Gone

  The Walking Man made a low grunt in his throat. He snapped open the flagon of cider and poured some into a chipped mug, set it next to his sleeping-bag.

  ‘I’m not here to give you more hassle,’ Caffery said. ‘You’ve already spent most of the day in the police station.’

  ‘Five hours wasted. Five good daylight hours.’

  ‘I’m not here on police business.’

  ‘Not here about that nonce? The letter-writer?’

  ‘No.’ Caffery ran his hands down his face. It was the last thing he wanted to talk about. ‘No. I’ve come for a holiday from that.’

  The Walking Man filled a second mug with cider. Handed it to Caffery. ‘Then, it’s her you want to talk about. The woman.’

  Caffery took the mug.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Jack Caffery. I’ve told you I’m not reading your mind. I’ve been wondering when you’d talk about her again. The woman. The one you’re always thinking about. When you were here in the spring she was all you could talk about. You were burning for her.’ He threw a log on the fire. ‘I envied you that. I’ll never feel like that again for a woman.’

  Caffery bit the cuticle on his thumb and stared blankly into the fire. He thought ‘burning’ was the wrong word for the polluted, knotted mess of half-finished thoughts and impulses he had about Flea Marley. ‘OK,’ he said after a while. ‘Let me tell you how it starts. There’s a name you see in newspapers sometimes. Misty Kitson. A pretty girl. She went missing six months ago.’

  ‘I didn’t know that was her name but I know who you mean.’

  ‘The woman – the one we’re talking about – knows what happened to Kitson. She was the one who killed her.’

  The Walking Man raised his eyebrows. His eyes glittered red. ‘Murder?’ he said lightly. ‘A terrible thing. What an immoral woman she must be.’

  ‘No. It was an accident. She was driving too fast. The girl, Kitson, stepped out of a field on to the road . . .’ He trailed off. ‘But you know that already, you bastard. I can see it in your face.’

  ‘I see things. I’ve watched you walking the route the girl took when she left the clinic. Over and over again. The night you walked until the sun came up?’

  ‘That was in July.’

  ‘I was there. When you found the place it had happened – the skidmarks in the road? I was there. Watching you.’

  Caffery didn’t speak for a while. It didn’t matter what the Walking Man said, how much he denied it, being with him was like being in the presence of God: someone who saw everything. Someone who smiled indulgently and didn’t interfere when mortals made their mistakes. The night of the skidmarks had been a good one. A night when everything had fallen into place and the question had moved from being why Flea had killed Kitson – for a long time all Caffery’d known was that she’d disposed of the corpse – and became why the hell, if it was an accident, hadn’t she just given the straight cough? Walked into the nearest cop shop and told the truth. She probably wouldn’t have even done a custodial. And that was what was still eating him now, and blocking him every step of the way – why she hadn’t just confessed. ‘It’s funny,’ he murmured. ‘I never had her down as a coward.’

  The Walking Man finished attending to the fire. He settled down on his bedroll, the mug in both hands, his head against a log. The edges of his huge beard gleamed red in the firelight. ‘That’s because you don’t know the full story.’

  ‘What full story?’

  ‘The truth. You don’t know the truth.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Your mind hasn’t properly formed around it. There’s one more corner you haven’t turned or even thought about turning. In fact, you can’t even see it’s there.’ He made a small motion with his hands as if he was tying an intricate knot. ‘You’re protecting her and you can’t yet see what a nice circle that makes.’

  ‘A nice circle?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘No. You don’t. Not yet.’ The Walking Man closed his eyes and smiled contentedly. ‘Some things you have to work out for yourself.’

  ‘What things? What circle?’

  But the Walking Man was motionless, the light of the fire playing across his blackened face, and once again Caffery knew he wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. Not until Caffery brought back to him some evidence that he’d worked at it. The Walking Man didn’t give anything away for free. It irritated Caffery – this smugness. It made him want to shake the guy. Made him want to say something that hurt.

