Mo Hayder - Gone

The hospital registrar had said it was odd her mouth and throat were free of the blisters they’d have expected from gas. They still hadn’t worked out what substance Moon had used to subdue them. Rags soaked in turpentine had been left in some of the rooms. They were what had been filling the flat with fumes, not chloroform. But turps hadn’t knocked everyone out.

‘I’m sorry.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Sorry – I don’t mean to . . . It’s not your fault.’ She put the rabbit to her nose, breathed in the smell. Then she opened the neck of her sweater and pushed it inside, as if it was a living creature that needed body warmth. She kept her hand in her sweater and worked the toy around, until it was sitting in her armpit. Caffery let his eyes travel across the garden. Coppery leaves had been swept into a pile in the corner where the low picket fence met the farmland. A spider’s web shivered lightly in the slight breeze that came up, smelling of manure from the fields. Caffery watched the web, trying to picture the way it would be frosted and dewed in the morning. He thought of the skull in the sheet. Of the fuzzy yellow-brown matter staining the cloth.

‘Janice, I’ve tried speaking to Cory. He’s not taking my calls either. Someone needs to answer some questions. Will you do it for me?’

Janice sighed. She pulled her hair back and looped it in a knot at the nape of her neck, then ran her hands down her face, smoothing the skin. ‘Go on.’

‘Your house has never been broken into, Janice?’ He pulled his pocket book out of his jacket, clicked a biro on his knee and wrote the date and time there. The book was only a prop. He wouldn’t fill it in now – only later. Having it there just helped him focus. ‘In your house? No burglaries?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, you’ve never had any burglaries in your house, have you?’

‘No.’ She stared at the pocket book. ‘Why?’

‘You’ve got an alarm system, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was on when you left that day to go to your mother’s?’

‘It’s always on. Why?’

Her eyes were still on the book. Suddenly he understood why, and immediately felt like a prize dick. The book made him seem inexperienced, like a probationer. He closed it and put it back in his pocket. ‘Your sister says you had some work done on the house, that you didn’t have the alarm system until then.’

‘That was months ago.’

‘You stayed here with your sister for a lot of the time, didn’t you, when the house was being worked on? Left the place empty?’

‘Yes.’ Janice’s eyes were still on the pocket where the book had gone. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Detective Prody showed you a picture of Ted Moon, didn’t he?’

‘I didn’t recognize him. Neither did Cory.’

‘You’re sure he wasn’t one of the people who came in? Worked on the house?’

‘I didn’t see all of them. There’d be people in and out – subcontractors, that sort of thing. We sacked one lot of builders, brought in another. I lost track of all the faces – all the cups of tea I made. But I’m sure – almost sure – I never saw him.’

‘I’d like, if possible, when Cory turns up, to get the details of all those workmen. The names of the builders you sacked. I’d like to be speaking to them as soon as possible. Have you got it all in a file at home? All the details? Or can you remember them?’

She sat for a few moments with her mouth half open, staring at Caffery. Then she let the air out of her lungs, dropped her head and rapped her forehead with her knuckles. One-two-three. Onetwo-three. One-two-three. Hard: making the skin redden. As if she wanted to knock some thoughts out of her head. If it had gone on any longer he’d have grabbed her hand. But the rapping stopped as abruptly as it had started. She composed herself – eyes closed now, hands folded primly on her lap. ‘I know what you’re telling me. You’re telling me that he’d been watching Emily.’ She kept her eyes closed and spoke rapidly, as if she had to concentrate on getting every word out before she forgot it. ‘That he’d . . . stalked her? That he was in our house ?’

‘We found some cameras in the Bradleys’ house today. So we went back to Mere – looked at your place. And we found the same thing.’

‘ Cameras? ’

‘I’m sorry. Ted Moon was able to install a CCTV system in your house without you knowing.’

‘There weren’t any cameras in my house.’

‘There were. You’d never have seen them – but they were there. They were put there long before all this started, because there’s no sign of a break-in since you left.’

‘You mean he put them there when we were here, staying with my sister?’

‘Probably.’

‘So he was watching her? He was watching Emily?’

‘Probably.’

‘Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ.’ She put her face into her hands. ‘I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it. I just can’t do it.’

Caffery turned away and sat there, pretending to focus on the horizon. He was still thinking about all the assumptions he’d made, and the avenues he’d ignored. About how stupid he’d been not to see it all before. He should have known, when Moon came back for Emily and didn’t just drop it, that he’d chosen her a long time before the kidnap. That she wasn’t a random hit. But most of all Caffery was thinking that of the times he was grateful to be alone, childless and loveless, this was one of them. It really was true what they said: the more you have, the more you have to lose.

Flea wasn’t hungry but she needed the fuel. She sat on the ledge in the hull, her legs in the sludge, and listlessly chewed the sandwich Prody had left her. She was shivering, her whole body convulsing. The meat in it was greasy and heavy-tasting, with tiny bits of cartilage and other gristle. She had to follow each mouthful with a gulp of water to wash it down her sore throat.

Prody was dead. No doubt in her mind. At first she’d watched the rope moving back and forward, leaving a scar in the moss and slime on the wall. That had gone on for fifteen minutes. It had stopped when he’d got to the top of the forty-foot shaft. ‘Going for a walk,’ he’d yelled down at her. His voice echoed and bounced around the tunnel. ‘No signal.’

Of course there’s not, she thought bitterly. Of course not. But she’d wet her lips and yelled, ‘OK. Good luck.’

And that had been that.

Something had happened to him on the surface. She knew what the top of the air shaft was like. Years ago, on the training exercise, she’d been there. She recalled woods, bridle-paths, grassy glades and yard after yard of impenetrable undergrowth. He’d have been tired. Would probably have sat down at the top of the shaft to recover after the climb. Easy pickings for Martha’s kidnapper. And now the day was on the wane. The great circle of daylight powering down from the shaft had moved slowly across the canal, throwing down the shadows of plants. It had thinned to an irregular sliver on the moss-covered wall, like a smiling mouth. All the shadows in the tunnel were starting to run into another so when she looked through the hole she couldn’t see the corners of the tunnel any more. Could hardly see Martha’s shoe.

Prody had reacted badly to the shoe. He’d been in Traffic, first on the scene to all the unimaginable accidents. He was supposed to be unflappable, but something about the shoe had shocked even him.

She lifted her arm and studied her hand. Her fingers were patched purple and white – one of the early symptoms of hypothermia. The body-racking shivering wouldn’t last. That would go as she sank nearer to death. She balled up the cellophane, pushed it inside the bottle. There was hardly any light left. If she was going to get out of here she had to do it now. She’d spent an hour sculling around the sludge and had already found an old acrow – an iron pit prop – lying in the sump hole. It was covered with slime but not too rusted and she’d lodged its top plate under the hatch. She’d found a sturdy six-inch nail that she could wedge into the acrow-winding mechanism and for the last two hours she had been laboriously tightening it, pushing the prop up into the hatch. She planned to dislodge the windlass. And then what? Crawl to the surface and be picked off like a First World War soldier going over the top? Better than dying from cold down here.