Gone (45 page)

Caffery shook his head. ‘You?’

‘No.’

‘So what are we supposed to think about that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Wellard put a finger to his throat. Swallowed. ‘But, uh, look, what I do know is the tunnel. I do know about that. I’ve been down there before, I’ve got the schematics. That shaft he’s gone down is between two rockfalls. He’s a rat in a trap down there. Really. No way out.’

They turned expectantly to the Bronze commander. He unbuckled his helmet and used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

‘I’m not sure. He’s not responding to our challenges.’

Caffery laughed. ‘What? Someone with a megaphone yelling at him? Course he won’t.’

‘Best to establish communications first. Bring in a negotiator. His wife’s on her way, isn’t she?’

‘Fuck the negotiations. Get a rope-access team in there now.’

‘I can’t do that. It’s not that simple – we need risk assessments.’

‘Risk assessments? Do me a fucking favour. The suspect knows the area – we think he brought one of the vics here. She could still be alive. Tell that to your Silver and Gold. Use the words “grave and immediate danger”. They’ll get the drift.’

He pushed past the commander, headed along the track, his feet squelching in the mud, cracking the ice on the puddles. He’d gone a few yards when a noise louder than the helicopter, the dogs and the megaphone put together lifted from under his feet. The ground seemed to move beneath them. The bare branches quivered with the shock and a few dry leaves fluttered down. A flock of rooks took to the air, cawing.

In the silence that followed, the three men stood facing the air shaft. There was a pause, then, from inside the trees, dogs began to howl. A high-pitched, terrified sound.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Caffery turned and looked back down the track at Wellard and the commander. ‘What the
fuck
was that?’

Janice switched off the Audi engine and looked at the crowded pub car park. It was full of response cars and specialist trucks. There were people everywhere, moving around, their faces grim, their breath steaming the air. From somewhere over the forest came the din of a helicopter.

‘The team will want us to stay here.’ Nick peered out of the windscreen at a track that disappeared into the woods. ‘They won’t want us any nearer than this.’

‘Won’t they?’ Janice took the keys out of the ignition and pocketed them. ‘I see.’

‘Janice,’ Nick said warningly, ‘I’m supposed to stop you doing this. You’ll get yourselves arrested.’

‘Nick,’ Janice said patiently, ‘you are lovely. You are one of the loveliest people I have ever met, but you haven’t got a clue about this. Whatever your training, you don’t even know the half of it. You can’t until it happens to you. Now,’ she held her gaze, eyebrows raised, ‘are you going to help us or are we on our own?’

‘I’d lose my job.’

‘Then, stay here in the car. Lie. Say we escaped. Whatever. We’ll back you up.’

‘We will,’ said Rose. ‘Stay here. We’ll be OK.’

No one spoke for a few moments. Nick looked from Rose to Janice and back again. Then she zipped up her oilskin jacket and wound a scarf around her neck. ‘You bastards. You’ll need me if you’re going to do it properly. Come on.’

The three women headed down the track, the deafening clackclack-clack of the helicopter over the trees blotting out the sound of their footsteps as they ran. Janice’s shoes were the court heels she’d put on that morning in a vague attempt to look presentable for the meeting at her sister’s. Completely unsuitable, she had to half hobble along the path trying desperately to keep up with Nick, who wore flat walking boots as if she’d been prepared for this all along. Next to Janice, Rose puffed away, moving like a sturdy carthorse, her hands in the pockets of her neat woollen jacket, her face grim and old. The little pink scarf bobbed around her neck.

They came round the bend in the track and saw the first cordon – a line of tape suspended across the track. Beyond it orange tread-plates on the ground leading into the trees. A loggist stood on duty. Nick didn’t stop moving. She turned to face Rose and Janice, trotting backwards in front of them, shouting above the noise of the helicopter. ‘Listen. Whatever happens, let me do the talking. ‘Kay?’

‘Yes,’ they shouted. ‘Yes.’

They slowed to a fast walk. Nick pulled out her warrant card and held it out at face height. ‘DC Hollis, MCIU,’ she shouted, as they approached. ‘Relatives coming through. Mrs Bradley, Mrs Costello.’ The loggist took a step forward, frowned at her card. ‘The cordon log, please.’ Nick snapped her fingers. ‘We’re in a hurry.’

He fumbled out the clipboard, unsnapped a pen and held it out to them. ‘No one said anything,’ he began, as the women gathered round to sign. ‘I was told no one past this point. I mean, we don’t usually let relatives—’

‘DI Caffery’s orders.’ Nick handed him back the pen and pushed the clipboard at him. ‘If I don’t get them there in the next five my head’s going to be on the block.’

‘They definitely won’t let you past the inner cordon,’ he shouted after them, as they headed off. ‘There’s been an explosion. You really can’t go past that one . . .’

The helicopter banked away, rattling off into the distance,
leaving the woods . . . quiet, the only noise the sound of their footsteps and breathing. They continued down the track, slower now as they tried to balance on the uneven tread-plates. Janice’s lungs were sore with the effort. The trail led them straight past the CSI team, who didn’t look up from swabbing and taping Skye Stephenson’s car to watch the three women pass. As they got further into the wood Janice became aware of black smuts floating down through the trees, like dark fairies. She kept glancing up at them as she walked. An explosion? What sort of explosion?

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?’

Slowly the image became clear. The spot on the camera cast a circle of jerky light illuminating whatever it came near. The first image was of a dripping wall, ancient and moss-covered. Then the camera turned slightly so the spot glinted off dark water in the canal, picking out a few submerged shapes. Everyone was silent. They all expected any of the humps to be Martha or Emily. Minutes passed as the camera trawled the canal. Five. Ten. The sun went behind clouds. A flock of crows left the branches overhead, stretching their black wings like hands across the sky. Eventually the camera operator shook his head.

‘Nothing. The place looks empty.’

‘
Empty?
Then, where’s that fucking noise coming from?’

‘Not the canal itself. Nothing on the floor or in the canal. It’s empty.’