  ‘Hey.’ He leaned forward. Looked hard at the smiling face. ‘Hey. Should I be asking you about the compound? Should I be asking if you’re going to try to break into it?’

  The Walking Man didn’t open his eyes, but his smile faded. ‘No. Because if you asked that question I’d ignore it.’

  ‘Well, I’m asking you anyway. You’ve given me the job of second-guessing you – of trying to fathom you. And that’s what I’ve been doing. That compound has been here ten years.’ He nodded to where the arc lights shone through the trees. He could just make out the top of the barbed-wire fence, like a gulag. ‘It wasn’t here when your daughter was killed and you think she might be buried there.’

  Now the Walking Man opened his eyes. He tilted his chin down and stared angrily at Caffery. Nothing playful in his belligerence now. ‘You’re trained to ask questions. Aren’t you trained to know when to shut up as well?’

  ‘You told me once that every step you walked was your preparation. You said you wanted to follow her. It was a mystery to me, why you walked, but I think I know now. You say you’re not a seer, but you can tread the same piece of land I tread and read in it a hundred things I would never read.’

  ‘You can talk all you like, policeman, but I make no promises I’ll listen.’

  ‘Then I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything I know about what you’re doing. I know what the walking is about. Some things I haven’t figured yet. The crocuses – they’re in a line and that means something, but I don’t know what. Then there’s the van Evans dumped in the Holcombe quarry after he’d got rid of her body. That was stolen from you in Shepton Mallet and I don’t know why you’re so far away from where it happened. But I know everything else. You’re still looking for her. For where she was buried.’

  The Walking Man held his gaze. His eyes were dark, ferocious.

  ‘Your silence,’ said Caffery, ‘says it all. Don’t you know that you can learn more about a man from what he doesn’t say than from what he does?’

  ‘Learn more about a man from what he doesn’t say than from what he does. Is that a policeman’s adage? Some bargain-basement homily from the cosy offices of Her Majesty’s law-keepers?’

  Caffery half smiled. ‘You only bait me when I’ve touched on something.’

  ‘No – I bait you because I know how effete and useless you really are. You’re angry, and you imagine it’s because of the evil in the world when what really infuriates you is how toothless you are about that woman. How straitjacketed and hand-tied. That’s what you can’t stand.’

  ‘And you’re angry because you know I’m right. You’re angry because, for all your insight and sixth senses, you come to something like this,’ he waved at the factory compound, ‘and you can’t get in to search it. And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.’

  ‘Get away from my fire. Get away from me.’

  Caffery put down his beaker. He got to his feet and carefully rolled up the piece of foam, placing it next to the plates and other belongings. ‘Thank you for answering my questions.’

  ‘I didn’t answer them.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Trust me. You did.’

  31

  By the time Caffery got to the office the next morning it was eight o’clock and already there had been meetings, interviews and phone calls. He made a rough bed with an old towel under the radiator behind his desk, settled Myrtle there with a bowl of w
ater and, taking sips of scalding coffee, wandered through the corridors, barely awake, his eyes bloodshot. He hadn’t slept well – never did in the middle of a case. After the argument with the Walking Man he’d gone back to the isolated cottage he rented in the Mendips and spent the night combing through the witness statements on Emily’s kidnapping. There’d been some Scotch somewhere along the line. Now he had a headache that could have brought down an elephant.

  The office manager updated him. Lollapalooza and Turner were still busy tickling up warrants for the remaining properties out in the Cotswolds. The CSI ‘surgery’ had forensicated Janice Costello’s Audi and come up with nothing. They’d left it in the car park downstairs and the family had collected it last night on their way to Janice’s mother in Keynsham. DC Prody had taken a half-day off yesterday. In a strop, probably, but he must have seen sense overnight. He’d been back since five this morning, dealing with the CCTV footage. Caffery made a silent pact to broker a peace with him. He carried his now empty mug down to Prody’s office. ‘Any chance of a coffee?’

  Prody glanced up from his desk. ‘I guess. Have a seat.’

