Gone (43 page)

‘Get out, bitch.’

‘No! No!
No!
’

But he was strong. He took her by the hair and dragged her out, her hands scrabbling at her scalp, legs kicking, frantically trying to find purchase. She got a knee wedged up under the steering-wheel and her left hand into the sill above the door, but she couldn’t hold it. With one wrench she was out, staggering, dropping once, cutting her knee through the tights. She got her fingers into his gloved hands, tried to get him to release her hair, but he dragged her backwards, ignoring her nails in his hands. She bounced her feet off the ground, kicked and screamed. He could feel little pieces of hair popping out all over her scalp as he flung her up against the front door of the house.

‘Fuck off.’ She pushed him away with all her might. ‘
Get away from me
.’

He gave her a shove, sent her staggering across the porch. Her arms went up, pinwheeled, slammed into the brick pillar, scraping the skin on her hands. Her left leg shot out, almost stopped the forward momentum, failed. She stumbled, went down, landing on her right shoulder. She rolled on to her side in time to see the man jump into the driver’s seat and start the engine. The radio came to life, pumping ‘When A Child Is Born’ into the cold air. The engine revved, a cloud of fumes shot out of the exhaust, the handbrake came off and he twisted in his seat to reverse the car rapidly out of the driveway.

The car stopped in the middle of the road just long enough for Prody to change gear, then screamed away. It was only then, with the almighty squeal of brakes rocking round the street, that any of Skye Stephenson’s neighbours realized what was happening. One or two came running out of their doors, down their paths, but it was too late. The cherry-red four-by-four had turned the corner at the end of the road and disappeared from sight.

Clare Prody didn’t wear makeup and she didn’t colour her lifeless blonde hair. She dressed nicely and plainly in neutral and pastel separates from mid-price high-street stores like Gap. Flat shoes. She looked as if she might come from the same socioeconomic bracket as Janice Costello. But then she opened her mouth and it was pure country bumpkin that came out. A Somerset girl, Bridgewater, and the furthest she’d strayed out of the area had been the train to London twice – once for
Les Mis
and once for
The Phantom
. She’d been a trainee nurse at Bristol Royal, dreaming of working with children, when Paul Prody had walked into her life. He’d married her and cajoled her into giving up work and staying at home with the two children, Robert and Josh. Paul had a good job, and Clare was dependent on him. It had taken her years of abuse to get up the courage to leave.

Caffery scrutinized her where she sat on the other side of his desk. She’d arrived at the offices wearing the first things she’d had to hand when his call came – a jogging T-shirt and khakis. For some reason she also wore a chequered blue blanket around her shoulders, clasped at her chest in bloodless fingers. It wasn’t because she was cold. It was something more. It was because she felt like a refugee. Someone in the permanent process of running away. Her face was pale, as if there wasn’t enough blood in her body, but her nose was an awful chapped red. Since she’d arrived half an hour ago she’d cried enough to break a person’s heart. She simply couldn’t believe this was happening to her. Just couldn’t believe it.

‘I can’t think of any more.’ Her eyes were fixed on the names scrawled on the whiteboard over his shoulder. Her lips were quivering. ‘I really can’t.’

‘It’s OK. Don’t push yourself. It’ll come.’

Clare had written the most comprehensive inventory of every person she could think of – anyone her husband might include in his appalling vendetta. Some of the names the team had already thought of, some they hadn’t. A few doors down the corridor a whole room of officers was frantically working through them. Getting on to the local police. Phoning direct warnings. MCIU was at its tensest ever because there wasn’t a person in the unit who wasn’t seized with the absolute conviction that Prody would strike again. And that their biggest hope lay in pinpointing his next victim. Caffery, who, because of his fury, believed he sensed Prody more keenly than anyone in the building, thought it would be soon. Very soon. This morning, maybe.

‘They were lucky.’ Clare’s eyes had travelled away from the list of names and had come to rest on the photos pinned up. She looked at Neil and Simone Blunt. At Lorna and Damien Graham. ‘So lucky.’

‘He let them off lightly.’

