The Treatment by Mo Hayder

would do anything for me, even would eat my doings if you know what I am saying because he loved me so much. This sounds crude to you and to me but it is the words of you're brother jack you're only brother and so I know you will see these words are sacred and not think that I invented them. And anyway I should tell you the end came because it was an acident and no more than an ACIDENT and not because I wanted a bad thing for you're brother but because it was an ACIDENT. He is at peace now. GOD BLESS US ALL
    And now this spying, this creeping around his garden. Caffery rolled a cigarette. He hated Penderecki for keepingup the pressure, hated him for the constant reminders. Rebecca kissed his back again and wandered away, over to the old beech at the foot of the garden. She pressed her palms against the trunk. “This is where the tree house was, am I right?”
    “Yes.” He lowered his head and lit the cigarette.
    “Then …” She rested her ear against the tree trunk, as if listening for a pulse, and looked upward into the spreading branches. “How did you—oh, I see.”
    “Rebecca—”
    But before he could stop her she was monkeying up the trunk using the iron handholds his father had nailed into it for his two sons. She crouched like a gnome in the elbow of a branch. Astonishing how a tree can cup a human body, he thought, looking up at her. Strange that we ever crawled down, traded the leaves and nooks for the wide uncertainties of the prairie. “Come on,” she called. “It's great up here.” He put the cigarette between his teeth and followed reluctantly, feeling the familiar irregularities of the iron loops against his palms. The night was clear, the sky sprinkled with stars. When he came level with Rebecca he leaned back against the branch, facing her, his feet braced against the trunk, the bark husky and warm against his soles. Behind her, above the houses, the green millennium laser on Greenwich Park sliced the great dome of black.
    “Good, isn't it?”
    “Maybe …”
    He rarely came up here. Once a year, maybe, and not at all since Rebecca. He thought that she wouldn't want him sitting up here dwelling on everything. The view hadn't changed much. Still the long scar of the railway. Still Penderecki's house on the other side: unpainted for years, the guttering hanging so that the back of the house was coated in moss—as incongruous in the terrace of cared-for houses as the boarded-up house next to the Peaches'.
    Okay, he told himself, no more connections like that. Rory isn't Ewan and Ewan isn't Rory.
Get it straight.
    “Zeus was a baby in a tree.” Rebecca dangled her feetover the edge and smiled. “He was hung in a cradle and fed by the bees.… Stop thinking about him.” She grabbed his hand suddenly. “Come on, stop it. I know you're thinking about Ewan.” Caffery didn't answer. He pulled his hand from her and looked across the railway cutting.
    “Jesus.” She shook her head and looked up at the stars. “Can't you see what's happening? Penderecki's got you so wound up that you carry it everywhere—the more he pushes the tighter you get. You're being eaten alive by it all, by Ewan, by that …” she nodded over the railway cutting, “that
pervert
.”
    “Not now, Rebecca—”
    “I mean it. Look at you—a fucked up, hunched-up, shriveled-up
miserable
git coming through the door at night looking like he's been dragged backward through Hades by his heels and
it's all because of Ewan
. You're
carrying
him, Jack, carrying him everywhere. The
smallest
thing makes you explode. And now you've got a case at work that's similar—”
    “Rebecca—”
    “And now you've got a case at work that's similar and God alone
knows
what'll happen. How will you control yourself? Someone'll get hurt—might even be you. You might even end up like Paul.”
    “That's enough.” He held his hand up. “Enough.” He knew where they were going. He knew that Paul Essex, the DS who had been part of the frantic