Gone

by Mo Hayder

  ‘Wait. He’s fitting.’ The doctor dropped to a crouch next to the stretcher and studied the portable monitor. ‘We’re losing that heart rate . . .’

  ‘What?’ said Caffery. ‘What’s happening?’ Under the fake tan the doctor’s face was hard and concentrated. Caffery’s mouth was dry. ‘He was fine a second ago. What happened?’

  ‘He was never fine,’ the doctor yelled. ‘I told you that. He’s forty-five beats a minute, forty, yes, he’s lost it – he’s gone straight to bradycardia now, and before you know it he’ll—’

  The monitor emitted a long, continuous tone.

  ‘Shit. Cardiac arrest. Chest compressions, someone. I’m going to intubate.’

  A paramedic leaned over and began compressions. Caffery inched himself between the two paramedics and got to his knees on the blood-soaked grass. ‘Paul,’ he yelled. ‘You piece of shit. Paul? You’d better fucking speak to me, that’s all. You’d better fucking speak to me.’

  ‘Out of my way.’ The doctor had sweat on her face as she slid the laryngeal mask into Prody’s slack mouth, fitted the bag valve to it. ‘I said, out of my way. Let me do my job.’

  Caffery dropped back on to his heels, pressed his finger and thumb either side of his forehead, squeezed his temples and took long, deep breaths. Fuck fuck fuck. He was going to be beaten. Not by the bitch of a doctor, but by Prody himself. The bastard. The clever bastard couldn’t have worked it any better.

  The doctor kept squeezing the bag, the paramedic continued the compressions, counting aloud. The line on the monitor stayed steady, the tone echoing around the trees. In the clearing no one moved. Every officer in the place had been turned to stone and was watching, appalled, as the paramedic kept pumping.

  ‘No.’ After less than a minute she stopped squeezing the bag and let it rest on Prody’s chest. She put her hand on the paramedic’s arm to stop him doing the compressions. ‘He’s in asystole – flatline. His capillary refill’s not happening. Really, this is futile. Are we in agreement we stop?’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’ Caffery couldn’t keep still. ‘You’re just going to let him die?’

  ‘He’s dead already. He’s never going to make it. He’s lost too much blood.’

  ‘I don’t fucking believe I’m hearing this. Do something. De-fucking-fibrillate him or something.’

  ‘No point. There’s no blood left in him. He’s shut down. We can stimulate his heart until the cows come home, but if there’s no blood to pump . . .’

  ‘I said fucking do something.’

  She gave him a long, steady look. Then she shrugged. ‘All right.’ With a tight, irritated expression, she unzipped her green emergency rucksack and pulled out a set of boxes, shook two foil wrappers out of them. ‘Let me show you how futile this is. Adrenalin, one mil to ten thousand. This would jump-start the Titanic.’ She opened the first wrapper with her teeth and took out a preloaded syringe, which she handed to the paramedic. ‘Follow it with this one – three milligrams atropine and run it through with twenty-five-mil saline.’

  The paramedic opened the drugs port on the Venflon and pushed in the drugs, flushed it through to make sure it got to the heart. Caffery stared at the monitor. The flatline didn’t move. Across the stretcher the doctor wasn’t looking at the monitor, she was watching him with steady eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s the defibrillator. Do you want me to turn it on, make him jump up and down like a puppet? Or are you satisfied I know what I’m talking about?’

  Caffery dropped his hands and sat helplessly in the grass, staring at Prody’s slack, yellowing body, the waxy mask of death creeping silently across his face. The steady straight heart-rate line on the monitor. The doctor was checking her watch for time of death and, seeing her do it, Caffery jerked to his feet, turning his back on her as quickly as he could. He put his hands into his pockets and walked twenty yards away, through the crunching frozen grass. He stood at the edge of the clearing, where a pile of felled silver birch blocked the path. He tilted up his chin, tried to concentrate on the sky beyond the branches. On the clouds.

