Gone (13 page)

‘Out of milk.’ She rattled the empty carton at him. ‘I went to try and get some more but the shop’s run out.’

‘You went out? What about Emily?’

‘I left her, of course. I put her into a nice warm bath and gave her some razor blades to play with. For God’s sake, Cory, what do you take me for? She came with me.’

‘You said she was asleep.’

‘I
said
she’d woken up. You don’t listen.’ She put the milk carton into the bin and stood, arms folded, studying him. He was good-looking, Cory. No getting away from that. But lately there was something soft about his jaw that made him seem almost feminine. And there was a bald spot starting on the top of his head. She’d noticed it in bed the other night. It didn’t bother her, but she wondered what Clare would make of it. Was it worth saying something to him – just to puncture his ego? Or should she let Clare notice it?

‘How was the session?’

‘Told you. Same old, same old.’

‘Clare?’

‘Eh?’

‘
Clare
. The one you were talking about the other day. Remember?’

‘Why do you want to know about her?’

‘Just showing an interest. Is she still fighting with her ex?’

‘Her husband? Yes – the piece of shit. The things he did to her, to her kids, outrageous.’

There was a tinge of extra venom there.
Piece of shit
? She’d never heard him use that expression before. Maybe something he’d learned from Clare.

‘Anyway – I’m thinking of stopping the group.’ He pushed past her into the hallway, unbuttoning his coat. ‘It’s taking too much time. Things are changing at work – they want more hours out of me.’

Janice followed him into the kitchen and watched him open the fridge, hunt for a beer. ‘More hours? That’ll mean late nights, I suppose.’

‘That’s the one. Can’t afford not to. Not with the world the way it is. The directors want me at a big meeting tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to discuss it then. Four o’clock.’

Four. Like a slap, Clare’s face came back to Janice, the way she was holding her hands up. Four fingers. They meant four o’clock. Cory and Clare were meeting at four. He wouldn’t be answering any of Janice’s calls because he’d be in a ‘meeting’. And then, almost to confirm exactly what she’d suspected, he said conversationally, ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Any plans?’

She didn’t answer for a moment, just regarded him calmly, her heart racing. I don’t love you, she thought. Cory, I really don’t love you. And in a way that makes me very happy.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Nothing,’ she said lightly, then turned away and began unloading the dishwasher. It was supposed to be his job, but she always did it, so why should today be any different? ‘Tomorrow? Oh, I think I’ll pick up Emily from school and head over to Mum’s.’

‘That’s an hour’s drive.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m happy for you, Janice, that you’ve got the free time to do things like that. I really am.’

‘I know.’ She smiled. Cory was always pointing out how easy her life was, doing freelance stuff here and there, not a
proper
job like he did. But she wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘I finished the project for that website and I thought I’d take the time before I start the next job. I may stay at Mum’s – maybe have dinner with her.’ She paused and repeated herself very slowly, staring down at the handful of cutlery in which her face was blearily reflected. ‘Yes. I won’t be in town tomorrow, Cory. Not for the whole afternoon.’

By seven o’clock the world was so cold and dark it might have been midnight. There was no moon, no starlight, just the glow of the security lights in the lumber-yard at the end of the lane. Flea stopped her car and got out, shrugging on a fleece and a waterproof. She wore Thinsulate gloves and a wool beanie. Usually she was OK in the cold – she had to be in her job – but this autumn the weather had a hard, almost vindictive edge that seemed to affect everyone. She flashed her card at the soporific cop in the car that blocked the lane and clicked on her torch. The track through the pine forest was a pale, almost luminous yellow in the beam. The Yaris’s tracks were surrounded by limp police tape, the ground covered in little forensics marker flags. She passed them and went through the pool of light cast by the yard’s halogen lights, the conveyor-belts, sawmills and log splitters now silent and shadowy. She continued down the lane until she was in the grounds of the abandoned factory.

Flea had been home already. She’d jogged and showered and eaten and listened to the radio and read. She couldn’t wind down. She couldn’t stop wondering what it was about the search that wouldn’t lie right at the back of her thoughts. If Dad had still been around he’d have said:
You’ve got a thorn in your head, girl. Better you take it out than leave it there and let it go to poison
.

