‘Boss?’ Turner, who had pulled out his quickcuffs, was waiting for Caffery to give him instructions. ‘Where are we taking them? Local shop?’
Caffery didn’t answer. He was transfixed by one of the bills.
‘Boss?’
Caffery raised his eyes slowly. ‘We need to speak to Ops,’ he murmured. ‘I think this might be something.’
Turner came to him. Studied the piece of paper Caffery was holding. He let out a low whistle. ‘Christ.’
‘Christ indeed.’ It was a commercial property-leasing statement. It showed that for at least the last eleven years Ted Moon had been renting a lock-up garage in Gloucestershire. It had a secure steel roller door and a hundred square metres of storage. It was all there in the spec. And the address was in Tarlton, Gloucestershire.
Just half a mile from the Sapperton tunnel.
Caffery didn’t believe in coincidences. In his book Ted Moon’s lock-up was about as concrete a lead as ever winged its way to an officer of the law. While another DC got the Moons cautioned and into the car, Caffery sat in the shabby little flat making phone calls. Within ten minutes he had two support units on their way to meet him at the lock-up. ‘No time for a warrant,’ he told Turner, as he swung into the Mondeo. ‘We’ll Section 17 it. Threat to life and limb. No need to bother the nice beak. See you up there.’
He drove as fast as he could through the morning traffic, row after row of red brakelights coming on and off in the queues, down the A432 and along the M4 behind Turner’s Sierra. They were less than four miles from the lock-up when Caffery’s phone rang. He shoved the dongle in his ear and answered. It was Nick, the Costellos’ FLO, sounding panicky: ‘I’m sorry to keep hassling you but I’m really worried now. I’ve left three messages and I do think it’s serious.’
‘I’ve been a bit tucked up here. Had the phone on silent. What’s up?’
‘I’m at the Costellos’, the new flat in—’
‘I know.’
‘I was due to turn up for an hour, just to see how they were doing, but I’m here now and I can’t get in.’
‘They’re not there?’
‘I think they are, but they’re not coming to the door.’
‘You’ve got keys, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but I can’t open the door. They’ve got the chain on inside.’
‘Isn’t there a PC with them?’
‘No. He got stood down last night by DC Prody. But Prody must’ve forgotten he was supposed to tell the local shop when he left because no one was rostered to replace him.’
‘Call him.’
‘I have. His phone’s switched off.’
‘The Costellos, then. Have you tried them?’
‘Of course. I’ve spoken to Cory but he’s not in the flat. Says he didn’t even spend the night there. I think he and Janice had a disagreement. He’s on the way over now. He’s called Janice, too, but she’s not picking up for him either.’
‘
Shit
.’ Caffery tapped the steering-wheel. They were just coming up to the exit for the A46. He could either go left to Sapperton, or right to Pucklechurch, where the Costellos’ flat was. ‘Shit.’
‘I’ve got to tell you – I’m scared.’ Nick’s voice was wobbly. ‘Something’s wrong here. All the curtains are closed tight. There’s no reply at all.’
‘I’ll come over.’
‘We’ll need an entry team. These chains are solid.’
‘Will do.’
He swerved the car to the right, got on to the southbound A46 and pulled out his phone. Thumbed in Turner’s number. ‘Change of plan, mate.’
‘How so?’
‘Get the units assembled and the lock-up covered. Ring it – wide – but don’t do anything yet. Wait for me. And I want you to get another entry team over to the Costellos’ place. Something’s gone seriously Pete Tong down there.’
‘Three entry teams? Ops are going to love us.’
‘Well, tell them their reward’ll be in heaven.’
The road to Pucklechurch had a forty-miles-per-hour speed limit. Caffery did sixty whenever the dreary trails of commuters thinned enough to let him. When he arrived it was getting light and the streetlamps had been switched off. Nick was standing on the front path wearing a houndstooth coat and smart high-heeled boots. She was looking up and down the road, biting her fingernails. She shot to the kerb when she saw him and tugged open his door. ‘I can smell something. I got the door open just enough and got my head through the crack and there’s a smell.’
‘Gas?’
‘More like a solvent. The way glueheads always smell – you know?’
Caffery got out of the car and looked up at the flat, the closed windows, tight curtains. Nick had left the front door open as far as it would go on the two chains. He could just see the blue carpet on the stairs inside, a few scuffmarks on the walls. He glanced at his watch. The entry team should be here any minute. They didn’t have far to come.
