Gone (21 page)

‘What do we do?’ Janice’s teeth were chattering. The rain in her hair scattered the fluorescent light. ‘Has he been
following
us?
Please
– what the hell’s going on?’

Caffery gritted his teeth hard and fought the desire to close his eyes. He’d put a lot of energy into making sure the story wasn’t leaked. And everyone, from the FLO to the press office, was telling him it was watertight. So how in Christ’s name had the jacker found out not only where they lived but where her damned
mother
lived? Trying to keep a step ahead of him was like trying to stop lightning.

‘Did you see anyone? Any reporters? Outside your house?’

‘Cory spent all afternoon watching. There wasn’t a soul.’

‘And are you
sure
– one hundred per cent cast-iron
sure
– that you haven’t told anyone?’

‘I’m sure.’ Tears were in her eyes. Tears of real fear. ‘I swear. And my mother hasn’t either.’

‘No neighbours saw you coming or going?’

‘No.’

‘And when you went out?’

‘It was just to the local shops first thing this morning. In Keynsham. Just to get bread for breakfast. Mum had run out.’

‘You didn’t try to go back to Mere?’

‘
No!’
She paused, as if her vehemence had shocked her. She pushed her sleeves up her arms, shivering. ‘Look – I’m sorry. It’s just I’ve gone over and over it. And we haven’t done anything. I swear.’

‘Where’s Emily now?’

‘With Cory. In the office downstairs.’

‘I’m going to find you somewhere. Give me half an hour. I can’t guarantee it’ll be as nice as your place – or your mother’s –
or that it’ll be close to Keynsham. It could be anywhere in Avon and Somerset.’

‘I don’t care where it is. I just want to know we’re safe. I want my mother to come too.’

Something occurred to Caffery as he picked up the phone. He replaced the handset and went to the window, put a finger on a blind slat and peered out into the street. Dark and rainy, the streetlamps on still, even though it was morning. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Outside. Round the back.’

He looked a little longer at the street. One or two cars were parked – empty. Another went past slowly, headlights making silver domes in the rain. He released the blind. ‘I’m going to get a driver to take you.’

‘I can drive.’

‘Not the way this driver can.’

Janice was quiet. She looked at the blind. At the darkness beyond it. ‘You mean he can do evasive driving, don’t you? You think he might have followed us here?’

‘I wish I knew.’ Caffery picked up the phone. ‘Go and wait with Emily. Go on. Give her a hug.’

The team did a sweep of the rainy streets outside the offices and found nothing. No cars loitering. No dark-blue Vauxhalls, registration ending in WW. No one taking off at the sight of the cops and gunning it down the high road. Of course, there wouldn’t be. The jacker was too sharp for anything so predictable. The Costellos were calmed down and given a safe-house, this one down in Peasedown St John, thirty or more miles away from the Bradleys. A specialist driver turned up and drove the family car for them. He called Caffery half an hour later to say they were settled – Nick and a local PC putting on a protective show for them.

When Caffery sat and thought about it – about just how the hell the jacker had found the family – the headache that had dogged him all morning ratcheted up a notch. He wanted to close the blinds, switch off the lights and curl up on the floor next to the dog. The jacker was like a virus, changing and evolving at a terrifying rate, and Caffery couldn’t get all the unanswered questions to stop screaming at him. He had to turn away from it. Just for a while.

He took the yellow box file back to the review team – told them in future to let him know before they passed it out to anyone under inspector rank. Then he put Myrtle into the car and drove out through the miserable suburbs, along the ring road, with its soulless industrial estates and hypermarkets, past the multiplexes with their tinsel Christmas trees mounted above the billboards. He stopped in Hewish, where the jets flew low
over the Somerset Levels, and parked outside a breaker’s yard.

‘Stay there,’ he told the dog. ‘And don’t cause trouble.’

Back in his probationary days in London one of the duties Caffery had liked least had been spot checks on the Peckham scrap-dealers. The sheer quantities of stolen metal that got fenced through the yards were awesome – lead from churches, phosphor bronze from lathes and ships, even cast-iron street manhole covers. In the last ten years the role had been passed to the local authorities so he had no authority in the yards now. Didn’t matter. The car that had hit Misty Kitson needed to be in the crusher, out of harm’s way.

