Gone

  Something clinked. It rolled away from her foot an inch or two. She pushed her sleeve to her upper arm and, bending at the waist, lowered her hand into the freezing water. Groped in the muck. She found the object and pulled it out.

  A mooring spike. Straightening, she shone the torch on it. It was about a foot long and shaped like a long fat tent peg with a splayed top where, over the years, it had been hammered into the banks for tying up to. Thicker than a blade and sharper than a chisel, it could easily have made the spikes in the CSM’s plaster-of-paris cast. The jacker might have used it to score out his footprints.

  She climbed out of the hull and stood, water streaming off her, on the towpath. She looked along the faintly gleaming canal. All the barges would have used a spike just like this. The place must be littered with them. She studied the spike in her hand. It would make a good weapon. You wouldn’t want to argue with someone holding this. No. You wouldn’t argue. Especially if you were only eleven years old.

  21

  The dog’s name was Myrtle. She was threadbare, half crippled by arthritis. Her white and black tail hung off the end of her bony back like a limp flag. But she hobbled along obediently behind Caffery, got in and out of the back seat of his car without complaining, though he could tell it hurt her. Even waited patiently outside the forensics lab at HQ in Portishead while he struggled with the technicians and tried to push forward the testing of the baby tooth against Martha’s DNA. By the time he was done with the lab he was feeling sorry for the damned dog. He stopped at a Smile store and got armfuls of dog food. The chew toy seemed a bit hopeful but he bought it anyway and put it on the back seat next to her.

  It was late, gone ten, by the time he got back to the MCIU building. The place was still busy. He took Myrtle limping along the corridor, running the gauntlet of people poking their heads out of offices to speak to him, hand him reports, messages, but mostly to pat the dog or make wisecracks about her: Jack, your dog looks like I feel. Hey, it’s Yoda in a coat. Here, furry Yoda.

  Turner was still there, dishevelled and a bit sleepy but at least no earring. He spent a little time bringing Caffery up to date on the trawl for the Vauxhall, which still hadn’t borne fruit, and gave him contact details for the superintendent who’d authorized the surveillance on the vicarage. Then he spent a longer time crouched down talking nonsense to Myrtle, who wearily lifted her tail once or twice in acknowledgement. Lollapalooza came in, still in full makeup, but she was letting her guard down: she’d taken off her high heels and rolled up her sleeves to reveal the down of fine dark hairs on her arms. She hadn’t done well on the sex offenders, she admitted. CAPIT had a short list of people they thought could meet the criteria: they’d been checked on overnight. But what she could tell Caffery was that chondroitin was the way to go with the dog’s arthritis. That or glucosamine. Oh, and cut all grains out of the poor animal’s diet. By which she meant all grains. All of them.

  When she’d gone he opened a can of Chum and let it gloop on to one of the cracked plates from the unit kitchen. Myrtle ate slowly, her old head on one side, favouring the left side of her jaw. The food stank. At ten thirty, when Paul Prody stuck his head in the door, the smell was still there. He made a face. ‘Nice.’

  Caffery got up, went to the window and opened it a fraction. Cold damp air came in, bringing with it the smells of drunks and takeaways. One of the shops opposite had Christmas lights in the window, Christmas officially beginning in November, of course. ‘So?’ He sat heavily in his chair. Arms hanging at his sides. He felt half finished. ‘What’ve you got for me?’

  ‘Just in the last few minutes spoke to the press office.’ Prody came in, sat down. Myrtle was lying on the floor, digesting her meal, her chin on her paws. She raised her head and watched him with a vague, burned-out interest. Even Prody was showing signs of wear and tear. His jacket was creased and his tie was undone round his neck as if he’d spent a couple of hours on the sofa at home, watching soaps. ‘The nationals, the locals and all the TV stations ran pictures of the Bradleys’ house. The number on the door was quite clear and so was the sign: “The Vicarage”. The cuttings agency is still searching, but so far all anyone can come up with is some copy about “the Bradleys’ house in Oakhill”. Nothing more specific than that. No road name. And no mention of the tooth. Anywhere.’

  ‘It could be him, then.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Good?’ Prody gave him a level look.

  ‘Yes. It means he knows the Oakhill area – knows the A37. It’s great.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Caffery dropped his hands on the desk. ‘No. It’s something, but it’s not “great” at all. We already knew he was familiar with that area. What does it add to our intel? That he knows an estate every bastard in the area has to drive past on their way to work.’

  They looked across at the map on the wall. It was covered with tiny pins, the heads coloured. The pink ones were personal to Caffery: they marked the places he knew the Walking Man had been. A pattern was emerging there: a long band stretching upwards from Shepton Mallet, where the Walking Man had once lived. But the black pins were the ones Caffery couldn’t mould a pattern from – six of them: three at the places the jacker had struck, the other three at places that had some relevance – the vicarage in Oakhill where he’d left the baby tooth, the area near Tetbury where the Bradleys’ Yaris had been parked briefly and the place near Avoncliff in Wiltshire where it had been abandoned.

