Gone

by Mo Hayder

  ‘We’d had an argument. The biggest of them all. Paul locked me in a toilet – the downstairs one where there was no window I could shout out of. He sent the boys to his mother’s and told everyone I’d gone away on holiday with friends.’

  ‘Go on,’ Caffery said, feeling something loosen in his chest that had been clenched from the moment he’d walked into Rose Bradley’s kitchen. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He switched off the water. For a while I drank from the toilet cistern, and he switched that off too.’ Her face was stark and rigid. ‘He kept me there for four days. I don’t know but I think I nearly died.’

  Caffery breathed slowly and quietly. He wanted to put his head down on the desk and yell. Because he knew instinctively that Clare was right: it was what Prody had done to Martha and Emily. Which meant they could still be alive. Just. Emily had a good chance. Martha – probably not. Caffery’d had reason, on a case back in London, to speak to doctors about dehydration and knew that, whatever the bushcraft rule said – a person could only live three days without water – the limit of life without water could be more than ten days. Martha was a child and that would limit her chances but if, as a dumb cop, he’d had to play the doctor he’d say five, maybe six days tops. If the universe was shining its good grace on her.

  Six days. He looked at the calendar. She’d been gone exactly that. Six days. All but six hours.

  The phone on the desk rang. Both he and Clare stared at it, immobilized. Even Myrtle sat up, ears pricked, suddenly all attention. It rang again and this time he lifted the handset. Listened, his heart thudding. He put the phone down and looked at Clare. She was gaping at him, her eyes wide.

  ‘Skye Stephenson.’

  ‘Skye? The solicitor? Shit.’

  Caffery hooked his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘She’s got a baby. Skye’s got a baby. A little boy. I never thought of her—’

  ‘I’ll get you an escort. DC Paluzzi. She’ll drive you out there.’

  ‘Drive me where?’ Clare gripped the desk – as if to stop herself being moved. The blue blanket flopped and fell to the floor, revealing her thin shoulders in the black jogging T-shirt. ‘Where’s she driving me?’

  ‘Out to the Cotswolds. We think we know where he is. We think we might’ve got him.’

  74

  Outside the MCIU offices it was raining. The side turning that led from the main street to the car park was packed with vehicles. There were people on the pavement, men in suits, uniformed officers. There was an armoured Sprinter van with the back doors open. Cold blue lights turned on vehicle roofs.

  Janice already knew that MCIU had figured out about Prody: at the same time as she’d been with the families, Caffery had been putting it together. But as the four of them – Janice, Nick, Cory and Rose Bradley – pulled up in the Audi, she could tell from the seriousness in the men’s faces that something more had happened. There was something terrible about the way the officers were concentrating, talking in neat, nipped sentences. Urgent. That serious intent was the worst thing for Janice. It meant it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it meant they’d got him. Found the girls.

  Nick saw it too. She unclipped her belt, her face fixed. ‘Wait here.’ She got out and walked fast in the direction of the offices.

  Janice hesitated, then unbuckled her seatbelt and got out. She set off across the street after Nick, her shoulders hunched in the rain, her coat half hitched up over her head. Past the vehicles, through the gates that stood wide open and into the car park. She had almost passed a long black car parked against the wall when something about it caught her eye. She came to an abrupt halt. She stood, facing ahead for a moment, motionless.

  Someone was sitting in the back seat of the car. A woman. A woman with pale hair and a sorrowful, drawn-down face. Clare Prody.

  Janice turned very slowly. Clare stared back at her from behind the rain-spattered window. She had a blanket around her shoulders as if she’d been rescued from a fire, and there was pure horror in her eyes – to be face to face suddenly with Cory’s wife. With Emily’s mother.

  Janice couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn away, couldn’t go forward. All she could do was stare back. Her eyes were dry – dry and sore as if they’d never close. There was nothing to say. Nothing adequate to express how it felt to be standing there wretchedly in the rain. Hopeless. Watched by the woman who was sleeping with Cory and whose husband had stolen Emily. She’d never felt so transparently weak and miserable in her life.

