8
Caffery’s office was heated by a tiny groaning radiator in the corner, but the windows were soon steamed up with the four people that crammed into it to conduct the interview with Cleo Blunt. Caffery stood in the corner, arms crossed. A small woman in her fifties, dressed in a pale-blue sweater and skirt set, sat at his desk, with a list of questions in her hand. She was a sergeant from CAPIT. Opposite her, in swivel chairs, sat Simone and ten-year-old Cleo. Cleo wore a brown pullover and cord jeans, with pink Kickers, and her blonde hair in bunches. She was thoughtfully stirring the cup of hot chocolate Lollapalooza had rustled up from the kitchen. Caffery didn’t need to see her sitting next to her rich mummy to grasp that this little character had private schools and Pony Club membership in her blood. You could tell it from the way she held herself. Still, she was sweet with it. Not obnoxious.
‘Now,’ the CAPIT sergeant began, ‘we’ve told you why you’re here, Cleo? Are you OK with that?’
Cleo nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Right. Now, the man, the one who took Mum’s car.’
‘And never brought it back again.’
‘And never brought it back. I know you’ve already had to talk about him once, and when I spoke to the police officer who asked you all the questions before, she was pretty impressed by you. She told me you were wicked at remembering things. That you thought about the questions, and that when you didn’t know the answers, you didn’t bother making it up. She said you were really honest.’
Cleo gave a small smile.
‘But we’re going to have to ask you a few more questions. Some will be the same questions all over again. It might seem kind of boring, but it is important.’
‘I know it’s important. He’s got someone else, hasn’t he? Another little girl.’
‘We don’t know. Maybe. So we’ve got to ask you to help us again. If it gets too much just tell me and I’ll stop.’
The officer’s finger rested on the list of questions Caffery had prepared. She’d been briefed with what he wanted and she knew he wanted it fast. ‘You told the police officer before me that this man reminded you of someone. Someone out of a story?
‘I didn’t see his face. He had a mask on.’
‘But you told us something about his voice. It was a bit like someone’s . . . ?’
‘Oh, I know what you mean.’ Cleo half rolled her eyes, half smiled. Embarrassed by the words that had come out of her nine-year-old mouth just six months ago. ‘I said he was like Argus Filch out of Harry Potter. The one who’s got Mrs Norris. That’s who he sounded like.’
‘So shall we call him the Filch man?’
She shrugged. ‘If you want, but he was worse than Argus Filch. I mean a lot worse.’
‘OK. How about we call him the – I don’t know – the caretaker? Argus Filch is the caretaker at Hogwarts, isn’t he?’ Caffery pushed himself away from the wall. He walked to the door, turned and walked back again. He knew the CAPIT officer had a protocol to follow but he wished she’d get a wriggle on. He turned at the window and crossed the room again. The CAPIT officer raised her chin and eyed him coolly, then went back to Cleo. ‘Yes, I think we’ll do that. We’ll call him the “caretaker”.’
‘Cool. Whatevs.’
‘Cleo, I want you do something for me. I want you to imagine that you’re back in that car on that morning. The morning the caretaker got into your car. Now imagine it hasn’t happened yet. All right? You’re with Mum on the way to school. Can you picture that?’
‘OK.’ She half closed her eyes.
‘What do you feel?’
‘I feel happy. My first class is PE – it used to be my favourite – and I’m going to wear my new gym T-shirt.’
Caffery watched the CAPIT officer’s face. He knew what she was doing. This was the cognitive interviewing technique a lot of the force was using these days. The interviewer took the subject back to the way they were feeling when the incident happened. It was supposed to open up the channels and let the facts flow.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘So obviously you’re not wearing the gym T-shirt yet?’
‘No. I’m wearing my summer dress. With a cardie over it. My gym shirt was in the boot. We never got it back. Did we, Mum?’
‘Never.’
‘Cleo, this is difficult but imagine it’s the “caretaker” driving now.’
Cleo took a breath. She screwed her eyes tighter shut and her hands came up to her chest. Rested there lightly.