He stopped just inside the gates and looked at the low light on the frosted mountains of metal, the huge hydraulic crusher crouched in the middle. In the distance the towering carcasses of scrapped cars rose like intricate metal termite mounds against the flat grey sky. The car he wanted was at the front of a pile of five shells stacked one on top of another. He picked his way towards it and stood for a while next to it in the freezing cold. A silver Ford Focus. He knew it well. The front end was destroyed, the engine block and the firewall crumpled. The engine was beyond repair – no one would be taking that for the reconditioned market. All that was keeping the car sitting there, waiting quietly for the end, were the other bits and pieces that could be scavenged: sills, door handles, instrument panels. Its decomposition had been slow so far. Caffery came here every week to check it, buying a door or a seat to speed its journey to the crusher. Nothing too obvious, though. He didn’t want to draw attention to it.

He ran a gloved hand over the crumpled bonnet, up the shattered windscreen and on to the roof. He let his fingers trail down into the familiar dent. He knew it like the back of his hand. He pictured Misty’s head colliding with it, bursting red in the night. Pictured her flying over the bonnet on a lonely country lane, making contact with the roof. A sloppy bag of slack muscle and bone by the time she hit the tarmac. Already dead, neck broken.

A German shepherd on a chain barked noisily as Caffery approached the reception building. Outside were parked three four-by-fours:
Andy’s Asphalt and Fascias
, their flanks said. Tiring and familiar to him. Still a cop wasn’t even supposed to
think
the word ‘pikey’. The job slang, with its way of getting round any obstacle, had shifted its terminology to TIB. Call them TIBs and they’d never know you were calling them thieving itinerant bastards. The TIB who owned the scrapyard was about as much the stereotype as you could get and not be in a cartoon: overweight, grease-stained overalls, a diddicoy ring in his ear. He sat behind the desk, a two-bar fire warming his legs, playing penny bets on the filthy, oil-stained computer. When Caffery came in he killed the screen and twisted round in the chair. ‘What can I do you for, mate?’

‘A tailgate. Ford Focus, Zetec. Silver.’

The man pushed himself off the chair and stood, hands on his sides, to peer up at the rows and rows of car parts ranked on the huge Dexion shelves mounted above the desk. ‘I’ve got a couple up there. Can do you either of them for a ton.’

‘OK. But I’ll have it from a car out on the yard.’

The owner turned. ‘One from out on the yard?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘But these are already cut.’

‘Don’t care. I want it from out in the yard.’

The TIB frowned. ‘Have you been in here before? Do I know you?’

‘Come on.’ Caffery held the door open. ‘I’ll show you.’

Disgruntled, the man came out from behind the desk, pulling on a stained fleece and following him out into the yard. They stood next to the silver Focus, their breath steaming white in the freezing air.

‘Why this one? I’ve got dozens of Focus tailgates inside. Silver ones too. The Focus is my biggest seller. It’s a clit car.’

‘A what?’

‘A clit car. Every cunt’s got one. And for me they’re arse cars too, because I’ve got them coming out my arse. Clits coming out
me arse. I’m a biological marvel.’ He gave a phlegmy laugh. Stopped when Caffery didn’t join in. ‘But you want this one, you’re looking at another thirty on top. You want something specific you’ve got to pay for your tastes. With the merchandise inside, I don’t have to do anything, just pass them over to you. This one, I’ve got to get the boys out with the cutting torch.’

‘They’re going to do it anyway. Eventually.’

‘A hundred and thirty or walk away.’

Caffery looked at the dent in the roof. He wondered if he should warn Flea about Prody. He didn’t know what he’d say, how he’d go about it. ‘A hundred for the tailgate,’ he said. ‘But when you’ve taken it off I want to watch you crush the car.’

‘It’s not ready for crushing.’

‘Yes, it is. If the tailgate goes there’s nothing else. The gearbox has gone, the offside headlamp, the seats, the wheels, even the trims. Take the tailgate away and the car’s ready for the chomper.’

‘The seatbelts.’

‘Nothing special about them. No one’ll want those. Throw them in with the tailgate for a ton. There’s a nice man.’

The TIB gave him a sly look. ‘I know what your sort would call me in private. You call me a TIB. A thieving itinerant bastard. But the thing is you’re wrong. I might be itinerant but I’m not thieving – and I’m not thick either. And in my world when someone asks me to crush a car it makes alarm bells go off.’

