Mo Hayder - Gone

‘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.