Gone

  ‘We don’t know that. It could be anyone’s. It could be a hoax – it could be anything.’

  ‘If you think it’s a hoax, why are you moving us out? You believe me. So why do I have to give it up?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he hissed impatiently. The whole exercise was falling apart at the seams. ‘I have to tell your daughter to grow up and now I’m telling the mother to do the same.’

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ said the FLO.

  ‘Christ.’ Caffery ran his hands through his hair. Outside, the cars had stopped. Their engines were running. ‘Just – please, Rose. Please give the nice man the tooth.’

  ‘Mum.’ Philippa stepped up behind her mother, put her hands on her shoulders and held Caffery’s eyes. There was no respect, just a look that said she and her mother were in this together and no one, no one, could understand what this whole thing meant. ‘Mum, do what he says. I don’t think he’s going to give up.’

  Rose was silent. Then she pushed her face into her elder daughter’s neck. The sobs shook her body noiselessly. After a moment or two her right hand came out from her armpit and slowly unclenched. She held out the tooth on her open palm. With a quick glance at Caffery, the CSI man stepped forward and carefully took it from her.

  ‘Good,’ Caffery said, feeling a line of sweat break just under his hairline and trail slowly down into the back of his collar. He hadn’t realized until now how tense he was. ‘Now can we all get going?’

  18

  At six o’clock that afternoon the inspector came into the office, put a hand on Flea’s desk and leaned over so that he was staring hard into her face.

  She ducked out of his way. ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Just the superintendent likes you, apparently. I’ve had Professional Standards on the phone.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. That review of your competency pay? It’s been suspended.’

  ‘You mean they’ll get their bonus?’

  ‘Happy Christmas. Ching ching ching.’

  When he’d gone she sat for a while in silence in her familiar office, surrounded by the things she’d got easy with over the years. The photos of the team on jobs pinned to the walls, the budget forecasts scribbled on the whiteboard. The stupid postcards stuck to the locker doors. One showed a man in snorkel and fins and read: Steve had got all his diving gear, now all he needed was to find those elusive muffs his friends kept telling him about. And a force poster on the wall about an anti-drugs operation: Atrium: since 2001 we’ve arrested one person a day. Help us make that two. One of the team had used a marker pen to delete ‘a day’. Flea would catch serious hell from the superintendents if they saw any of this, but she’d let the boys leave it all up. She liked their sense of humour. Liked the easy way they were around each other. They were going to get their money. They could buy their Xboxes and their kids’ Wiis and their alloy wheels and all the guy things that would make it a real Christmas for them.

  The front door opened, wafting in a blast of cold air and petrol fumes from outside. Someone came down the corridor. Wellard, carrying a bag and heading for the decontamination room. She stopped him in the doorway. ‘Hey.’

  He put his head into the office. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to get your pay. The inspector just told me.’

  He inclined his head. A small, chivalrous bow. ‘Well, thank you, kind lady. My poor disabled children will smile this Christmas for the first time in their sad, short lives. Oh, they will be content, kind miss. They will. It will be the best Christmas ever.’

  ‘Make sure the one with the polio gets the iPod Touch.’

  ‘You’re not as nasty as you like to pretend, Boss. No, really, you’re not.’

  ‘Wellard?’

  He paused, door half open. ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Seriously. This morning.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘You saw the cast the CSI made. You didn’t recognize what the jacker used to score out his prints?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She felt something cold and half opaque patter across the back of her head. A shadowy picture of the forests they’d searched. The farmland stretching away to either side. During the search this morning there had been whispers about the things the jacker had said in the letter. No one outside MCIU was supposed to know but things got around the other units, and this morning all the officers had worked with their heads full of vague, unsettling notions about what the jacker might have done with Martha. ‘Just a . . . feeling about that place. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.’

  ‘A hunch?’

  She gave him a cold look. ‘I’m learning to trust my “hunches”, Wellard. Learning I’m not as blonde as you think. And I feel like there’s something in the . . .’ she groped for the word ‘. . . the environment out there that was important. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘You know me, Sarge, I’m a grunt. It’s my stunning body I use to turn a dime. Not my loaf.’ He winked and left the office, his footsteps fading down the corridor. She smiled bleakly and listened to him go. Outside, rain had begun to fall, so slow, fat and nebulous it could almost have been snow. Winter really was here.