  Caffery hesitated. Prody’s tone was sullen. Don’t rise to it, he thought. Just don’t. He kicked the door closed, put the mug on the desk, sat and looked at the walls. The room was cheerier now. The overhead light was working, there were pictures on the walls, and in the corner there was a dust sheet with a roller tray resting on some tins. The smell of paint was overwhelming. ‘Decorators been in, have they?’

  Prody got up and clicked the kettle on. ‘Not that I asked for it. Maybe someone decided I needed a proper welcome. Electric lights, too. Honestly? I’m just a bit disappointed I didn’t get a mood board through the internal first.’

  Caffery nodded. He was still hearing that sullen note in the man’s voice. ‘Well? What’s come in overnight?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ He spooned coffee into cups. ‘The streets around the place Emily was taken have been combed – the only dark-blue Vauxhall had different digits. Turned out to belong to a nice lady with two dogs and a hairdressing appointment in the area.’

  ‘And the CCTV on the stations?’

  ‘Nothing. No data at two, and the one where the Yaris was found – Avoncliffe? – it’s a request stop.’

  ‘A request stop?’

  ‘You put out your arm, the train stops.’

  ‘Like a bus?’

  ‘Like a bus. But no one stopped the train over the weekend. He left the Yaris there and must have got away on foot. None of the local cab companies had any pick-ups either.’

  Caffery swore lightly under his breath. ‘How’s the bastard doing it? He got past the ANPR cameras – there’s no way he could have known where the units were going to be, is there?’

  ‘I can’t see how.’ He clicked the kettle off and poured hot water into the cups. ‘They’re mobile, not fixed.’

  Caffery nodded thoughtfully. He’d just noticed a familiar file on Prody’s windowsill. Yellow. From the review team. Again.

  ‘Sugar?’ Prody was holding a loaded spoon above one of the mugs.

  ‘Please. Two.’

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He held the mug out to Caffery, who looked at it steadily, but didn’t take it. ‘Paul.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you not to look at that file. I asked you to return it to the review team. Why did you ignore me?’

  There was a pause. Then Prody said, ‘Do you want this coffee or not?’

  ‘No. Put it down. Explain why you’ve got the file.’

  Prody waited a second or two longer. Then he put the coffee on the desk, went to the windowsill and got the file. He pulled up a chair and sat, facing Caffery, with it on his lap. ‘I’ll fight you over this, because I can’t let it go.’ He found a map in the file and unfolded it on his knee. ‘This is Farleigh Wood Hall and this, roughly, is the radius you initially searched. You concentrated a lot of your resources on the fields and villages in that radius. You did some house-to-house outside the radius too. Around here.’

  Caffery didn’t let his eyes drop to the map. He could tell from his peripheral vision that Prody was pointing to a place about half a mile from where Flea’s accident had happened. He kept his eyes on Prody’s face. Kept the huge fat fist of rage tucked under his sternum. He’d been wrong. Prody was never going to be a steady-hand cop. There was something else underneath: a hard, urban intelligence that could make him a brilliant cop in the right circumstances – and a dangerous one in the wrong.

  ‘But mostly outside that radius you went wide, to the bigger towns. Trowbridge, Bath, Warminster. Looked at railway stations, bus stops, some of the dealers around there because she was a junkie. It occurred to me – what if she got out of this radius but didn’t get as far as one of the towns? What if something happened to her on one of the roads? What if she was picked up by someone, given a lift? Taken somewhere miles away – God knows, Gloucestershire, into Wiltshire, London. But, of course, you’d thought of that. You had checkpoints set up. You interviewed drivers for two weeks. But then I thought, What if it was a hit-and-run? What if it happened on one of these small roads? Some of them only serve these little hamlets.’ Again that finger, right over the place of the accident. ‘There’s hardly any traffic down there. Something happened and there’d have been no one to witness it. Seriously, have you thought of that? What if someone hit her, panicked and hid the body? Or maybe even loaded the body into the car – disposed of it somewhere else?’

