The Treatment Read Online Free PDF Page A

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—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 itwas 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 letter box 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, “I 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 SIOs' 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 surewhat 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 toward 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.

3

    P ROTOCOL 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 pretransfusion 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