‘Good. Now, you remember his jeans. Mum says you especially remember his jeans – with loops on them. When he was driving could you see those jeans?’
‘Not all of them. He was sitting down.’
‘He was in the seat in front of you. Where Dad usually sits?’
‘Yes. And if Dad’s sitting there I can’t see all his legs.’
‘What about his hands? Could you see them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you remember about them?’
‘He had on them funny gloves.’
‘Those funny gloves . . .’ Simone corrected.
‘Those funny gloves. Like at the dentist’s.’
The CAPIT officer glanced up at Caffery, who was still pacing. He was thinking about gloves. The CSI’s report on the Blunts’ Yaris hadn’t turned up any DNA at all. And the guy was wearing gloves in the CCTV footage at the exit barrier. Forensically aware, then. Bloody great.
‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘Were they big? Small?’
‘Medium. Like Dad’s.’
‘And quite important now,’ the officer continued slowly, ‘can you remember where his hands were?’
‘On the steering-wheel.’
‘Always on the steering-wheel?’
‘Yes.’
‘They never came off it?’
‘Umm . . .’ Cleo opened her eyes. ‘No. Not until he stopped and let me out.’
‘He leaned past you and opened the door from the inside?’
‘No. He tried to open it but Mum’s child lock was on. He had to get out and come round. Like when Mum and Dad let me out of the car.’
‘So he leaned across you once to try the door? Did he touch you when he did that?’
‘Not really. Just brushed my arm.’
‘And when he got out of the car did you see his jeans?’
Cleo gave the CAPIT woman a strange look. Then she glanced at her mother, as if to say, Are we going mad? I thought we’d gone through this already. ‘Yes,’ she said cautiously, as if this was another test of her memory. ‘They were with loops. Climber’s jeans.’
‘And they looked normal? Not undone like he wanted the toilet or anything?’
She frowned, puzzled. ‘No. We didn’t stop at toilets.’
‘So he came round, opened the door and let you out?’
‘Yes. And then he drove off.’
The clock was ticking: the day was getting away from them. Caffery could feel every passing hour like a brick piled on his back. He moved to stand behind Cleo, caught the CAPIT officer’s eye and made a circling motion with his finger. ‘Move on,’ he mouthed. ‘Move on to the route he took.’
She raised her eyebrows coolly at him, gave him a polite smile, then calmly turned back to Cleo. ‘Let’s go back to when it first happened. Let’s imagine you’re in the car just after the caretaker’s pushed Mummy away.’
Cleo closed her eyes again. Pressed her fingers to her forehead. ‘OK.’
‘You’re wearing your summer dress because it’s warm outside.’
‘Hot.’
‘The flowers are out. Can you see all the flowers?’
‘Yes – in the fields. There are those red ones. What’re they called, Mum?’
‘Poppies?’
‘Yes, poppies. And some white ones in the hedges. They’re a bit puffy and stalky. Like a stalk with a puff of white on them. And the other white flowers like trumpets.’
‘As you’re driving along are there always flowers and hedges? Or do you go pa
st anything else?’
‘Umm . . .’ Cleo wrinkled her forehead. ‘Some houses. Some more fields, that deer thingy.’
‘Deer thingy?’
‘You know. Bambi.’
‘What’s Bambi?’ said Caffery.
‘The Bulmer’s factory in Shepton Mallet,’ Simone said. ‘They’ve got the Babycham fawn out at the front. She loves it. A huge great fibreglass thing.’
The CAPIT officer said, ‘What happened then?’
‘Lots of roads. Lots of bends. Some more houses. And the pancake place he promised.’
There was a moment’s silence. Then it sank in: she’d said something that hadn’t been in her first interview. Everyone looked up at the same time.
‘A pancake place?’ Caffery said. ‘You didn’t mention that before.’
Cleo opened her eyes and saw them all looking at her. Her face fell. ‘I forgot,’ she said defensively. ‘I forgot to say it, that’s all.’
‘It’s OK,’ he said, holding his hand up. ‘It’s all right. It’s not a problem that you didn’t say.’
‘It was an accident that I didn’t say it before.’
