Gone

7

That night there was an article about Martha on every news bulletin. Every hour, on the hour, all the way into the night. A network of people searching for her stretched across the county – across the country. Sleepless traffic cops sat on the ANPR points, eyes locked on their screens, checking every dark-blue Vauxhall that passed against the database. Other officers snatched a couple of hours here and there, their mobiles set to loud in case a call came through. Concerned citizens who’d heard the news put on coats and outdoor shoes to open their sheds, their garages. They checked the ditches that skirted their properties, the hard shoulders that ran near their houses. No one voiced their thoughts – that Martha could be dead already. On such a cold night. A little girl, in just a T-shirt, cardigan and raincoat. Shoes all wrong too. The force’s photographic department had been distributing pictures of the pair she’d been wearing. Little printed ones with a strap and a buckle. Not meant for being outside on a freezing night in winter.

The hours went by without news. The night became dawn, the dawn became another day. A blustery, watery day. A Sunday. Martha Bradley wasn’t going to be blowing out any candles today. In Oakhill Jonathan Bradley cancelled her party. He got a priest through the joint ministry to stand in for him at his services and the family stayed at home, in their kitchen, waiting for news. On the other side of Bristol, in the streets of Kingswood, a few people braved the weather to attend their local churches. They scurried past the MCIU offices, swaddled in scarves and hats, battling the arctic wind that hadn’t let up all night.

Inside the building it was a different story. People went from office to office in shirtsleeves. The windows dripped with condensation. The place was heaving. Unarranged leave had been suspended and anyone under the rank of inspector was happily chalking up the overtime. The incident room was like a City trading floor, people making stand-up phone calls, shouting across the office. The jacker, in addition to all the other cases MCIU was fighting, had given them a migraine of biblical proportions and no one had slept much. In a series of emergency meetings that morning Caffery delegated responsibilities on the case. He had a goodish staffing quota, free rein to handpick his crew and he corralled a wish list: a pod of HOLMES indexers out of the computer room, and dibs on five assorted detectives. Then he chose a core team. Two men and a woman. They roughly spanned the skill sets he guessed he would need.

There was DC Prody. A big, neatly dressed thirty-something new guy who hadn’t long come over to plainclothes. He’d done four years as a traffic cop in the Road Policing Unit and although no one would say it to his face this detail put him at the bottom of the food chain in the police cred hierarchy. Caffery was prepared to give him a chance, though. He had a feeling from first impressions that Prody might have the makings of a steady-hand cop. Plus he had background in Traffic. That ticked a couple of Caffery’s boxes on a case involving cars. Next there was Detective Sergeant Paluzzi, who always said that if the guys in the team were going to call her Lollapalooza behind her back then she’d just as soon they cut to the chase and said it to her face. They did. Lollapalooza was a real number, with olive skin, sleepy eyes and an obsessive taste in high heels. Turned up at work each day in a lipstick-red Ka that she occasionally, cheekily, parked in the superintendent’s unofficial bay just to get a rise out of him. Lollapalooza should by rights have been a disruption in the team but she was a solid worker and Caffery needed a woman if the case was going to take the paedophile turn Flea Marley had said it would.

Last on the list was DS Turner. An old hand, Turner was hitand-miss as an investigator. He had two speeds – the ‘interesting-job speed’, which turned him into an up-all-night-living-on-his-nerves grafter, and the ‘uninteresting-job speed’, which made him a slothful bastard who had to be threatened with a disciplinary to get him out of bed. Turner was a father of two. On this case Caffery knew where his dial would be set. By ten o’clock that morning Turner was hard at it. He’d already rustled up two victims of the earlier carjackings and had brought them into the MCIU offices, where Caffery took them off his hands. The two should probably be interviewed separately, but Caffery was prepared to shove procedure if it meant he’d gain a few hours. He led them together to the only place he could find in the whole building with a modicum of sound insulation – a side room at the end of a corridor on the ground floor.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ He closed the door with his foot, shutting out the din, switched on the flickery fluorescents and put his pile of papers on the desk with his MP3 player. ‘Take a seat. I know it’s not glamorous.’

They each chose a chair.

‘Damien?’ Caffery held out his hand to the young black guy on the right. ‘Thanks for making the time.’

‘No worries.’ He half rose and shook his hand. ‘Hi there.’

Damien Graham was built like a professional footballer, wearing a magenta leather jacket and, on his massive legs, designer jeans. His credentials were all Jack-the-lad: you could tell just in the way he sat, his hand held casually with the sleeve up enough to display the heavy Rolex watch. He kept his knees open just the right distance to show he was in control. Sitting next to him, Simone Blunt was poles apart. White, mid-thirties, blonde and coolly elegant, dressed in top-drawer career-woman wardrobe: wide-collared shirt, killer legs in black nylons, and a suit cut short, crisp and not overtly sexy. Too professional to flirt.

