Gone (48 page)

Rose threw herself away, still screaming, her hands moving faster, like a wounded bird trying to get some lift. She took a few tottery steps forward, found she’d come to a tree, half turned as if to head off in another direction, turned again, seemed to stagger a little, then, as if she’d been shot in the knees, dropped to the ground. Her whole body folded till her forehead was touching the earth. Her hands came up and she grabbed the back of her neck as if she was trying to force her face into the ground. She rocked back and forth, bellowing into the frozen earth, a long trail of spittle drooping from her mouth and wetting the soil.

Janice came and knelt in the brambles. Her own heart was racing, but the controlled thing inside her was growing. Growing and getting harder. ‘Rose.’ She put a hand on the older woman’s back. ‘Listen.’

At her voice Rose stopped rocking and quietened.

‘Listen. We’ve got to move on. We’re in the wrong place, but there’s somewhere else. His wife’s helping us now. We’re going to find them.’

Slowly Rose raised her head. Above the little scarf her face was a jumbled knot of red flesh and mucus.

‘Really, Rose, I promise. We’ll find them. His wife’s a good person. She is and she’s going to help us.’

Rose rubbed her nose. ‘Do you think so?’ she whispered, her voice tiny. ‘Do you really think so?’

Janice took a breath and looked back at the clearing. The coroner’s van was pulling away, the officer in charge was making his way back towards the car park and the last of the teams slammed the door on their van. Something wanted to bubble up through the calm – hard and bitter and desperate – wanted to wrench itself out from the hole that would never be filled. But she swallowed it and nodded. ‘I do. Now get up. That’s it. Get up and let’s move on.’

Flea wasn’t sure what they’d put in the drip but she knew she’d give half a year’s wages for another shot of it. She tried to say that to the paramedic who locked down her trolley in the helicopter, tried to yell it at him as the rotors started. Maybe he’d heard it all before or maybe she still wasn’t making any sense when she spoke, because he just smiled, nodded and gestured for her to keep still and lie back. So she stopped trying. She lay and watched the way the webbing inside the helicopter’s roof vibrated and merged. Smelt the fresh blue air coming in through the hatch. Aviation fuel and sunlight.

Her eyes closed. She drifted back into the dream. Let it fold itself around her like white wings. She was just a dot in the sky. A pirouetting dandelion seed. Above her the sky was cloudless. Below her the land spread out with its English patchwork of colours. No shadows on it. Just dreamless greens and browns. She saw a forest. Thick and plush. Small clearings with deer grazing in them. She saw people down there. Some picnicking. Some standing in groups. Among the cracked greenish trunks of ash trees that lined a track, she saw three women walking towards a car park: one woman was in oilskin, one in a pink scarf and one in a green coat. The woman in the green coat had no shoes on. She had her arm around the one in the scarf. They both walked with their heads so low they looked as if they might topple over at any minute.

Flea twisted away. She floated across the tops of the trees. She
saw the top of the air shaft, cinders floating gently around it. From her vantage-point she could see all the way into the tunnel. Could hear noises. A child crying. And it came back to her. Martha’s body. In the pit. It was still there. Something had to be done about it.

She lifted her head. Looked around herself – saw police cars and vehicles leaving the area. Saw the miles and miles of roads stretching away into the distance like a bleached yellow spider’s web sprawled out across the winter land. On the lane that snaked away towards the big motorway in the south, bleak sunlight flashed off the roof of a car. Tiny – like a Tonka toy. She fixed her eyes on it and swivelled to face it, waiting for the elemental force to come and take her. It took her by the shoulders and slid her head first across the air, through the clouds. The fields and the trees rushed away beneath her, she saw the road, closed in on it until she could see the fabric of it, its very grain, moving fast. Up ahead she saw the top of the car. The wind was visible like quicksilver, undulating over the car roof as she neared. It was a plain silver Mondeo. The sort some of the specialist units used. She slowed, got level with the car, and drifted down. Hovered next to the passenger window, her hand resting on the wing mirror.

Inside there were two men wearing suits. The one who was driving she recognized vaguely, but it was the man sitting nearest her in the passenger seat – a distant expression on his face – who got her attention. Jack. Jack Caffery. The only man in the world who could burst her heart into pieces with just a look.

