Gone (8 page)

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, you’re not in the media, are you?’

‘No. I mean, I’m a—’

‘You’re a cop. Your official stance might be “We’re still pursuing lines of enquiry,” but the truth in here,’ he tapped his temple, ‘is you’ve moved on. The unit’s screwed the lid on the Kitson case. It’s over. Finished.’

‘But—’

‘But what?’

‘Be honest. Aren’t you intrigued?’

Caffery didn’t need to be intrigued. He knew exactly where Misty Kitson was. He even knew roughly the route she’d taken out of the clinic’s grounds because he’d walked it himself. He knew who had killed her too. And how. ‘No,’ he said levelly. ‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Not in the slightest?’

‘Not in the slightest. I’m fighting one serious fire here with the jacker case. And I need all hands on deck. I don’t need my men wandering into the review team and “having a flick through” old cases. Now.’ He dropped the file on Prody’s desk. ‘Do you want to take it back or shall I?’

Prody was silent, looking at the file. There was a long pause, and Caffery sensed him struggling not to argue. In the end he swallowed it. ‘Yeah, whatever. I’ll do it.’

‘Good.’

Caffery left the office, feeling irritated and jangled. He closed the door softly, not giving in to the urge to slam it. Turner was standing outside his room, waiting for Caffery as he came down the corridor. ‘Boss?’ He was holding a piece of paper in one hand.

Caffery stopped in his tracks, gave him a long look. ‘From your face, Turner, I’d say I’m not going to like what you’re going to tell me.’

‘Probably not.’

He held out the paper. Caffery closed his thumb and forefinger on it. But something stopped him taking it from Turner’s hand. ‘Tell me.’

‘We got a call from boys in Wiltshire. They found the Bradleys’ Yaris.’

Caffery’s grip on the paper tightened. Still he didn’t pull. ‘Where?’

‘On some disused farmland.’

‘And Martha’s not in it. Is she?’

Turner didn’t answer.

‘If she’s not in it,’ Caffery’s voice was calm, ‘it doesn’t mean she won’t still turn up.’

Turner coughed, embarrassed. ‘Uh – read it first, Boss. Wiltshire faxed it over. They’re getting their own SOCOs to drive the original down to us personally.’

‘What is it?’

‘A letter. It was on the dashboard, rolled up inside some of her clothing.’

‘What clothing?’

‘Uh.’ He gave a long sigh.

‘What?’

‘Her underwear, Boss.’

Caffery stared at the paper. His fingers were burning. ‘And what does it say?’

‘Oh, Christ. Like I said, Boss, maybe you should read it.’

The man crouched at the edge of the camp, the fire lighting his filthy face and beard red, making him look like something born not of woman but of a volcano. Caffery sat a few feet away, watching him in silence. It had been dark for four hours already, but the man was busy planting a bulb in the frozen earth. ‘There was once a child,’ he said, trowelling the earth away. ‘A child called Crocus. Crocus was a girl child with golden hair. She loved to wear purple dresses and ribbons.’

Caffery listened in silence. In the short time he had known the vagrant, whom the locals called the Walking Man, he’d learned to listen and not to question. He’d learned that in this relationship he was the pupil and the Walking Man was the teacher – the one who chose most things about their encounters: what they talked about, where and when they met. It was six long months since they’d last sat together, but maybe the twentieth time Caffery had searched for him. Those hunts had been long lonely nights, driving lanes at five miles an hour, stretched up in the driver’s seat, craning his neck to see over the hedgerows. Tonight, almost the moment he’d begun looking, the campfire had sprung up like a beacon in a field. As if the Walking Man had been there all along, watching Caffery’s efforts with amusement. Waiting for the time to be right.

‘One day,’ the Walking Man continued, ‘Crocus was taken by a witch and condemned to live trapped among the clouds where her parents could neither speak to her nor see her. They still don’t know for sure if she’s alive, but every spring, on her birthday, they
turn their eyes to the sky and pray that this spring will be the one their child is returned.’ He patted the ground around the bulb and dribbled some water on to it from a plastic bottle. ‘It is an act of faith, to continue to believe their daughter is still there. An act of absolute faith. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them never to know for sure what had happened to their daughter? Never to know for sure if she was dead or alive?’

‘Your daughter’s body was never found,’ Caffery said. ‘You know how they felt.’

‘And your brother’s wasn’t either. So that makes us twins.’ He smiled. The moonlight caught his teeth, which were even, clean and healthy in his blackened face. ‘Peas in a pod.’