  ‘There’s a station near where he left the car.’ Caffery squinted at the black pins. ‘If you look at it there’s a railway line runs through there.’

  Prody went to the map, tilted sideways from the waist and studied the pins. ‘The line that goes from Bristol through Bath and Westbury.’

  ‘The Wessex line. Look where it goes after Bath.’

  ‘Freshford, Frome.’ He looked over his shoulder at Caffery. ‘Martha was taken in Frome.’

  ‘And Cleo was taken in Bruton. On the same line.’

  ‘You think he’s using the train?’

  ‘Maybe. He drove to the Bradleys today, I’m sure of it. And he must have used a car to get out to Bruton – the Vauxhall, maybe. But when he jacks someone else’s car he has to come back, pick up the Vauxhall, at some point.’

  ‘So maybe he lives near one of the stations on the line?’

  Caffery shrugged. ‘Well, it’s tentative, but let’s go with it. In the absence of anything else. In the morning I want you to get on to Railtrack, take in their CCTVs. Know the routine for that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And, Prody?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Just because Turner wears his Glasto look after six p.m., Lollapallooza thinks it’s cool to go barefoot and I’ve got a Labrador in my office, it doesn’t mean you get to lower your standards.’

  Prody nodded. Did up his tie. ‘It’s a collie, Boss.’

  ‘A collie. That’s what I said.’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’ Prody half opened the door to leave, when something occurred to him. He stopped and came back in, closing it behind him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I took the file back. Last night, like you said. No one even noticed I’d had it.’

  For a moment Caffery couldn’t think what he was talking about. Then he remembered. Misty Kitson.

  ‘Good. ’S what I said to do.’

  ‘Thought I’d really pissed you off there for a bit.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I had a fly up my arse yesterday. Don’t take it seriously.’ He pulled the keyboard over. Needed to check his emails. ‘See you.’

  But Prody didn’t leave. He hovered at the door. ‘It was difficult for you. The way the case closed.’

  Caffery raised his eyes and stared at him. He couldn’t believe this. He pushed the keyboard away and gave him his full attention. He’d told the guy to drop it once, so where was he getting off pursuing it? ‘It was difficult when the unit had to let go of it.’ He swi
tched off his lamp. Put his elbows on the table. Made his face as calm as he could. ‘I can’t lie to you. That part was difficult. That’s why I don’t appreciate you bringing files in from the review team.’

  ‘The informer you had?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You never did say who he was.’

  ‘It’s not in the paperwork. That’s the whole point of snouts. They get their privacy.’

  ‘You never thought he was lying to you, your contact? That doctor – the one the snout said had done Misty – they dug up his garden but they never found her. There was nothing else to connect the guy to her. So that’s why I thought – maybe the snout was lying, putting you off the track?’

  Caffery studied Prody, looking for signs that the guy knew anything – anything at all – about the truth he was scraping near. There was no informer. Never had been. And the digging in the garden was just another of the ways Caffery had got the force to chase its own tail over the Kitson case. He might never quite understand why he’d done it for Flea. If it wasn’t for the way she froze something in him every time he saw her, if she’d been a guy, if she’d been Prody, say, or Turner, with what he knew he’d probably have turned them over in a blink. ‘It wasn’t my finest hour,’ he told Prody steadily. ‘If I had it over again I’d do things differently. But I can’t, and the force has run out of resources and come to the end of too many avenues, and like I said yesterday I’d appreciate your energy going on what’s happened to Martha Bradley and what that bastard has done to her. So . . .’ he held up his hand, inclined his head pleasantly ‘. . . the CCTV footage?’

  This time Prody got it. He gave a grim smile. ‘Yeah. Fair enough. I’m on it.’

  When the door was closed Caffery dropped back into the chair and stared blankly at the ceiling for a long time. The guy was turning out to be a prick. Wasting time. It was at least seventy hours since Martha had gone. The magic twenty-four had long been burned up and the next step, if he was truthful, was speaking to the Met and getting them to bring their specialist dead-body dogs up the M4. It was Caffery’s job to trim the fat from any job, but he couldn’t lose Prody: it’d take too long to bring someone else up to speed and, anyway, there was a tiny problem about what Prody’s side of the story might be if he did turn him over to another investigation. The Kitson case would get mentioned, no doubt about it. So he’d have to bite on it for the time being. And watch Prody. Keep him focused.

  Caffery’s mobile was ringing. He pulled it out of his pocket. ‘Flea Marley’, the display said. He went to the door and checked in the corridor that no one was about to come into his office. She made him secretive like this. When he was sure he was alone he went back to his desk. Myrtle followed him with her eyes as he answered.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said sharply. ‘What?’

  There was a pause. ‘Sorry. Is this a bad time?’

  He breathed out, leaned back in his chair. ‘No. It’s a – a good time.’

  ‘I’m at the Thames and Severn canal.’

  ‘Really? How nice. I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘You won’t have. It’s been decommissioned for years. Listen, I want to speak to the CSM, but he won’t take calls from a support-unit sergeant at this time of night. Will you speak to him?’