‘Jack?’ She put her face to the window. Knocked on it. He didn’t turn. Just sat, staring, his head moving slackly with the motion of the car. ‘
Jack
.’

He didn’t respond. His face was so defeated, so lacking in energy or hope, he looked as if he could cry at any moment. He wore body armour over a shirt and tie and there was blood on his sleeves. He must have tried to wipe some of it off, but he’d missed places. Little rusty lines circled his wrists. She pushed her face through the glass. Nuzzled it gently in through the melting milky translucence until she was in the car itself, smelling
the thick, overheated air. The combination of aftershave, sweat and exhaustion. She put her lips against his ear. Felt the faint burr of his hair against her nose. ‘She’s under the tunnel floor,’ she whispered. ‘He dug down. Put her in a pit. A
pit
, Jack. A pit.’

Caffery put his finger in his ear. Wiggled it.

‘A pit, that’s what I said. A pit in the floor of the canal.’

Caffery couldn’t get rid of the sound of Prody’s wheezing. His death rattle. It wouldn’t go away. It kept buzzing in his right ear. He poked at his ear, rubbed it. Shook his head. But it was as if someone was sitting close to him, hissing at him.

‘Pit.’ The word came at him suddenly. ‘A pit.’

Turner shot him a sideways look. ‘Do what, Boss?’

‘A pit.
A pit
. A fucking pit.’

‘What about it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sat forward, looking out of the window at the road markings racing under them. The sun flashed blindingly into his eyes. His head was moving again. Fast this time. Really fast. Pit. He tested the word in his mouth. Wondered why it had appeared completely formed in his head.
Pit
. A hole in the ground. A place to hide things. Search teams were trained to do a 360-degree sweep. He’d been caught out by that before. Looking everywhere except
up
. The way they hadn’t looked up to find Prody in the tunnel. But looking
down
. Looking further than the ground beneath your feet, looking
through
it. That was something he’d never thought of.

‘Boss?’

Caffery drummed his fingers on the dashboard. ‘Clare said her sons were scared to death of the police.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘Somehow he’d made them think the police were their enemies. The last people to turn to.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘What’s the first thing the team yelled when they went into the tunnel?’

‘The first thing they yelled? I dunno. Probably “Police”, yeah. That’s what they’re supposed to do, isn’t it?’

‘Where was Prody when the teams searched the tunnel?’

Turner gave Caffery a strange look, as if he’d grown an extra head. ‘He was in the tunnel, Boss. He was with them.’

‘Yeah. And what was he doing all that time?’

‘He was . . .’ Turner shook his head. ‘I dunno. Where’s this going? He was dying, I guess.’

‘Think about it. He was
breathing
. And loud. You heard it. No one could get away from that sound. It didn’t stop from the time of the explosion to the time they came out. You wouldn’t have been able to hear anything else down there.’

‘They searched the tunnel, Boss. They searched it. The girls weren’t there. Whatever you’re thinking I don’t know how you got to it.’

‘I don’t know how either, Turner, but it’s time you turned this car round.’

Janice didn’t know how her body would stand this. Her bones and muscles felt like water. She thought her head might explode with the pressure. She stood with her back to the trunk of a silver birch, holding Rose’s hand, both of them staring blankly at the clearing. Everything was different. It was no longer the despondent, silent place they’d left half an hour ago. Now the area around the shaft was crawling with people: officers were yelling at each other, equipment that had been packed away was being hastily unpacked. Another medical helicopter had landed and was sitting with its rotors motionless in the clearing. Two pulley tripods had been set up and two men had been lowered into the shaft. Janice knew the burrowing and panicked shouting that must be happening in the darkness a hundred feet below, but what she really couldn’t take were the worried expressions on the surface. That awful bloody seriousness. Nick stood a little in front of Rose and Janice, her hands in her pockets, her face grave. It had been Nick who, driving Janice’s Audi back along the A419, had noticed cars coming fast in the other direction, sunlight reflecting off their windscreens. She’d recognized them as unmarked unit cars and knew what it meant. She’d swung the Audi into a lay-by, three-point-turned across two lanes of traffic and floored it back up the road after the cars. This time no one had tried to stop the women coming to watch. No one seemed to have the time.

