The Treatment Read Free

neon-pink-handled screwdriver, three bottles of prescription pills, and a plastic wallet printed with a Union Jack that he'd found last week on the upper deck of the number-two bus, it would remain, its evidence wound neatly inside, for more than five days.
    All prisons in London insist on being informed about any helicopter that passes. It keeps them calm. India 99, seeing the familiar glass-roofed gym and octagonal emergency control room ahead on their right, got on to channel eight and identified themselves to HMP Brixton before they continued toward the park. It was a warm and breathless night; the low cloud cover trapped the orange city light, spreading it back down across the roofs so that the helicopter seemed to be flying through a glowing layer of heat, as if its belly and rotor blades had been dipped in hot, electric orange. Now they were over Acre Lane—a long, spangled, untangled row of pearls. On they went, out over the hot, packed streets behind Brixton Water Lane, on and on, over a warren of houses and pubs, until suddenly, on a tremendous rush of air and aviation fuel—
flak flak flak FLAK
—they floated out into the clear darkness over Brockwell Park.
    Someone in the dark cockpit whistled. “It's bigger than I thought.”
    The three men peered dubiously down at the vast expanse of black. This unlit stretch of wood and grass in the middle of the blazing city seemed to go on forever—as if they'd left London behind and were flying over an empty ocean. Ahead, in the distance, the lights of Tulse Hill marked the farthest borders of the park, twinkling in a tiny string on the horizon.
    “Jesus.” In the little dark cockpit, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, the air observer shifted uncomfortably. “How we going to do this?”
    “We'll do it.” The commander checked the radio frequency card in the plastic leg pocket of his flying suit, adjusted the headset and spoke above the rotor noise to Brixton Divisional Control. “Lima Delta from India ninenine.”
    “Good evening, India nine-nine. We've got a helicopter over us—is that you?”
    “Roger. Request talk through with search unit on this code twenty-five.”
    “Roger. Use MPS 6—go ahead, India nine-nine.”
    The next voice the commander heard was DI Caffery's. “Hi there, nine-nine. We can see you. Thanks for coming.”
    The air observer leaned over the thermal imaging screen. It was a bad night for it—the trapped heat was pushing the equipment to its limits, making everything on the screen the same uniform milky gray. Then he saw, in the top left-hand corner, a luminous white figure holding up its hand into the night. “OK, yes. I've got him.”
    “Yeah, hello there, ground units,” the commander said into his mike. “You're more than welcome. We've got eyeball with you too.”
    The observer toggled the camera and now he could see them all, the ground units, glimmering forms strung out around the perimeter of the trees. It looked like almost forty officers down there. “Jeez, they've got it well contained.”
    “You've got it well contained,” the commander told DI Caffery.
    “I know. Nothing's getting out of here tonight. Not without us knowing.”
    “It's a large area and there's wildlife in there too, but we'll do our best.”
    “Thank you.”
    The tactical commander leaned into the front of the cockpit and held up his thumb. “OK, lads, let's do it.”
    The pilot put the Squirrel into a right-hand orbit above the southern quarter of the park. About half a mile to the west they could see the chalky smudge of the dried-out boating lake, and from among the trees the basalt glitter of the other four lakes. They took the park in zones, moving in concentric circles five hundred feet in the air. The air observer, hunched over his screen, steeled against the deafening roar of the rotors, could see no hot spots. He toggled the controls on his laptop. The ground crews had been easy, hot and moving and outside the trees,