‘And Mrs Blunt.’

‘Please – Simone.’ She leaned forward to shake his hand. ‘Good to meet you.’

‘Hope you didn’t mind not having Cleo here. Didn’t think it was going to be appropriate. I’d like to speak to her later if that’s OK?’ Lollapalooza was babysitting Simone’s ten-year-old daughter in another room. ‘We’re waiting for someone from CAPIT to come along and be with us. They’ll know how to speak to her. CAPIT is the unit that—’

‘I know CAPIT. They interviewed her when it first happened. Child Abuse and Protection something or other.’

‘Protection Investigation Team. They’re on their way.’ Caffery swung a chair round and sat, elbows on the desk. ‘Now, Mr Turner told you both why you’re here?’

Damien nodded. ‘It’s that little girl last night.’ The way he said girl – ‘geh-awl’ – pinned him as a Londoner. South London, Caffery guessed, maybe even from his old stamping ground, the south-east. ‘Been on the news.’

‘Martha Bradley,’ said Simone. ‘I take it you haven’t found her.’

Caffery inclined his head a touch towards her. ‘Not yet. And we don’t know if it’s connected with what happened to you both. But I’d like, if it’s OK with you, to explore that eventuality a bit.’ He switched on the MP3 player, then twisted it so the mic pointed to them. ‘Damien. Do you want to start?’

Damien pushed his sleeves back. Uncomfortable in the police station with the posh totty next to him and determined he wasn’t going to show it. ‘Sure. I mean, it’s going back a few years now.’

‘2006.’

‘Yeah – Alysha was only six at the time.’

‘Did Turner say we’d like to arrange an interview with her when the time suits?’

‘You’ll have a job. I haven’t seen her in two years.’

Caffery raised his eyebrows.

‘She’s gone. Gone back to the homeland, bruv. With her damn gully mother always running at the mouth. Sorry.’ He made a show of correcting himself, smoothing his shirt and putting his head back, hands on his lapels, pinkies up. ‘I do beg your pardon. I mean, my daughter is out of the country at the moment. I believe she might be in Jamaica. With her talkative mother.’

‘You’re separated?’

‘Best thing I ever did.’

‘Does Turner—’ Caffery swivelled to the door, as if Turner might be standing there with a Moneypenny notepad, pen poised. He turned back. ‘I’ll tell Turner. If you could give us her number.’

‘Don’t know it. Haven’t got a clue how to find her. Or my daughter. Lorna’s . . .’ he made inverted commas with his forefingers ‘. . . finding herself. With some wack person called Prince, runs a boat-rental place.’ He cocked his head sideways, did his best Jamaican again. Probably for Simone’s benefit. ‘Him make him coil showing dem tourists da crocs. Know what I is sayin’?’

‘She’s got family here?’ said Caffery.

‘No. And good luck finding her is all I’m saying. And if you do, tell her I want a picture of my girl.’

‘OK, OK. We’ll come to that. Let’s – let’s think back to 2006. To what happened.’

Damien touched his fingers to his temples, then flicked them outwards as if the whole incident had scrambled his brains. ‘It was a weird thing. A weird time, if I’m honest. We’d had a break-in, me and Lorna and Alysha, and that shook us up, plus we weren’t seeing eye to eye, things were a bit rocky at work, get me? Everything’s pretty fucked up anyway and suddenly this happens. We’re in this car park—’

‘Outside the theatre.’

‘Yeah, the Hippodrome, and we’re getting out the car and Alysha’s bitch of a mother’s out already, like she always was, doing some airhead thing with her makeup next to the car. But my little girl’s still in the back, and I’m untangling the sat nav, like, and suddenly out of nowhere comes this – this person, all tooled up. When I look back I think it was the shock because it’s not me to put up with crap – not in my nature, get me? But this time I’m like that. I just go rigid. And this person comes in and next I know I’m on the tarmac. See that?’ He held up his hand for Simone to look at. Showed it to Caffery. ‘Broke my damn wrist, damn eediat.’

‘He took the car?’

‘Takes the thing from under my nose. Think I’m so clever, don’t I? But the man’s fast – before I know it, it’s all over and he’s driving my car up into Clifton. He’s only gone a bit and my kid’s yelling at him in the back so much he loses it.’

‘The files say half a mile away.’

‘Yeah – up by the university.’

‘He parked the car?’

‘On the roadside. Burst a tyre on the pavement, like, but what’s a new radial among friends? And then he’s like that.’ Damien pushed a hand towards the window. ‘Legs it.’

‘Leaves Alysha behind?’