  19

  At six fifteen a dark Audi S6 screamed through the small streets of Mere, gunning itself around the bends. Janice Costello was racing to get home before her husband, her hands gripping the wheel, sweat making her palms slick. The radio was on – a media psychiatrist giving his opinion on the carjacker who had kidnapped a little girl in Frome the other day: it was probably a white male in his thirties. Could be a husband, could even be a father. Janice shakily turned the radio off. Why hadn’t she thought about that bastard before she’d left Emily on her own in the car? Frome wasn’t that far from here. She was so, so lucky nothing had happened. She was losing her mind, taking a risk like that. Losing it.

  Clare. It was all her fault. Clare, Clare, Clare. The name bothered Janice more than almost anything. If it had been Mylene or Kylie or Kirsty, any one of those young-girl names, she’d have found it easier. She could have pictured a big-breasted teenager with straightened blonde hair and ‘BENCH’ written on her bottom. But Clare? Clare sounded like someone Janice might have gone to school with. And the pale woman at the clinic wasn’t sexy or brash or inexperienced. She looked like someone you could have a proper conversation with. She looked like a Clare.

  It wasn’t the first time Cory’d had an affair. That had happened six years ago. With a ‘beauty therapist’ whom Janice had never met but pictured as someone with a year-round suntan, expensive underwear and maybe a Brazilian bikini wax. When Janice had found out about it, the Costellos had gone into therapy together: Cory was so repentant, so mortified at the mistake he’d made, that for a while she almost forgave him. And then something else had entered the mix, something that changed her mind and convinced her to give him a second chance. She’d found she was pregnant.

  Emily arrived in a rush in the winter and Janice was poleaxed with such unexpected love for her little girl that for years it didn’t matter what was happening in the marriage. Cory was in therapy and had a new job in Bristol as a ‘marketing consultant on sustainable product development’ to a printing company. It made her laugh, that title, with the earnest way he disregarded his own carbon footprint. Still, he was earning enough money for Janice to stop work and take small freelance editing jobs, which paid a pittance but kept her skills sharp. For a while life had moved along serenely. Until now. Until Clare. And now everything had narrowed down to this obsession – nights lying awake, staring at the ceiling while Cory snored next to her. The secretive phone monitoring, the checking of pockets at the dry-cleaner’s, the questioning. All leading to tonight – the darkened rush across town with poor Emily tucked up in the back of the car.

  She lunged the Audi sideways, down the residential street. Screeched to a halt in the driveway of their Victorian semi. No Cory. When she turned round she saw that Emily, bless her – in
stead of sitting white-faced, terrified by the race home – really had fallen asleep, Jasper tucked between her chin and her shoulder like one of those neck pillows clutched by people trailing around in airports.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ Janice whispered. ‘Mummy’s going to take you up to bed.’

  She was able to bundle Emily out of the car and into her bunkbed without waking her. She rubbed toothpaste on a finger hurriedly round Emily’s sleepy mouth – it would have to do for now – kissed the little girl on the forehead, tore off her own coat and shoes and threw them into the wardrobe. She was in the kitchen emptying the last of the milk into the sink when Cory’s car pulled up outside. Quickly she rinsed the carton and carried it out to the front to put in the recycling bin.

  Cory met her at the door, keys in his hand, suspicion on his face. ‘Hello.’ He looked her up and down, noting the outdoor shoes.

  ‘Out of milk.’ She rattled the empty carton at him. ‘I went to try and get some more but the shop’s run out.’

  ‘You went out? What about Emily?’

  ‘I left her, of course. I put her into a nice warm bath and gave her some razor blades to play with. For God’s sake, Cory, what do you take me for? She came with me.’

  ‘You said she was asleep.’