  Her head dropped forward. She didn’t have it in her any more – even standing was too much effort. She turned to trudge back to the Audi. Behind her the window of the black car opened with a shushing sound. ‘Janice?’

  She stopped. She couldn’t take another step, couldn’t turn back. Dog-tired.

  ‘Janice?’

  Painfully she lifted her chin and twisted her head. In the car Clare’s face was so white it was almost luminous. There were black tracks on her cheeks where she’d cried her mascara off. Her expression was pinched and cloudy with guilt. She half leaned out of the window and checked quickly around the car park that no one was watching her. Then she leaned further towards Janice and whispered, ‘They know where he is.’

  Janice’s mouth opened numbly. She shook her head. Not getting it. ‘What?’

  ‘They know where he is. They’re taking me now. I’m not supposed to be saying anything, but I know.’

  Janice took a step back towards the car. ‘What?’

  ‘He’s somewhere called Sapperton. I think it’s in the Cotswolds.’

  Janice felt her face widen. Felt a squeezed-up part of her head come to life. Sapperton. Sapperton. She knew that name. It was the tunnel where the teams had searched for Martha.

  ‘Janice?’

  She wasn’t listening. She was running back to the Audi, as fast as her legs would carry her, splashing crazily through the puddles. Cory was out of the car now, a strange look on his face. He wasn’t looking at her, but at Clare sitting in the car. Janice didn’t stop. She didn’t care. She opened her arm out behind her. ‘She’s all yours, Cory. All yours.’

  She jumped into the car. Rose was leaning forward from the back seat, her face full of questions.

  ‘They’ve found him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Sapperton tunnel. The place they searched for Martha? They don’t want us there but that doesn’t matter.’ She jammed her keys in and started the engine. The windscreen wipers came on, cannoning back and forth with urgent squeaks. ‘We’re going too.’

  ‘Hey.’ The passenger door opened and Nick peered in, dripping rain everywhere. ‘What’s going on?’

  Janice clicked on the sat nav, tapped in ‘Sapperton’.

  ‘Janice. I asked you a question. What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that. They’ve told you.’

  The sat nav was crunching the instructions. And now the map came up on the screen. Janice fiddled with the toggle button, zooming out to get a perspective.

  ‘Janice, I don’t know what you’re thinking of doing.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I can’t let that happen. You’ll have to abduct me if you want me to stay with you.’

  ‘Then you’re abducted.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Nick jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. Janice put the car into gear, took the handbrake off and began to pull forward. But she had to slam her foot on the brake. At the end of the bonnet, half obscured by the rain, stood Cory. His eyes were hooded miserably, his body was half hanging, as if his arms and hands had got too heavy for him. She stared at him, not understanding what was happening. Beyond him Clare was in the black car, looking stonily in the opposite direction. With colour in her face at last. Her cheeks were red. Janice got it. There’d been an argument.

  She took the car out of gear and Cory came round to the driver’s side. She opened the window and gave him a long, appraising look. Studied his t
an, which had been sprayed on in a booth in Wincanton. Was he as pale under it as she felt? It was hard to tell. She studied the suit – pressed and neat because he’d had time to do all that somehow, whereas she’d have to look down at herself if she wanted to know what she was wearing. And he was crying. In all the time Emily had been gone he hadn’t cried. Not once. It had taken Clare to make him cry.

  ‘She dumped me. I don’t know what you said to her, but she dumped me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Janice kept her voice calm. Quiet. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He held her eyes, his mouth shaking a little. Then his face crumpled. His shoulders came up. He dropped his head forward, put his hands on the side of the car, and began to sob. Janice watched him in silence, saw the vulnerable bald spot on the top of his head. She felt nothing for him. No pity, no love. Just a cold, hard wedge of nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, and this time she meant she was sorry for everything. For him, for their marriage, for their poor, poor little girl. She was sorry for the world. ‘I’m sorry, Cory, but now you have to get out of my way.’

  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 b
ecause 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.’