  He wished and prayed for something natural and calm to come and lie cool against his thoughts. He could feel Rose and Janice watching all this from the trees. He’d known they were there for the last half an hour, had long felt their eyes boring into the side of his head, but he hadn’t acknowledged them or moved them on. They were waiting for him to take the futile, scattered set of facts out of the clearing and bring them down to a calm, measured plan of action. And how the hell was he going to do that now that the only person who could give them a clue about where Martha and Emily were was lying dead on a stretcher in the grass?

  80

  The men pulling Emily and Martha out of the hole were smiling. They were laughing and shouting at each other, raising their hands in victorious salutes. Both girls had sheets of the purest white tucked around them. Martha was pale, but Emily was pink and happy and completely unmarked, and was sitting up on the stretcher, leaning forward and trying to see Janice among the crowd, craning her neck eagerly. The clearing was full of golden light. Light and laughter and people turning to smile at her, and in Janice’s dream no one wore coats or frowns or had to stand with their backs to her to hide their expressions from her. In Janice’s dream everyone floated in a summery haze and there were clumps of bluebells under her feet as she crossed to take Emily’s hand.

  In front of her eyes the mean reality was that the clearing was nearly empty. The helicopters had long gone, the teams had all packed up, harnesses had been removed, equipment returned to vans. The officer in charge had taken the names and contact details of every officer involved and had let them go. In the middle of the clearing, Prody’s body was being loaded on a stretcher into the coroner’s van. A doctor walked next to it, the sheet lifted so he could scrutinize Prody’s face.

  Janice was freezing. She had cramps in her legs from crouching and her muscles were weak from the adrenalin constantly flooding through them. Thorns had come through her torn tights and were drawing lines of blood from her knees and feet. The girls weren’t in the tunnel, Prody was dead and, judging from the way Caffery and Nick were standing – about twenty feet away among the trees, backs turned, talking in low urgent voices – he hadn’t given the police any information at all. But somehow Janice was calm. From somewhere she’d found the strength not to buckle but to stand without moving and simply wait to hear.

  Rose, on the other hand, was fragmenting. She was about a yard away, pacing to and fro in a little clearing surrounded by young ash trees that seemed to bend in around her as if they were studying her, or protecting her. Her trousers were muddy, flecked with leaves and the black smudges of the withered blackberries they’d been crouching among; she was shaking her head and muttering into the pink scarf, which she held pressed against her mouth with one hand. Strangely, the madder she seemed, the closer to the edge she got, the calmer and more icily controlled Janice became. When Nick began to cross the clearing towards them, head ominously lowered, Janice was able to stand her ground and wait, while Rose immediately began speaking, clutching at Nick’s sleeves. ‘What did he say? What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re doing everything we can. We’ve got several leads. Prody’s wife has given us several—’

  ‘He must have said something.’ Rose immediately began to weep bitterly. Her hands down at her sides, mouth open in a stiff O, her face naked like a helpless little girl in a playground. ‘He must have said where they are. Anything, please, anything.’

  ‘His wife has given us several leads and there are some keys in his pockets, which look like they’re from a garage. We’re going to search it. And—’

  ‘No!’ Out of nowhere Rose began to scream, high-pitched, stuttering shrieks that made everyone left in the clearing turn to look. She groped wretchedly at Nick’s jacket, trying to shake some different news out of her. ‘Search the tunnel again. Search the tunnel.’

  ‘Rose! Sssh, now. They’ve searched the tunnel. It�
��s empty.’

  But Rose had spun herself round and was yelling at the few officers left in the clearing, her arms jerking up and down. ‘Search it again! Search it again!’

  ‘Rose, listen. Rose!’ Nick tried to catch the flailing arms. Tried to pin them to Rose’s sides. She had to keep her face back, her eyes half closed, to avoid being socked by one of the crazily wheeling hands. ‘They can’t go back in – it’s too dangerous. Rose! Listen! They can’t go in again – Rose!’

  Rose threw herself away, still screaming, her hands moving faster, like a wounded bird trying to get some lift. She took a few tottery steps forward, found she’d come to a tree, half turned as if to head off in another direction, turned again, seemed to stagger a little, then, as if she’d been shot in the knees, dropped to the ground. Her whole body folded till her forehead was touching the earth. Her hands came up and she grabbed the back of her neck as if she was trying to force her face into the ground. She rocked back and forth, bellowing into the frozen earth, a long trail of spittle drooping from her mouth and wetting the soil.