She gave a dry, hopeless laugh. ‘That’s Paul for you. He’s very precise. The punishment always fits the crime. If you’d really upset him you’d get it worse. He wasn’t as angry with Alysha’s mum, with Neil . . .’ she squinted at the name ‘. . . Blunt. I suppose he must have introduced himself at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, I just don’t remember. I sort of recognize his face but I would never have known his name. I do remember that day, though, because afterwards Paul was waiting for me outside. Threatened to kill me.’ She shook her head as if she still couldn’t quite fathom her own stupidity. ‘I missed it all. Jonathan Bradley used to be Robert and Josh’s
headmaster
– the boys and I even went up to Oakhill when Martha was kidnapped and left flowers outside his house and I
still
didn’t make the connection.’

‘He’s very, very clever, Clare. Your husband is very clever. Don’t blame yourself.’

‘
You
knew.
You
worked it out.’

‘Yes, but I had help. And, anyway, I’m the police. I’m supposed to make connections.’

While Caffery wished he could claim some subtle sleuth’s sleight-of-hand here, he couldn’t. It had been a simple phone call from the hospital lab, something routine, that had started the slats falling in his head. Paul Prody still hadn’t brought his shirt in to be tested. The technicians had run out of tests to do for inhalants and were starting to ask themselves if the jacker had used an oral sedative. Prody’s stomach contents would make a very welcome addition to their pipettes and beakers. After the phone call Caffery hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the clean look of Janice’s mouth in the garden yesterday. White and pink and scab-free. Unsettlingly so. And then he’d understood what it was in the photo of the safe-house kitchen that had been bugging him. It was the little line of beakers on the drainingboard. The last thing Paul Prody had done in the safe-flat was serve cocoa to the family. To Janice, her mum and Emily.

Caffery got to his feet, went to the window, where Myrtle lay on her bed, and looked out at the watery sky. He’d managed a quick rinse in the men’s, with pump-dispenser soap and handdryers, and a shave with the disposable razor he kept locked in his filing cabinet, but his suit was crumpled and somehow he still felt dirty. As if Paul Prody had crawled inside his skin. Waiting to hear was like waiting for a storm to come. Not knowing which direction it would be, which roofs the dark clouds would tower above. But he could feel Prody out there like a vibration in his skin, on this rainy winter’s day, moving nimbly around in the cold city and the countryside. Things were already happening out there: already the force had its tentacles out. They were going to find him today. And when they did they’d find Flea Marley too. Caffery was a hundred per cent sure of that awful reality. A junior DC had left the offices an hour ago to check her house and the whole of the Underwater Search Unit were being woken from their beds by the telephone team in the next office. But everyone suspected the answer lay with Prody.

‘He was a bastard to me,’ Clare said behind Caffery. ‘A bastard. I lost count of the black eyes.’

‘Yes.’ Caffery rested his fingers on the window, thinking, You’re coming to us, Prody. You’re coming. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t tell the police.’

‘I know. Of course now I can see how stupid it was, but I believed everything he told me – so did the boys. We never thought the police would help us, that’s how brainwashed we were – we thought you were like a club. All in it together and you’d never turn on your own. I was more scared of the police than I was of Paul. So were the boys. It’s just—’ She broke off. There was a moment’s silence. Then he heard her suck in a small, shocked breath.

He turned. She was staring at a point in the middle of the air, an expression of dawning horror on her face. ‘What is it?’

‘Christ,’ she said faintly. ‘Oh, Christ.’

‘Clare?’

‘Dehydration,’ she murmured. ‘Dehydration?’

‘Yes.’ She turned her eyes to him. They were glittering. ‘Mr Caffery, do you know how long it takes to die from dehydration?’

‘It depends,’ he said cautiously, coming to sit opposite her, ‘on the conditions. Why?’

‘We’d had an argument. The biggest of them all. Paul locked me in a toilet – the downstairs one where there was no window I could shout out of. He sent the boys to his mother’s and told everyone I’d gone away on holiday with friends.’

‘Go on,’ Caffery said, feeling something loosen in his chest that had been clenched from the moment he’d walked into Rose Bradley’s kitchen. ‘Go on.’

‘He switched off the water. For a while I drank from the toilet cistern, and he switched that off too.’ Her face was stark and rigid. ‘He kept me there for four days. I don’t know but I think I nearly died.’

