Mo Hayder - Gone

From far away across the sky the noise of the helicopter grew louder. It was coming back, low over the trees. The women stopped. They put their hands above their eyes to shield them from the light, and watched the dark crow shape blot out the sky above them.

‘What does that mean?’ Janice shouted. ‘Does it mean they’ve lost him? Is he out here in the woods?’

‘No,’ Nick yelled. ‘It’s not the same helicopter. Not air-support craft. It’s black and yellow, not blue and yellow.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning it’s probably the HEMS ’copter from Filton.’

‘What’s HEMS?’ shouted Rose.

‘Helicopter Emergency Medical Services. It’s a medivac. There’s a casualty.’

‘Him? Is it him ?’

‘ I don’t know .’

Janice broke into a run, leaving the others behind. Her heart was hammering, and her shoes caught hopelessly in the tread-plates, so she stopped, kicked them off and continued in her stockinged feet. She passed whole new plantations of saplings enclosed in rabbit-guard tubes. She ran through soft orange beds of sawdust until she got to a place where the trees were thinner and patches of sky poked through. There was a clearing ahead. She could see the blue and white splash of police tape. That must be the inner cordon. And now she saw the inner cordon loggist, standing side on to her, squinting up at the helicopter. He was different from the earlier one. Bigger, more serious-looking. He wore riot gear and stood with his feet wide, his arms folded across his chest.

She came to a halt. Breathing hard.

He turned his head and eyed her stonily. ‘You shouldn’t be here. Who are you?’

‘Please,’ she began. ‘Please—’

He approached. Just as he was almost on her Nick appeared from behind, panting. ‘It’s OK. I’m MCIU. These are relatives.’

He shook his head. ‘Still shouldn’t be here. Only authorized personnel in here – and you’re not on my very, very short list.’

Rose stepped forward, not scared of him at all. She was bright red, breathing hard, every inch of her skin flushed and shiny. ‘I’m Rose Bradley. This is Janice Costello. It’s our little girls he took. Please – we won’t cause any trouble. We only want to know what’s happening.’

The officer gave her a slow, thoughtful look. He took in the stretchy trousers and the little smart scarf at her neck. He took in the piped woollen jacket and the hair damp with sweat and neglect. Then he looked at Janice – carefully, almost warily, as if she might be from a different planet.

‘Please,’ Rose begged. ‘Don’t send us back.’

‘Don’t send them back,’ Nick said, a note of pleading in her voice. ‘Don’t. Please. They don’t deserve it with what they’ve gone through.’

The officer tilted his head and studied the underside of the branches above him. He took slow breaths as if he was doing complicated sums in his head. ‘Over there.’ After a few moments he dropped his head and held out a hand, indicating a tangle of brambles that had formed a natural hidey-hole. A place a person could crouch and not be spotted. ‘You could have walked in there and I wouldn’t never have seen you. But,’ he held up a finger and fixed Nick’s eyes, ‘don’t take the piss, OK? Don’t take the piss or abuse my kindness. Because I’m a better liar than you are, whatever you think. And be quiet. For Christ’s sake, be quiet.’

The air shafts that fed the tunnel in some places reached well over a hundred feet in depth. Roughly the height of a ten-storey office block. The eighteenth-century engineers had let the waste soil accumulate around the shafts so that they’d come to resemble enormous ant hills – strange funnel shapes jutting out of the ground, holes sunk in the centre of each. Often covered with trees and foliage, they weren’t usually very remarkable. This particular air shaft, however, was far from unremarkable.

It was in a natural clearing surrounded by beech and oak trees in the last stages of the autumn drop. Crows cawed from the tops of bare branches and underfoot the ground was deep in coppery brown leaves. At the top of the slight incline the hole gaped secretively, its sides coated with the tarry black evidence of the explosion. The smuts still floated out of it, rising into the air as if on a convection column, reaching to a point above the trees where the air cooled and slowly floated them down again to land in the trees, the grass. They coated everything – even the ropeaccess team’s white Sprinter van.

More than twenty people trampled the frosty grass: plainclothes officers, some in riot gear, some in caving helmets and complex harnesses. A handler led a German shepherd, still straining on the leash, into the dog van. Caffery noticed that, whatever their duty, no one seemed to want to spend much time near the hole. The two officers who had come with cutters to remove the protective wire around it had worked fast and retreated as soon as the job was over, not meeting anyone’s eye. It wasn’t just the uneasy knowledge that the shaft plunged straight into the earth, it was the noise coming from it. Now that the HEMS helicopter had landed and switched off its rotors, the sound echoed eerily up from the yawning shaft. Made everyone uncomfortable. A faint hoarse wheezing like a trapped animal. No one seemed inclined to turn their back on the hole.

Caffery approached with five other men: the Bronze commander, a drop-cam operator – who wheeled ahead of him a stainless-steel trolley on which sat a complex tubing camera system – and Acting Sergeant Wellard, who had brought two of his men with him. No one spoke as they crunched through the frozen leaves. Everyone’s expression was closed, concentrated. At the edge of the hole they gathered in a line and peered down. The shaft was about ten feet in diameter. Traversing it was a single reinforcing beam, now almost rotted to nothing. An oak tree at the edge of the hole had spread a single root out across the beam, drawing in God only knew what moisture and nourishment from it. Caffery put his hand on the tree and leaned over. He saw a white layer of limestone. Below it, darker rock. And then nothing. Just cold shadows. And that unearthly noise again. Breathing. In and out.

The camera operator reeled out the yellow cable and fed the tiny drop-cam down into the hole. Caffery watched him unwind the electric leads and set up the monitor. It took for ever and Caffery had to stand absolutely still, a tic starting in his eye, wanting to yell at the guy, Get a fucking move on . Next to him Wellard had got himself into an abseil harness, had secured himself to another tree, and was kneeling with one hand braced on the oak’s root so he could lean out over the hole and carefully lower the gas detector on a cable. On the other side of the shaft Wellard’s men were prepping themselves: belaying kernmantle ropes off the surrounding trees and checking safety rigs, buckling harnesses, fixing self-braking descender units to their lines.

The Bronze commander watched the whole thing from a few paces away, a pinched, anxious look on his face. He, too, was unnerved by the noise. No one knew for sure what had caused the blast – whether it was accidental or whether Prody had tried to blow himself up – but no one had even begun to let themselves wonder what the hell it meant for the girls. Or Sergeant Marley. If any of them were in the tunnel too.

‘OK.’ The operator had got the camera all the way down into the shaft and was powering up the monitor on the trolley. Caffery, Wellard and the Bronze commander all gathered round to watch the image. ‘It’s a fish-eye lens, so it’s distorted. But I’d guess that those shapes you see here are the tunnel wall . . .’ He tucked his lip under his teeth in concentration and played with the focus. ‘There you are. Is that better?’