Gone (37 page)

‘Damien, thank you for your consideration. Someone’ll be in touch. With an expense claim. For the – you know . . . mess.’ He pushed the Twix bar into his mouth, wiped his hands and went back on to the landing, past Q, and down the stairs, chewing as he went. At the bottom he glanced up at Alysha’s photographs. Three pictures, three outfits, but the poses weren’t any different. Hands under her chin. Teeth on display. A little girl trying her best to smile at the camera. He had the front door half open when something about the photos made him pause, stand still and consider them seriously.

Alysha. Nothing like Martha. Nothing like Emily. Alysha was black. Ticking away in the back of Caffery’s head was what the literature said – that paedophiles had types. Colourings and age ranges. It came up time and time again. If Moon was going to the trouble of selecting these girls, then why weren’t they more similar? All blonde and eleven? All brunette and four? Or all black and six?

Caffery ran his tongue around his mouth, dislodging the chocolate from his teeth. He thought about Martha’s tooth in the pie. And then he thought about the letters. Why, he thought, did you send those letters, Ted? Out of nowhere he thought of what Cleo had said – that the jacker had asked about her parents’ jobs. And then everything settled on Caffery all at once. He closed the front door and stood shakily in the hallway, his hand on the wall. He understood. He knew why things had felt so wrong for such a long time. And he knew why the jacker had asked Cleo the question. He’d been double-checking he had the right child.

Caffery glanced up at Damien, who was standing at the foot of the stairs lighting a cigarillo from a flat tin. He waited until he’d got it lit, then gave the guy a tight smile. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a spare one of those knocking around?’

‘Yeah, sure. You OK?’

‘I will be when I’ve had a smoke.’

Damien opened the tin and held it out. Caffery took one, lit it, drew in the smoke and paused, giving it time to damp down his pulse.

‘Thought you were on your way? Changed your mind? Stopping?’

Caffery took the cigarillo out of his mouth, blew the smoke in a long, delicious stream in front of him. Nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Can you put the kettle on? I think I’m going to be here a bit longer.’

‘How come?’

‘I need to talk to you seriously. I need to ask you about
your
life.’

‘My life?’

‘That’s right. Yours.’ Caffery turned his eyes to Damien. He was tasting the low, easy glow of things falling into place. ‘Because we were wrong. It was never Alysha he was targeting. He’s not interested in what happens to her. Never has been.’

‘Then what? What’s he interested in?’

‘You, mate. He’s interested in
you
. It’s the parents he wants.’

Janice Costello sat at her sister’s big wooden table in the huge kitchen at the back of the house. She’d been there most of the afternoon, ever since Nick had helped her in from the freezing garden. Cups of tea had been made, food had been offered, a bottle of brandy had appeared from somewhere. She’d touched none of it. It all looked unreal to her. Like something meant for someone else. As if there as an invisible barrier in the physical world and that everyday things – like plates and spoons and candles and potato-peelers – were meant to be used only by people who were happy. Not by those who felt like her. The day had dragged. At about four o’clock Cory had appeared out of nowhere. He’d come into the room and stood in the doorway. ‘Janice,’ he’d said simply. ‘Janice?’ She hadn’t answered him. It was too much effort even to look at him and eventually he’d left the room. She didn’t wonder where he went. She just sat there, arms wrapped around herself, Jasper the rabbit squashed hard into her armpit.

She was trying to remember the last moment she’d spent with Emily. They’d shared the bed, she knew that much, but she couldn’t remember if she’d been lying on her side, spooning Emily, or if she’d been on her back, her arm around her, or even, and this thought stung her more than anything, if on that occasion she’d fallen asleep with her back to Emily. The cold truth was that a bottle of prosecco had been shared and Janice’s thoughts had been more with Paul Prody asleep on the pull-out in
the living room than on holding Emily, breathing her in as deeply as she could. Now she struggled towards the memory, stretched forward to it, like an exhausted swimmer straining for the shore. Searched and searched for just one scrap of Emily. The smell of her hair, the feel of her breath.

Janice leaned forward and rested her forehead on the table. Emily. A tremor went through her. The overwhelming urge to bang her head against the wood. Skewer herself. Shut her thoughts up. She screwed her eyes tight. Tried to focus on something practical. The parade of workmen who had wandered in and out of the house during the renovations – Emily had loved them: they’d let her climb their ladders, go through their tools and lunch boxes, examine the wrapped sandwiches and packets of crisps. Janice tried to find Moon’s face among them, tried to see him standing in the kitchen at the breakfast bar, drinking a cup of tea. Tried and failed.

