Mo Hayder - Gone

Hey? You know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans .

she got to her feet, legs creaking and aching. Wearily she put the bottle into the net pocket of the rucksack, then reached for the nail to start winding the acrow. It was gone.

It had been on the ledge – right here next to her. She moved her hands frantically, skimming over the rivets and the slime. Half an hour it had taken to find that nail, feeling around in the muck at the bottom of the barge sump. She fumbled for the head torch in the rucksack, pulled it out and the nail came with it. Fell, plinkplink , on to the ledge.

She froze. Stared at the nail. It had been in the rucksack. But she’d left it on the ledge. She remembered making a careful decision to put it on there. Or did she really remember that? She put her hand to her head, momentarily dizzy. She did remember putting it on the ledge, she was sure. It meant her memory was slipping. Another symptom of hypothermia shutting her system down.

She picked up the nail in numb fingers. It wasn’t quite thick enough for the hole in the acrow and she pushed it easily into the mechanism. There were tender gullies in her palms where the nail had dug in earlier, even through the gloves, and now she lined it up with those channels, ignoring the pain, and leaned all her weight on the nail. It didn’t move. With a grunt she did it again. And again. It didn’t move. Fucking thing. She rammed at it again. Still nothing. And again.

‘Shit.’

She sat on the ledge. Sweat prickled under her arms in spite of the cold. The last time the nail had moved was more than an hour ago. And then it had been less than half a centimetre. A sign like that was telling her to give up.

But she had no other choice.

The right ankle cuff on her immersion suit felt wrong. She submerged her hand in the water and touched the ankle carefully. The cuff itself was OK but, above it, the neoprene bulged tight as if water was trapped in there. She used her hands to lift her leg out of the muck, rest it on the ledge. She strapped on the head lamp and she leaned over to study the suit. Above the ankle it ballooned out. When she moved her leg she could feel fluid sloshing around. Gingerly she slid a finger under the cuff and pulled it. Something like water gushed out. Warm. Red in the torch beam.

Fuck. She leaned her head against the bulkhead, took deep, slow breaths to stop the giddiness. The wound in her thigh had opened and that was one hell of a lot of blood to lose. If she’d seen someone else lose that much she’d be getting them to hospital. And fast.

This wasn’t good. Not good at all.

Damien Graham wasn’t doing himself any favours when it came to cracking people’s prejudice. When Caffery arrived at his tiny terraced house, just past six in the evening, he was standing in the open doorway surveying the street and smoking, of all things, a cigarillo. He was wearing wraparound Diesel shades and a long camel pimp coat draped around his shoulders. All that was missing was the purple-velvet fedora. Part of Caffery couldn’t help feeling a trace of pity for the guy.

As he came up the path Damien took the cigarillo out of his mouth, nodded an acknowledgement. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘’S long as you don’t mind if I eat.’

‘Nah – you’re safe, man, safe.’

This morning, catching a shave in the mirror at MCIU, Caffery’d thought he’d looked haggard. Along with his other notes he’d made an internal memo to eat something. Now he had a passenger seat full of service-station sandwiches and chocolate bars – Mars, Snickers, Dime. Typical man’s solution to the problem. He’d have to remember to sweep them somewhere safe before Myrtle next got into the car. He pulled out a Caramac and peeled it, snapped off two sections and put them into the corner of his mouth to melt. He and Damien stood with their backs to the house and looked blankly at the vehicles in the street. The CSI van. Q’s insane retro Vauxhall.

‘You gonna tell me what’s going on?’ said Damien. ‘They’re in there taking the place apart. Saying there’s some kind of camera system in my house.’

‘That’s right.’ Damien wasn’t the only one. The Blunts had the same set of paraphernalia in theirs. Turner was over there now, talking to them. In fact, everyone was out in the field. Everyone except Prody. Caffery couldn’t reach him on the phone. He’d have liked to know where he was – what he’d found out about Flea. He’d have liked to be sure that was what he was doing – looking for Flea and not nosing around the review team’s Kitson file again. ‘Damien,’ he said, ‘these cameras. I don’t suppose you have any idea how they came to be there?’

Damien made a noise of contempt through his teeth. ‘What’re you saying? You think I put them there?’

‘No. I think someone got into your house and put them there. But I don’t know how they had the opportunity. Do you?’

Damien was silent for a while. Then he flicked the stub of the cigar into the scrappy front lawn. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted, pulling the coat closer around his shoulders. ‘Maybe I do. Been thinking about it.’

‘Well?’

‘A break-in. Long time ago. Before the car got jacked. Me, I always thought it was something to do with my missus – she had some dodgy friends back in those days. We reported it, but it was weird – nothing got nicked. And now I’m thinking about it I’m starting to . . . you know . . . wonder.’

Caffery put the last of the Caramac into his mouth. He glanced past Damien at the photos on the hallway wall: framed black-and-white studio shots of Alysha, her hair pulled back in a wide Alice band. He felt the sickening disorientation of a case that had turned a slow somersault in a matter of hours. The team was switching its focus: it had stopped studying Ted Moon and was instead studying his victims because Moon was choosing the girls in advance, and that made it a completely different investigation. Worse, everyone had the uneasy sense it wouldn’t be long before he did the whole thing again. That there was another family out there with surveillance cameras already in their house. All MCIU had to do was find out where that family was – and Caffery was sure the key lay in working out why he’d chosen Alysha, Emily, Cleo and Martha.

Damien said, ‘What’s going on? Feels like I’m being haunted. I don’t like it.’

‘Don’t suppose you do.’ Caffery crumpled up the wrapper and stuck it, with hardwired crime-scene instinct, in his pocket. ‘What’s going on is we’ve climbed up a few steps. Seen Ted Moon from a different perspective. He’s clever. Right? Look at what he’s done in your house. He could have abducted Alysha – any of the others – at any time he chose. But he didn’t. He staged it. Took the girls in a public place to make it look random. He did that to hide the fact that he already knew your girls.’

‘Already knew her?’ Damien folded his arms and shook his head. ‘No. I don’t buy that. I’ve seen the bastard’s photo. I don’t know him.’

‘Maybe not. But he knows Alysha. Somehow. Maybe he met her through friends. Did she used to stay away – at her friends’ houses?’

‘No. I mean, she was little in those days. Just a little girl. Lorna kept her with us all the time. We haven’t got family here, even. Mine are all in London, hers are in Jamaica.’

‘No close friends she went out with?’

‘Not at that age. I dunno what her mother lets her do now.’

‘Any times she was left on her own maybe?’

‘No. Really, I mean it. Lorna – for all her scabby ways – was a good mother. And if you want to know more about that time she’s the one you need to speak to.’

Caffery wished he could speak to her. With all the Interpol searches Turner had initiated, the Jamaican police had come up with nothing. He swallowed the chocolate. His mouth was furred and dry with all the sugar. It made him feel wrong and disordered and added to the maddening sense that something else was lingering on the periphery of his consciousness that he was still missing. ‘Damien. Can we go upstairs?’