Now she went to the tree-line, where the field began and where Wellard had been standing. She found the line of cleared land, the place that had been searched and the line of rubbish, like the
boundary line of flotsam and jetsam a retreating tide had left. She twisted the beam to halfway between flood and spot. Shone it on the line of rubbish and tried to pull up images from this morning.

Whatever was bugging her had struck her after they’d searched the tank. She’d been standing over at the tank talking to one of the other team’s sergeants about what time their shift finished and what staffing they’d have available if they had to go into overtime. The teams were still searching around them. Wellard had been over here at the edge of the field. She remembered watching him vaguely while she spoke. He’d found something in the grass and was talking to the crime-scene manager about it. Flea had been concentrating on what the sergeant next to her was saying and only half watching Wellard and the CSM, but now she could see the picture clearly. She could even see what he was holding out to the CSM. A piece of rope. Blue, nylon, about a foot long. The rope itself wasn’t what she’d wanted – she’d seen it later on the exhibits table and it had been unremarkable in and of itself – but something about it had started up a particular thought process that she knew was important.

She went to the old water tank where she had been standing and switched off the torch. She waited for a few quiet moments, surrounded by the monster shapes of the winter trees, beyond them the ploughed fields stretching away, dull, immense and dead. From somewhere in the distance to her right came the giant sound of a train racing along the Great Western Union Railway, flying through the darkness. Flea had a desktop at home that drove her crazy by giving off a faint crackle moments before her phone rang. She knew what it was – electromagnetic currents trying to piggyback the speaker wires for antennae – but to her it always seemed as if the machine had prescience, a subtle inkling of the future. Wellard would laugh if she told him, but sometimes she imagined she had a similar electromagnetic warning system – a biological buzzer that sent the hairs up on her arms moments before a thought or an idea clicked into place. Now, standing in the frozen field, she felt it happen. A current racing across her skin. Just seconds before the knowledge fell neatly into her head.

Water. The rope had made her think of boats and marinas and
water
.

This morning the thought had gone as quickly as it had come – the other sergeant was talking to her and, anyway, there wasn’t any water around here so she’d let it flit away. She’d dismissed it. But now she’d had time to think about it she realized she’d been wrong. There was water here. And not very far away.

She turned slowly and looked towards the west, to where the low cloud cover was up-lit a faint orange by a town or highway. She began to walk. Like a zombie, Sarge – Wellard would crack up to see her now. She cut straight across the field, frozen grass soaking her boots, hardly looking down as if something had a hook in her sternum and was slowly dragging her along. Through a small glade of crowded rustling trees, over two stiles on to a short gravelled lane, silver in the diffuse torchlight. After ten minutes she stopped.

The path she stood on was narrow. To her right the ground sloped upwards. To her left it ran steeply down to a tarry gully. A decommissioned canal. The Thames and Severn. An eighteenth-century engineering miracle, built to carry coal from the Severn estuary – when it had become redundant it had seen some service as a pleasure canal. Half dried out now, what water was left in the bottom had shrunk to a dark, poisonous-looking mulch. She knew this canal: knew its beginning and its end. To the east it extended twenty-six miles as far as Lechlade, to the west eight miles to Stroud. It was littered with the evidence of its former existence. The broken and rotting hulls of old coal and pleasure barges were dotted every few hundred yards. There were two in the short stretch she could see now.

She went a few yards along the towpath, sat down and swung her feet on to the deck of the nearest barge. The smells of decay and stagnant water were overpowering. Bacteria and moss. She put one hand on the deck and leaned over, shining the torch into the hull. This vessel wasn’t like the old iron-built coal barges that had first used this waterway: it was newer, a timber-hulled Norfolk wherry, perhaps, with its masts removed and an engine
fitted. Probably brought to this side of the country as a canal cruiser. The timber had given in to the years of neglect and was now half submerged, debris from the canal floating on the black stinking water inside it. Nothing else to see. She knelt up and searched around on the tiller deck at the stern. Kicked aside beer cans and the plastic bags that floated on the water like jellyfish. She felt all around the platform and found nothing. She hauled herself out of the barge and went back along the towpath until she found the next. This one was older and might actually have been a working barge. It sat higher out of the canal and the water inside the hull was only knee-deep. She dropped into it, the freezing, inky water soaking into her jeans. She waded a little way, letting her feet in their trainers feel every inch of the hull below her. Every rivet, every piece of jettisoned wood.

