Gone

75

The rain in the city hadn’t reached the countryside to the northeast of Bristol. Persistent wind had kept the sky clear and the temperatures down so that even by midday most of the fields were still covered with frost. Turner drove Caffery’s Mondeo, taking it fast up the little lanes that led to the wood near the Thames and Severn canal where Prody had dumped Skye Stephenson’s four-by-four. Caffery sat silently in the passenger seat, not speaking. His head jiggled slightly, bumping with the movement of the car. The body armour he wore under his suit was digging into his back.

‘Lion,’ he said distantly. ‘That’s what I was missing.’

Turner shot him a look. ‘Beg pardon?’

‘A lion.’ He nodded. ‘Should have seen it.’

Turner followed his eyeline. Caffery was gazing at the emblem on the steering-wheel. ‘Peugeot? The lion?’

‘Prody’s car is a Peugeot. I saw it when he drove out of the car park last night. It reminded me of something.’

‘What?’

‘You could mistake it for a dragon, couldn’t you? If you were a woman in your sixties who didn’t know much about cars?’

‘Mistake it for a Vauxhall?’ Turner put his indicator on. They’d reached the RV point. ‘Yeah. You could.’

Caffery thought of the miles of streets the units had searched, always looking for a Vauxhall, when Prody’s car was a dark-blue Peugeot. Walking down the wrong road: looking for a dragon and ignoring all the lions they walked past. If they’d had the chip from the shop’s CCTV they’d have known it was a Peugeot. But Prody had taken care of that too. Caffery was willing to bet who the first attending officer had been taking the camera chip out for the robbery investigation and who had forgotten to switch the CCTV back on. Plus Paul and Clare Prody had lived for ten years in Farrington Gurney – at the time it hadn’t struck Caffery as a coincidence. Now he thought of the last six days, pictured them spread out behind him like a trail. He saw every wasted second. Every bitter lapse of concentration. Every cup of coffee he’d stopped to make and drink, every piss he’d taken. All measured against the time – minutes or hours – Martha might have left. He put his forehead to the window and stared out. This morning Ted Moon had tried to hang himself from the same tree his mother had. He was in hospital now, surrounded by his family. Did things get any bleaker?

Turner pulled into the car park of a pub that sat near the easterly entrance to the Sapperton tunnel. The place was crawling with cops: dog vans, CSI vans, support unit vans. The roar of an Air Support Unit helicopter rattled the air above them. Turner pulled on the handbrake, turned to Caffery, his face grave. ‘Boss. At the end of the day my missus always makes me dinner. We sit down and open some wine and then she asks me what happened at work. What I want to know is, am I going to be able to tell her?’

Caffery peered out of the windscreen to where the afternoon sky was cut at mid-section by the tops of the forest trees, and above it the tail rotor of the helicopter. The trees started about fifty yards from the car park – the vague white smear of the inner cordon tape was already in place, lifting lazily in the wind. He sat back. ‘I don’t think so, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think she’s going to want to hear any of this.’

They got out of the car, went past the people in the car park, and signed in with the outer cordon loggist. The containment area was enormous and there was a long way to walk – along a rutted track overhung with dripping trees, past the five-bar gate Prody had smashed through being chased by two road policing unit vehicles – until they came to the place where he’d crashed and continued on foot. They walked in silence. They were only a quarter of a mile from where Prody had parked the Bradleys’ Yaris the night he’d kidnapped Martha. You know this area, Caffery thought, as they picked up the trail the CSI’s tread-plates made into the wood, don’t you? And you’re not far from here right now. You can’t have gone very far at all now you’re on foot.

By the time they arrived at the crash site the helicopter had stopped circling and was hovering a few hundred yards to the south, over an area of dense woodland. Caffery squinted up at it, noting its position. Wondered what it was focusing on and when he’d hear something. He flashed his badge and ducked under the inner cordon, Turner behind him, to where Skye Stephenson’s four-by-four sat inside its own taped-out containment area. Caffery pocketed his card and stood for a moment, staring at the scene, measuring himself. Trying to get his heart to sit down a bit: trying to stop it battering its way out of his chest.

The vehicle was a dark almost cherry red, its flanks scarred with mud churned up in Prody’s frantic effort to drive it down this tiny lane. He’d known by then he was being followed. Its offside bumper was smashed, the tyre tread split wide to show the radial wires inside. The passenger door and both rear doors stood open. From the sill on the passenger side a blanket trailed slackly, connecting the car to a baby seat that was tipped over, its underside facing Caffery and Turner. Blue, with yellow anchors. Baby clothes lay strewn around. A small arm was just visible in the curve of the seat: a clenched fist.

The crime-scene manager looked up. He saw Caffery and came towards him, pulling down his hood. His face was ashen. ‘The guy is sick.’

‘I know.’

‘The officers on his tail think he knew about them for the last ten miles. He could have opened the window and thrown the baby seat out. But he didn’t. He kept it in the car.’

Caffery eyed the seat. ‘Why?’

‘He was pulling the damned thing apart as he drove. Furious with us, I guess.’

They went to the seat and looked down at it. The life-size baby doll Skye had dressed in Charlie’s clothes had been reduced by Prody to a pile of plastic limbs, deposited in the baby seat. A foot away, half covered by Charlie’s Babygro, lay the doll’s head. Squashed flat. A muddy footprint stamped across it.

‘How is she doing?’ asked the CSM. ‘The stand-in?’

Caffery shrugged. ‘She’s in shock. I don’t think she really believed it was going to happen the way we said it would.’