Caffery breathed slowly and quietly. He wanted to put his head down on the desk and yell. Because he knew instinctively that
Clare was right: it was what Prody had done to Martha and Emily. Which meant they could still be alive. Just. Emily had a good chance. Martha – probably not. Caffery’d had reason, on a case back in London, to speak to doctors about dehydration and knew that, whatever the bushcraft rule said – a person could only live three days without water – the limit of life without water could be more than ten days. Martha was a child and that would limit her chances but if, as a dumb cop, he’d had to play the doctor he’d say five, maybe six days tops. If the universe was shining its good grace on her.

Six days. He looked at the calendar. She’d been gone exactly that. Six days. All but six hours.

The phone on the desk rang. Both he and Clare stared at it, immobilized. Even Myrtle sat up, ears pricked, suddenly all attention. It rang again and this time he lifted the handset. Listened, his heart thudding. He put the phone down and looked at Clare. She was gaping at him, her eyes wide.

‘Skye Stephenson.’

‘
Skye?
The solicitor?
Shit
.’

Caffery hooked his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

‘She’s got a baby. Skye’s got a baby. A little boy. I never thought of her—’

‘I’ll get you an escort. DC Paluzzi. She’ll drive you out there.’

‘Drive me where?’ Clare gripped the desk – as if to stop herself being moved. The blue blanket flopped and fell to the floor, revealing her thin shoulders in the black jogging T-shirt. ‘Where’s she driving me?’

‘Out to the Cotswolds. We think we know where he is. We think we might’ve got him.’

Outside the MCIU offices it was raining. The side turning that led from the main street to the car park was packed with vehicles. There were people on the pavement, men in suits, uniformed officers. There was an armoured Sprinter van with the back doors open. Cold blue lights turned on vehicle roofs.

Janice already knew that MCIU had figured out about Prody: at the same time as she’d been with the families, Caffery had been putting it together. But as the four of them – Janice, Nick, Cory and Rose Bradley – pulled up in the Audi, she could tell from the seriousness in the men’s faces that something more had happened. There was something terrible about the way the officers were concentrating, talking in neat, nipped sentences. Urgent. That serious intent was the worst thing for Janice. It meant it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it meant they’d got him. Found the girls.

Nick saw it too. She unclipped her belt, her face fixed. ‘Wait here.’ She got out and walked fast in the direction of the offices.

Janice hesitated, then unbuckled her seatbelt and got out. She set off across the street after Nick, her shoulders hunched in the rain, her coat half hitched up over her head. Past the vehicles, through the gates that stood wide open and into the car park. She had almost passed a long black car parked against the wall when something about it caught her eye. She came to an abrupt halt. She stood, facing ahead for a moment, motionless.

Someone was sitting in the back seat of the car. A woman. A
woman with pale hair and a sorrowful, drawn-down face. Clare Prody.

Janice turned very slowly. Clare stared back at her from behind the rain-spattered window. She had a blanket around her shoulders as if she’d been rescued from a fire, and there was pure horror in her eyes – to be face to face suddenly with Cory’s wife. With Emily’s mother.

Janice couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn away, couldn’t go forward. All she could do was stare back. Her eyes were dry – dry and sore as if they’d never close. There was nothing to say. Nothing adequate to express how it felt to be standing there wretchedly in the rain. Hopeless. Watched by the woman who was sleeping with Cory and whose husband had stolen Emily. She’d never felt so transparently weak and miserable in her life.

Her head dropped forward. She didn’t have it in her any more – even standing was too much effort. She turned to trudge back to the Audi. Behind her the window of the black car opened with a shushing sound. ‘Janice?’

She stopped. She couldn’t take another step, couldn’t turn back. Dog-tired.

‘Janice?’

Painfully she lifted her chin and twisted her head. In the car Clare’s face was so white it was almost luminous. There were black tracks on her cheeks where she’d cried her mascara off. Her expression was pinched and cloudy with guilt. She half leaned out of the window and checked quickly around the car park that no one was watching her. Then she leaned further towards Janice and whispered, ‘They know where he is.’

Janice’s mouth opened numbly. She shook her head. Not getting it. ‘What?’

‘They know where he is. They’re taking me now. I’m not supposed to be saying anything, but I know.’