Mo Hayder: Gone

‘Someone came in last week and pulled out a knife. A couple of boys, you know, hoodies. I wasn’t here. They only got about forty pounds.’

‘Boys, though. Not men?’

‘No. I think I’ve got a good idea who they are. It’s just a question of making the police believe me. They’re still looking at the footage.’

In the corner a black-and-white TV monitor showed the back of the sales assistant’s head as he cashed up a lottery ticket, beyond him the rows of sweets, and beyond that the street outside, litter blowing around in the dark. Caffery scrutinized the screen. In the bottom left-hand corner, past all the posters and magazines and parked cars, was the space where the woman had said the blue Vauxhall had been parked. ‘There was a carjacking this morning.’

‘I know.’ The manageress shook her head. ‘In town. That little girl. It’s terrible. Just terrible. Everyone’s talking about it. Is that why you’re here?’

‘Someone we’d like to speak to about it might have parked here.’ He tapped the screen. ‘The car was there all day. Can you pull up the footage?’

The woman unlocked a unit sunk into the wall using another key on the pink springy necklace. A door swung open to reveal a video recorder. She dropped the key and pressed a button. She frowned, pressed another button. A message appeared on screen: Insert media card . Swearing under her breath she hit another button. The screen cleared, for a second or two, then the message popped back up again. Insert media card . She was silent. She stood with her back to Caffery, not moving for several seconds. When she turned to him her face had changed.

‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s not running.’

‘What do you mean it’s not running?’

‘It’s not switched on.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. No.’ She waved a hand, dismissing the words. ‘That’s a lie. I do know. When the police took the chip?’

‘Yes?’

‘They said they’d put another card in it and switched it back on. I didn’t check. This card’s completely empty. I’m the only one’s got the keys so there’s nothing on it since Monday when the police came for the pictures of the robbery.’

Caffery opened the door and stood looking through the shop, past the customers with their magazines and bottles of cheap wine to the road, to the cars parked in the pools of light dropped by the streetlamps.

‘I can tell you one thing.’ The manageress came and stood beside him, looking at the road. ‘If he parked up there to walk into town he’d have been coming from Buckland.’

‘Buckland? I’m new here. What direction’s Buckland?’

‘It’s Radstock way. Midsomer Norton? You know?’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’

‘Well, that’s where he’d have been coming from. Radstock, Midsomer Norton.’ She fiddled with the key fob on the spring around her neck. She smelt of a floral perfume – light and summery but cheap. The sort of thing you’d get from a corner chemist. Caffery’s father had been a racist, in the sort of casual, everyday-pub-conversation way a lot of people had been back in those days. Lackadaisical and thoughtless. He’d told his sons that ‘the Pakis’ were OK and hard-working, but smelt of curry. Simple as that. Curry and onions. Now, in the back of his head, Caffery realized part of him still expected it to be true. And part of him was still surprised when it wasn’t. That, he thought, showed how deep parenting could burrow. Showed how raw and skinless a child’s mind was.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Her face pursed. It seemed to close in at the mouth and the nose to a small point. ‘Just one question?’

‘Sure.’

‘That little girl. Martha. What do you think he’s going to do with her? What terrible thing is that man going to do to her?’

Caffery took a long, deep breath, stretched a good, calm smile across his face. ‘Nothing. He’s going to do nothing. He’s going to drop her somewhere – somewhere safe where she can be found. And then he’s going to run for the hills.’

Night had set in with a sort of vengeful permanence. Caffery decided he didn’t need to pay the Bradleys another visit. There was nothing to tell them, and anyway, said the FLO, they were being swamped with well-wishers – neighbours and friends and members of the congregation bringing over flowers and cakes and bottles of wine to keep their spirits up. Caffery made sure the details of the Vauxhall were on the wire to all the ANPR points and then, because of the shitload of paperwork he had to catch up on, he drove back to the unit’s offices, tucked behind a police station in Kingswood, on the north-easterly tip of the sprawling octopus that made up Bristol’s suburbs.

He stopped the car at the electronic gate and got out in the full glare of the security lights, pulled back the sleeve of his shirt and studied the number scrawled in pen on his inner wrist. They’d had a theft from this car park three weeks ago – one of the unit cars had disappeared from right under their noses. Red faces all round and new access codes for everyone and he was still having problems remembering this one. He’d got half of the number on his wrist tapped in when he realized someone was watching him.

He paused, his hand on the pad, and turned. It was Sergeant Flea Marley. She was next to a car, holding the driver’s door open. She slammed it and began to make her way towards him. The security light timed out and snapped off. He lowered his hand and pulled down his sleeve, feeling irrationally trapped by her.

Caffery was nearly forty, and for years he thought he’d known what he needed from women. Most of the time they half-broke his heart so he’d learned to be precise and utilitarian about it. But the woman coming across the street had started him wondering if it was less efficiency he was carrying around and more a ragged, hard ball of loneliness. Six months ago he’d been getting closer to doing something about that, until the moment everything he’d thought he’d known about her had had a bomb dropped on it when he’d seen her do something that meant she was nothing like the person he’d imagined. The chance discovery he’d made had gone through him like a storm, taken away everything he’d thought he felt about her, leaving him confused, puzzled and choked. Choked and disappointed in a way that was more like something from childhood than adulthood. From a time when Pakis smelt of curry and things went deep. Like being on the losing football team. Or not getting the bike he wanted for Christmas. Since then he’d bumped into Flea at work once or twice and knew he should tell her what he’d seen, but the words weren’t there yet. Because he still hadn’t worked out in his head why she’d done what she’d done.

She stopped a few yards away. She wore standard support-group winter kit – black cargoes, a sweatshirt and a waterproof. Her wild blonde hair, usually tied back, hung loose to her shoulders. Really and truly a support-group sergeant shouldn’t look anything like she did. ‘Jack,’ she said.

He reached over and slammed the Mondeo door. Put some height and breadth into his shoulders. Made his face hard. His eyes ached from not looking too closely at her.

‘Hi,’ he said, as she got nearer. ‘It’s been a long time.’

Flea was still unnerved and on guard from what had happened at the quarry earlier. Then, this evening, the news about the carjacking had trickled though the force, reaching her distant unit just before down-tools and giving her serious spikes in the head. Realistically there was only one person she could talk to about it. DI Caffery. At the end of her late shift she drove straight out to the MCIU offices in Kingswood.