Gone (31 page)

‘Don’t speak to him.’ Caffery pushed his face close to Prody’s, spoke hard and fast: ‘If there’s anything to be said, let me say it.’

Prody didn’t answer. He kept his eyes locked on Cory, who stopped a few feet away.

Caffery turned. Cory’s face was quite smooth, no wrinkles or creases in his forehead. A small jaw, feminine nose and very clear grey eyes fixed on the side of Prody’s face. ‘Cunt,’ he said quietly.

Caffery sensed Nick, somewhere to his right, getting frantic, panicking about what was going to happen.

‘Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.’ Cory’s face was calm. His voice was almost a whisper. ‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.’

‘Mr Costello . . .’ Caffery said.

‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.’

‘Mr Costello. That’s not going to help Emily.’

‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt CUNT.’

‘
Mr Costello!
’

Cory shuddered. He took half a step back and blinked at Caffery. Then he seemed to remember who and where he was. He straightened his cuffs and turned to look around the street, a polite, reasonable expression on his face, as if he was thinking of
buying the house and sizing up the neighbourhood. Then he took off his overcoat and dropped it on the ground. He unwound the scarf he was wearing, dropped that on top of the coat. He stopped to consider the pile, as if he was mildly surprised to see it there. Then, without any warning, he took three steps round the side of the picnic bench and launched himself at Prody.

Caffery had time to leap to his feet before Prody was wrestled off the bench and thrown on his back on the grass. He didn’t resist: he let Cory get on with it and lay there, his arms half raised across his face, allowing the man in the business suit to rain punches on him. Almost patient, as if he accepted this as his punishment. Caffery dodged round the picnic bench and got to Cory, grasped the backs of his arms as Wellard and another officer came steaming across the lawn.

‘Mr Costello!’ Caffery yelled into the back of the guy’s head – into his perfect haircut. The two other officers grappled for his hands. ‘
Cory
, let him go now. You have to let him go or we’ll have to cuff you.’

Cory managed to land two more punches in Prody’s ribs, before the support-group guys got his arms behind his back and pulled him away. Wellard rolled Cory away across the ground, gripping him from behind, lying on his side, spooning him with his face pressed against the back of his neck. Prody managed to get to his hands and knees and crawl a few paces away. He stopped there, panting.

‘You didn’t deserve that.’ Caffery squatted next to Prody, got him by the shirt and pulled him upright so he rocked back on his heels. His face was slack, his mouth bleeding. ‘You really didn’t deserve that. But you still shouldn’t have been there.’

‘I know.’ He wiped his forehead. Blood was trickling down from his scalp where Cory had managed to pull out a clump of hair. He looked as if he might start crying. ‘I feel like shit.’

‘Listen – and listen carefully. I want you to go to that nice young paramedic over there and tell her you want to go to hospital, get checked over and patched up – you hear? And then I want you to discharge yourself and call me. Tell me you’re OK.’

‘And you?’

‘Me?’ Caffery straightened up. Brushed off his jacket, the knees of his trousers. ‘S’pose I’ll have to go and have a sniff around this bloody lock-up. Not that we’ll find him there. Like I said.’

‘Too clever?’

‘Exactly. Too effing clever.’

The area was quiet, rural and very pretty. At the edge of the Cotswolds, it was scattered with cottages and manor houses built from the local sugary brown stone. The lock-up Ted Moon rented was among a development so out of character with its surroundings it couldn’t be long before the developer’s wrecking ball paid a visit. It comprised five squat breezeblock buildings, each roofed with moss-covered corrugated iron. They must have been cattle sheds once. No commercial signage and no activity. God only knew what they were used for.

Ted Moon’s lock-up was the last of the buildings at the western end where the development gave way to farmland. To look at it now, dark and featureless in the sparkling autumn sunlight, you wouldn’t guess it was only half an hour out of one of the most intensive and fraught police searches conducted in years. The entry teams had broken in through a side door and within minutes the place had been swarming with cops. They’d stripped the place to its bones, found nothing. Now, however, they were nowhere to be seen. The place was quiet. The cops were still there, though. Somewhere out in the silent trees a team of surveillance officers surrounded the building. Eight pairs of eyes watching and waiting.