Peas in a pod? Two men who couldn’t have been more different. The insomniac lonely cop and the bedraggled homeless guy, who walked all day and never slept in the same place twice. But it was true they shared things in common. They had the same eyes. Astonishingly when Caffery looked at the Walking Man he saw his own blue eyes staring back at him. And, more importantly, they shared a story. Caffery had been eight when his older brother Ewan had disappeared from the family’s back garden in London. The ageing paedophile Ivan Penderecki, who lived over the railway tracks, was to blame, Caffery had no doubt, but Penderecki had never been charged or convicted. The Walking Man’s daughter had been raped five times before she was murdered by an itinerant offender on probation, Craig Evans.

Craig Evans hadn’t been as lucky as Penderecki. The Walking Man, who in those days had been a successful businessman, had taken his revenge. Now Evans lived in a chair in a long-term care facility near his family home in Worcestershire. The Walking Man had been precise about the injuries he’d inflicted. Evans no longer had eyes to watch children nor a penis to rape them with.

‘Is that what makes you different?’ Caffery said. ‘Is that what makes you able to see?’

‘To see? What does that mean?’

‘You know what I mean. You
see
. You see more than others see.’

‘Supernatural powers, you mean.’ The Walking Man snorted. ‘Don’t talk mumbo-jumbo. I live out here and off the ground, like an animal. I exist and I absorb. My eyes are open wider and more light gets into them. But it doesn’t make me a seer.’

‘You know things I don’t.’

‘So? What do you expect of yourself? Being a cop doesn’t make you superhuman. No matter what you think.’

The Walking Man came back to the fire. He lifted some more wood on to it. His walking socks were spread out to dry on a stick shoved into the ground near the flames. They were good socks. The most expensive money could buy. Made from alpaca. The Walking Man could afford it. He had millions tucked away in a bank somewhere.

‘Paedophiles.’ Caffery sipped his cider. It stung the back of his throat and sat flat and cold in his stomach, but he knew he’d drink the whole mug and more before the night was finished. ‘My specialist subject. Stranger kidnaps. The outcome is usually the same: if we’re very lucky the child gets returned almost immediately after the assault, and if we’re not, the child will be killed within the first twenty-four hours.’ It was nearly thirty hours since Martha had gone. He lowered the mug. ‘Or, now I think of it, maybe that’s when we
are
lucky.’

‘If the child is killed in the first twenty-four hours you’re lucky? What’s that? Police logic?’

‘I mean that maybe it’s a better outcome than those who are kept alive longer.’

The Walking Man didn’t answer. The two men were silent for a long time, pondering that. Caffery raised his eyes to watch the clouds roll across the moon. He thought how lonely and majestic they were. He imagined a child with golden hair peeping down from them, watching for her parents. Somewhere in the woods a fox cub was calling. And Martha was somewhere out in the great spread of the night. Caffery reached inside his jacket pocket. He pulled out the photocopied letter that had been wrapped inside her underwear and held it out. The Walking Man grunted. Leaned over and took it. Opened it and began to read, tilting the paper
forward so it caught the light from the fire. Caffery watched his face. A handwriting expert had already decided the jacker was trying to disguise his writing. While the Bradleys’ car was being crawled over by the forensics guys, Caffery had spent a long time in his office, poring over the letter. Now he knew every word by heart.

Dear Mummy of Martha
,

I am sure Martha would of wanted me to get in touch with you though it’s not like she’s said or anything. She’s not very TALKATIVE at the moment. She has told me she likes BALLET DANCING and DOGS, but you and I know very well that girls of this age lie all the time. THEY ARE LIARS. See what I think is I think she likes other things. Not like she’s going to admit that to you now, of course. She LOVED the things I did to her last night. I wish you could of seen her face
.

But then she turns around and lies to me. You should see her face when she does that. Ugly don’t even come near it. Luckily now I have REARRANGED things in that department. She looks much better now. But please, Martha’s Mummy please can you find it in your heart to do me a kindly favour???? Pretty please? Can you tell the police cunts that they can’t stop me now so don’t bother. It’s started now, hasn’t it, and it ain’t going to stop just sudden. Is it now?

Is it?

The Walking Man finished reading. He looked up.

‘Well?’

‘Take it away from me.’ He thrust the letter at Caffery. His eyes had changed. They were bloodshot and dead.