  ‘I said she’d woken up. You don’t listen.’ She put the milk carton into the bin and stood, arms folded, studying him. He was good-looking, Cory. No getting away from that. But lately there was something soft about his jaw that made him seem almost feminine. And there was a bald spot starting on the top of his head. She’d noticed it in bed the other night. It didn’t bother her, but she wondered what Clare would make of it. Was it worth saying something to him – just to puncture his ego? Or should she let Clare notice it?

  ‘How was the session?’

  ‘Told you. Same old, same old.’

  ‘Clare?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Clare. The one you were talking about the other day. Remember?’

  ‘Why do you want to know about her?’

  ‘Just showing an interest. Is she still fighting with her ex?’

  ‘Her husband? Yes – the piece of shit. The things he did to her, to her kids, outrageous.’

  There was a tinge of extra venom there. Piece of shit? She’d never heard him use that expression before. Maybe something he’d learned from Clare.

  ‘Anyway – I’m thinking of stopping the group.’ He pushed past her into the hallway, unbuttoning his coat. ‘It’s taking too much time. Things are changing at work – they want more hours out of me.’

  Janice followed him into the kitchen and watched him open the fridge, hunt for a beer. ‘More hours? That’ll mean late nights, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s the one. Can’t afford not to. Not with the world the way it is. The directors want me at a big meeting tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to discuss it then. Four o’clock.’

  Four. Like a slap, Clare’s face came back to Janice, the way she was holding her hands up. Four fingers. They meant four o’clock. Cory and Clare were meeting at four. He wouldn’t be answering any of Janice’s calls because he’d be in a ‘meeting’. And then, almost to confirm exactly what she’d suspected, he said conversationally, ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Any plans?’

  She didn’t answer for a moment, just regarded him calmly, her heart racing. I don’t love you, she thought. Cory, I really don’t love you. And in a way that makes me very happy.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said lightly, then turned away and began unloading the dishwasher. It was supposed to be his job, but she always did it, so why should today be any different? ‘Tomorrow? Oh, I think I’ll pick up Emily from school and head over to Mum’s.’

  ‘That’s an hour’s drive.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m happy for you, Janice, that you’ve got the free time to do things like that. I really am.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled. Cory was always pointing out how easy her life was, doing freelance stuff here and there, not a proper job like he did. But she wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘I finished the project for that website and I thought I’d take the time before I start the next job. I may stay at Mum’s – maybe have dinner with her.’ She paused and repeated herself very slowly, staring down at the handful of cutlery in which her face was blearily reflected. ‘Yes. I won’t be in town tomorrow, Cory. Not for the whole afternoon.’

  20

  By seven o’clock the world was so cold and dark it might have been midnight. There was no moon, no starlight, just the glow of the security lights in the lumber-yard at the end of the lane. Flea stopped her car and got out, shrugging on a fleece and a waterproof. She wore Thinsulate gloves and a wool beanie. Usually she was OK in the cold – she had to be in her job – but this autumn the weather had a hard, almost vindictive edge that seemed to affect everyone. She flashed her card at the soporific cop in the car that blocked the lane and clicked on her torch. The track through the pine forest was a pale, almost luminous yellow in the beam. The Yaris’s tracks were surrounded by limp police tape, the ground covered in little forensics marker flags. She passed them and went through the pool of light cast by the yard’s halogen lights, the conveyor-belts, sawmills and log splitters now silent and shadowy. She continued down the lane until she was in the grounds of the abandoned factory.

  Flea had been home already. She’d jogged and showered and eaten and listened to the radio and read. She couldn’t wind down. She couldn’t stop wondering what it was about the search that wouldn’t lie right at the back of her thoughts. If Dad had still been around he’d have said: You’ve got a thorn in your head, girl. Better you take it out than leave it there and let it go to poison.

  Now she went to the tree-line, where the field began and where Wellard had been standing. She found the line of cleared land, the place that had been searched and the line of rubbish, like the boundary line of flotsam and jetsam a retreating tide had left. She twisted the beam to halfway between flood and spot. Shone it on the line of rubbish and tried to pull up images from this morning.