‘In my world if someone bothers to cut cars up and stack the parts in a shed without getting any orders
that
makes alarms go off. Why the tidy lines inside? Why did you bother cutting them up before you knew they’d be wanted? And where are the shells? I know what happens in your midnight crushing sessions. I know how many VIN numbers get mashed up of a night out here.’

‘Who the fuck are you? I’ve seen you round here before, haven’t I?’

‘Just crush the car, OK?’

The man opened his mouth, then closed it. He shook his head. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What is the world coming to?’

The house was an unremarkable little box on a bedraggled windswept estate. For years it had been the local bobby’s, but now the force had no use for it and a weatherbeaten FOR SALE sign was planted in the unkempt garden. Today, probably for the first time in ages, there were lights on inside. The heating had even come on – the upstairs radiators and the gas fires in the living room were working. Janice had got the kettle on and made tea for everyone. Emily – who’d cried on the way over – had been allowed hot chocolate and a jelly and had cheered up. Now she was watching
CBeebies
in the living room, sitting on the floor and giggling along to Shawn the Sheep.

Janice and her mother watched her from the doorway.

‘She’ll be fine,’ said her mother. ‘A couple of days off school won’t hurt her. I sometimes kept you off at that age just because you were tired or grumpy. She’s only four.’ With her wide-necked Fair Isle sweater and her short, boyishly cut white hair pushed back off her tanned face, she was still beautiful. Periwinkle-blue eyes. Very soft skin that always smelt of Camay soap.

‘Mum,’ Janice said, ‘do you remember the house at Russell Road?’

Her mother raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘I think I can cast my mind back. We lived there for ten years.’

‘Do you remember the birds?’

‘The birds?’

‘You kept telling me not to have the window open in my
bedroom. Of course I ignored you. I used to sit up there and throw paper planes out of it.’

‘Wasn’t the last time you disobeyed me.’

‘Well, we went away for the weekend to that campsite in Wales. The one with the cove at the bottom of the lane? I made myself sick on Opal Fruits? And when we got home there was a bird in my bedroom. It must have come in when I’d had the window open and when we shut them to go away it got trapped.’

‘I think I remember.’

‘It was still alive but it had babies in the nest outside the window.’

‘Oh, God, yes.’ Her mother put her hand to her mouth, half delighted to have this memory delivered to her, half horrified too. ‘Yes. Of course I remember. Poor little things. The poor mother. She was sitting at the window looking at them.’

Janice gave a small, sad laugh. Tears pricked the back of her eyes just thinking about the bird. At the time she’d felt sorry for the babies dead in the nest. She’d buried each one under a white pebble in the flowerbed, crying with guilt. She’d had to grow up and have her own baby to understand that the greatest suffering had been for the mother bird, watching its babies die. Not being able to do anything to help. ‘Yesterday when the car drove off I just couldn’t stop thinking about that bird.’

‘Janice.’ Her mother put an arm around her, kissed her head. ‘Sweetheart. She’s safe now. It might not be very nice here, but at least the police are looking after us.’

Janice nodded. She bit her lip.

‘Now, you make yourself another cup of something. I’m going to clean that awful bathroom.’

When she’d gone, Janice stood where she was for a long time, the door half open, her arms crossed. She didn’t want to go to the kitchen. It was tiny and depressing, and Cory was sitting in there with a cup of coffee and his iPhone, answering work emails. All morning he’d been at it. He hated having to take time off work – just hated it. He’d spent a long time muttering darkly about lost hours, about the recession, jobs being hard to come by and about
ingratitude, as if he resented Janice for what had happened to them, as though she had planned the upheaval just to keep him away from work.

In the end she went upstairs to the small bedroom at the front. There were two single beds, hastily made up with sleeping-bags she and Cory had grabbed as they left the house and sheets that Nick had managed to rustle up from somewhere. She looked at the beds: it would be the first time in ages that she’d sleep on her own. Even after all this time together, and all the things they’d been through, Cory still wanted sex. In fact, if anything, he seemed to want it even more since Clare had been on the scene. Even when all Janice wanted was to lie still and silent in the dark and let dreams play out across the backs of her eyelids, she’d still let him do what he needed to. It spared her the bad moods, the veiled insinuations that she wasn’t living up to the wife he’d hoped for. But she was silent when it was happening. She never pretended to enjoy it.