‘I know her. Through the force. She’s a good officer but if I’d thought she’d volunteer for a stunt like that I’d’ve told her to go have a lie-down in a darkened room and rethink it. Still,’ he said grudgingly, ‘that was some good bet. To guess where it would happen.’

‘Not really. I was lucky. Very lucky. And lucky everyone played their part. That it worked.’

Only now was Caffery realizing that for once in this godforsaken case something in the great unknowable universe had come down on his side: even before Clare had got to the office and given them her list of Prody’s possible victims, Caffery, Turner and Lollapalooza had already written down three names they thought could be next. People who’d been contacted by the police and warned. Who’d spent the morning with covert surveillance units outside their houses. Skye Stephenson had been the one the team had been rooting for because she was the only person they could use a substitute with. Prody had never met her personally until today – he’d known her only from her address and from a photograph on the company website. The unit’s fortunes were changing.

Caffery bent over, hands on his knees, to study the tracking unit Q had attached to Skye’s four-by-four in case the tail cars outside her house had lost Prody.

‘What?’ said the CSM.

‘Are these the ones the force always uses?’

‘I think so. Why?’

He gave an ironic shrug. ‘Nothing. It’s the same as Prody used on the Costellos’ car. Must’ve half inched it from the technical department. Sly sod.’

‘Knows his stuff, then.’

‘You could say that.’

From the other side of the wood a dog began to bark. Loud enough to be heard above the helicopter. Every person at the crime scene stopped what they were doing. Straightened and stared out across the trees. Caffery and Turner exchanged a glance. They recognized the familiar note in the yap. A tracking dog made a sound like that for one reason and one reason only. It had found its target. The two men turned without a word, ducked under the tape and headed fast along the path in the direction of the noise.

As they moved through the woods, other figures in uniform appeared in the surrounding trees, all converging on the place the dog was barking. Caffery and Turner came through a soft and silent pine forest, their footsteps cushioned by the carpet of henna red needles, the clatter of the helicopter rotors growing louder the nearer they got. There was another sound too – the bellow of a loudhailer. Caffery speeded up. Sprinted through a glade littered with felled silver birch, back up a short slope, mud and leaves all over his trousers now – and out on to a cleared track where the thin winter sun glanced down in blades. He stopped. A tall man in riot gear, his visor up, was coming towards them, his arm held aloft to halt them. ‘Inspector Caffery? The SIO?’

‘Yes?’ Caffery flashed his warrant card. ‘What’s happening? Sounds like the dogs’ve got a knock over there.’

‘I’m the Bronze commander for today.’ He put his hand out. ‘Good to meet you.’

Caffery took a long, deep breath. He made himself return the card to his pocket and shake the hand calmly. ‘Yes. Very nice to meet you. What’s happening here? Have the dogs got him?’

‘Yes. But it’s not good.’ Sweat was popping out on the guy’s face. The Silver and Gold commanders on an exercise like this would be at HQ, organizing the operation from the safety of their seats, while this poor bastard, Bronze, was at the bottom of the pile. The tactical commander, the guy on the ground, he had to take Silver and Gold’s orders and translate them into action. If Caffery was in his shoes he’d be sweating too. ‘We know where he is, but we haven’t effected an arrest yet. It’s not a good place at all. There are air shafts all over this place – they feed the Sapperton tunnel.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, he’s got a belay rope in one of them. Went down like a fucking rabbit.’

Caffery let all his breath out at once. Flea’d been right. All along she’d been right. And suddenly he felt her – like he’d hear a shout in the darkness. A tug at his instinct. As if she was near by. He looked around at the empty expanse of trees. There hadn’t been anything yet from the PC in Bath sent out to check her house. Flea was definitely here somewhere.

‘Sir?’

He turned and there, as if Caffery had magicked him up from the strength of his anxiety for Flea, stood Wellard. Also dressed in dark-blue cargoes and an opened riot helmet. He was panting, his breath white in the freezing air. He had bluish circles under his eyes and Caffery knew from his face that the guy was thinking about exactly the same thing. ‘You haven’t heard from her?’

Caffery shook his head. ‘You?’

‘No.’

‘So what are we supposed to think about that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Wellard put a finger to his throat. Swallowed. ‘But, uh, look, what I do know is the tunnel. I do know about that. I’ve been down there before, I’ve got the schematics. That shaft he’s gone down is between two rockfalls. He’s a rat in a trap down there. Really. No way out.’

They turned expectantly to the Bronze commander. He unbuckled his helmet and used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

‘I’m not sure. He’s not responding to our challenges.’

Caffery laughed. ‘What? Someone with a megaphone yelling at him? Course he won’t.’

‘Best to establish communications first. Bring in a negotiator. His wife’s on her way, isn’t she?’

‘Fuck the negotiations. Get a rope-access team in there now.’

‘I can’t do that. It’s not that simple – we need risk assessments.’

‘Risk assessments? Do me a fucking favour. The suspect knows the area – we think he brought one of the vics here. She could still be alive. Tell that to your Silver and Gold. Use the words “grave and immediate danger”. They’ll get the drift.’

He pushed past the commander, headed along the track, his feet squelching in the mud, cracking the ice on the puddles. He’d gone a few yards when a noise louder than the helicopter, the dogs and the megaphone put together lifted from under his feet. The ground seemed to move beneath them. The bare branches quivered with the shock and a few dry leaves fluttered down. A flock of rooks took to the air, cawing.

In the silence that followed, the three men stood facing the air shaft. There was a pause, then, from inside the trees, dogs began to howl. A high-pitched, terrified sound.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Caffery turned and looked back down the track at Wellard and the commander. ‘What the fuck was that?’