‘Hold this.’ He pulled off his jacket and handed it to her. ‘And look the other way.’
Nick took a few steps back and held up her hand to shield her eyes. Caffery threw himself at the door, half turning so his shoulder made the contact. The door leaped on its hinges, shuddered noisily, but the chains held and he ricocheted back on to the path. He hopped a little, got his balance and came
back at it. He gripped the wooden frame that lined the small porch with both hands, braced himself and shoved his foot at the door. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time it shivered, made deafening splintering noises, and each time it bounced straight back into the frame.
‘Fuck.’ He stood on the path, sweating. His shoulders were aching, his back was jarred from the kicks. ‘Getting too old for this.’
‘It’s supposed to be a safe-house.’ Nick took her hands from her eyes and looked at the door dubiously. ‘And it is. Safe, I mean.’
He looked up at the windows again. ‘I hope you’re right.’
A white armoured Mercedes Sprinter pulled up. Caffery and Nick watched six men in riot gear pile out – 727: Flea’s unit.
‘We meet again.’ As the rest of the team pulled the red battering ram out of the van Wellard came forward to shake Caffery’s hand. ‘Starting to think you fancy me.’
‘Yeah, well, the uniform’s kind of rugged. You acting again?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Where’s your sergeant?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. Never turned up at work today. It’s not like her, but recently nothing’s like her.’ He tipped his visor back and looked up at the side of the house. ‘What’ve we got here? Think I know this place. This the old rape suite, is it?’
‘We’ve got a vulnerable family inside, lodged for witness protection. Lady over here,’ he gestured to Nick, ‘turns up half an hour ago. She’s expected but no one comes to the door. Chains are on inside. There’s a smell too. Like a solvent.’
‘How many souls?’
‘Three, we think. Woman in her thirties, another woman in her sixties and a little girl. Four.’
Wellard raised his eyebrows. He looked at the flat again, then at Nick and Caffery, and silently beckoned to the men. They trotted over, carrying the battering ram between them. They flanked the door and swung the ram at it. With three
deafening thuds the door splintered in two, one half hanging off the two security chains, the other on the hinges.
Wellard and two of his men stepped over the door and into the hallway, shields at the ready. They streamed up the stairs, yelling as they had in the Moons’ flat – ‘
Police, police!
’
Caffery followed, face screwed up at the astringent fumes. ‘Open some windows, someone,’ he yelled.
As he got to the top of the stairs he saw Wellard at the end of the landing, holding a door open. ‘Your lady in her sixties.’
Caffery looked through the door and saw the woman on the bed – Janice’s mother. In cream pyjamas, her short white hair pushed back from her tanned face, she lay on her side, one arm stretched up, the other drooped across her face. She was breathing in a slow, depressed way that made Caffery think of hospices and RTCs. She stirred at the noise and half opened her eyes, her hand lifting vaguely, but she didn’t wake.
Caffery leaned over the staircase and yelled to the men below, ‘Someone get some paramedics ASA.’
‘Adult male here,’ called another officer. He was in the kitchen doorway.
‘Adult male?’ Caffery joined him. ‘Nick said he’s not . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence. The window in the room was slightly open. There were some washed dishes and mugs on the draining-board, a plate of food covered with clingfilm on the side and an empty wine bottle on top of the fridge. A man lay on the floor, his head bent at a strange angle against the cabinets, vomit covering his white shirt. But it wasn’t Cory Costello. It was DC Prody.
‘Jesus Christ – Paul?
Hey!
’ Caffery crouched and shook him. ‘Wake up. Wake the fuck up.’
Prody moved his jaw up and down. A long line of drool dangled from his lip. He lifted a hand and made a weak effort to brush it away.
‘What the hell happened?’
Prody’s eyes half opened, then closed again. His head drooped. Caffery went back into the hallway, his eyes watering at the fumes.
‘Are those paramedics on their way?’ he yelled down the stairs. ‘They’d better be. And, for the second time, will someone open the fucking windows?’ He stopped and looked to the end of the landing. An officer – Wellard, still with his visor down – was standing at another opened door, at the front of the flat this time. It must be the room that looked out over the road. He was beckoning slowly. He was doing it without turning because whatever was in front of him had him riveted.
Caffery experienced a moment of pure, full-on fear. Suddenly he wanted out. Suddenly the last thing he wanted to know was what Wellard was looking at.