  Caffery took the map from him, folded it up.

  ‘Boss, listen. I want to be a good cop. That’s all this is. It’s just the way I’m made – I have to put my back into everything I do.’

  ‘Then start by learning how to take orders and how to be respectful, Prody. This is the last warning: you don’t stop being a prick I’ll get you shifted to that prostitute murder the others are working on. You can spend your days down at City Road interviewing the slag meth dealers if you prefer.’

  Prody took a breath. His eyes went to the map in Caffery’s hand.

  ‘I said, is that what you’d prefer?’

  There was a long silence. Two men fighting without saying a word or moving a muscle. Then Prody breathed out. Let his shoulders droop. Closed the file. ‘But I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’

  ‘Oddly enough,’ Caffery said, ‘I really didn’t think you would.’

  32

  Twenty minutes after Caffery’s meeting with Prody, Janice Costello appeared unannounced at his office door in a rainstreaked coat, her hair untidy, her face flushed. She looked as if she’d been running. ‘I’ve called nine nine nine.’ She was holding a piece of paper in her right hand. ‘But I wanted to show you in person.’

  ‘Come in.’ Caffery got up and pulled back a chair. On her bed under the radiator Myrtle pricked her ears and blinked at Janice. ‘Sit down.’

  She took a step inside and, ignoring the chair, pushed the crumpled paper at him. ‘It came through the door at my mother’s. We’d been out. The note was on the doormat when we got back. We didn’t stay in the house for a second after that. We got straight out and came here.’

  Her hand was trembling and Caffery knew, without having to ask, what the paper was. Almost knew what it would say. A long, slow wave of nausea came up from his stomach. The sort of nausea that could only be sent away by cigarettes and Glenmorangie.

  ‘We need you to put us somewhere safe, somewhere we’re protected. We’ll sleep on the floor of the police station if we have to.’

  ‘Put it down.’ He went to a filing cabinet and found a small box of latex gloves, pulled on a pair. ‘That’s it – on the table.’ He bent and straightened it. Some of the ink was smudged from the rain on Janice’s hands, but he recognized the writing instantly.

  Do not believe it is over. My love affair with your daughter has only just begun. I know where you are – I will always know where you are. Ask your daughter – she knows we’r
e supposed to be together . . .

  ‘What do we do?’ Janice’s teeth were chattering. The rain in her hair scattered the fluorescent light. ‘Has he been following us? Please – what the hell’s going on?’

  Caffery gritted his teeth hard and fought the desire to close his eyes. He’d put a lot of energy into making sure the story wasn’t leaked. And everyone, from the FLO to the press office, was telling him it was watertight. So how in Christ’s name had the jacker found out not only where they lived but where her damned mother lived? Trying to keep a step ahead of him was like trying to stop lightning.

  ‘Did you see anyone? Any reporters? Outside your house?’

  ‘Cory spent all afternoon watching. There wasn’t a soul.’

  ‘And are you sure – one hundred per cent cast-iron sure – that you haven’t told anyone?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Tears were in her eyes. Tears of real fear. ‘I swear. And my mother hasn’t either.’

  ‘No neighbours saw you coming or going?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And when you went out?’

  ‘It was just to the local shops first thing this morning. In Keynsham. Just to get bread for breakfast. Mum had run out.’

  ‘You didn’t try to go back to Mere?’

  ‘No!’ She paused, as if her vehemence had shocked her. She pushed her sleeves up her arms, shivering. ‘Look – I’m sorry. It’s just I’ve gone over and over it. And we haven’t done anything. I swear.’

  ‘Where’s Emily now?’

  ‘With Cory. In the office downstairs.’

  ‘I’m going to find you somewhere. Give me half an hour. I can’t guarantee it’ll be as nice as your place – or your mother’s – or that it’ll be close to Keynsham. It could be anywhere in Avon and Somerset.’

  ‘I don’t care where it is. I just want to know we’re safe. I want my mother to come too.’