She used the lanes that laced through the countryside near her home. She’d run until sweat poured from her and there were blisters on her feet. Past stiles and half-dormant cows, past stone-built cottages and mansions, past the officers in uniform who poured out of the Ministry of Defence base near her house. Sometimes she’d run late into the night, until all her thoughts and apprehensions had shaken themselves loose and there was nothing left in her head save the desire for sleep.
Being physically in shape was one thing. Maintaining that fitness and control all the way through to the inside was another. As she turned the corner on the last leg of the run, she was picturing the Bradleys’ Yaris screeching out of the car park in Frome. She kept thinking about Martha Bradley sitting in the back seat. Flea had got a friend from Frome station to read her Rose’s statement. In it she’d said Martha had been leaning over
from the back seat to tune in the radio when the car took off. So she wasn’t strapped in. Had she been thrown around as the jacker sped away? He wouldn’t have stopped to strap her in.
Nearly twenty hours had passed since Flea had spoken to Jack Caffery. It took time for the force grapevine to pass messages between distant units, but even so she thought she’d have heard by now if Caffery’d picked up her idea. What kept going through her head like a shriek was that there’d already been two chances for her to push her conviction that the attacks were connected. She imagined a world where she hadn’t been intimidated by her inspector, a world where she’d followed her instincts, the jacker had been picked up months ago and Martha hadn’t been abducted from the supermarket car park yesterday.
She let herself into the house from the garage, full of Dad and Mum’s old diving and caving equipment. Stuff she would never move or chuck out. Upstairs she did her stretches and took a shower. The heating in the rambling old house was on, but outside it was seriously cold. What would Martha be thinking? At what point had she realized that the man wasn’t going to stop the car and let her out? At what point had she realized she’d stepped full face into the world of adults? Did she cry? Beg for her mum? Would she be thinking now that she might never see her or her dad again? It wasn’t right that any little girl should have to ask herself questions like that. Martha’s head wasn’t old enough to sort it all out. She hadn’t had time to make safe places in her thoughts to hide, the way adults did. It wasn’t fair.
When Flea was little she’d loved her parents more than anything. This creaky old house, four artisans’ cottages knocked into one, had been her family home. She’d grown up there, and though there hadn’t exactly been money coming out of their ears, they’d lived well, with long, untidy summer days playing football or hide-and-seek in the rambling garden that dropped in terraces away from the house.
Most of all she’d been loved. So very, very well loved. In those days it would have killed her to be separated from her family like Martha had been.
But that had been then and this was now and everything was different. Mum and Dad were dead, both of them, and Thom, her younger brother, had done something so unspeakable that she would never be able to find her way back to any relationship with him. Not in this lifetime. He’d killed a woman. A young woman. And pretty – pretty enough that she’d been famous for it. Not that her looks had done her much good. Now she was buried under a cairn in an inaccessible cave next to a disused quarry, put there by Flea in an idiot attempt to cover the whole thing up. Insanity, in hindsight. Not the way a person like her – a normal, salaried, mortgage-paying person – should have behaved. No surprise she was carrying this balled-up rage around. No surprise there was just deadness in her eyes these days.
By the time she was dressed it was almost sunset. Downstairs, she opened the fridge and stared at what was inside. Microwave meals. Meals for one. And a two-litre carton of milk that was past its sell-by date because there was only her to drink it, and if she did unexpected overtime it never got used. She closed the door and rested her head against it. How had it come to this – on her own, no kids, no animals, no friends any more? Living a spinster’s life at twenty-nine.
There was a bottle of Tanqueray gin in the freezer, and a bag of lemon she’d sliced at the weekend. She made herself a tall tumbler, the way Dad would have done, with four precise slices of lemon, frozen hard, four cubes of ice and a splash of tonic. She put on a fleece and took the glass outside to the driveway. She liked to stand there and drink, watch the distant lights coming on in the old city of Bath in the valley, even when it was cold. You’d never take a Marley away from this place. Not without a fight.
The sun crept the last few degrees to the horizon, sent orange light streaming across the sky in huge shards. She put her hand over her eyes and squinted at it. There were three poplars on the edge of the garden to the west: one summer Dad had noticed something about them that had pleased him no end. On the solstices the sunset lined up exactly with one of the two outer ones, while on the equinoxes it set directly behind the middle one.