‘What’s the signal like inside?’ In a lay-by near the entrance, sheltered from the road, Caffery sat in the front seat of one of the entry team’s Sprinter vans, twisted round, his elbow on the back of the seat, quizzing the team sergeant. ‘Did the radios drop out at all?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I’m going to have a look round. Just want to be sure that if he makes an appearance I get the heads up.’

‘Fine, but you won’t find anything. You’ve seen the evidence list. Ten stolen cars, five stolen mopeds, a stack of moody numberplates and some respectable citizen’s brand-new Sony widescreen TV and a Blu-ray still in their boxes.’

‘And the unit’s Mondeo?’

The sergeant nodded. ‘And a Mondeo believed to have been taken without consent from the MCIU car park. There’s a four-by-four that – from the brake discs – has been driven in the last twenty-four hours and, apart from that, just some bits of rusting agricultural stuff in the corner. And the pigeons. It’s a giant nesting box for them.’

‘Just make sure the surveillance teams know to give me some warning.’ Caffery jumped out of the van. He checked that the radio clipped to his belt was showing a signal, pulled his coat on and raised his hand to the sergeant. ‘OK?’

The sun on the cracked driveway made the world feel almost warm for the first time in days. Even the ragwort stems that grew out of the ballast seemed to be straining upwards to the sky, as if they were aching for spring. Caffery walked quickly, head down, feeling the urge to hurry. At the side window of the building – which had just one neatly broken pane and no police tape or other signs they’d been here – he covered his hand with his coat sleeve, pushed his arm through, and unfastened the latch. He was careful as he climbed in. In just a year he’d gone through two good suits in the course of his job and wasn’t about to ruin another. He closed the window behind him, and stood, silently, looking around him.

On the inside the place looked more like a bomb bunker. The little light there was came through cracked, cloudy windows and fell in dusty squares on the floor. A single electric bulb had been strung up from a hook in the ceiling and cobwebs traced graceful rainbows from it. The cars – a range of sizes and colours – were parked in three rows facing the door. All polished and gleaming
as if they were in a showroom. Moon had gathered the rest of the stolen goods into one corner, huddled them together as if that might make them less conspicuous. The agricultural equipment lay at the far end. Beyond the cars, in the very centre of the unit, sat an old Cortina, like a prairie corpse half dismantled by vultures, its innards on show.

Caffery crossed the echoey building to the rusting ploughs. He crouched to peer into the mangled mess, making sure nothing was there. Then he made his way across to the other side of the shed and checked through the collection of stolen goods. Everywhere he went his feet crunched through pigeon droppings that formed little stalagmites. Miniature cities crumbling with every step. The Cortina must have been one of the last made. It had a vinyl roof and slatted tail-lights and had obviously been parked there for years. Cobwebs linked the opened bonnet to the chassis. Why, with all the other cars polished and gleaming, this one had been left so was anyone’s guess. Caffery went back to the other corner and, using his penknife, slit away a piece of cardboard from the box of the Sony TV. The exhibits officer would get the hump, but rather that than another suit buggered. He carried the cardboard back to the Cortina, threw it on to the floor and lay on it. He used his toes to push himself a few inches further under the car.

So that was why the Cortina hadn’t been moved.

‘Uh—’ He pulled the radio closer to his mouth. Hit the transmit button. ‘Did anyone notice the inspection pit under the car?’

There was a pause, then a rattle of static, and the sergeant’s voice: ‘Yeah, we noticed that – had one of our lads down in it.’

Caffery grunted. Patted his trouser pockets. On his key-ring he had a tiny LED torch. Meant to help find the lock on a car door at night, it didn’t throw out much of a light. Holding it down into the hole he could just make out the sides, lined with MDF panels that looked like parts of a cannibalized kitchen cabinet. He let the torch play over them for a few seconds and then, because he was the sort who never had been able to walk past an open door without looking inside, he shuffled out from under the car, turned the
cardboard so it lay lengthways along the edge of the hole, lay down on it again and rolled himself into the pit, landing with a bone-jarring thud on both feet.

