Gone (19 page)

‘When we’ve got him it will.’

‘So I’ll have to get up and testify?’

‘I don’t see why you would. Janice, maybe. It depends how the CPS wants to handle it. Why?’

Cory tucked his lower lip under his teeth. He narrowed his eyes and let them stray away. ‘Uh – there’s a problem.’

‘How so?’

‘When all this happened . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘It took quite a long time for Janice to get in touch with me. It was five o’clock before I knew.’

‘I know. She tried to call you. You were in a meeting.’

‘Except I wasn’t.’ He lowered his voice. Caffery caught the glacial, oily tang of the vodka on his breath. ‘I wasn’t in a meeting and that’s what I’m scared of. I’m scared someone’s going to find out where I really was. That I’ll have to stand up in court and be questioned about it.’

Caffery raised an eyebrow and Cory shivered. He wrapped his arms around the thin sweater he’d pulled on over his shirt. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I had to meet a client.’

‘Where?’

‘In a hotel room.’ He rummaged in the back pocket of his trousers and handed him a piece of crumpled paper. Caffery unfolded it and held it under the porch light to read.

‘Champagne? At a meeting in a hotel room?’

‘Yes, well.’ Cory snatched the receipt back and pushed it into his pocket. ‘Don’t rub my nose in it. Will it go to court?’

Caffery regarded him with a mixture of pity and contempt. ‘Mr Costello. Whatever cock-up you make or are intending to make
of your private life is none of my business. I can’t guarantee what happens in court, but this conversation doesn’t have to go any further. If you do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘The Bradley family. The guy found out where they lived.’

Cory’s face whitened. ‘Jesus.’

‘Our media strategy could have been better – I admit that – but I’m clear now. There’ll be no mention of what happened this afternoon in the press.’

‘What did he do to them?’

‘Nothing. At least, nothing to harm them physically. I don’t think for a second he’ll come after you – he hasn’t got Emily so he’s got no hold over you. But, just in case, I’ve put a complete block on the press. I don’t want to frighten Janice and Emily – but I need you to make sure they don’t talk.’

‘You’re not telling me he’s going to turn up here?’

‘Of course not. He doesn’t know where you live, but that’s only because the press don’t know either. We’re pretty good with the media, and on the whole they’re pretty good with us, but we’re never a hundred per cent sure.’ He looked at the front garden. It was a good one. There was a long path to the gate and the house was shielded from the street by large yews planted along the perimeter. A streetlight glowed on the other side of the trees. ‘You can’t be seen from the road.’

‘No. And I’ve got a top-end security system. I can set it for when we’re in the house. If you think I should.’

‘It’s not that bad – there’s nothing to panic about.’ He got his wallet from his pocket and pulled out a business card. ‘I’m going to have a patrol car stop by every hour or so, but if you get a hint that the press are on to you . . .’

‘I’ll call you.’

‘That’s the one. Day or night.’ He handed him the card. ‘You won’t wake me, Mr Costello. I’m not a great sleeper.’

The USU men had knocked off at six. They’d showered, changed and cleaned their gear then gone,
en masse
, to the pub. They’d have made a spectacle, seven men in black warm-up trousers and Karrimor fleeces, arguing at the bar about who was going to buy the round. Flea didn’t join them. She’d had enough of pubs for the day. She locked up the offices on her own and drove home with the radio switched off. It was almost eight when she got there.

She parked the car nose out to the valley, switched off the engine and sat listening to the click-click of the engine cooling. Earlier this afternoon, when she’d got back to the offices after the pub, the inspector had come in to see her again. He’d done the same routine as yesterday, put his hands on the desk and leaned over, his face close to hers, holding her eyes. But this time when she said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Nothing,’ she knew it was a bad nothing, not a good one. He’d heard about the morning at the Sapperton tunnel.

