Gone

12

When Caffery woke, aching and frozen, the Walking Man was gone. He must have got up and dressed in the dark, leaving nothing but the blackened fire and a plate with two bacon sandwiches on it next to Caffery’s bedroll. It was a hazy day. Cold again. An arctic breath in the air. He waited a few minutes for his head to clear, then got up. He ate the sandwiches standing in the field, chewing thoughtfully and looking down at the patch of earth where the Walking Man had planted the bulb. He cleaned the plate with grass, packed up his bedroll and stood again with the things under his arm, studying the way the land lay: the fields stretching away, grey and dull at this time of year, bisected and criss-crossed with hedgerow. Although he knew little about the Walking Man’s movements, he did know there was always a place near by, a protected place, that he could store a few things: things to be used the next time he passed. Sometimes that place was as far as half a mile from the camp.

The clue came from the grass: grey and stiff with frost. The Walking Man’s footsteps were black, leading clearly away from the campsite. Caffery half smiled. If he hadn’t been meant to follow them, those footsteps wouldn’t be visible. The Walking Man never left anything to chance. Caffery set off, stepping carefully inside them, surprised to find his feet fitted exactly.

The footsteps stopped a third of a mile away at the far end of the next field and there, tucked secretly in the hedgerow, was the usual assortment of supplies covered with polythene: tinned food, a cooking pot, a flagon of scrumpy. Caffery tucked in the bedroll and the plate and secured the polythene around everything. When he straightened to leave he noticed something: about a yard along the hedgerow, tight under the hawthorn, a tiny patch of ground had been disturbed. When he crouched next to it and gently moved away the earth he found the bruised, tender tip of a crocus bulb.

Every person in the world had habits – Caffery thought later that morning as he pulled into a pub car park six miles away in Gloucestershire – from the obsessive compulsive who had to count every pea he ate, every light switch he touched, down to the drifter who seemed to have no aim and no direction yet could always find a good place to make camp and sleep. Everyone moved in patterns to some degree or another. Those patterns might be all but invisible, even to the persons themselves, but they were there, nonetheless. The Walking Man’s patterns, the places he stopped, the places he planted crocuses, were slowly revealing themselves to Caffery. And the jacker? Caffery turned off the engine and opened the door, looked at the police vehicles: the forensics van, the four Sprinters belonging to the search units. Well, the jacker had patterns too. And they’d become clear. Given time.

‘Sir?’ The police search adviser – the POLSA – a small guy with neat John Lennon glasses, appeared next to the car. ‘A word?’

Caffery followed him across the car park and through a low stone doorway into a room the landlord had set aside for the police to use. The games room, it smelt of stale beer and bleach. The pool table had been pushed to one side and replaced with a row of chairs; the dartboard was invisible behind a flip-chart stand where a series of photographs had been mounted.

‘The briefing’s in ten – and it’s going to be a nightmare. This area the soil man’s given us – it’s massive.’

Every forensic test known to man had been thrown at the Bradleys’ Yaris. There were signs of a struggle in the back seat – the upholstery had been torn and there were strands of Martha’s pale blonde hair in a window seal, but the car hadn’t yielded any fingerprints that didn’t match a member of the Bradley family. The latex gloves, of course. No blood either and no semen. But there had been soil lodged in the treads of the tyres and an expert in forensic soil analysis had spent the night analysing the samples. He had put it together with how many miles the Bradleys estimated had gone on the clock, and decided there was only one place a car could have picked up a soil signature so unique: before the jacker had dumped it in Wiltshire he’d stopped somewhere out here in the Cotswolds, somewhere within a radius of about ten kilometres from this pub. Half the police force, it seemed, from the vehicles in the car park, had descended on the area.

‘We knew it was going to be a wide net,’ said Caffery. ‘The soil man didn’t have much time – we paid him to stay up all night.’

‘With the area he gave me, I’ve identified about a hundred and fifty buildings that should be searched.’

‘Shit. We’d need about six units to do that properly.’

‘Gloucestershire’s offering manpower. We’re on their patch.’

‘An interforce operation? I don’t even know how you do that. I’ve never done a memorandum of understanding in my life, it’s a logistical nightmare. We need to narrow it down.’

‘That is narrowed down. Those hundred and fifty are just the buildings you could hide a car in. About thirty per cent of them are garages, mostly connected to private homes, so they’re easy, but there are others you need Land Registry searches even to find out who owns them. And this is the Cotswolds, area of outstanding natural beauty. Half the places are second homes: Russians running some prostitute ring in London want to own a house next to Prince Charles but never bother to visit. It’s either absentee rich bastards or bolshy farmers with single-bore shotguns. Think Tony Martin.’ He tapped the back of his head. ‘A round in the skull as you’re running away. Welcome to rural bliss. Still, on a bright note, it rained yesterday. Perfect weather for it. If he parked out here the tracks will still be visible.’

Caffery wandered over to look at the photos on the board. A series of tracks. Made last night in the lab using casts of the Yaris’s tyres.

‘There was something else in the soil, they told me. Wood chip?’

‘Yes. So maybe a timber yard. Stainless-steel swarf, too, and flecks of titanium. The titanium’s too small to say what process it came from so it’s probably not relevant at this point, but the stainless steel means some kind of engineering plant. I’ve outlined seven in the area. And a couple of timber yards. I’m going to divvy up my team – half of them knocking on the buildings, the other half trying to find those tyre tracks.’

Caffery nodded. Tried to hide how despondent he felt. A radius of ten kilometres. A hundred and fifty buildings and Christ only knew how many driveways and lanes. It was going to be searching for a needle in a haystack. Even with extra units from Gloucestershire, with the warrants and the paperwork it was going to take for ever. And – the jacker’s words came back to him: It’s started now, hasn’t it, and it ain’t going to stop just sudden – time was the one thing they didn’t have.