‘Of course it was.’ The CAPIT sergeant gave Caffery a steely smile. ‘And aren’t you the clever one for remembering now? I reckon you’ve got a much better memory than I have.’
‘Have I?’ she said uncertainly, her eyes flitting from her to Caffery and back again.
‘Yes! Much, much better. A shame you didn’t get the pancake. That’s all I can say.’
‘I know. He promised me one.’
Her eyes stopped on Caffery. Hostile. He folded his arms and forced a smile. He’d never been good with kids. He thought they saw through him most of the time. Saw the empty hole he was mostly able to keep hidden from adults.
‘He wasn’t very nice, then, was he, the caretaker?’ said the CAPIT officer. ‘Especially as he promised you a pancake. Where were you going to have the pancake?’
‘At the Little Cook. He said there was a Little Cook up there. But when we got to it he just went straight past it.’
‘Little Cook?’ Caffery murmured.
‘What did the Little Cook look like, Cleo?’
‘Little Cook? He’s red. And white. Holding a tray.’
‘Little Chef,’ said Caffery.
‘That’s what I meant. Little Chef.’
Simone frowned. ‘There aren’t any Little Chefs around here.’
‘There are,’ the CAPIT officer said. ‘In Farrington Gurney.’
Caffery went to the desk, pulled the map over. Shepton Mallet. Farrington Gurney. Right in the heart of the Mendip Hills. From Bruton to Shepton Mallet wasn’t a long way, but Cleo had been in the car forty minutes. The jacker had driven her in zigzags. He’d gone north, then hairpinned back south-west. And in doing that he’d gone past the road that led to Midsomer Norton. The place the convenience-store manager had mentioned. If they had nothing else for the jacker at least they could put a pin in the map on the Midsomer Norton and Radstock area. And focus on it.
‘They do waffles there,’ said the CAPIT woman, smiling at Cleo. ‘I have my breakfast there sometimes.’
Caffery couldn’t keep still. He pushed the map away and sat at the desk. ‘Cleo, in all that time you were with the caretaker, did he talk to you? Did he say anything?’
‘Yes. He kept asking about my mum and dad. Kept asking what their jobs were.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told him the truth. Mum’s a financial analyst, she earns all the money, and Dad, well, he works to help little children when their mums and dads split up.’
‘You sure there’s nothing else he said? Nothing else you can remember?’
‘I guess,’ she said unconcernedly. ‘I think he said, “It’s not going to work.” ’
‘It’s not going to work?’ Caffery stared at her. ‘When did he say that?’
‘Just before he stopped. He said, “It’s not working, get out.” So I got out and went to the side of the road. I thought he was going to give me my bag with my T-shirt in it but he didn’t. Mum had to buy me a new one because we never got our car back, did we, Mum? We got the T-shirt at the school shop. It’s got my initials and it’s . . .’
Caffery had stopped paying attention. He was staring at a point in mid-air, thinking about the words: It’s not working. Meaning it had gone wrong. He’d lost his nerve.
But if that was true for Cleo, it wasn’t true for Martha. This time it was different. This time the jacker had kept his nerve. This time it was working.
9
By three o’clock the cloud cover had broken in places and the low sun shone obliquely across the fields in this corner of north Somerset. Flea wore the jacket with reflective strips for her afternoon jog. She’d got her dumb nickname as a child because people told her she never looked before she leaped. And because of her irritating, incurable energy. Her real name was Phoebe. Over the years she had tried systematically to iron the ‘Flea’ part out of her character, but still there were days when she thought her energy might burn a hole through the ground she stood on. On those days she had a trick to calm herself. She ran.
She used the lanes that laced through the countryside near her home. She’d run until sweat poured from her and there were blisters on her feet. Past stiles and half-dormant cows, past stone-built cottages and mansions, past the officers in uniform who poured out of the Ministry of Defence base near her house. Sometimes she’d run late into the night, until all her thoughts and apprehensions had shaken themselves loose and there was nothing left in her head save the desire for sleep.
