, he believed, not worth surviving. 'Maybe we're too late already.'
'Unless,' Souness climbed wearily from the car and together they crossed the road, 'unless he's not in the park.'
'Oh, he's in the park. I promise you he's in the park.' Caffery swiped his pass card and held the door for Souness. 'It's just a question of where.'
'Shrivemoor' was how most officers referred to this old red-brick building, after the unexciting residential street in which it stood. AMIT's offices were housed on the second floor. Tonight lights were on in all the windows. Most of the team had arrived, called away from dinner parties, pubs, babysitting duty. The HOLMES database operators, the five members of the intelligence cell, seven investigating officers, they were all here, wandering between the desks, drinking coffee, murmuring to each other. In the kitchen three embarrassed-looking paramedics in white-hooded forensic suits - nonce suits, the team called them -waited while the exhibits officer photocopied their boot soles and used low-tack tape to lift hairs and fibres from their clothing.
While Souness made strong coffee, Caffery put his face under the tap to wake himself up and quickly checked his in-tray. Among the circulars, the memos, the post-mortem reports, someone had left this week's copy of Time Out. It was folded open at a page titled: 'The Artists who Turn Crime into Art.' A photograph of Rebecca - eyes closed, head tilted back, a prison number painted on the centre of her forehead where a bindi spot would go.
Rebecca Morant, tabloid totty or the genuine article? You have to be a long way out of the loop not to have heard of Morant, sex-assault
victim turned art-world darling. Suspiciously beautiful, the critics found it difficult to take lynx-eyed Morant seriously, until a nomination for the ultra-cool Vincent Award and a shortlisting by Becks confirmed her as a key player in the post YBA pack . . .
Caffery closed the magazine and placed it face down in the in-tray. How much more publicity do you need, Becky?
'Right, crew. Listen up.' He used an empty Sprite can to bang on the wall. 'Come on, listen, everyone. I know you're all on short notice but let's get this bit done. We'll do it in the SIO's.' Holding the videotape above his head, he started towards the office he and Souness shared, beckoning the officers to follow. 'Come on, it'll only take ten so you can have your piss breaks later.'
The senior investigating officer's room was small -for all the team to cram in, the door had to be left open. Souness stood against the window, coffee mug cupped in both hands as Caffery plugged in the video and waited for everyone to gather.
'Right. You all know the basics. DCI Souness is doing the search and house-to-house parameters so whoever's on the knock come and see her after this. First light we've got the search-team meeting in Brockwell Park so I want everyone ready. SPECRIMs go out as usual, but bear in mind what I'm going to tell you now for hold-back on the press bureau. Exhibits, family liaison, organize yourselves. What else? We've got primacy but we'll appoint a liaison officer for, I'm sorry to say, the paedophile unit and the risk-management panel at Lambeth and, uh, someone better have a whisper with the child-protection lads at Belvedere, make sure Rory hasn't
made an appearance there before. Now . . .' He gestured at the blank TV screen and took a deep breath. 'When I show you this, the first place you're going to wonder about is the Maudsley.' He paused. At the mention of the Maudsley - the mental-health clinic on Denmark Hill - one or two of the civilian workers had sucked in a breath. He didn't want that: he wanted the team thinking and functioning and not overreacting to the nature of the crime.
'Look,' he said, 'I don't want you writing him off as a psycho just yet. I'm only saying that's how it looks.' He glanced around at the faces. 'Maybe that's how it's meant to look. Maybe there's some trail-covering here - maybe he's your common or garden paedo who's trying to throw up a smokescreen, pave his way to an insanity plea if he gets caught. And keep in mind that he's been in play for three days. Three days. That's controlled, isn't it? Have a think about those three days and what they mean. Do they mean, for example, that he knows he's not going to get disturbed?'
Or do they mean he was enjoying himself so much with Rory that he'd decided to stay on for the long weekend?
