Gone

20

By seven o’clock the world was so cold and dark it might have been midnight. There was no moon, no starlight, just the glow of the security lights in the lumber-yard at the end of the lane. Flea stopped her car and got out, shrugging on a fleece and a waterproof. She wore Thinsulate gloves and a wool beanie. Usually she was OK in the cold – she had to be in her job – but this autumn the weather had a hard, almost vindictive edge that seemed to affect everyone. She flashed her card at the soporific cop in the car that blocked the lane and clicked on her torch. The track through the pine forest was a pale, almost luminous yellow in the beam. The Yaris’s tracks were surrounded by limp police tape, the ground covered in little forensics marker flags. She passed them and went through the pool of light cast by the yard’s halogen lights, the conveyor-belts, sawmills and log splitters now silent and shadowy. She continued down the lane until she was in the grounds of the abandoned factory.

Flea had been home already. She’d jogged and showered and eaten and listened to the radio and read. She couldn’t wind down. She couldn’t stop wondering what it was about the search that wouldn’t lie right at the back of her thoughts. If Dad had still been around he’d have said: You’ve got a thorn in your head, girl. Better you take it out than leave it there and let it go to poison.

Now she went to the tree-line, where the field began and where Wellard had been standing. She found the line of cleared land, the place that had been searched and the line of rubbish, like the boundary line of flotsam and jetsam a retreating tide had left. She twisted the beam to halfway between flood and spot. Shone it on the line of rubbish and tried to pull up images from this morning.

Whatever was bugging her had struck her after they’d searched the tank. She’d been standing over at the tank talking to one of the other team’s sergeants about what time their shift finished and what staffing they’d have available if they had to go into overtime. The teams were still searching around them. Wellard had been over here at the edge of the field. She remembered watching him vaguely while she spoke. He’d found something in the grass and was talking to the crime-scene manager about it. Flea had been concentrating on what the sergeant next to her was saying and only half watching Wellard and the CSM, but now she could see the picture clearly. She could even see what he was holding out to the CSM. A piece of rope. Blue, nylon, about a foot long. The rope itself wasn’t what she’d wanted – she’d seen it later on the exhibits table and it had been unremarkable in and of itself – but something about it had started up a particular thought process that she knew was important.

She went to the old water tank where she had been standing and switched off the torch. She waited for a few quiet moments, surrounded by the monster shapes of the winter trees, beyond them the ploughed fields stretching away, dull, immense and dead. From somewhere in the distance to her right came the giant sound of a train racing along the Great Western Union Railway, flying through the darkness. Flea had a desktop at home that drove her crazy by giving off a faint crackle moments before her phone rang. She knew what it was – electromagnetic currents trying to piggyback the speaker wires for antennae – but to her it always seemed as if the machine had prescience, a subtle inkling of the future. Wellard would laugh if she told him, but sometimes she imagined she had a similar electromagnetic warning system – a biological buzzer that sent the hairs up on her arms moments before a thought or an idea clicked into place. Now, standing in the frozen field, she felt it happen. A current racing across her skin. Just seconds before the knowledge fell neatly into her head.

Water. The rope had made her think of boats and marinas and water.

This morning the thought had gone as quickly as it had come – the other sergeant was talking to her and, anyway, there wasn’t any water around here so she’d let it flit away. She’d dismissed it. But now she’d had time to think about it she realized she’d been wrong. There was water here. And not very far away.

She turned slowly and looked towards the west, to where the low cloud cover was up-lit a faint orange by a town or highway. She began to walk. Like a zombie, Sarge – Wellard would crack up to see her now. She cut straight across the field, frozen grass soaking her boots, hardly looking down as if something had a hook in her sternum and was slowly dragging her along. Through a small glade of crowded rustling trees, over two stiles on to a short gravelled lane, silver in the diffuse torchlight. After ten minutes she stopped.

The path she stood on was narrow. To her right the ground sloped upwards. To her left it ran steeply down to a tarry gully. A decommissioned canal. The Thames and Severn. An eighteenth-century engineering miracle, built to carry coal from the Severn estuary – when it had become redundant it had seen some service as a pleasure canal. Half dried out now, what water was left in the bottom had shrunk to a dark, poisonous-looking mulch. She knew this canal: knew its beginning and its end. To the east it extended twenty-six miles as far as Lechlade, to the west eight miles to Stroud. It was littered with the evidence of its former existence. The broken and rotting hulls of old coal and pleasure barges were dotted every few hundred yards. There were two in the short stretch she could see now.

She went a few yards along the towpath, sat down and swung her feet on to the deck of the nearest barge. The smells of decay and stagnant water were overpowering. Bacteria and moss. She put one hand on the deck and leaned over, shining the torch into the hull. This vessel wasn’t like the old iron-built coal barges that had first used this waterway: it was newer, a timber-hulled Norfolk wherry, perhaps, with its masts removed and an engine fitted. Probably brought to this side of the country as a canal cruiser. The timber had given in to the years of neglect and was now half submerged, debris from the canal floating on the black stinking water inside it. Nothing else to see. She knelt up and searched around on the tiller deck at the stern. Kicked aside beer cans and the plastic bags that floated on the water like jellyfish. She felt all around the platform and found nothing. She hauled herself out of the barge and went back along the towpath until she found the next. This one was older and might actually have been a working barge. It sat higher out of the canal and the water inside the hull was only knee-deep. She dropped into it, the freezing, inky water soaking into her jeans. She waded a little way, letting her feet in their trainers feel every inch of the hull below her. Every rivet, every piece of jettisoned wood.

Something clinked. It rolled away from her foot an inch or two. She pushed her sleeve to her upper arm and, bending at the waist, lowered her hand into the freezing water. Groped in the muck. She found the object and pulled it out.

A mooring spike. Straightening, she shone the torch on it. It was about a foot long and shaped like a long fat tent peg with a splayed top where, over the years, it had been hammered into the banks for tying up to. Thicker than a blade and sharper than a chisel, it could easily have made the spikes in the CSM’s plaster-of-paris cast. The jacker might have used it to score out his footprints.

She climbed out of the hull and stood, water streaming off her, on the towpath. She looked along the faintly gleaming canal. All the barges would have used a spike just like this. The place must be littered with them. She studied the spike in her hand. It would make a good weapon. You wouldn’t want to argue with someone holding this. No. You wouldn’t argue. Especially if you were only eleven years old.