She rested her chin on the steering-wheel and gazed at the sky above the valley. It was clear but wispy cirrus mare’s tails slipped across the moon. The earlier rainclouds – a towering bank of cumulonimbus – marched like an army into the east, gleaming orange on the underside as they passed over cities. Dad had loved the clouds. He’d taught Flea all the names: the altostratus, the stratocumulus, the ‘mackerel sky’ cirrocumulus. They would sit here, in this spot, on weekend mornings – Dad with his coffee and Flea with her bowl of Rice Krispies – quizzing each other on the
different forms. Dad would suck his teeth if she said she didn’t know, if she tried to give up. ‘No, no, no. We don’t give up in this family. It’s against the Marley code. Ancient belief system. Bad things happen when you do – it’s like flying in the face of nature.’

She took the keys out of the ignition, then pulled her kit off the back seat. It still bothered her that she was missing something about the Sapperton tunnel but however much she peered and scrutinized, she couldn’t quite catch the thought and examine it properly.

We don’t give up in this family. It will come
. . . She could almost hear him saying it, smiling at her across his cup of coffee.
It will come
…

Nick, the family liaison officer, hung around the house for a while after Caffery had gone. Janice made her tea and talked to her because she liked her company – it diverted Emily, too, and gave Janice an excuse not to have to speak to Cory. He was restless – he kept going into the front bedrooms and peering out of the windows. He’d closed the curtains in the downstairs rooms and for the last hour he’d been in the music room at the front. When Nick left at six Janice didn’t go in to him. Instead she put on her pyjamas and bedsocks, made hot chocolate and joined Emily upstairs on the big double bed.

‘Are we going to bed?’ Emily climbed under the covers.

‘It’s late.
CBeebies
is over but I’ve got
Finding Nemo
on DVD. The fish one?’

They sat propped up on pillows with their hot chocolate, Emily’s in a pink sippy cup because Janice knew it soothed her to be a baby again, and stared at the cartoon light rippling through Nemo’s water. Downstairs Cory was moving around, going from room to room, opening and closing curtains, like an animal in a zoo. Janice didn’t want to see him, didn’t think she could bear it, because over the course of the day – no, over the course of years – she’d realized that she would never, could never, love her husband as much as she loved her daughter. She had friends who’d as good as admitted the same thing: that they loved their husband, but the children came first. Maybe this was the great female secret, which men knew on some level but would never properly
face. Somewhere in all the punditry in the papers about little Martha Bradley one thing had stuck in Janice’s mind: some expert or other had said that when a family loses a child the couple’s chances of staying together afterwards were nigh on zero. She knew, on some instinctive level, that it would be the woman who did the leaving. Whether she left physically or just in her heart, so that the man eventually gave up and abandoned the marriage, didn’t matter. Janice knew it would be the woman who, faced with a future that included her husband but not their child, would give up on the relationship.

Next to her Emily had fallen asleep, Jasper tucked under her arm, the beaker resting on her chest, a dribble of chocolate coming out on to her nightie. She hadn’t cleaned her teeth. That was two nights in a row. But there was no point in waking her now, not after what she’d been through. Janice tucked her in, went downstairs to the kitchen and put the beaker in the dishwasher. Her glass was gone so she found another, poured some vodka and took it to the music room. The light was off, the room in darkness, and it took her a moment to grasp that Cory was in there too. Something cold crossed her chest. He was standing
under
the curtains. As if he was wearing them.

‘What are you doing?’

He jumped. The curtains billowed and his face appeared, shocked. ‘Janice, don’t creep up on me.’

‘What’s going on?’ She threw the light switch. He dropped the curtain hurriedly. She just had time to see the twin circles of steam on the pane where he’d had his face pressed to it.

‘Switch the light off.’

She hesitated, then did as she was told. The room fell into darkness again. ‘Cory?’ she said. ‘Don’t be weird. What are you looking for?’

‘Nothing.’ He came away from the window and gave one of his fake smiles. ‘Absolutely nothing. It’s a nice night.’

She licked her lips. ‘What did the detective say to you? He was talking to you in the garden when he left.’

‘Just chit-chat.’

‘Cory. Tell me.’ She couldn’t keep her eyes off the curtain. ‘What did he tell you? What were you looking for?’

‘Don’t get whiney, Janice, please. You know I can’t bear it when you do that.’

‘Please.’ She kept her sharp reply down and instead touched his sleeve, feigning an affectionate smile. ‘Just please tell me.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. You have to know everything, don’t you? Why can’t you just trust me for once? It was about the press. Caffery doesn’t want them finding us.’