‘Yeah. But she’s OK. I mean, she’s a clever kid, you know? Got the smarts.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘So bright. She deals with it like it happens every day. Just climbs out the car and stands there looking at the crowd what’s gathered and goes, “What you looking at? You going to get the police or what?” ’

Simone gave a small smile. ‘She sounds great.’

Damien nodded, smiled back. ‘She’s wicked. I swear.’

‘Do you remember seeing a car?’

‘What sort of car? I mean, there were cars everywhere. It was a car park.’

‘A dark blue Vauxhall.’

‘A Vauxhall.’ He turned and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Simone, who shook her head and shrugged. Caffery noted it – this silent conferring. It meant that even if he hadn’t decided it was the same person who had taken their cars, they had. Without knowing any of the details about what had happened to Rose Bradley they’d nailed their jacker as the same guy and had probably decided he’d taken Martha too. But Caffery had to keep an open mind. From a glance at Damien and Simone’s original statements the attacks had had common denominators: the theft had been fast, with violence, and the jacker’s clothing had been similar. A ski mask – not a Santa mask, but in both cases he’d been wearing a black jacket of some sort and low-slung jeans with loops and buckles. Probably a fashion thing, Simone had said in her statement. But it made him look like he was planning to climb Everest, not steal a car. Rose Bradley’s statement had said he was wearing jeans with little pockets and straps. Still, Caffery knew a handful of circumstantials like that didn’t add up to a definitive.

‘Damien? A dark-blue Vauxhall.’

‘It’s more than four years ago. Sorry. Not a Scooby.’

‘Simone?’

‘I’m sorry. There were cars everywhere. I really can’t remember.’

Caffery nudged the MP3 player so its directional mic faced her. ‘It was school drop-off time? In Bruton.’

She nodded and sat forward, eyes on the player. One arm she rested across her chest, hand placed lightly on her shoulder. The other she lowered to somewhere near her calf. ‘That’s right. I don’t know how much you already know, but Cleo was nine then. She’s turned ten since. It was two hours before I heard she was safe.’ She gave Damien a small, sympathetic smile. ‘The worst two hours of my life.’

Damien’s mouth hung half open. ‘Two hours?’ he said. ‘I had no idea. I never heard about any of this. No idea.’

‘It was in the local paper but it didn’t get much further. I suppose when a child comes back safe and sound you don’t hear about it. And, anyway, it was about the same time that foot-baller’s wife went missing. Misty Kitson? Nobody was interested in what had happened to us.’

‘Mrs Blunt?’ Caffery cut across her quickly. He didn’t want anyone veering off and talking about the Kitson case. He had his reasons. ‘Who was in the car that morning?’

‘Just me and Cleo.’

‘Where was your husband?’

‘Neil’d had an early meeting that day – he’s at the Citizens Advice Bureau, advises on child custody matters, that sort of thing. I’m afraid I’m the breadwinner – still in the dog-eat-dog end of life. Raking in the filthy lucre.’

She was doing a good job of it, Caffery thought. Cleo had been at King’s School in Bruton, the sort of education that’d put someone back a serious few bob.

‘It happened outside the school?’

‘Not right outside. Actually it was round the corner in the high street. I’d stopped to get something from the shop on my way into school. When I was walking to the car he just . . . appeared. Out of nowhere. Running.’

‘Did he say anything? Anything you remember?’

‘Yes. He said, “Get down, you bitch.” ’

Caffery stopped writing and looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘He said, “Get down, you bitch.” ’

‘The guy who did us said something like that,’ Damien offered. ‘Said, “Get down, you piece of shit,” to me, called the missus a bitch. Told her to move her arse.’

‘Why?’ said Simone, wonderingly. ‘Is it important?’

‘I don’t know.’ Caffery kept his eyes on Simone’s face. The same words the guy in Frome had said to Rose. He felt something start to tick deep in his thoughts. He cleared his throat, lowered his eyes and wrote ‘Language’ on his notepad. Question mark. Put a circle around it. Then he gave a confident smile. Damien and Simone looked back at him seriously.

‘If it’s the same guy,’ Simone said, ‘then isn’t it a bit of a coincidence? Three different cars? Each with a different girl in it? I mean,’ she lowered her voice, ‘do you wonder if it isn’t the cars he’s after but the girls? Doesn’t it make you wonder what he might have done to Martha?’

Caffery pretended he hadn’t heard that. He let his smile broaden and encompass them in his absolute assertion that everything, everything, was going to be just fine. Fine as a fairy cake with a cherry on top. ‘Thank you both for your time.’ He switched off the MP3 player and gestured in the direction of the door. ‘Shall we go and see if someone from CAPIT is here yet?’