Gone

  ‘Stretchers,’ Nick said suddenly. ‘Two stretchers.’

  Janice stiffened. She and Rose jerked their heads forward as four paramedics came across the clearing at a trot. Their faces were flat, focused. They gave nothing away. ‘Stretchers?’ Her heart began to thump deafeningly. ‘Nick? What does that mean? Stretchers? What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does it mean they’re alive? They wouldn’t send stretchers in if they were dead. Would they?’

  Nick was silent, biting her lip.

  ‘Would they, Nick? Would they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  ‘Those are more paramedics going into the shaft,’ she hissed. ‘What does that mean? Tell me what it means.’

  ‘I don’t know, Janice – I promise. Please don’t get your hopes up. It might be for one of the search team.’

  The hard centre that Janice had kept rigid till now gave way with a soft, exhausted slump. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, twisting to Rose, her throat tight, ‘Rose, I can’t do it.’

  It was Rose’s turn to be strong. She caught Janice around the waist, taking her weight as she leaned heavily against her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rose, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Rose got her steady, lifted Janice’s arms over her own shoulders. She dropped her forehead so it touched the other woman’s. ‘It’s OK. I’ve got you. Just keep breathing. That’s it. Slowly. Keep breathing.’

  Janice did as she was told, feeling the cold air come through her nose and down into her lungs. Tears ran down her face. She didn’t try to stop them, just let them trickle off her chin and splash into the dead leaves at her feet. Nick came to stand behind the two women and rested her hands on their backs. ‘God, Janice,’ she muttered. ‘I wish I could do more. Just wish I could do more for you both.’

  Janice didn’t answer. She could smell Nick’s perfume and the rich, woody odour of her oilskin jacket. She could smell Rose’s breath and hear her heart thumping. That heart, she thought, feels the same as mine does. Two human hearts pressed one to the other. Each one aching in the same way. There were embroidered flowers on Rose’s sweater. Roses. Roses for Rose. There had been roses on the wallpaper in the house at Russell Road. She remembered lying in bed as a child and fixing her eyes on the pattern, willing it to make her sleep. Thank God for you, Rose, she thought. Thank God you exist.

  Someone was shouting.

  ‘OK,’ said Nick. ‘Something’s happening.’

  Janice’s face jolted up, her mouth open. The pulley systems were moving. Caffery was there, about fifty yards away, his back to them. A man wearing a blue headset stood close to him, one earphone lifted, and Caffery was leaning into it, listening to whatever was being said. Everyone else was standing at the hole, peering down into it. They were pulling something up. No doubt about it. Caffery’s body tightened – she saw it, even from behind. This was it. It really was happening. Her hands tightened on Rose’s shoulders.

  Caffery pulled away from the man, his face ashen. He shot a look over his shoulder at the women, saw them watching and turned back hurriedly so they couldn’t see his expression. Janice felt her insides crumble, her legs buckle. A rushing sensation flooded her chest, as if she was freefalling, dropping fast out of the blue. This was it. They were dead. She knew it. He was taking a moment or two to straighten his tie. He did up his jacket and smoothed his hands down it, took a deep breath, pulled his shoulders up and turned to them. He walked woodenly, and when he got close to them Janice saw his skin was grey under his eyes.

  ‘Let’s sit down.’

  They sat in a rough circle, the three women on the trunk of a fallen tree, Caffery on its stump opposite them. Janice sat with her hands in her hair, her teeth chattering. Caffery put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, looking at the women intently. Nick couldn’t take this either – she dropped her eyes to the ground.

  ‘I’m sorry it took us so long to find your girls. I’m sorry you’ve had such a long wait.’

  ‘Say it,’ Janice said. ‘Please. Just say it.’

  ‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Prody made a pit. Under the side of the canal. It’s quite small, covered with corrugated iron and in it we found a travel trunk. He put them in there, both of them, and they’re…’

  ‘Please, God,’ Janice whispered. ‘Please, God.’

  He gave her a broken, apologetic look. ‘They’re very sad. They’re very scared and very hungry. And above everything they want their mums.’

  Janice leaped up, her heart thumping.