Caffery returned it to his pocket. He repeated, ‘Well?’

‘If I was really a seer or a clairvoyant this would be the time I would tell you where that child is. I would tell you now and I would tell you to use whatever powers you have to get to her, whatever the cost to your life and profession, because that person,’ he jabbed a finger towards the pocket where the letter was, ‘is cleverer than any of the others you’ve brought to me.’

‘Cleverer?’

‘Yes. He’s laughing at you. Laughing that you think you can outsmart him, you petty Bow Street Runners with your truncheons and your dunce’s hats. He is so much more than he seems.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ He unfurled his bedroll and laid it out. He began to arrange the sleeping-bag. His face was hard. ‘Don’t ask me more – don’t waste your time. For the love of God, I’m not a psychic. Just a man.’

Caffery took another swig of cider and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He studied the Walking Man’s face as he got ready for bed. Cleverer than any of the others. He thought about what the jacker had said:
It’s started now, hasn’t it, and it ain’t going to stop just sudden. Is it now?
He knew what the words meant: he was going to do it again. He was going to choose another car at random: any car, any driver. The only important thing would be the child in the back seat. A girl. Under twelve. He was going to steal her. And all Caffery had to go on was that it would, in all likelihood, happen within a radius of ten miles from Midsomer Norton.

After a long time of staring at the darkness on the edge of the firelight, Caffery picked up a foam mattress and unrolled it. He got out his sleeping-bag and settled on his back, the bag tucked around him to keep out the cold. The Walking Man grunted, and did the same. Caffery looked at him for a while. He knew he wouldn’t speak again tonight: it was the end of the conversation and from that moment on not another word would be uttered. He was right: they lay in their respective sleeping-bags, looking at their own section of the sky, thinking about their own worlds and how they were going to battle through what life brought them in the next twenty-four hours.

The Walking Man slept first. Caffery stayed awake for several hours, listening to the night, wishing the Walking Man was wrong, that clairvoyance or a supernatural power did exist and that it was possible to divine, just from the noises out there, what had become of Martha Bradley.

When Caffery woke, aching and frozen, the Walking Man was gone. He must have got up and dressed in the dark, leaving nothing but the blackened fire and a plate with two bacon sandwiches on it next to Caffery’s bedroll. It was a hazy day. Cold again. An arctic breath in the air. He waited a few minutes for his head to clear, then got up. He ate the sandwiches standing in the field, chewing thoughtfully and looking down at the patch of earth where the Walking Man had planted the bulb. He cleaned the plate with grass, packed up his bedroll and stood again with the things under his arm, studying the way the land lay: the fields stretching away, grey and dull at this time of year, bisected and criss-crossed with hedgerow. Although he knew little about the Walking Man’s movements, he did know there was always a place near by, a protected place, that he could store a few things: things to be used the next time he passed. Sometimes that place was as far as half a mile from the camp.

The clue came from the grass: grey and stiff with frost. The Walking Man’s footsteps were black, leading clearly away from the campsite. Caffery half smiled. If he hadn’t been meant to follow them, those footsteps wouldn’t be visible. The Walking Man never left anything to chance. Caffery set off, stepping carefully inside them, surprised to find his feet fitted exactly.

The footsteps stopped a third of a mile away at the far end of the next field and there, tucked secretly in the hedgerow, was the usual assortment of supplies covered with polythene: tinned food,
a cooking pot, a flagon of scrumpy. Caffery tucked in the bedroll and the plate and secured the polythene around everything. When he straightened to leave he noticed something: about a yard along the hedgerow, tight under the hawthorn, a tiny patch of ground had been disturbed. When he crouched next to it and gently moved away the earth he found the bruised, tender tip of a crocus bulb.

Every person in the world had habits – Caffery thought later that morning as he pulled into a pub car park six miles away in Gloucestershire – from the obsessive compulsive who had to count every pea he ate, every light switch he touched, down to the drifter who seemed to have no aim and no direction yet could always find a good place to make camp and sleep. Everyone moved in patterns to some degree or another. Those patterns might be all but invisible, even to the persons themselves, but they were there, nonetheless. The Walking Man’s patterns, the places he stopped, the places he planted crocuses, were slowly revealing themselves to Caffery. And the jacker? Caffery turned off the engine and opened the door, looked at the police vehicles: the forensics van, the four Sprinters belonging to the search units. Well, the jacker had patterns too. And they’d become clear. Given time.