Gone

14

Caffery stood alone on a small track that ran through pine forest, the air around him scented and muffled by the trees. A hundred yards to his right there was a decommissioned arms factory, and to his left a lumber-yard surrounded by worn, weatherboarded sheds. Sawdust, darkened to an apricot colour by the rain, was piled under a huge rusting hopper.

He kept his breathing slow and quiet, his hands slightly held out at his sides, his eyes focused on nothing. He was trying to get something elusive. Some kind of atmosphere. As if the trees could give up a memory. It was two in the afternoon. Four hours ago Sergeant Marley’s team had ignored the POLSA’s instructions and headed out here. They hadn’t had to search long, just thirty minutes, before one of them had discovered a remarkably clear set of tyre tracks that exactly matched the Yaris’s. Something had happened here last night. The jacker had been here and something important had happened.

Behind Caffery, further back up the track, the place was overrun with crime-scene investigators, search teams and dog handlers. An area had been taped out, fifty yards radius from the point of the clearest tyre marks. The teams had found footprints everywhere. Large deep marks made by a man’s trainers. They should have been easy to cast for analysis but the jacker had studiously obliterated them, scoring the mud in criss-crosses with a long, sharp instrument. There were no child’s shoes anywhere, but some of the man’s prints, the CSI team had pointed out, were especially deep. Maybe the jacker had subdued or killed Martha in the car, then carried her away and dealt with her somewhere in the surrounding woods. Problem was, if he’d carried her, her scent wouldn’t have touched the ground. And the weather was disastrous for the dog team – what scent line there might have been had been blown and rained away. The dogs had come in excited and salivating, straining at the leashes, then spent two hours chasing their tails, bumping into each other and running in circles. The lumber-yard and the derelict factory to Caffery’s right had been searched. There, too, the teams turned up nothing – no clues that Martha had been anywhere near them. Even the disused water tank, now cracked and dry, hadn’t got any clues to cough up.

He sighed, let his eyes come back into focus. The trees were giving him nothing either. As if they would. The site might as well be dead. From the direction of the lumber-yard, where they’d set up a work station, the crime-scene manager was wandering down the track. He wore his Andy Pandy forensics suit, the hood pulled down to his shoulders.

‘Well?’ said Caffery. ‘Anything?’

‘We’ve cast what he’s left us of the prints. Do you want to see?’

‘I guess.’

They walked back to the lumber-yard, their footprints and voices muffled by the trees.

‘Seven different trails.’ The CSM waved at the ground as they skirted the cordon. ‘It looks like a jumble but there are actually seven distinct trails. They fan out in every direction and they all stop at the edge of the wood. No one can get anything after that. They could go anywhere – into the fields, through the plant and out on to the road. The teams are doing their best, but it’s too big an area. He’s tricking us. Clever little shit.’

Yeah, Caffery thought, peering into the woods as they walked, and he’ll be liking how pissed off we are right now. He couldn’t figure it out. Had this really been the place the jacker had taken Martha out of the car or had that happened somewhere else? Had he taken her miles away, knowing that the carousel of police expertise would descend on these woods and keep them occupied while he did his ugly business with her elsewhere? Not for the first time on this case Caffery had the feeling he was having his chain yanked.

Past the cordoned-off area, in the lumber-yard, teams were still working, moving around like ghosts in their forensics suits, the bitter smells of sap from the log sawmill hanging on the air. Next to a shed stacked with the stained dovecotes the yard produced, a temporary trestle table had been set up on which all the evidence the teams had gathered was being examined. The disused factory had been the worst to search – full of fly-tipped household waste: rotting old sofas and fridges, a child’s tricycle, even a carrier bag of used nappies. The CSM and the exhibits officer had the job of deciding what to discard and what to tag and bag. They’d got the serious hump dealing with the nappies.

‘I’m out of ideas on this.’ The CSM took the plastic wrapping from a cast and placed it in front of Caffery. ‘Can’t work out what he’s used here.’

A few people gathered round to look. Caffery got down on his haunches at eye level and stared at the cast. The bottom layer showed some traces of the footprints, but where the jacker had scored through them the plaster-of-paris had trickled deep into the holes made by the sharp instrument, creating spikes and peaks when the cast was reversed.

‘Any idea what he used to make those gouges? Recognize that shape?’