  ‘Janice, wait. Let the doctors—’

  But she pushed past him, and Nick – who jumped to her feet to stop her – ran into the clearing, her coat flying open. Rose, too, broke free and came running up behind her, crying openmouthed, heading clumsily up the slope. Someone to their right was laughing. A great, happy, jubilant sound. Three men were clapping each other on the shoulder. Two officers at the shaft saw the women coming and put out their hands to stop them a few feet from the edge, but this time their faces weren’t the awful closed-down concentrated masks they had been an hour ago: this time they were almost smiling as the two women came bumping into them, panting and gasping.

  ‘Wait here. You can see everything, just wait here.’

  Both pulleys were turning on the tripods. A head in a caving helmet appeared, and a man scrambled out on his knees, holding a drip bag. He turned on the lip of the shaft and waited for the surface team to haul the stretcher on to the ground, settling it a few feet from the hole. It was Martha, swaddled in an aluminium blanket, her face rigid, bewildered by the sights and sounds and the light. A woman in green trousers and a huge waterproof jacket was yelling something and, out of nowhere, paramedics were swarming everywhere. Rose made a loud noise, like a choke, and broke past the two men, ignoring the hands trying to hold her back; she dropped to her knees next to the stretcher and fell across Martha’s chest, babbling and crying.

  In the shaft someone else was yelling. The second surface crew were leaning down into the hole. Another head in a red caving helmet appeared.

  ‘And haul,’ someone shouted. ‘That’s it – haul.’

  Jerkily the man’s head shot up another few feet. Janice couldn’t breathe. His face was tilted, concentrating on what was happening below him, sweat dripping down his neck. Another wrench on the pulley and the back of the stretcher appeared, bumping and turning against the edge of the shaft. The pulley attendant reached down to take the weight. As he did the stretcher pivoted slightly and Emily’s face was there.

  The hard bundle of grief and terror that had been trapped against Janice’s heart broke. It flowed around her body. She had to put out a hand to keep her balance and stop herself falling to her knees. Emily’s hair was wet, smoothed back against her head, and her face was pale. But her eyes were bright and alive. Darting all over the place, up and down, taking in what was happening, the great drop beneath her, the people gathered on the edge of the shaft. The man next to her on the pulley said something to her, a gentle joke. She turned, looked into his face and smiled.

  She smiled. Emily smiled.

  As Janice stood on the grass, she felt a warmth go up her spine, encase her head in a glow. She felt the warmth unzipping her chest, letting her heart rise up and breathe. Just like in the dream she’d had. Emily looked at her – right into her eyes.

  ‘Mum,’ she said simply.

  Janice put up her hand and smiled. ‘Hey, baby,’ she said. ‘We missed you.’

  83

  The pharmaceuticals compound lay in a slight dip on the arid plateau land of south Gloucestershire – a pocket of industrialization dwarfed by the royal hunting estates that haughtily covered much of the county. The police units had used GPR – ground-probing radar – and body dogs brought in all the way from London. All day long they’d worked, gridding the place out, using laser theodolites, then methodically treading every inch, moving machinery, if necessary, working along the
wall of the warehouse.

  Locally the little huddles of trees that were scattered around the area were known not as copses but by the quaint nineteenthcentury name ‘covert’. The nearest, slightly elevated one was known as Pine Covert and tonight, lit gold and red by the sunset but unnoticed from the factory, two men stood in the shelter of its trees and watched the progress of the team silently. DI Caffery and the man they called the Walking Man.

  ‘Who do they think they’re searching for?’ said the Walking Man. ‘Not my daughter. They wouldn’t be taking this much care if they thought it was my daughter.’

  ‘No. I told them they were looking for Misty Kitson.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The pretty one.’

  ‘The famous one. The biggest monkey on my unit’s back.’

  All afternoon the sun had crawled obliquely across the sky, lighting but never warming the earth, and now that it was sunset, the team began to break up from the debriefing. They trickled out of the perimeter gate under the great arc lights, back to waiting trucks and cars. Caffery and the Walking Man couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they could guess.

  ‘It’s empty.’ The Walking Man stroked his beard ruminatively. ‘She’s not in there.’