Being physically in shape was one thing. Maintaining that fitness and control all the way through to the inside was another. As she turned the corner on the last leg of the run, she was picturing the Bradleys’ Yaris screeching out of the car park in Frome. She kept thinking about Martha Bradley sitting in the back seat. Flea had got a friend from Frome station to read her Rose’s statement. In it she’d said Martha had been leaning over from the back seat to tune in the radio when the car took off. So she wasn’t strapped in. Had she been thrown around as the jacker sped away? He wouldn’t have stopped to strap her in.
Nearly twenty hours had passed since Flea had spoken to Jack Caffery. It took time for the force grapevine to pass messages between distant units, but even so she thought she’d have heard by now if Caffery’d picked up her idea. What kept going through her head like a shriek was that there’d already been two chances for her to push her conviction that the attacks were connected. She imagined a world where she hadn’t been intimidated by her inspector, a world where she’d followed her instincts, the jacker had been picked up months ago and Martha hadn’t been abducted from the supermarket car park yesterday.
She let herself into the house from the garage, full of Dad and Mum’s old diving and caving equipment. Stuff she would never move or chuck out. Upstairs she did her stretches and took a shower. The heating in the rambling old house was on, but outside it was seriously cold. What would Martha be thinking? At what point had she realized that the man wasn’t going to stop the car and let her out? At what point had she realized she’d stepped full face into the world of adults? Did she cry? Beg for her mum? Would she be thinking now that she might never see her or her dad again? It wasn’t right that any little girl should have to ask herself questions like that. Martha’s head wasn’t old enough to sort it all out. She hadn’t had time to make safe places in her thoughts to hide, the way adults did. It wasn’t fair.
When Flea was little she’d loved her parents more than anything. This creaky old house, four artisans’ cottages knocked into one, had been her family home. She’d grown up there, and though there hadn’t exactly been money coming out of their ears, they’d lived well, with long, untidy summer days playing football or hide-and-seek in the rambling garden that dropped in terraces away from the house.
Most of all she’d been loved. So very, very well loved. In those days it would have killed her to
be separated from her family like Martha had been.
But that had been then and this was now and everything was different. Mum and Dad were dead, both of them, and Thom, her younger brother, had done something so unspeakable that she would never be able to find her way back to any relationship with him. Not in this lifetime. He’d killed a woman. A young woman. And pretty – pretty enough that she’d been famous for it. Not that her looks had done her much good. Now she was buried under a cairn in an inaccessible cave next to a disused quarry, put there by Flea in an idiot attempt to cover the whole thing up. Insanity, in hindsight. Not the way a person like her – a normal, salaried, mortgage-paying person – should have behaved. No surprise she was carrying this balled-up rage around. No surprise there was just deadness in her eyes these days.
By the time she was dressed it was almost sunset. Downstairs, she opened the fridge and stared at what was inside. Microwave meals. Meals for one. And a two-litre carton of milk that was past its sell-by date because there was only her to drink it, and if she did unexpected overtime it never got used. She closed the door and rested her head against it. How had it come to this – on her own, no kids, no animals, no friends any more? Living a spinster’s life at twenty-nine.
There was a bottle of Tanqueray gin in the freezer, and a bag of lemon she’d sliced at the weekend. She made herself a tall tumbler, the way Dad would have done, with four precise slices of lemon, frozen hard, four cubes of ice and a splash of tonic. She put on a fleece and took the glass outside to the driveway. She liked to stand there and drink, watch the distant lights coming on in the old city of Bath in the valley, even when it was cold. You’d never take a Marley away from this place. Not without a fight.
The sun crept the last few degrees to the horizon, sent orange light streaming across the sky in huge shards. She put her hand over her eyes and squinted at it. There were three poplars on the edge of the garden to the west: one summer Dad had noticed something about them that had pleased him no end. On the solstices the sunset lined up exactly with one of the two outer ones, while on the equinoxes it set directly behind the middle one. ‘Perfectly aligned. Someone must have planted them like that a century ago,’ he’d said, laughing, surprised by the cleverness. ‘Just the sort of thing the Victorians would have loved. You know, Brunel and all that malarkey.’