  ‘If you tell me why.’

  ‘Because I know what the jacker used to gouge out those footprints. A mooring spike. From a barge. I’ve got one in my hand now – there are probably hundreds all over this place. Dead barges everywhere. And it’s only a mile from where the Yaris left the tracks.’

  ‘We didn’t search it yesterday?’

  ‘No. It runs just outside the POLSA’s parameters. What do you think? Will you get him to look at it?’

  Caffery drummed his fingers on the desk. He’d never been easy taking advice from departments outside the unit. It could scramble your head, make you chase too many rabbits. And Flea was acting all of a sudden as though this was her unit’s case. Maybe using it to find ways of polishing her reputation. And her unit’s.

  But a mooring spike? Fitting the cast? ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me.’

  He put down the phone and sat staring at it. The dog tapped her tail lightly. As if she knew what it did to him to have any sort of conversation with Flea Marley.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said bad-temperedly. He reached over for the contacts list for the CSM. ‘I can live without the look. Thank you very much.’

  22

  In the early hours of the morning the CSM had peered again at the mould of the footprints and tended to agree with Flea: the marks did look as if they could have been made by a mooring spike. The POLSA turfed out at first light and marked up a stretch of canal to be searched. Teams were given waders and a two-mile section to check either side of where the Yaris had been parked. But the Thames and Severn canal had a peculiarity that the standard search teams couldn’t deal with. Two miles of it ran completely unseen and unnoticed in a tunnel deep under farmland and forests. The Sapperton tunnel. Abandoned and deeply unstable. A two-mile death trap. Nothing more, nothing less. Only one unit was trained to deal with a search like that.

  By eight o’clock more than forty people had gathered at the westerly entrance to the Sapperton tunnel. On the crenellated parapet above the opening, hoping for a glimpse of what was going on below, stood about twenty journalists and a handful of plainclothes MCIU officers. They were all looking down to where Flea and Wellard were thigh-deep in the black, stagnant canal water, readying their little Zodiac inflatable, loading it with what they needed to enter the dripping tunnel – communications systems and air cylinders.

  The Underwater Search Unit knew a little about the tunnel already. They’d used it years ago as part of their confined-space search training. The trust that owned the canal had given them structural information: the tunnel was seriously unstable; it ran dangerously close to the Golden Valley railway line, and every time a train went past the great slabs of fuller’s earth and oolite that made up the roof were shaken. The trust wanted to make it clear that they couldn’t guarantee what was going on in there: it was too dangerous to survey properly. What they could say for sure was that a massive, impassable rockfall blocked at least a quarter of a mile of the tunnel. It was vaguely visible from the surface as a long necklace of tree-filled craters and started not far from the easterly entrance, extending a long way into the tunnel. It had been relatively easy for two of Flea’s men to put on hard hats and wade the couple of hundred yards to the eastern end of the rockfall and push a probe through in the faint hope it’d come out the other side to be picked up by a team coming from the westerly entrance. Now, though, they were going to have to cover the tunnel from the other end and go a mile and a quarter underground before meeting the rockfall from the other side. And hope none of the unstable rocks chose to shake themselves loose as they did it.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Caffery was sceptical. Dressed in a padded North Face jacket, with his hands thrust into his pockets, he peered past them into the gloom. At the rubbish and bits of trees floating on the inky surface. ‘Sure the HSE are happy with it?’

  She nodded, didn’t meet his eye. Truth was, the HSE would have kittens if they knew what she intended doing. But the only way they’d find out was when the bastard press hounds got the news out there, and by that time the search would be over. And they’d have found Martha. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’

  She kept her eyes just south of his as she spoke. Thought that if he saw inside them he’d know she was following that ineffable thing. A hunch. And straining at the leash to do it. Because now finding Martha wasn’t just about putting a pretty feather in the unit’s cap. It meant more to her. It meant making amends for not being stronger earlier.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Caffery shook his head. ‘A maybe match on the cast and that’s all? It’s kind of a flimsy justification to be putting officers through this.’

  ‘We know what we’re doing. I won’t be putting either of us at risk.’
/>
  ‘I believe you when you say that.’

  ‘Good. Nice to be trusted.’

  The journey into the canal was slow. They pushed the boat carefully, guiding it past obstacles, past broken barges. Shopping trolleys stuck up out of the muck like skeletons. She and Wellard wore the dry suits they used for swift water rescues, with red hard hats and the wellies that had built-in steel toecaps and shanks. Each carried a small escape set: rebreathers mounted on their chests that would give them thirty minutes of clean air if they ran into a bad pocket of gas. They went in silence, using the beams from their head torches to scan the sides and bottom of the tunnel.

  It had been designed for the canal lightermen to ‘leg’ the barges through: lying on their backs, pushing with their feet against the ceiling to move the tons of coal and wood and iron along the two miles of darkness. In those days the tunnel roof would have been claustrophobically close to the water surface and there would have been no towpath: Flea and Wellard could only walk upright now because the canal level had dropped so much that it had revealed a narrow ledge of sorts on one side that they could use.