  Caffery stood shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘I did my best.’

  ‘I know. I know you did.’

  The last of the search teams pulled out of the lane leading to the compound and now it was safe to light the fire. The Walking Man turned away and went a few paces back into the covert where he’d gathered some wood into a pile. He took lighter fuel from under a log and shook it on the branches. Chucked on a match. There was a moment’s silence, then a loud whoomph. An orange flame fattened to a ball, thinned and unrolled itself up into the branches, sending a blazing finger of red heat and smoke through them. The Walking Man went to another log and began pulling things out from under it – bedrolls, tins of food, his customary flagon of cider.

  Caffery watched him distantly, thinking about the map on his office wall. The Walking Man always had these supplies waiting for him, no matter where he made camp. Somehow this – the gargantuan undertaking, the never-ending search for his daughter – was all planned meticulously. But how could it be otherwise? A search for a child: it would go on for ever. The search that would never end. Caffery thought of the look on Rose and Janice’s faces when they saw their lost children come back. It was a look that might never cross his own face. Might never cross the Walking Man’s.

  ‘We found that nonce. You know. The one who wrote the letter.’

  The Walking Man poured the cider into plastic beakers, handed one to Caffery. ‘Yes. I saw you had from your face the moment you walked across that field. But he wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hoped.’

  Caffery sighed. He looked across the fields to where the town of Tetbury sent an orange glow up against the clouds. Sapperton tunnel was beyond the town, out in the unlit fields. In his mind’s eye he saw the two girls being taken towards the helicopter. Two stretchers, two little girls. And between the stretchers a bridge. A pale, delicate bridge made by the girls’ arms as Martha, the eldest, reached across the gap and took Emily’s hand in hers. For nearly forty hours they’d been lying together in a storage trunk buried under the floor of the tunnel. Hugging each other like twins in a womb, breathing their fears and secrets into each other’s faces. When they’d got to hospital and had been examined they were in better shape than they should have been. Prody hadn’t touched them. He’d made Martha remove her underwear and had given her a pair of his eldest son’s jogging pants to wear. He’d put cartons of apple juice in the trunk and told them he was the police – that this was a top-secret operation to hide them from the real jacker. Because the real jacker was the most dangerous man imaginable. A trickster who would do anything, pretend to be anyone. That under no circumstances should the girls make a sound in the trunk if they didn’t want to give themselves away – no matter what guises he took on.

  Martha had taken some time to believe him. Emily, who’d been introduced to Prody as a police officer in the safe-house, had swallowed the story. He’d given them sweeties when he told them all this. He’d been kind. He’d been handsome and strong and easy to believe. That was just the way it sometimes went when a child was abducted.

  ‘Sit.’ The Walking Man brought out plates from under the log. ‘Sit down.’

  Caffery sat on a thin bedroll. The ground was freezing. The Walking Man placed the tins and the plates near the fire to start cooking when the fire was ready. He poured his own beaker of cider and settled down.

  ‘And so . . .’ He waved his hand at the enclosure the team had searched. ‘For this? For doing this for me? What do I give you? Not my anger, that’s for sure. Have to take back my anger and swallow it.’

  ‘What can you give me?’

  ‘I can’t give you your brother back. I know that’s what you’re hoping, but I can’t tell you anything about him.’

  ‘You can’t tell me or you won’t?’

  The Walking Man laughed. ‘I’ve told you, Jack Caffery, until I’m worn to a shadow with telling it – I’m a human being, not a super-human. Do you believe that an ex-con frittering away his pathetic life on the lanes of the West Country could really know what happened to a boy thirty years ago, more than a hundred miles away in London?’

  The Walking Man was right. In the back of Caffery’s head he really had believed that somehow this opaque, soft-voiced vagrant might know something about what had happened all those years ago. He held out his hands to the fire. His car was a hundred yards away, just out of sight from the copse. No Myrtle in it: she’d gone back to the Bradleys. Stupid, but he missed the damned dog.

  ‘Tell me about the circle, then. The nice little circle. That me protecting the woman is a nice circle.’