  Janice came and knelt in the brambles. Her own heart was racing, but the controlled thing inside her was growing. Growing and getting harder. ‘Rose.’ She put a hand on the older woman’s back. ‘Listen.’

  At her voice Rose stopped rocking and quietened.

  ‘Listen. We’ve got to move on. We’re in the wrong place, but there’s somewhere else. His wife’s helping us now. We’re going to find them.’

  Slowly Rose raised her head. Above the little scarf her face was a jumbled knot of red flesh and mucus.

  ‘Really, Rose, I promise. We’ll find them. His wife’s a good person. She is and she’s going to help us.’

  Rose rubbed her nose. ‘Do you think so?’ she whispered, her voice tiny. ‘Do you really think so?’

  Janice took a breath and looked back at the clearing. The coroner’s van was pulling away, the officer in charge was making his way back towards the car park and the last of the teams slammed the door on their van. Something wanted to bubble up through the calm – hard and bitter and desperate – wanted to wrench itself out from the hole that would never be filled. But she swallowed it and nodded. ‘I do. Now get up. That’s it. Get up and let’s move on.’

  81

  Flea wasn’t sure what they’d put in the drip but she knew she’d give half a year’s wages for another shot of it. She tried to say that to the paramedic who locked down her trolley in the helicopter, tried to yell it at him as the rotors started. Maybe he’d heard it all before or maybe she still wasn’t making any sense when she spoke, because he just smiled, nodded and gestured for her to keep still and lie back. So she stopped trying. She lay and watched the way the webbing inside the helicopter’s roof vibrated and merged. Smelt the fresh blue air coming in through the hatch. Aviation fuel and sunlight.

  Her eyes closed. She drifted back into the dream. Let it fold itself around her like white wings. She was just a dot in the sky. A pirouetting dandelion seed. Above her the sky was cloudless. Below her the land spread out with its English patchwork of colours. No shadows on it. Just dreamless greens and browns. She saw a forest. Thick and plush. Small clearings with deer grazing in them. She saw people down there. Some picnicking. Some standing in groups. Among the cracked greenish trunks of ash trees that lined a track, she saw three women walking towards a car park: one woman was in oilskin, one in a pink scarf and one in a green coat. The woman in the green coat had no shoes on. She had her arm around the one in the scarf. They both walked with their heads so low they looked as if they might topple over at any minute.

  Flea twisted away. She floated across the tops of the trees. She saw the top of the air shaft, cinders floating gently around it. From her vantage-point she could see all the way into the tunnel. Could hear noises. A child crying. And it came back to her. Martha’s body. In the pit. It was still there. Something had to be done about it.

  She lifted her head. Looked around herself – saw police cars and vehicles leaving the area. Saw the miles and miles of roads stretching away into the distance like a bleached yellow spider’s web sprawled out across the winter land. On the lane that snaked away towards the big motorway in the south, bleak sunlight flashed off the roof of a car. Tiny – like a Tonka toy. She fixed her eyes on it and swivelled to face it, waiting for the elemental force to come and take her. It took her by the shoulders and slid her head first across the air, through the clouds. The fields and the trees rushed away beneath her, she saw the road, closed in on it until she could see the fabric of it, its very grain, moving fast. Up ahead she saw the top of the car. The wind was visible like quicksilver, undulating over the car roof as she neared. It was a plain silver Mondeo. The sort some of the specialist units used. She slowed, got level with the car, and drifted down. Hovered next to the passenger window, her hand resting on the wing mirror.

  Inside there were two men wearing suits. The one who was driving she recognized vaguely, but it was the man sitting nearest her in the passenger seat – a distant expression on his face – who got her attention. Jack. Jack Caffery. The only man in the world who could burst her heart into pieces with just a look.

  ‘Jack?’ She put her face to the window. Knocked on it. He didn’t turn. Just sat, staring, his head moving slackly with the motion of the car. ‘Jack.’