‘Janice love?’

She jerked her head up. Nick was standing in the doorway, holding her red hair up in a coil behind her head, massaging her neck wearily.

‘What?’ Janice’s face was like ice. She couldn’t have moved it into an expression if she’d wanted to. ‘What is it? Has something happened?’

‘Nothing. No news. But I do need to speak to you. DI Caffery’s got some questions he wants me to ask.’

Janice put her hands on the table, two lumps of dead meat, and pushed the chair back. Slowly, woodenly, she got to her feet. She must look like a marionette, she thought, walking with her arms slightly outstretched, her feet heavy. She shuffled through into the big formal living room – the fire in the inglenook made up but unlit, the big comfy chairs, all sitting in silence, as if they were waiting, the smell of woodsmoke in the air. She sat lumpenly on her sister’s sofa. Somewhere at the other end of the cottage she could hear a television playing. Maybe her sister and her husband were sitting in there, the volume turned up so they could say ‘Emily’ without Janice hearing. Because then she might scream,
might fill the cottage with her screaming, until the windows rattled and broke.

Nick switched on a small table light and sat opposite her. ‘Janice,’ she began.

‘You don’t need to, Nick. I know what you’re going to say.’

‘What?’

‘It isn’t Emily, is it? It’s
us
. It’s us he’s after, isn’t it? Me and Cory. Not Emily. I’ve worked it out.’ She jabbed a finger at her forehead. ‘My brain is sweating, Nick, trying to put everything together. I’ve got all the information the well-meaning but ever so slightly inefficient police will give me. I’ve put it together, added two to two, and come up with ten. It’s
us
. Cory and me. Jonathan Bradley and his wife. The Blunts, the Grahams. The adults. It’s what the police think too. Isn’t it?’

Nick folded one hand over the other. Her shoulders were sloped, her head drooped. ‘You’re smart, Janice. Really smart.’

Janice sat quite still, staring hard at the top of Nick’s head. At the far end of the cottage someone on the television cheered. A car went past on the lane, its headlights briefly illuminating the lonely furniture. Janice thought of DI Caffery sitting next to her on the bench in the garden earlier. She thought of his notebook with the scribblings in blue biro. It had made her feel sick, that book. A flimsy square of card and paper – the only tool to bring Emily back.

‘Nick,’ she said after a long time. ‘I like you. I like you very much. But I don’t trust your force. Not as far as I could throw it.’

Nick raised her face. She was pale and her eyes were hollow with tiredness. ‘Janice, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never been in this position before. The force? It’s an institution just like any other. It’s got “public servant” writ large in its manifesto, but I’ve never confused it with anything other than a business. Except I can’t say that, can I? I have to look you in the face and tell you the investigation is being run perfectly. It’s the most difficult thing I have to do. Especially when you get to like a family. When that happens it’s like lying to friends.’

‘Then, listen.’ Speaking felt like the most enormous effort to Janice. Exhausting. But she knew where she had to go next. ‘There’s a way to sort this out, but I don’t believe your unit will do it. So I’m going to do it instead. And I’ll need your help.’

The corner of Nick’s mouth twitched. ‘Help,’ she said noncommittally. ‘I see.’

‘I need you to find some contact details for me. I want you to do some phoning. Will you? Will you help?’

‘My son is not a nonce. He’s a bad boy, a very bad boy, but he’s not a fucking nonce.’

It was nearly midnight. The lights were still on in the MCIU building. Still the clatter of keyboards in distant offices, the noise of phones ringing. Turner and Caffery sat in the meeting room at the end of one of the corridors on the second floor, the blinds drawn, the fluorescent tubes on. Caffery was fiddling with a paperclip. Three cups of coffee sat on the table, and Peter Moon was seated at the other side of the desk on a swivel chair, dressed in a diamond-design jumper and saggy blue sweatpants. He’d agreed to talk on condition they released him from the cell overnight. He didn’t want to talk under caution, didn’t want a lawyer present, but he’d been thinking about it all night and now he wanted to set the record straight. Caffery let him do it. He didn’t plan to let the guy off. He planned to bang him up again the moment he’d coughed.

‘Not a nonce.’ Caffery looked at him dully. ‘Then why have you been covering for him?’

‘The cars. His problem is with cars – he’s like a little kid with them. He’s nicked scores of them. It’s like he can’t help himself.’