‘Perfectly aligned. Someone must have planted them like that a century ago,’ he’d said, laughing, surprised by the cleverness. ‘Just the sort of thing the Victorians would have loved. You know, Brunel and all that malarkey.’
Now the sun stood exactly between the middle and the outer one. She looked at it for a long time. Then she checked her watch: 27 November. Exactly six months to the day since she’d hidden the corpse in the cave.
She thought of the disappointment in Caffery’s face. The lightless reflection of his eyes last night. She drained her drink. Rubbed her arms to make the bumps go away. How long was it supposed to go on? When something so impossible and unimaginable had happened, just how long were you supposed to shut down for?
Six months. That was the answer. Six months was long enough. Too long. The time had come. The corpse wasn’t going to be found. Not now. She’d have to pack the whole thing away in the back of her mind because it was time for other things. It was time to get the unit back on track. Time to prove she was the same sergeant she’d always been. She could do it. She was going to blot the disappointment out of everyone’s eyes. Maybe then the walls in her own eyes would come down. Maybe the day would come when there weren’t sour milk and meals for one in the freezer. And maybe, just maybe, the day would come when there’d be someone else standing on the gravel driveway with her, drinking Tanqueray and watching the night lower itself on to the lighted city.
Caffery’s head felt full of lead. Like a cold, miserable ball with
It’s not working
etched on it. He went down the corridor opening doors, delegating tasks. He gave Lollapalooza the job of tracking down known sex offenders in the Frome area, and told Turner to tickle up any more witnesses to either jacking. Turner looked a mess: unshaven, and he’d forgotten to take out the diamond stud earring he wore at weekends. The one that, with his spiky highlighted hair, gave him the look of a devout clubber and sent the superintendent into paroxysms of abuse. Before he left the office Caffery pointed it out to him. Stood at the doorway, said, ‘Uh, Turner?’ and waggled his own ear up and down to give him the clue. Turner pulled it out hurriedly, pocketed it, and Caffery went on his way ruminating that no one in the unit seemed to give a damn about looking professional. There was Turner with his earring, and Lollapalooza with her killer heels. Only the new guy, the traffic cop DC Prody, seemed to have checked in the mirror before he’d left home that morning.
He was sitting neatly at his desk when Caffery came in, lit only by a small lamp. He was shaking the mouse on the mouse mat and frowning at the screen. Behind him a workman, standing on a stepladder, was painstakingly removing the plastic cover from the fluorescent light fitting on the ceiling.
‘I thought these computers were supposed to time out,’ said Prody.
‘They are.’ Caffery pulled back a chair. ‘After five minutes.’
‘Mine’s not. I leave the room, come back and it’s still hot to trot.’
‘The number for IT’s on the wall.’
‘
That’s
where the extension list is.’ Prody unpinned it and put it in front of him. Lined it up. Placed his hands on the desk and considered it carefully, as if its tidiness pleased him. He was such an orderly man compared to Turner and Lollapalooza. There was a dark-blue gym bag hanging on the wall and you could tell from Prody’s physique that it got used. He was tall and broad and solid, with tightly trimmed hair that was just edging into grey at the sideburns. A big, handsome Kennedy jawline, slightly tanned. The only thing screwing up his appearance was the evidence of teenage acne. Looking at him Caffery saw, with a moment of surprise, that he was expecting good things from this guy. ‘Every day’s a little better. I’m not such a noob any more. They’re even giving me leccy at last.’ Prody nodded to the workman. ‘They must like me.’
Caffery held up a hand to the workman. ‘Mate? Can we have some space here? Just for ten.’
He got down the ladder without a word. He put his screwdriver into a toolbox, closed it and left the room. Caffery sat down. ‘Anything new?’
‘Nothing really. No bites from the ANPR points – not on the Yaris or the partial index on the Vauxhall in Frome.’
‘It’s definitely the same guy as the earlier two jackings. No getting away from it.’ He put the Ordnance Survey map between them. ‘You were in Traffic before you came over here.’