  The Walking Man smiled. ‘It’s against my principles to give you anything for nothing. But this is an exception because you helped me. So I give it to you freely – and I tell you openly that I saw what happened that night.’

  Caffery stared at him.

  The Walking Man nodded. ‘The monkey on the force’s back? The pretty one? I saw her die.’

  ‘How? How the hell did you . . . ?’

  ‘Easy. I was there.’ He waved a gnarly finger in the air to the south, towards Wiltshire. ‘Up on a hillside, minding my own business. I told you – all you have to do is open your head: you open it and suddenly it’s full of truths you never expected.’

  ‘Truths? Jesus – what are you talking about? What truths?’

  ‘The truth that it wasn’t the woman who killed your monkey.’ The Walking Man’s face was lit red from the fire. His eyes gleamed. ‘That it was a man.’

  Caffery kept breathing in and out. Slowly. Not giving anything away on his face. A man. Everything in his head began to lower itself, fit itself into what seemed now to be an obvious and a simple pattern that had been waiting a long time for this moment. A man who killed Misty? And Flea had protected him? It would have been her shithead brother. No doubt about it. Caffery got to this knowledge so easily, so unsurprisingly, that it was as if it had been there all along, just waiting to be nudged out from the debris.

  ‘So, Mr Caffery, my friendly policeman,’ the Walking Man looked up at the branches, lit in the reds and the oranges of the fire, ‘what does this truth give you?’ He turned and smiled at him. ‘A place to stand? Or a place to start?’

  Caffery was silent for a long, long time. He thought about what it meant. Flea’s fucking brother all along. He thought about his anger. He thought about all the things he wanted to say to her. He got up, went to the edge of the covert and stood facing the sky. In the distance, near the long-forgotten Wor Well where the ancient river Avon rose, the plateau dipped slightly. The flanks of the hollow were dotted with distant buildings on the edge of Tetbury. Houses and garages and industrial buildings. A hospital. The place Flea Marley had been taken by the helicopter. Most of the buildings had their lights on, illuminating th
e dark plateau like fireflies in trees. One of them was the room she lay in.

  ‘Well? Is it a place to stand, or a place to start?’

  ‘You know the answer to that.’ Caffery felt his foot inch forward. Felt a long, powerful force come through his body. As if he was ready to start running. ‘It’s a place to start.’

  84

  The smoke from the Walking Man’s fire rose straight and calm into the night sky. It climbed high above the dark trees, unruffled by winds or breeze, just a straight grey finger in the freezing night sky. It was visible for miles around, from the streets of Tetbury, from the farmhouses that lined the sides of the valley, from the agricultural buildings in Long Newnton and the lanes near Wor Well. In a private room in Tetbury hospital, Flea Marley slept. She’d come in with severe concussion, blood loss, creeping hypothermia, dehydration. But the CAT scans were clear. She was going to recover. When they’d got her out of A and E, Wellard had visited, holding a bunch of lilies wrapped in cellophane and purple ribbons. ‘I ordered funeral flowers. Because when your real funeral comes around after you’ve killed yourself being an arse, I won’t be in the church.’ He’d sat grumpily on the plastic chair and filled her in about what had happened. He’d told her about Prody dying. He’d told her it hadn’t just been Martha down there but Emily Costello too, that both of them were fine and were somewhere in this very hospital, their families bringing in treats and toys and cards. And the unit – well, that was a great song to sing, because Flea was smelling of roses, positively bathed in admiration, and she’d better get clean pyjamas from somewhere because the chief constable intended coming over in the morning to see her before she was discharged.

  In her dreams now she was at home. The storm clouds had disappeared. Thom had gone and she was younger. Maybe only three or four. She was sitting in the gravel outside the garage, playing with the caving lamp, trying with her pudgy child’s fingers to make it ignite. The family cat was still a kitten, and standing next to her, both front paws close to Flea’s hands, its tail pushed up in the air, all its energy focused on what she was doing. A few feet away, on the lawn, Dad was digging and raking, scattering grass seed. ‘There.’ He watered the seeds with an old-fashioned watering-can. ‘There you are. It’s finished.’