Mo Hayder: Gone

He was at the gate near his car, surrounded by yellow pools of light that bounced out of the office windows behind him and reflected up from the puddles. He wore a heavy coat and was standing quite still watching her approach. He was dark-haired, medium height, lean under the coat and, even if you didn’t know it from experience, which she did, you could tell from the way he stood that he knew how to look after himself. He was a good detective, a brilliant one, some would say, but everyone whispered about him. Because there was something a bit sideways about Caffery. Something a bit wild and alone. You could tell it from his eyes.

He didn’t look pleased to see her. Not at all. She hesitated. Gave him an uncertain smile.

He took his hand down from the security pad he’d been jamming numbers into. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Good.’ She nodded, still a bit thrown by the expression. There had been a time, months ago, when he’d looked at her completely differently – looked at her in the way a man is supposed to look at a woman. Once or twice. He wasn’t doing that now. Now he was regarding her as if she disappointed him. ‘You?’

‘Oh, you know – same shit, different day. I heard your unit’s got some problems.’

News travelled fast around this force. USU had botched a few things lately – an operation over in Bridgewater when they’d been diving for a suicide victim in a river and had swum straight past the body. Plus the small matter of a grand’s worth of diving equipment lost at the bottom of Bristol harbour. And other things – little mistakes and lapses that added up to the fat ugly truth of the Underwater Search Unit on its knees, performance targets missed, competency pay on hold, with only one person, the sergeant, to blame. This was the second time today someone’d thought to point it out.

‘Getting tired of hearing it,’ she said. ‘We’ve had our problems, but we’ve turned the corner. I’m confident of that.’

He gave an unconvinced nod, and glanced up the road as if he was trying to see any good reason for them both still to be standing there. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind, Sergeant Marley?’

She took a breath. Held it. For a moment she considered not telling him, just for the dull, unimpressed way he was communicating with her. It was like all the disappointment in the world was heaping out of him on to her shoulders. She exhaled. ‘OK. I heard about the carjacker on the news.’

‘And?’

‘Thought you should know. He’s done it before.’

‘Done what?’

‘The guy who’s just taken that Yaris? He’s done it before. And he’s not just a carjacker.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A guy, yes? In a Santa mask? He snatched a car. There was a kid in it? Well, this is the third time.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a second.’

‘Look, I can’t be the one who told you this. I got into shit over it the first time. I put my nose in it a bit too deep, eventually got a slap down from my inspector – told to lay off, stop hanging around the Bridewell station. No one got killed or anything so, really, I was wasting my time. None of this is coming from me. Right?’

‘I’m hearing you loud and clear.’

‘A couple of years ago, before you were transferred from London, there was a family down by the docks. Some guy jumps them, gets the keys and takes the car. Then again this spring. Do you remember I found that dead dog in the quarries up at Elf’s Grotto? That woman’s dog? The murder?’

‘I remember.’

‘But do you know why my unit was diving the quarry in the first place?’

‘No. I don’t think I ever even . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Yes, I do. It was a carjacking. You thought the guy had dumped the car in the quarry. Right?’

‘We’d had a call from a payphone on the motorway. Witness reported seeing the car go in. It was a Lexus jacked from down near Bruton or somewhere. It turned out it wasn’t a witness who made the call. It was the carjacker himself. There was no car in the quarry.’

Caffery was silent for a moment, his eyes not quite focused, as if he was rearranging it all in his head. ‘And you think it was the same guy because . . .’

‘Because there was a child in the back seat.’

‘A child?’

‘Yes. Both times when the jacker took the car he took a child with it. He got scared both times, dumped the kid. I knew it was the same guy because the children were about the same age. Both girls. Both under ten.’

‘Martha is eleven,’ he said distantly.

Flea felt suddenly heavy – heavy and cold. She half hated the idea she was about to bring to Caffery. She knew it would be like a slap to him. He had reason to care more than most about paedophiles. His own brother had been disappeared by a paedophile nearly thirty years ago. They’d never found the body. ‘Well, then,’ she said, her voice a bit softer, ‘I guess that just about pulls it all together. It’s not the car he wants, it’s the girls. Young girls.’

Silence. Caffery didn’t speak, didn’t move, just looked at her, no expression. A car went past, lit up their faces. A few drops of rain fell.

‘OK.’ She held up a hand. ‘I’ve said my piece. If you want to run with it, then that’s up to you.’

She paused to see if he’d reply. He didn’t, so she went back to her car and got in, sat for a while watching him, lit half by a streetlight, half by the car-park lights behind. Stony still. She thought about the way he’d looked her up and down. As if she’d somehow disappointed him. There was nothing left of the intent that had once been in his eyes. The thing that, six months ago, had half opened her heart and made her feel like dust and warmth at the same time.

Give it a day, she thought, starting the engine. If he hadn’t done anything about the jacker by tomorrow night she’d be speaking to his superintendent.

That night there was an article about Martha on every news bulletin. Every hour, on the hour, all the way into the night. A network of people searching for her stretched across the county – across the country. Sleepless traffic cops sat on the ANPR points, eyes locked on their screens, checking every dark-blue Vauxhall that passed against the database. Other officers snatched a couple of hours here and there, their mobiles set to loud in case a call came through. Concerned citizens who’d heard the news put on coats and outdoor shoes to open their sheds, their garages. They checked the ditches that skirted their properties, the hard shoulders that ran near their houses. No one voiced their thoughts – that Martha could be dead already. On such a cold night. A little girl, in just a T-shirt, cardigan and raincoat. Shoes all wrong too. The force’s photographic department had been distributing pictures of the pair she’d been wearing. Little printed ones with a strap and a buckle. Not meant for being outside on a freezing night in winter.

The hours went by without news. The night became dawn, the dawn became another day. A blustery, watery day. A Sunday. Martha Bradley wasn’t going to be blowing out any candles today. In Oakhill Jonathan Bradley cancelled her party. He got a priest through the joint ministry to stand in for him at his services and the family stayed at home, in their kitchen, waiting for news. On the other side of Bristol, in the streets of Kingswood, a few people braved the weather to attend their local churches. They scurried past the MCIU offices, swaddled in scarves and hats, battling the arctic wind that hadn’t let up all night.

Inside the building it was a different story. People went from office to office in shirtsleeves. The windows dripped with condensation. The place was heaving. Unarranged leave had been suspended and anyone under the rank of inspector was happily chalking up the overtime. The incident room was like a City trading floor, people making stand-up phone calls, shouting across the office. The jacker, in addition to all the other cases MCIU was fighting, had given them a migraine of biblical proportions and no one had slept much. In a series of emergency meetings that morning Caffery delegated responsibilities on the case. He had a goodish staffing quota, free rein to handpick his crew and he corralled a wish list: a pod of HOLMES indexers out of the computer room, and dibs on five assorted detectives. Then he chose a core team. Two men and a woman. They roughly spanned the skill sets he guessed he would need.