‘For my sins.’
‘Do you know Wells, Farrington Gurney, Radstock?’
‘Farrington Gurney?’ He laughed. ‘Just a little. I mean, I lived there for ten years. Why?’
‘The superintendent’s muttering about bringing in a geographical profiler. Meanwhile I think someone who’s spent enough time out on the roads knows more about the way the land lies than a psychologist.’
‘And I get paid half as much, so I must be your man.’ Prody
pulled the lamp towards himself and hunched over the map. ‘What’ve we got?’
‘What we’ve got is a fuck-awful situation, Paul, if you’ll pardon my language. But let’s suck that one up and think what to do about it. Look at this. The first jacking’s over in minutes, but the second one, he took longer. And he went a weird route.’
‘Weird how?’
‘He came up the A37, going north, and kept going. Past Binegar, past Farrington Gurney. Then he turned back on himself.’
‘He was lost?’
‘No. Definitely not. He knew that road really well. He told the girl there was a Little Chef up the road a long time before they got to it. He knew where he was. And that’s what I’m wondering. If he knew the area why did he take the route he did? Is there something along there he was attracted to?’
Prody ran his finger along A37, the road that came down from Bristol into the Mendips. He went down south, past Farrington Gurney, past the turn the jacker had taken. He stopped north of Shepton Mallet and was quiet for a moment or two, frowning.
‘What?’ Caffery said.
‘Maybe he knew the road from north to south, but not from south to north. If he travelled it often in this direction he’d know this way to Wells, but he might not know it coming from the south. Which might mean that whatever he was using the road for – going to work or visiting friends or whatever – he only knew it up to this point. So he was stopping his route somewhere here, south of Farrington, north of Shepton. And yesterday’s jacking was here. In Frome.’
‘But I’ve got a witness who thinks the Vauxhall must have come through from Radstock, which is in the direction of Farrington. So let’s just say this general area is important to him somehow.’
‘We could put ANPR on these roads too. If they’re not already over-committed around Frome.’
‘Know anyone in the Tactical Traffic Unit?’
‘Been trying to get away from the bastards for the last two years. Leave it to me.’
Caffery had noticed a file on the side unit. He stopped listening to Prody and stared at the name on the spine. After a moment he put his hands on the chair arms and pushed himself upright. Went across to the unit and glanced casually at it.
‘The Misty Kitson case?’
‘Yup.’ Prody didn’t lift his eyes from the map he was studying, trying to figure out a good place to position the ANPR units.
‘Where’d you get the file?’
‘The review team had it. Thought I’d give it a quick flick through.’
‘Thought you’d “give it a quick flick through”?’
Prody stopped looking at the map and raised his eyes to Caffery. ‘Yes. Just – you know, see if anything jumped out at me.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ He said it cautiously, as if it was a trick question, as if Caffery had asked him something obvious, like
Hey, Paul, why do you breathe in and out?
‘Well – because it’s fascinating? What happened to her? I mean a girl in the drying-out bin for a couple of days wanders out of the clinic one afternoon, and next you know,
ta-da
, she’s gone. It’s just . . .’ He shrugged. Faintly embarrassed. ‘Interesting.’
Caffery looked him up and down. Six months ago the Misty Kitson case had been a serious headache for the unit. At first there’d been a kind of excitement about it. She’d been a minor celebrity, a footballer’s wife and very pretty. The media had fallen on it like hyenas. That had excited a lot of the cops in the team. But when, after three months, the unit had consistently come back empty-handed, the lustre began to tarnish. Humiliation had set in. Now the case had been back-burnered. The review team still had it, and they still chastised and sent periodic recommendations to MCIU over it. The press were still interested too, not to mention the occasional starstruck cop. But most of MCIU would have liked to forget they’d ever heard the name Misty Kitson. Caffery was surprised at this – Prody going to the review
team off his own bat. Writing his own ticket like he’d been around the place for years and not just two weeks.
‘Let’s get this straight, Paul.’ He picked up the file and felt its weight testing the bones in his fingers, trying to pull his hand down. ‘You only still want to know what happened to Misty Kitson if you’re in the media. Now, you’re not in the media, are you?’