Something clinked. It rolled away from her foot an inch or two. She pushed her sleeve to her upper arm and, bending at the waist, lowered her hand into the freezing water. Groped in the muck. She found the object and pulled it out.

A mooring spike. Straightening, she shone the torch on it. It was about a foot long and shaped like a long fat tent peg with a splayed top where, over the years, it had been hammered into the banks for tying up to. Thicker than a blade and sharper than a chisel, it could easily have made the spikes in the CSM’s plaster-of-paris cast. The jacker might have used it to score out his footprints.

She climbed out of the hull and stood, water streaming off her, on the towpath. She looked along the faintly gleaming canal. All the barges would have used a spike just like this. The place must be littered with them. She studied the spike in her hand. It would make a good weapon. You wouldn’t want to argue with someone holding this. No. You wouldn’t argue. Especially if you were only eleven years old.

The dog’s name was Myrtle. She was threadbare, half crippled by arthritis. Her white and black tail hung off the end of her bony back like a limp flag. But she hobbled along obediently behind Caffery, got in and out of the back seat of his car without complaining, though he could tell it hurt her. Even waited patiently outside the forensics lab at HQ in Portishead while he struggled with the technicians and tried to push forward the testing of the baby tooth against Martha’s DNA. By the time he was done with the lab he was feeling sorry for the damned dog. He stopped at a Smile store and got armfuls of dog food. The chew toy seemed a bit hopeful but he bought it anyway and put it on the back seat next to her.

It was late, gone ten, by the time he got back to the MCIU building. The place was still busy. He took Myrtle limping along the corridor, running the gauntlet of people poking their heads out of offices to speak to him, hand him reports, messages, but mostly to pat the dog or make wisecracks about her:
Jack, your dog looks like I feel. Hey, it’s Yoda in a coat. Here, furry Yoda
.

Turner was still there, dishevelled and a bit sleepy but at least no earring. He spent a little time bringing Caffery up to date on the trawl for the Vauxhall, which still hadn’t borne fruit, and gave him contact details for the superintendent who’d authorized the surveillance on the vicarage. Then he spent a longer time crouched down talking nonsense to Myrtle, who wearily lifted her tail once or twice in acknowledgement. Lollapalooza came in, still
in full makeup, but she was letting her guard down: she’d taken off her high heels and rolled up her sleeves to reveal the down of fine dark hairs on her arms. She hadn’t done well on the sex offenders, she admitted. CAPIT had a short list of people they thought could meet the criteria: they’d been checked on overnight. But what she
could
tell Caffery was that chondroitin was the way to go with the dog’s arthritis. That or glucosamine. Oh, and cut all grains out of the poor animal’s diet. By which she meant
all
grains. All of them.

When she’d gone he opened a can of Chum and let it gloop on to one of the cracked plates from the unit kitchen. Myrtle ate slowly, her old head on one side, favouring the left side of her jaw. The food stank. At ten thirty, when Paul Prody stuck his head in the door, the smell was still there. He made a face. ‘Nice.’

Caffery got up, went to the window and opened it a fraction. Cold damp air came in, bringing with it the smells of drunks and takeaways. One of the shops opposite had Christmas lights in the window, Christmas officially beginning in November, of course. ‘So?’ He sat heavily in his chair. Arms hanging at his sides. He felt half finished. ‘What’ve you got for me?’

‘Just in the last few minutes spoke to the press office.’ Prody came in, sat down. Myrtle was lying on the floor, digesting her meal, her chin on her paws. She raised her head and watched him with a vague, burned-out interest. Even Prody was showing signs of wear and tear. His jacket was creased and his tie was undone round his neck as if he’d spent a couple of hours on the sofa at home, watching soaps. ‘The nationals, the locals and all the TV stations ran pictures of the Bradleys’ house. The number on the door was quite clear and so was the sign: “The Vicarage”. The cuttings agency is still searching, but so far all anyone can come up with is some copy about “the Bradleys’ house in Oakhill”. Nothing more specific than that. No road name. And no mention of the tooth. Anywhere.’