Free The Treatment by Mo Hayder Page B

with them a softness of style. Something in her had shifted, but she still wanted Jack and so here he was, still hopelessly and helplessly attracted to her, in love with her in spite of how she had changed—she was the sweet weight in his heart and in his cock. Just the smell of one of her cigarillos in an ashtray could give him a hard-on.
    He opened his eyes and looked up at her face above him, eyes closed, a calm, distant smile on her face. I should close the curtains, he thought vaguely, looked at the dark window and saw the white smudge of a face, a snoutlike impression and the telltale frosting of excited breath on the panes—
    “Shit!” He pulled Rebecca's T-shirt down.
    “What?”
    “Move it. Quick.”
    Rolling her away, he sprang to his feet and slammed open the French windows. Penderecki had reached the foot of the garden, running for the back fence. Caffery sprinted the forty feet in seconds, but Penderecki was prepared: he had brought a green plastic milk crate which he used to hike himself over the back fence, and scurried away into the undergrowth of the railway cutting, leaving behind just the crate and the sound of his wheezing trailing in the air behind. Caffery, shoeless, shirt undone, picked up the crate and threw it after him. “
Do that again and I will kill you.
” He stood in the garden his mother had planted, watching the larval shape of the old man scuttling away through the undergrowth. “I
mean it
—I've got your
blood
in my
mouth
, Penderecki.” He dropped his hands on the wire fence, letting his breathing slow, trying not to be drawn, trying to pull his anger back in. “I've got your blood.”
    It's just a new way of him disturbing the silt. Ignore it. Ignore it—
    He dropped his head. Ignoring Penderecki was the hardest work he'd known. Sometimes his mere presence across the track felt like a telephone ringing in a neighbor's house on a quiet afternoon. The body reacted instinctually, made to respond, but the mind tugged it back—
Don't answer it, don't answer, not for you.
Penderecki, with his piercing gift for evil, was dishing out this kind of bait on a weekly basis: the odd phone call here, the odd scribbled note or letter, feeding Caffery a repertoire of theories about what had happened to Ewan. They were imaginative, they were varied, and he had learned to believe none of them. Ewan had died instantly, hit by a train, the sheer velocity carrying his small body far away from the area the police searched; Ewan had survived but later starved to death in a caravan on an isolated farm where Penderecki had hidden him during the search of his house; Ewan was alive and well and, having been so acclimatized, was now a predator himself, operating from Amsterdam … Any of the letters might have been the one to crack Caffery's will.It was his work to ignore them all. Someone touched his shoulders. He started. “Rebecca.” He shook his head. “I'm sorry.” He was still shaking with anger.
    “Not your fault. He's a little shit.”
    “He's baiting me.”
    “I know.” She kissed his back. “He makes it difficult.”
    “Yeah, well.” He felt in his trousers for his roll-ups. “He's always made it difficult.” She put her arms around his waist and they stood together in silence, staring into the darkness above the silent railway tracks. Watching the lights in Penderecki's house come on. Maybe, Caffery thought, he had decided to escalate the torment. In the last month there had been a sense of urgency coming across the railway track: it was only three days since the last letter had appeared on his doorstep:
    Dear Jack
    After 28 years it is now time to tell you the truth what happened with you're brother and you will know when I tell you that I am teling you the TRUTH, the most TRUTHFUL thing not because I am sorry for you no but because I have “remorse” and because you DESERVE to have the truth told you.
    He was not in pain Jack and not scaired because he WANTED it. He told me he