He pointed the remote control at the video. Donegal Crescent appeared on screen. It was dusk. Beneath the time-code a crowd jostled the cordons, trying to get a better glimpse of the little terraced house: blue ambulance lights flashed silently across their faces. Caffery, standing back against the wall now with his arms folded, watched the AMIT detectives out of the corner of his eye. This was the first they had seen of the crime scene and he knew they'd find something terrible about the Peaches' house. Something terrible about its normality.
'This is on the edge of Brockwell Park,' he said evenly. 'Just to give you some geography, that tower
you can see in the distance is Arkaig Tower on Railton Road, which the divisionals know and love as Crack Heights.'
The camera tracked down the path to the doorstep of number thirty, and turned to pan across the street, the little scrap of grass opposite, the neighbours' faces shocked white ovals against the evening sky. Any point that could be observed from the Peaches' house could also be a vantage-point for a potential witness. The camera recorded everything then swung 180 degrees and faced the house head on. The number '30' in gold screw-on numerals filled the screen.
'All the doors and windows were closed.' The camera ran itself around the splintered front door -opened with the Enforcer battering-ram - zooming in on an intact lock. 'The Territorials had to batter their way in. The only thing not locked was the back door - we think it's our point of entry. Watch.'
They were inside the house now, the camera flooding the hallway with halogen light. Slightly worn wallpaper, a grey cord carpet protected by a heavy-duty plastic runner. Two badly framed prints cast long, bobbing shadows up the hall and a child's turbo water-gun lay on its side on the bottom step. Up ahead, at the end of the hall, a doorway. The tape blurred for a moment, helical scan traces across the screen, and when the picture steadied the camera had gone through the doorway and was in a small kitchen. A glazed terracotta chicken eyed the camera beadily from next to the breadbin and a checked curtain over the door wallowed in the breeze, revealing a broken window, flashes of the darkened yard, a glimpse of the trees in the park beyond.
'Right. Important.' Caffery rested his elbow on the monitor, leaning over to point at the screen. 'Glass on the floor, door unlocked. This is not only the point of
entry but also the exit point. Intruder breaks window and lets himself in - we think this is some time after seven p.m. on Friday evening.' The camera zoomed through the broken window and out into a small yard beyond. A carousel clothes-dryer, a child's bike, some toys and four overturned milk bottles, their contents rancid and yellow. 'The intruder then stays in the house with the Peach family until Monday afternoon when he's disturbed - at which point he picks up Rory Peach and leaves through the same door.' The camera pulled back into the kitchen and panned the room, pausing at a set of bloody drag marks on the doorpost. Caffery tapped the remote control on his leg and looked around the silent faces, expecting a reaction. But no one spoke or asked questions. They were staring at the blood on the screen.
'The lab thinks his wounds aren't fatal at this point. The received wisdom is that the intruder carried him out of the house - through this broken fence here and into the woods. He's probably found a way to staunch the blood flow, maybe a towel or something, because the dogs lost him early. Right.' The camera was moving. 'Good, now I'm going to show you where the family were found.'
A woman's face came briefly in and out of shot: DS Quinn, the crime-scene co-ordinator, the most experienced CSC in South London. After she and Caffery had orchestrated the video she had returned to the kitchen to ensure that the glass from the break-in was carefully photographed and removed. Then she had called the Specialist Crime Unit biologists down from Lambeth. While Caffery was with the helicopter crew the scientists had come through the house, dressed in protective suits, applying their specialized chemicals: ninhydrin, amido black, silver nitrate.
'Alek Peach - that's Dad - was found here,
handcuffed by the wrists to this radiator, and by the ankles to this radiator. You can tell the position he was in from the mark he's left.' Caffery pointed it out to the team - a large dark stain on the shag-pile carpet, stretching between the two radiators in the living room. 'He's got a wound to the back of his head so we won't be talking to him for a while. Maybe not at all. And the second place - watch, you'll see it now we're going upstairs Ч is where Carmel was held.'
