Mo Hayder: Gone

The pharmaceuticals compound lay in a slight dip on the arid plateau land of south Gloucestershire – a pocket of industrialization dwarfed by the royal hunting estates that haughtily covered much of the county. The police units had used GPR – ground-probing radar – and body dogs brought in all the way from London. All day long they’d worked, gridding the place out, using laser theodolites, then methodically treading every inch, moving machinery, if necessary, working along the wall of the warehouse.

Locally the little huddles of trees that were scattered around the area were known not as copses but by the quaint nineteenthcentury name ‘covert’. The nearest, slightly elevated one was known as Pine Covert and tonight, lit gold and red by the sunset but unnoticed from the factory, two men stood in the shelter of its trees and watched the progress of the team silently. DI Caffery and the man they called the Walking Man.

‘Who do they think they’re searching for?’ said the Walking Man. ‘Not my daughter. They wouldn’t be taking this much care if they thought it was my daughter.’

‘No. I told them they were looking for Misty Kitson.’

‘Ah, yes. The pretty one.’

‘The famous one. The biggest monkey on my unit’s back.’

All afternoon the sun had crawled obliquely across the sky, lighting but never warming the earth, and now that it was sunset, the team began to break up from the debriefing. They trickled out of the perimeter gate under the great arc lights, back to waiting trucks and cars. Caffery and the Walking Man couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they could guess.

‘It’s empty.’ The Walking Man stroked his beard ruminatively. ‘She’s not in there.’

Caffery stood shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘I did my best.’

‘I know. I know you did.’

The last of the search teams pulled out of the lane leading to the compound and now it was safe to light the fire. The Walking Man turned away and went a few paces back into the covert where he’d gathered some wood into a pile. He took lighter fuel from under a log and shook it on the branches. Chucked on a match. There was a moment’s silence, then a loud whoomph. An orange flame fattened to a ball, thinned and unrolled itself up into the branches, sending a blazing finger of red heat and smoke through them. The Walking Man went to another log and began pulling things out from under it – bedrolls, tins of food, his customary flagon of cider.

Caffery watched him distantly, thinking about the map on his office wall. The Walking Man always had these supplies waiting for him, no matter where he made camp. Somehow this – the gargantuan undertaking, the never-ending search for his daughter – was all planned meticulously. But how could it be otherwise? A search for a child: it would go on for ever. The search that would never end. Caffery thought of the look on Rose and Janice’s faces when they saw their lost children come back. It was a look that might never cross his own face. Might never cross the Walking Man’s.

‘We found that nonce. You know. The one who wrote the letter.’

The Walking Man poured the cider into plastic beakers, handed one to Caffery. ‘Yes. I saw you had from your face the moment you walked across that field. But he wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hoped.’

Caffery sighed. He looked across the fields to where the town of Tetbury sent an orange glow up against the clouds. Sapperton tunnel was beyond the town, out in the unlit fields. In his mind’s eye he saw the two girls being taken towards the helicopter. Two stretchers, two little girls. And between the stretchers a bridge. A pale, delicate bridge made by the girls’ arms as Martha, the eldest, reached across the gap and took Emily’s hand in hers. For nearly forty hours they’d been lying together in a storage trunk buried under the floor of the tunnel. Hugging each other like twins in a womb, breathing their fears and secrets into each other’s faces. When they’d got to hospital and had been examined they were in better shape than they should have been. Prody hadn’t touched them. He’d made Martha remove her underwear and had given her a pair of his eldest son’s jogging pants to wear. He’d put cartons of apple juice in the trunk and told them he was the police – that this was a top-secret operation to hide them from the real jacker. Because the real jacker was the most dangerous man imaginable. A trickster who would do anything, pretend to be anyone. That under no circumstances should the girls make a sound in the trunk if they didn’t want to give themselves away – no matter what guises he took on.

Martha had taken some time to believe him. Emily, who’d been introduced to Prody as a police officer in the safe-house, had swallowed the story. He’d given them sweeties when he told them all this. He’d been kind. He’d been handsome and strong and easy to believe. That was just the way it sometimes went when a child was abducted.

‘Sit.’ The Walking Man brought out plates from under the log. ‘Sit down.’

Caffery sat on a thin bedroll. The ground was freezing. The Walking Man placed the tins and the plates near the fire to start cooking when the fire was ready. He poured his own beaker of cider and settled down.

‘And so . . .’ He waved his hand at the enclosure the team had searched. ‘For this? For doing this for me? What do I give you? Not my anger, that’s for sure. Have to take back my anger and swallow it.’

‘What can you give me?’

‘I can’t give you your brother back. I know that’s what you’re hoping, but I can’t tell you anything about him.’

‘You can’t tell me or you won’t?’

The Walking Man laughed. ‘I’ve told you, Jack Caffery, until I’m worn to a shadow with telling it – I’m a human being, not a super-human. Do you believe that an ex-con frittering away his pathetic life on the lanes of the West Country could really know what happened to a boy thirty years ago, more than a hundred miles away in London?’

The Walking Man was right. In the back of Caffery’s head he really had believed that somehow this opaque, soft-voiced vagrant might know something about what had happened all those years ago. He held out his hands to the fire. His car was a hundred yards away, just out of sight from the copse. No Myrtle in it: she’d gone back to the Bradleys. Stupid, but he missed the damned dog.

‘Tell me about the circle, then. The nice little circle. That me protecting the woman is a nice circle.’

The Walking Man smiled. ‘It’s against my principles to give you anything for nothing. But this is an exception because you helped me. So I give it to you freely – and I tell you openly that I saw what happened that night.’

Caffery stared at him.

The Walking Man nodded. ‘The monkey on the force’s back? The pretty one? I saw her die.’

‘ How? How the hell did you . . . ?’

‘Easy. I was there.’ He waved a gnarly finger in the air to the south, towards Wiltshire. ‘Up on a hillside, minding my own business. I told you – all you have to do is open your head: you open it and suddenly it’s full of truths you never expected.’

‘Truths? Jesus – what are you talking about? What truths?’

‘The truth that it wasn’t the woman who killed your monkey.’ The Walking Man’s face was lit red from the fire. His eyes gleamed. ‘That it was a man.’

Caffery kept breathing in and out. Slowly. Not giving anything away on his face. A man. Everything in his head began to lower itself, fit itself into what seemed now to be an obvious and a simple pattern that had been waiting a long time for this moment. A man who killed Misty? And Flea had protected him? It would have been her shithead brother. No doubt about it. Caffery got to this knowledge so easily, so unsurprisingly, that it was as if it had been there all along, just waiting to be nudged out from the debris.