Gone

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.’

Now the sun stood exactly between the middle and the outer one. She looked at it for a long time. Then she checked her watch: 27 November. Exactly six months to the day since she’d hidden the corpse in the cave.

She thought of the disappointment in Caffery’s face. The lightless reflection of his eyes last night. She drained her drink. Rubbed her arms to make the bumps go away. How long was it supposed to go on? When something so impossible and unimaginable had happened, just how long were you supposed to shut down for?

Six months. That was the answer. Six months was long enough. Too long. The time had come. The corpse wasn’t going to be found. Not now. She’d have to pack the whole thing away in the back of her mind because it was time for other things. It was time to get the unit back on track. Time to prove she was the same sergeant she’d always been. She could do it. She was going to blot the disappointment out of everyone’s eyes. Maybe then the walls in her own eyes would come down. Maybe the day would come when there weren’t sour milk and meals for one in the freezer. And maybe, just maybe, the day would come when there’d be someone else standing on the gravel driveway with her, drinking Tanqueray and watching the night lower itself on to the lighted city.