It was instantly darker. The rusting Cortina above him blocked out what little light there was in the lock-up. He switched the torch on again and shone it around himself, examining the panels, the cheap oil-stained cabinet mouldings, the marks where the handles must have been. He checked the concrete floor. Stamped on it. Nothing in there. He slung the bunch of keys on to the cardboard and was just about to haul himself up when something made him stop. Carefully he pulled the keys back, crouched in the pit and held up the torch.

All the panels had been nailed to batons drilled into the concrete. But there wasn’t any good reason to line a pit like this. Unless it was to hide something. He ran his fingers along the bottom of the panel at the rear of the pit. Tugged at it. It held solid. He wriggled his knife between the panel and the baton, pulled it back and saw the gap behind it.

Caffery’s heart was thudding. Someone had said there were holes and caves under this area. It had been the guy from the Sapperton tunnel trust, briefing Flea Marley’s team. He’d said there were interconnecting tunnels and hidey-holes all over the place. A man as strong as Ted Moon could carry a four-year-old girl like Emily a long way through those tunnels. Maybe to somewhere he’d prepared. A place where he could do what he wanted undisturbed.

Caffery pulled himself out of the pit and went back to the window, turning the volume down on his radio as he did. ‘Hey.’ He leaned out of the window and hissed into the unit: ‘When your someone went into the inspection pit did they notice the boarded-up entrance?’

There was a long silence. Then: ‘Say again, sir. Think I missed something there.’

‘There’s a bloody escape hole down here. A way out of the inspection pit. Didn’t anyone notice?’

Silence.

‘Oh, Christ. Don’t answer. There is something down here. I’m going to have a look. Get someone in here, will you? Don’t have them breathing down my neck – I don’t want a hundred kilos of armed police clanking its way after me but it’d be nice to know someone’s sitting in the pit so my backside is covered.’

Another pause. Then: ‘Yeah – that’s not a problem. They’re on their way.’

‘But keep the outside as clean-looking as it has been. If Moon does turn up I don’t want him seeing the place crawling with men in black.’

‘Will do.’

Caffery crunched back through the pigeon shit and rolled himself into the hole. With the top of the panel half prised off the baton the remainder came away easily. He put the wood to one side and bent over, peering at what it had revealed.

It was a tunnel big enough for a man to get into. Even a tall man would only have to stoop a little to walk straight through. Filthy newspapers lay on the ground for as far as Caffery could see. He shone the tiny torch in: it showed a ceiling of soil buttressed with two-by-four like something out of the world’s best war movies,
The Great Escape
, maybe. The walls were about two foot wide. The construction was crude, but effective. Someone had worked very hard to build themselves a secret underground passage.

He took a few steps in, following the beam of the torch. It was warmer down here than up on the surface, the air thick with the peaty smells of plant roots. Silent and muffled too. He took a few more cautious paces, pausing every now and then to listen. When the light of the inspection pit behind him had dwindled to a small grey hole he switched off the torch and stood quite still for a while, eyes screwed tight. He concentrated on opening his ears, listening to the darkness around him.

When he was a kid, sharing a room with Ewan, they had played a game at lights out: when their mother had closed the door and gone down the creaking stairs Ewan would tiptoe across the bare floorboards and creep into bed with Jack. They’d lie
together on their backs trying not to giggle. They were too young for it to be girls they were talking about – it was dinosaurs and bogey men, and what it’d be like to be a soldier and kill someone. They tried to scare the living crap out of each other. The game was for each to tell the scariest story he could. Then he got to put his hand over his brother’s chest and feel if it had made his heart beat faster. The one whose heart beat fastest lost the round. Ewan was the oldest so usually he won. Jack had a heart like a steamhammer, a great meaty organ that would keep him alive into his nineties, the doctor said, if he didn’t pickle it in Glenmorangie. He’d never learned to keep it quiet. Now it was bounding out of his chest, racing the blood through his veins because he had the feeling, a completely unwarranted sensation, like cold water on his skin, that he wasn’t alone down there.

He looked back at the tiny point of light at the entrance. The back-up teams were on their way. He had to trust that. He clicked on the torch and shone it further into the hole. The weak beam fragmented to shadows. There was nothing here. Couldn’t be. That panel had been nailed closed. Still, he could imagine someone breathing in the darkness around him.