Carmel, who was now sedated at the hospital, had given something of a statement in the ambulance. Although a cursory examination showed no head wounds it was assumed she had lost consciousness at some point: apart from making dinner at 6 p.m. on Friday, she remembered nothing until she had woken gagged and cuffed to a water-pipe in the airing cupboard on the first-floor landing. There she had remained until the shopkeeper had called through the letterbox three days later. She hadn't seen or spoken to the intruder, and, no, there was no reason, business or personal, that someone would want to hurt her family. When the paramedics helped her out of the cupboard they angled the stretcher so that she faced the stairs. They didn't want her to turn and see what was spray-painted on the wall behind her.
'And when you see it,' he looked around at the faces, T think you'll agree that, in spite of the heavy traffic through the house, it's what we should keep from the press.'
He turned back to the TV. The camera operator was climbing the stairs, the shadows danced across the landing ahead. When Caffery had seen the spray-painting he had instantly recognized it as a tool to weed out false confessions.
The camera wobbled, someone in the hallway said, 'Fuck,' and then in a louder voice on screen, 'Have
you seen this?' Darkness. A brief fumble then a flare of light, the camera aperture closed down momentarily, flinching like an iris. When the image came into focus the detectives in the SIO's room inched a little closer, trying to read the spray-painted message.
Caffery paused the tape, allowing each member of the team time to bend in and examine it. 'Female Hazard.' He flicked off the video and turned on the light. 'We want this bottomed out by tomorrow - I won't insult your intelligence by telling you why.'
In the kitchen at the Fairoaks base the air observer took off his helmet and rubbed his ears. He still wasn't sure what he'd seen. 'I'd like to have done that on maximum endurance, y'know.'
The commander patted him on the back. 'They said we were just a tick in the box, Howie. They don't even know if he's in the park.'
'It's a kid, though.'
'Maybe when we lift we'll go back, eh?'
But in the time they took to refuel, a traffic officer in Purley had been hit by a car while deploying a stinger. The offender was out of the car and running towards Croydon airfield, so India 99 rerouted to that instead. When his shift finished at 2 a.m. the air observer was finding it a little easier not to think about the hazy white doughnut shape he thought he'd seen among the trees in Brockwell Park.
Protocol at the Jack Steinberg Intensive Care Unit in King's Hospital kept all head-injury victims on a Codman intercranial pressure bolt and a ventilator for the first twenty-four hours, whether the patient could breathe unaided or not. Even without the heavy dose of medazolam sculling through his veins, AMIT's key witness, Alek Peach, wouldn't have been able to speak with the endotrachial tube down his throat. His wife, Carmel, was still sedated but Caffery would have gone to the hospital and paced the corridors like an expectant father all night, had DCI Souness not pulled rank.
'They'll never let you near while he's on that thing, Jack.' She respected this in Caffery, this hungry, stray-dog determination, but she knew her hospital consultants well. She knew not to push it. 'If he needs blood they've promised us a pre-transfusion sample. We've got the consultant's statement, and that's the most we can ask.'
It was 1 a.m.: now that the team knew their parameters for the search, overtime had been assigned and the Brockwell Park area was secured, Souness and some of the other officers went home to catch a precious hour or two's sleep before sun-up. Caffery had now been awake for twenty-five hours but he
couldn't relax. He went into the SIO's room - found a bottle of Bell's under the desk, slugged some into a mug and sat at the desk, jiggling his knees and tapping his fingers on the phone. When he couldn't stand it any longer he picked up the receiver and got through to the ICU.
But the consultant, Mr Friendship, was losing patience. 'What part of "no" don't you understand?' And he hung up.
Caffery stared at the dead receiver. He could redial - spend twenty minutes bullying the hospital staff -but he knew he was up against a brick wall. He sighed, put down the receiver, refilled the mug, put his feet up on the desk and sat with his tie undone, staring blankly out of the window at the Croydon skyscrapers lit up against the sky.