Gone

31

By the time Caffery got to the office the next morning it was eight o’clock and already there had been meetings, interviews and phone calls. He made a rough bed with an old towel under the radiator behind his desk, settled Myrtle there with a bowl of water and, taking sips of scalding coffee, wandered through the corridors, barely awake, his eyes bloodshot. He hadn’t slept well – never did in the middle of a case. After the argument with the Walking Man he’d gone back to the isolated cottage he rented in the Mendips and spent the night combing through the witness statements on Emily’s kidnapping. There’d been some Scotch somewhere along the line. Now he had a headache that could have brought down an elephant.

The office manager updated him. Lollapalooza and Turner were still busy tickling up warrants for the remaining properties out in the Cotswolds. The CSI ‘surgery’ had forensicated Janice Costello’s Audi and come up with nothing. They’d left it in the car park downstairs and the family had collected it last night on their way to Janice’s mother in Keynsham. DC Prody had taken a half-day off yesterday. In a strop, probably, but he must have seen sense overnight. He’d been back since five this morning, dealing with the CCTV footage. Caffery made a silent pact to broker a peace with him. He carried his now empty mug down to Prody’s office. ‘Any chance of a coffee?’

Prody glanced up from his desk. ‘I guess. Have a seat.’

Caffery hesitated. Prody’s tone was sullen. Don’t rise to it, he thought. Just don’t. He kicked the door closed, put the mug on the desk, sat and looked at the walls. The room was cheerier now. The overhead light was working, there were pictures on the walls, and in the corner there was a dust sheet with a roller tray resting on some tins. The smell of paint was overwhelming. ‘Decorators been in, have they?’

Prody got up and clicked the kettle on. ‘Not that I asked for it. Maybe someone decided I needed a proper welcome. Electric lights, too. Honestly? I’m just a bit disappointed I didn’t get a mood board through the internal first.’

Caffery nodded. He was still hearing that sullen note in the man’s voice. ‘Well? What’s come in overnight?’

‘Nothing much.’ He spooned coffee into cups. ‘The streets around the place Emily was taken have been combed – the only dark-blue Vauxhall had different digits. Turned out to belong to a nice lady with two dogs and a hairdressing appointment in the area.’

‘And the CCTV on the stations?’

‘Nothing. No data at two, and the one where the Yaris was found – Avoncliffe? – it’s a request stop.’

‘A request stop?’

‘You put out your arm, the train stops.’

‘Like a bus?’

‘Like a bus. But no one stopped the train over the weekend. He left the Yaris there and must have got away on foot. None of the local cab companies had any pick-ups either.’

Caffery swore lightly under his breath. ‘How’s the bastard doing it? He got past the ANPR cameras – there’s no way he could have known where the units were going to be, is there?’

‘I can’t see how.’ He clicked the kettle off and poured hot water into the cups. ‘They’re mobile, not fixed.’

Caffery nodded thoughtfully. He’d just noticed a familiar file on Prody’s windowsill. Yellow. From the review team. Again.

‘Sugar?’ Prody was holding a loaded spoon above one of the mugs.

‘Please. Two.’

‘Milk?’

‘Yes.’

He held the mug out to Caffery, who looked at it steadily, but didn’t take it. ‘Paul.’

‘What?’

‘I asked you not to look at that file. I asked you to return it to the review team. Why did you ignore me?’

There was a pause. Then Prody said, ‘Do you want this coffee or not?’

‘No. Put it down. Explain why you’ve got the file.’

Prody waited a second or two longer. Then he put the coffee on the desk, went to the windowsill and got the file. He pulled up a chair and sat, facing Caffery, with it on his lap. ‘I’ll fight you over this, because I can’t let it go.’ He found a map in the file and unfolded it on his knee. ‘This is Farleigh Wood Hall and this, roughly, is the radius you initially searched. You concentrated a lot of your resources on the fields and villages in that radius. You did some house-to-house outside the radius too. Around here.’

Caffery didn’t let his eyes drop to the map. He could tell from his peripheral vision that Prody was pointing to a place about half a mile from where Flea’s accident had happened. He kept his eyes on Prody’s face. Kept the huge fat fist of rage tucked under his sternum. He’d been wrong. Prody was never going to be a steady-hand cop. There was something else underneath: a hard, urban intelligence that could make him a brilliant cop in the right circumstances – and a dangerous one in the wrong.

‘But mostly outside that radius you went wide, to the bigger towns. Trowbridge, Bath, Warminster. Looked at railway stations, bus stops, some of the dealers around there because she was a junkie. It occurred to me – what if she got out of this radius but didn’t get as far as one of the towns? What if something happened to her on one of the roads? What if she was picked up by someone, given a lift? Taken somewhere miles away – God knows, Gloucestershire, into Wiltshire, London. But, of course, you’d thought of that. You had checkpoints set up. You interviewed drivers for two weeks. But then I thought, What if it was a hit-and-run? What if it happened on one of these small roads? Some of them only serve these little hamlets.’ Again that finger, right over the place of the accident. ‘There’s hardly any traffic down there. Something happened and there’d have been no one to witness it. Seriously, have you thought of that? What if someone hit her, panicked and hid the body? Or maybe even loaded the body into the car – disposed of it somewhere else?’

Caffery took the map from him, folded it up.

‘Boss, listen. I want to be a good cop. That’s all this is. It’s just the way I’m made – I have to put my back into everything I do.’

‘Then start by learning how to take orders and how to be respectful, Prody. This is the last warning: you don’t stop being a prick I’ll get you shifted to that prostitute murder the others are working on. You can spend your days down at City Road interviewing the slag meth dealers if you prefer.’

Prody took a breath. His eyes went to the map in Caffery’s hand.

‘I said, is that what you’d prefer?’

There was a long silence. Two men fighting without saying a word or moving a muscle. Then Prody breathed out. Let his shoulders droop. Closed the file. ‘But I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’

‘Oddly enough,’ Caffery said, ‘I really didn’t think you would.’