  Whatever was bugging her had struck her after they’d searched the tank. She’d been standing over at the tank talking to one of the other team’s sergeants about what time their shift finished and what staffing they’d have available if they had to go into overtime. The teams were still searching around them. Wellard had been over here at the edge of the field. She remembered watching him vaguely while she spoke. He’d found something in the grass and was talking to the crime-scene manager about it. Flea had been concentrating on what the sergeant next to her was saying and only half watching Wellard and the CSM, but now she could see the picture clearly. She could even see what he was holding out to the CSM. A piece of rope. Blue, nylon, about a foot long. The rope itself wasn’t what she’d wanted – she’d seen it later on the exhibits table and it had been unremarkable in and of itself – but something about it had started up a particular thought process that she knew was important.

  She went to the old water tank where she had been standing and switched off the torch. She waited for a few quiet moments, surrounded by the monster shapes of the winter trees, beyond them the ploughed fields stretching away, dull, immense and dead. From somewhere in the distance to her right came the giant sound of a train racing along the Great Western Union Railway, flying through the darkness. Flea had a desktop at home that drove her crazy by giving off a faint crackle moments before her phone rang. She knew what it was – electromagnetic currents trying to piggyback the speaker wires for antennae – but to her it always seemed as if the machine had prescience, a subtle inkling of the future. Wellard would laugh if she told him, but sometimes she imagined she had a similar electromagnetic warning system – a biological buzzer that sent the hairs up on her arms moments before a thought or an idea clicked into place. Now, standing in the frozen field, she felt it happen. A current racing across her skin. Just seconds before the knowledge fell neatly i
nto her head.

  Water. The rope had made her think of boats and marinas and water.

  This morning the thought had gone as quickly as it had come – the other sergeant was talking to her and, anyway, there wasn’t any water around here so she’d let it flit away. She’d dismissed it. But now she’d had time to think about it she realized she’d been wrong. There was water here. And not very far away.

  She turned slowly and looked towards the west, to where the low cloud cover was up-lit a faint orange by a town or highway. She began to walk. Like a zombie, Sarge – Wellard would crack up to see her now. She cut straight across the field, frozen grass soaking her boots, hardly looking down as if something had a hook in her sternum and was slowly dragging her along. Through a small glade of crowded rustling trees, over two stiles on to a short gravelled lane, silver in the diffuse torchlight. After ten minutes she stopped.

  The path she stood on was narrow. To her right the ground sloped upwards. To her left it ran steeply down to a tarry gully. A decommissioned canal. The Thames and Severn. An eighteenth-century engineering miracle, built to carry coal from the Severn estuary – when it had become redundant it had seen some service as a pleasure canal. Half dried out now, what water was left in the bottom had shrunk to a dark, poisonous-looking mulch. She knew this canal: knew its beginning and its end. To the east it extended twenty-six miles as far as Lechlade, to the west eight miles to Stroud. It was littered with the evidence of its former existence. The broken and rotting hulls of old coal and pleasure barges were dotted every few hundred yards. There were two in the short stretch she could see now.

  She went a few yards along the towpath, sat down and swung her feet on to the deck of the nearest barge. The smells of decay and stagnant water were overpowering. Bacteria and moss. She put one hand on the deck and leaned over, shining the torch into the hull. This vessel wasn’t like the old iron-built coal barges that had first used this waterway: it was newer, a timber-hulled Norfolk wherry, perhaps, with its masts removed and an engine fitted. Probably brought to this side of the country as a canal cruiser. The timber had given in to the years of neglect and was now half submerged, debris from the canal floating on the black stinking water inside it. Nothing else to see. She knelt up and searched around on the tiller deck at the stern. Kicked aside beer cans and the plastic bags that floated on the water like jellyfish. She felt all around the platform and found nothing. She hauled herself out of the barge and went back along the towpath until she found the next. This one was older and might actually have been a working barge. It sat higher out of the canal and the water inside the hull was only knee-deep. She dropped into it, the freezing, inky water soaking into her jeans. She waded a little way, letting her feet in their trainers feel every inch of the hull below her. Every rivet, every piece of jettisoned wood.