Gone

37

‘It’s not just the car park he’d have had access codes for,’ said Turner. ‘He’d have been able to walk round the whole building, in and out of all the offices. He might as well have been invisible.’

Caffery, Turner and Prody were crammed into Prody’s office. The heating was on full and the windows were steamed up. The smell of paint and sweat hung heavy in the air.

‘There’s CCTV in the car park.’ Caffery was standing in the corner, hands in his pockets. ‘If he put the tracker on the car we’d have footage of it. Has anyone looked at that?’

The two other men were silent.

‘What?’

Turner shrugged. Didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Camera’s broken.’

‘Again? That was the excuse when the sodding unit car was stolen. You’re telling me it’s happened again?’

‘Not again. It just never got fixed in the first place.’

‘Oh, great. How long’s it been on the blink?’

‘Two months. He was the handyman – it was kind of his job to fix it.’

‘And how long has this wanker been working for us?’

‘Two months.’

‘Christ, Christ, Christ.’ Caffery put his knuckles to his head. Dropped them, exasperated. ‘I hope we folded his fucking napkin when we served Martha up to him on a plate.’

He picked up the paperwork on Prody’s desk that had been faxed over from Human Resources. A photo was stapled to the top. Richard Moon. Thirty-one. Employed by the police as a ‘maintenance officer’ for the last year and at MCIU for the last eight weeks, doing general jobs around the building: painting, fixing lights, nailing skirting-boards, replacing broken lavatory cisterns. Planning Martha’s abduction and how best to indulge his habits without being caught.

It was Prody who’d made the connection. He’d remembered a note he’d found on his desk that morning and had crumpled up in his wastepaper basket. A message from the handyman Moon: Sorry about the smell of paint. Don’t touch the radiator. The Barack Obama CSM, who knew a little about handwriting, was sure they’d been written by the same person who’d sent the notes to the Bradleys. Then someone had pointed out that the notes to the Bradleys and the Costellos had been written on paper that looked suspiciously like the notepads issued to them from HQ. The jacker had been using the force’s own stationery to write his sick messages on. How brilliant was that?

Moon had been at work this morning. But he was rostered off duty at midday and had left the building just as the meeting with the CSM had started. He’d been here, right under their noses. Caffery stared at his photo, remembering the guy he’d seen around the place a couple of times. Tall, if he recalled rightly, overweight. Usually dressed in overalls, though in the photo he wore a khaki T-shirt. He was white, with an olive skin, a broad forehead, wide-spaced eyes, a full mouth. Dark hair cut close, probably a number three, not a number two. A number two took maintenance. Caffery looked at the eyes. He tried to see something reflected in them. The eyes that had seen God-only-knew-what happen to Martha Bradley. The mouth that had done God-only-knew-what to her.

Christ, he thought, what a total feast of snakes this was. Heads would roll.

‘He’s got no cars registered to his name,’ Turner said, ‘but he was driving himself to and from work. Lots of the boys remember seeing him.’

‘I saw him too,’ Prody said dully.

The two men turned to him. He was sitting in his chair, his shoulders slumped. He hadn’t spoken much. He was furious with himself that he hadn’t picked it up sooner. For a while Caffery had been tempted to use it as a stick to beat him with, to ram home the point that if he’d had his head properly locked on this case they might have picked up Moon earlier. But Prody was ashamed enough already. If there were lessons to be learned, he was doing all the teaching himself.

‘Yeah – he had a car.’ Prody gave them a thin, sick smile. ‘And guess what it was?’

‘Oh, please,’ Caffery said faintly. ‘Don’t tell me. A Vauxhall.’

‘I saw him driving it one day. Noticed it because it was the same blue as my Peugeot.’

‘Jesus.’ Turner shook his head, deflated. ‘I can’t believe this.’

‘Yeah, OK. No need to look at me like that. I know I’m a cunt.’

‘You worked on relocating the Costellos today,’ said Caffery. ‘Tell me he wasn’t in the room when you did it. Tell me he didn’t overhear that conversation.’

‘He didn’t. I’m sure.’

‘How about when you were ordering up all the ANPR points? You’re sure he couldn’t have . . . ?’

Prody shook his head. ‘That was late at night. He’d have gone.’

‘How did he know about it, then? Because he definitely knew where those cameras were.’

Prody started to say something but stopped and closed his mouth as if something had dawned on him. He turned to the computer and shook the mouse. The screen lit up and he stared at it, his face going dark red. ‘Great.’ He threw his hands into the air. ‘Fucking great.’

‘What?’

He pushed his chair bad-temperedly away from the desk, swivelled it to face the wall, and sat there with his arms folded, his back to the room, as if he’d come to the end of his patience.

‘Prody. Don’t act like a fucking child.’

‘Yeah, well, feel like one at the moment, Boss. He’s probably been into my computer. That’s why it never seemed to time out. It’s all in there.’ He waved a hand at it over his shoulder. ‘Everything. The works. All my emails. That’s how he did it.’

Caffery chewed his lip. He checked his watch. ‘I’ve got a job for you. You need to go and see someone.’

Prody turned his chair back. ‘Yeah? What?’

‘The bean-counters are whining about budgets – throwing their toys out of the pram about the staffing levels on the new safehouse. Go over there and give the PC the afternoon off. Speak to the Costellos and Nick. Give them an update on what’s going on – try to calm Janice down because she’s going to lose it when she hears about this. When you’ve done all that – and you can take your time about it, hang around if you have to – get the local shop to send someone back to cover you.’

Prody regarded him balefully. Go and explain to a woman who had nearly lost her daughter that they knew who the bastard was? That something could have been done about it a long time ago? Not exactly the soft option. A hidden punishment in there. Still, he pushed his chair back, got his raincoat off the hook and found his keys. He walked to the door without a word, not looking at anyone.

‘See you,’ Turner shouted to him. But he didn’t answer. He closed the door, leaving the two men standing in silence. Turner might have spoken to Caffery at that point, but his phone rang. He answered it. Listened. Finished the call, put the phone in his pocket, and looked sombrely at the DI.

‘They’re ready, I take it?’ Caffery asked.

Turner nodded. ‘They’re ready.’

They held each other’s eye. Each knew what the other was thinking. They had Richard Moon’s address, a witness who said Moon was at home right this second, and now a forced-entry team standing by. And no reason to think Moon knew they were coming. He might be at home, just sitting on the sofa in front of the TV with a cup of tea, not expecting anything to happen.

Of course it wouldn’t be like that. Both Turner and Caffery knew it. So far Moon had outsmarted them at every turn. He was cunning and deadly. There was no reason to think he was going to change now. But they had to make the effort. Really, there wasn’t anything else they could do.