The CSM shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Something sharp, but not with a blade. Something long, thin. Ten inches – a foot? Made a good job of it. We’re not going to get any readable footprints.’

‘Can I see?’ Sergeant Flea Marley came forward from the group, holding a polystyrene cup of coffee. She was bedraggled from the search – her hair was a mess, her black coat unzipped to show her sweat-stained police T-shirt. Her face was different from the way she’d looked the other night outside the offices, he thought. A bit calmer. This morning her unit had fallen on its feet for a change and, really, he should be pleased for her. ‘I’d like to look.’

The CSM held out some nitrile gloves. ‘Want these?’

She put down the coffee, pulled on the gloves and tilted the cast to one side. Squinted at it.

‘What?’ said Caffery.

‘Dunno,’ she murmured. ‘Dunno.’ She turned it round and round. She rested her fingers thoughtfully on the tips of the spikes. ‘Weird.’ She handed the cast back to the CSM, turned away and wandered along the trestle table to where the exhibits officer was busily bagging and tagging the various bits and pieces they’d pulled out on the search to take to the forensics lab: tissues, Coke cans, syringes, a length of blue nylon rope. The place was obviously a hang-out for local glue huffers, the number of baggies they’d found. Most had been discarded in the field – along with more than a hundred plastic cider bottles. She stood, arms folded, and scanned the objects.

Caffery came up to her. ‘See anything?’

She turned over a six-inch nail. An old plastic coat hanger. Put them back again. Bit her lip and looked back to where the CSM was wrapping the cast.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘Thought the shape of those gouges reminded me of something. But it doesn’t.’

‘Boss?’ DC Turner appeared from the direction of the main road, making his way between the parked cars. In a raincoat, with a little tartan scarf at the neck, he looked weirdly preppy.

‘Turner? I thought you were on your way back to the office.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, but I’ve just got off the phone to Prody. He’s been trying to call – you must have been out of signal range. He’s sent a PDF through to your BlackBerry.’

Caffery had a new phone and he could get email attachments wherever he was. The Walking Man would say it was typical of him to find more ways of never being absent from work. He fished in his pocket for the phone. The email icon was lit up.

‘It arrived at the office an hour ago,’ Turner said. ‘Prody scanned it and sent it straight over to you.’ He gave an apologetic shrug, as if this whole thing was his fault. ‘Another letter. Same as the one in the car. Same handwriting, same paper. Has a stamp on it but no postmark. Came through internal so we’re trying to trace it back – but so far no one knows where it originated, how it got in the damned post.’

‘OK, OK.’ Caffery pulled out his phone. He could feel a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘Get back to the office, Turner. I want you doing liaison for those search warrants the POLSA’s after.’

He went further up the track to stand where he couldn’t be seen, at the edge of the lumber-yard, behind an open-sided barn piled with the trunks of Norway spruces. He opened the attachment on the phone. It took a minute or two to download but when it came through he knew instantly it was from the jacker. Knew it wasn’t a hoax.

Martha says hello. Martha says hello and says tell Mummy and daddy she’s being really brave. But she doesn’t like the cold very much does she. And she’s not a big talker. Not any more. I’ve tried to have a conversation with her, but she won’t speak a lot. Oh except for one thing: she’s said a few times to let you know her mother’s a cunt. Which maybe she’s right about! Who knows! One thing’s for sure: her mothers fat. Fat AND a cunt. Christ, life doesn’t shine clean on some of us, does it? What a fat cunt she is. I look at someone like Martha and think that’s the tragedy, isn’t it, that she has to grow up and turn into a fat cunt like her mother? What does Mummy think about that? Does she think it’s a shame her daughter has to grow up? Probably scared of what will happen when she leaves the house. I mean when Martha’s gone who’s Daddy going to diddle? Have to go back to having a ride on big tit Mama.

Caffery hadn’t realized until now he’d been holding his breath. He let it out all at once. Scrolled up to the top of the letter and read it through again. Then, almost as if he might be caught reading a dirty mag or something, he shoved the phone in his pocket and looked around him. The vein in his temple was aching. On the other side of the yard Sergeant Marley had started the van and was reversing it back up the track. He pressed a finger to the vein, held it there for a count of ten. Then he made his way back to his car.