‘We found most of them in his lock-up.’

‘That’s why he got a job here.’ Peter looked thin and defeated. Embarrassed. Here was a man whose only legacy to the world was two sons, one of whom would die at home in bed before he was thirty, and the other in prison. An A4 blow-up of Ted was
pinned to the whiteboard on the wall. It had been taken from the police-staff pass. Ted stared down into the room with his blank dead eyes, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, his forehead lowered. Peter Moon, Caffery noticed, avoided looking at it. ‘He’s stolen so many he thought you were on to him. Thought if he worked here he could – I dunno – get into your computers. Change the records or whatever.’ He put his hands in the air. ‘God knows what ideas he had – that he was some computer genius or something.’

‘He went into our system – but to find out what we knew about his stolen cars?’ Caffery looked at Turner. ‘Does that sound right to you? That he was looking for stolen cars?’

Turner shook his head. ‘No, Boss. Doesn’t sound right to me. To me it sounds more like he was doing it to find the places we’d housed that family. The one he’s targeted. And the traffic-surveillance cameras.’

‘Yes – those traffic cameras. Amazing how he avoided them.’

‘Amazing,’ Turner agreed.

‘See, Mr Moon, your son’s kidnapped four children now. Two he hasn’t given back. He’s got good reason to want to stay ahead of us.’

‘
No
,
no
,
no
. I swear on the heads of all the saints, he’s not a nonce. My son is not a nonce.’

‘He killed a thirteen-year-old girl.’

‘Not for nonce reasons.’

On the desk there was a single sheet covered with Caffery’s handwriting – the scribbled notes he’d made of a phone conversation earlier this evening. After the post-mortem on Sharon Macy’s remains, Caffery’d had a brief informal call from the pathologist. The man wasn’t going to say anything official, that would be in the report later, but he could give him a few things on the QT. Sharon Macy’s body was so decomposed that no one could be 100 per cent sure of anything, but if he’d been a betting man he’d say she had been killed either by the blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull or by blood loss from the enormous gash in her throat. There was evidence she’d struggled: one of her
fingers was broken on the right hand, but when it came to evidence of sexual assault the pathologist had drawn a blank. The clothing wasn’t disturbed and her body hadn’t been displayed in a sexual way.

‘I know,’ Caffery said now. ‘I know he’s not a nonce.’

Peter Moon blinked. ‘You what?’

‘I said I know he’s not a paedo. The fact he’s taken girls? All under the age of thirteen? It’s a red herring. Coincidence. They could just as well been boys. Or teenagers. Or babies.’

Caffery shook a set of copied photographs out of an envelope, stood and began very carefully taping them to the whiteboard, one by one, lined up under Ted Moon’s picture. Caffery had got one of the DCs to print out little tags with all the relevant information he could think of: name, age, appearance, socioeconomic class, job, background, etc. He stuck the tags beneath the faces. ‘You’re here because your son has got a list of victims. A whole catalogue of people he’s got something against. But it’s not the kids he hates, it’s the parents. Lorna and Damien Graham. Neil and Simone Blunt. Rose and Jonathan Bradley. Janice and Cory Costello.’

‘Who the fuck are they?’

‘Your son’s victims.’

Peter Moon stared at the pictures for a long time. ‘You’re honestly saying my boy’s supposed to have attacked these people?’

‘In a manner of speaking. What he’s done with the children he abducted, God knows. I’ve given up hoping. But I can’t see him worrying much about their human rights, because they’re incidental. Dispensable. He knows the facts of life: hurt the young and you may as well kill the parents. And
that
’s what he wants. All these people.’ Caffery sat down, waved a hand at the photos. ‘They’re the ones who mean something to your son.
They
’re the ones we’re looking at now. Ever heard of victimology?’

‘No.’

‘You should watch more TV, Mr Moon. Sometimes we investigate crime by studying the people it’s happening to. Usually
it’s to learn who our perpetrator is. In this case we don’t need to know
who
’s doing it, we know that already, in this case we need to know why he’s choosing the people he is, and we need to do that because he’s going to do it again. And soon. Something –
something
– in your son’s head is telling him he has to do it again. Look at these faces, Mr Moon. Look at their names. What do they mean to your son? This guy on the left is Neil Blunt. Neil works for the Citizens Advice Bureau. When I was with him this evening he said he knew he’d pissed people off now and then, and he’s had a couple of threats from clients at work. Has Ted had any dealings with the CAB?’