His heart bumped low and hard in his chest as he crossed the landing and came to stand next to him. The room in front of them was dark. The curtains were drawn and the windows closed. The chemical smell was much stronger. There were two beds in plain sight: a single pushed up against the window – empty – and a rumpled double bed. A woman lay on it: Janice Costello, from the tangle of dark hair. Her back rose and fell.
Caffery turned to Wellard, who gave him a strange look. ‘What?’ he hissed. ‘It’s a woman. Isn’t that what you expected?’
‘Yes, but what about the little girl? I’ve seen two women and a man but I haven’t seen a little girl. Have you?’
Dawn broke over the tiny hamlet of Coates. It was a half-hearted, wintry dawn with no orange or speckled skies, just a featureless, ashen light that lifted listlessly over the roofs, past the tower of the neighbourhood church, across the heads of the trees and came down like mist on a tiny clearing deep in a forest on the Bathurst estate. In a grass-choked air shaft, a hundred feet above the canal, the black border between day and night crept slowly down. Heading for the bowels of the earth, it reached a cavern formed by two rockfalls at either end of a short space of tunnel. The swarmy, diffuse light found the black water, formed a shadow under the kitbag that hung motionless at the end of the rope and settled on the humped rocks and debris.
On the other side of one rockfall, Flea Marley knew nothing about the dawn. She knew nothing except the cold and the old, stale silence of the cavern. She lay on a rough ledge at the foot of the fall. Curled in a ball, like an ammonite fossil, she kept her head tucked in, her hands shoved inside her armpits in an effort to keep warm. She was half asleep, her thoughts flat and exhausted. The darkness pressed on her eyelids, like fingers. Something complex in the optical pathways lit up with dancing lights, with strange and pastel images.
No caving lights for now. The big torch and her little head lamp were all that had survived the rockfall. She kept them switched off, rationing the batteries, before she had to turn to Dad’s old carbide lamp. There was nothing to see anyway. She
knew what a torch beam would pick out: the yawning hole in the ceiling where tons of earth and rock had been dislodged. The debris had brought the floor level up about three feet in some places and covered the original screes at either end of the tunnel section in earth and stone. Both her escape routes had vanished. This time digging by hand wasn’t enough. She’d tried. And exhausted herself. Only a pneumatic drill and earth movers would tunnel through those barriers. If the jacker came back, he’d never get to her now. But that hardly mattered because for her there was no going back. She was trapped.
Still, she was learning a lot down here. She’d learned that just when you thought you couldn’t get any colder, you could. She’d learned that even in the early-morning hours trains ran along the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway. Goods trains, she imagined. Every fifteen minutes one would thunder along, rattling the ground like a dragon in the night, shaking out a few stones from invisible recesses in the tunnel. Between trains she slept, fitful, dozing, and woke, shivering and electric with fear and cold. On her wrist her waterproof Citizen clicked through the minutes, marking off the increments of her life.
A picture of Jack Caffery was in her head. Not Jack Caffery yelling at her, but Jack Caffery talking to her quietly. The hand he’d once put on her shoulder – it had been warm through her shirt. They’d been sitting in a car and at the time she’d thought he’d touched her because she was standing at an open door, ready to step through into a completely new world. But life ducked and wove and the only ones who weren’t thrown every now and then were the strongest and most capable. Then Misty Kitson’s face came to her, smiling out from the front pages of newspapers, and Flea thought that maybe this was the big catch: that because she and Thom had got away with concealing what had happened to Misty, something higher than them had decided they had to pay. Ironic she’d end up paying by being entombed the same way Misty’s corpse was.
Now she stirred. She pulled her freezing hands out from her armpits and touched the mobile phone in the waterproof pocket
of her immersion suit. No signal. Not a chance. She knew from the schematics roughly where she was. She’d punched out scores of texts in rapid fire with approximate co-ordinates and sent them to everyone she could think of. But the texts all sat there in the outbox, the ‘resend scheduled’ icon hovering over them. In the end, scared she’d lose the battery, she’d switched the phone off and tucked it back into its plastic wrapper. Eleven o’clock, she’d told Prody. That was seven hours ago. Something had gone wrong. He hadn’t got the message. And if he hadn’t got the message then God’s harsh truth was this: the caving line was in the entrance to the tunnel. She’d left the car at the very edge of the village green, where it wouldn’t get reversed into. It could be days before someone noticed either and drew any conclusions about where she was.