  He didn’t respond. His face was so defeated, so lacking in energy or hope, he looked as if he could cry at any moment. He wore body armour over a shirt and tie and there was blood on his sleeves. He must have tried to wipe some of it off, but he’d missed places. Little rusty lines circled his wrists. She pushed her face through the glass. Nuzzled it gently in through the melting milky translucence until she was in the car itself, smelling the thick, overheated air. The combination of aftershave, sweat and exhaustion. She put her lips against his ear. Felt the faint burr of his hair against her nose. ‘She’s under the tunnel floor,’ she whispered. ‘He dug down. Put her in a pit. A pit, Jack. A pit.’

  Caffery put his finger in his ear. Wiggled it.

  ‘A pit, that’s what I said. A pit in the floor of the canal.’

  Caffery couldn’t get rid of the sound of Prody’s wheezing. His death rattle. It wouldn’t go away. It kept buzzing in his right ear. He poked at his ear, rubbed it. Shook his head. But it was as if someone was sitting close to him, hissing at him.

  ‘Pit.’ The word came at him suddenly. ‘A pit.’

  Turner shot him a sideways look. ‘Do what, Boss?’

  ‘A pit. A pit. A fucking pit.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He sat forward, looking out of the window at the road markings racing under them. The sun flashed blindingly into his eyes. His head was moving again. Fast this time. Really fast. Pit. He tested the word in his mouth. Wondered why it had appeared completely formed in his head. Pit. A hole in the ground. A place to hide things. Search teams were trained to do a 360-degree sweep. He’d been caught out by that before. Looking everywhere except up. The way they hadn’t looked up to find Prody in the tunnel. But looking down. Looking further than the ground beneath your feet, looking through it. That was something he’d never thought of.

  ‘Boss?’

  Caffery drummed his fingers on the dashboard. ‘Clare said her sons were scared to death of the police.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘Somehow he’d made them think the police were their enemies. The last people to turn to.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘What’s the first thing the team yelled when they went into the tunnel?’

  ‘The first thing they yelled? I dunno. Probably “Police”, yeah. That’s what they’re supposed to do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where was Prody when the teams searched the tunnel?’

  Turner gave Caffery a strange look, as if he’d grown an extra head. ‘He was in the tunnel, Boss. He was with them.’

  ‘Yeah. And what was he doing all that time?’

  ‘He was . .
.’ Turner shook his head. ‘I dunno. Where’s this going? He was dying, I guess.’

  ‘Think about it. He was breathing. And loud. You heard it. No one could get away from that sound. It didn’t stop from the time of the explosion to the time they came out. You wouldn’t have been able to hear anything else down there.’

  ‘They searched the tunnel, Boss. They searched it. The girls weren’t there. Whatever you’re thinking I don’t know how you got to it.’

  ‘I don’t know how either, Turner, but it’s time you turned this car round.’

  82

  Janice didn’t know how her body would stand this. Her bones and muscles felt like water. She thought her head might explode with the pressure. She stood with her back to the trunk of a silver birch, holding Rose’s hand, both of them staring blankly at the clearing. Everything was different. It was no longer the despondent, silent place they’d left half an hour ago. Now the area around the shaft was crawling with people: officers were yelling at each other, equipment that had been packed away was being hastily unpacked. Another medical helicopter had landed and was sitting with its rotors motionless in the clearing. Two pulley tripods had been set up and two men had been lowered into the shaft. Janice knew the burrowing and panicked shouting that must be happening in the darkness a hundred feet below, but what she really couldn’t take were the worried expressions on the surface. That awful bloody seriousness. Nick stood a little in front of Rose and Janice, her hands in her pockets, her face grave. It had been Nick who, driving Janice’s Audi back along the A419, had noticed cars coming fast in the other direction, sunlight reflecting off their windscreens. She’d recognized them as unmarked unit cars and knew what it meant. She’d swung the Audi into a lay-by, three-point-turned across two lanes of traffic and floored it back up the road after the cars. This time no one had tried to stop the women coming to watch. No one seemed to have the time.