‘Stretchers,’ Nick said suddenly. ‘Two stretchers.’

Janice stiffened. She and Rose jerked their heads forward as four paramedics came across the clearing at a trot. Their faces were flat, focused. They gave nothing away. ‘Stretchers?’ Her heart began to thump deafeningly. ‘Nick? What does that mean? Stretchers? What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does it mean they’re alive? They wouldn’t send stretchers in if they were dead. Would they?’

Nick was silent, biting her lip.

‘Would they, Nick? Would they?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘Those are more paramedics going into the shaft,’ she hissed. ‘What does that mean? Tell me what it means.’

‘I don’t know, Janice – I promise. Please don’t get your hopes up. It might be for one of the search team.’

The hard centre that Janice had kept rigid till now gave way with a soft, exhausted slump. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, twisting to Rose, her throat tight, ‘Rose, I can’t do it.’

It was Rose’s turn to be strong. She caught Janice around the waist, taking her weight as she leaned heavily against her.

‘I’m sorry, Rose, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’ Rose got her steady, lifted Janice’s arms over her own shoulders. She dropped her forehead so it touched the other woman’s. ‘It’s OK. I’ve got you. Just keep breathing. That’s it. Slowly. Keep breathing.’

Janice did as she was told, feeling the cold air come through her nose and down into her lungs. Tears ran down her face. She didn’t try to stop them, just let them trickle off her chin and splash into the dead leaves at her feet. Nick came to stand behind the two women and rested her hands on their backs. ‘God, Janice,’ she muttered. ‘I wish I could do more. Just wish I could do more for you both.’

Janice didn’t answer. She could smell Nick’s perfume and the rich, woody odour of her oilskin jacket. She could smell Rose’s breath and hear her heart thumping. That heart, she thought, feels the same as mine does. Two human hearts pressed one to the other. Each one aching in the same way. There were embroidered
flowers on Rose’s sweater. Roses. Roses for Rose. There had been roses on the wallpaper in the house at Russell Road. She remembered lying in bed as a child and fixing her eyes on the pattern, willing it to make her sleep. Thank God for you, Rose, she thought. Thank God you exist.

Someone was shouting.

‘OK,’ said Nick. ‘Something’s happening.’

Janice’s face jolted up, her mouth open. The pulley systems were moving. Caffery was there, about fifty yards away, his back to them. A man wearing a blue headset stood close to him, one earphone lifted, and Caffery was leaning into it, listening to whatever was being said. Everyone else was standing at the hole, peering down into it. They were pulling something up. No doubt about it. Caffery’s body tightened – she saw it, even from behind. This was it. It really was happening. Her hands tightened on Rose’s shoulders.

Caffery pulled away from the man, his face ashen. He shot a look over his shoulder at the women, saw them watching and turned back hurriedly so they couldn’t see his expression. Janice felt her insides crumble, her legs buckle. A rushing sensation flooded her chest, as if she was freefalling, dropping fast out of the blue. This was it. They were dead. She knew it. He was taking a moment or two to straighten his tie. He did up his jacket and smoothed his hands down it, took a deep breath, pulled his shoulders up and turned to them. He walked woodenly, and when he got close to them Janice saw his skin was grey under his eyes.

‘Let’s sit down.’

They sat in a rough circle, the three women on the trunk of a fallen tree, Caffery on its stump opposite them. Janice sat with her hands in her hair, her teeth chattering. Caffery put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, looking at the women intently. Nick couldn’t take this either – she dropped her eyes to the ground.

‘I’m sorry it took us so long to find your girls. I’m sorry you’ve had such a long wait.’

‘Say it,’ Janice said. ‘Please. Just say it.’

‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Prody made a pit. Under the side
of the canal. It’s quite small, covered with corrugated iron and in it we found a travel trunk. He put them in there, both of them, and they’re…’

‘
Please, God
,’ Janice whispered. ‘
Please, God
.’

He gave her a broken, apologetic look. ‘They’re very sad. They’re very scared and very hungry. And above everything they want their mums.’

Janice leaped up, her heart thumping.

‘
Janice
, wait. Let the doctors—’