Janice frowned. ‘The press?’ It wasn’t like Cory to shy away from attention. And he was genuinely afraid of what was out there in the darkness. She went to the curtain and pulled it back, looked down the long driveway to where the streetlamp shone yellow through the yew trees. Nothing. ‘It’s more than that. What does it matter to him if the press see us?’

‘Because,’ Cory said, with exaggerated patience in his voice, ‘the guy found out where the Bradleys lived and did something silly to them. Caffery doesn’t want it happening to us. Happy now?’

She took a step away from the window. Stared at him.

‘He
did something silly
to the Bradleys?
What
did he do?’

‘I don’t know. Made contact or something.’

‘And now Caffery thinks he might do the same to us? Do “something silly” to us? Jesus, Cory, thanks for telling me.’

‘Don’t make a big thing about it.’

‘I’m not making a big thing. But I’m not staying here.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going.’

‘Janice, wait.’

But she’d gone, slamming the door behind her. She dumped the vodka in the kitchen and ran up the stairs. It took her less than ten minutes to assemble Emily’s stuff – her favourite toys, pyjamas, toothbrush, her school things. A couple of changes for herself and some sleeping tablets – she had a feeling she would need them. She was in the kitchen shovelling two bottles of wine into her rucksack when Cory appeared in the doorway.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I’m going to my mother’s.’

‘Well, hold on, let me get some stuff together. I’m coming too.’

Janice put the rucksack on the floor and looked at her husband. She wished she could find a way back to caring about him.

‘What? Don’t look at me like that.’

‘Really, Cory, there’s no other way to look at you.’

‘What the fuck’s
that
supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘But if you’re coming you’ll have to get the suitcase out from under the bed. There’s no room in the rucksack.’

Caffery got a call from a cop in Gloucestershire. The Walking Man had been arrested for loitering around a local pharmaceuticals factory. He was interviewed at the police station in the old market town of Tetbury, then cautioned and released into the open air. The duty inspector had taken him to one side before he had left and suggested, in the politest possible way, that it might be a good idea for the Walking Man not to be spotted again anywhere near the factory. But Caffery was beginning to know some of the shapes and crevices of the Walking Man’s character and guessed that if he’d been interested in something he wouldn’t let a little thing like an arrest stop him.

He was right. When he arrived at half past ten, parked the car with Myrtle asleep on the back seat and got out, he spotted the Walking Man almost immediately. He’d set up camp about fifty yards from the barbed-wire perimeter in a clump of trees where he could see the factory compound without being spotted from the security post.

‘You haven’t walked far today.’ Caffery found a spare piece of bed foam and unrolled it. Usually it would be out ready for him. Usually there’d be a meal for him too. Tonight the scent of food hung in the air, but the pots and plates had been cleaned and replaced neatly near the fire. ‘You started the day up here.’

The Walking Man made a low grunt in his throat. He snapped open the flagon of cider and poured some into a chipped mug, set it next to his sleeping-bag.

‘I’m not here to give you more hassle,’ Caffery said. ‘You’ve already spent most of the day in the police station.’

‘Five hours wasted. Five good daylight hours.’

‘I’m not here on police business.’

‘Not here about that nonce? The letter-writer?’

‘No.’ Caffery ran his hands down his face. It was the last thing he wanted to talk about. ‘No. I’ve come for a holiday from that.’

The Walking Man filled a second mug with cider. Handed it to Caffery. ‘Then, it’s
her
you want to talk about. The woman.’

Caffery took the mug.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Jack Caffery. I’ve told you I’m not reading your mind. I’ve been wondering when you’d talk about her again. The woman. The one you’re always thinking about. When you were here in the spring she was all you could talk about. You were burning for her.’ He threw a log on the fire. ‘I envied you that. I’ll never feel like that again for a woman.’

Caffery bit the cuticle on his thumb and stared blankly into the fire. He thought ‘burning’ was the wrong word for the polluted, knotted mess of half-finished thoughts and impulses he had about Flea Marley. ‘OK,’ he said after a while. ‘Let me tell you how it starts. There’s a name you see in newspapers sometimes. Misty Kitson. A pretty girl. She went missing six months ago.’