Dear Mummy of Martha,
I am sure Martha would of wanted me to get in touch with you though it’s not like she’s said or anything. She’s not very TALKATIVE at the moment. She has told me she likes BALLET DANCING and DOGS, but you and I know very well that girls of this age lie all the time. THEY ARE LIARS. See what I think is I think she likes other things. Not like she’s going to admit that to you now, of course. She LOVED the things I did to her last night. I wish you could of seen her face.
But then she turns around and lies to me. You should see her face when she does that. Ugly don’t even come near it. Luckily now I have REARRANGED things in that department. She looks much better now. But please, Martha’s Mummy please can you find it in your heart to do me a kindly favour???? Pretty please? Can you tell the police cunts that they can’t stop me now so don’t bother. It’s started now, hasn’t it, and it ain’t going to stop just sudden. Is it now?
Is it?
The Walking Man finished reading. He looked up.
‘Well?’
‘Take it away from me.’ He thrust the letter at Caffery. His eyes had changed. They were bloodshot and dead.
Caffery returned it to his pocket. He repeated, ‘Well?’
‘If I was really a seer or a clairvoyant this would be the time I would tell you where that child is. I would tell you now and I would tell you to use whatever powers you have to get to her, whatever the cost to your life and profession, because that person,’ he jabbed a finger towards the pocket where the letter was, ‘is cleverer than any of the others you’ve brought to me.’
‘Cleverer?’
‘Yes. He’s laughing at you. Laughing that you think you can outsmart him, you petty Bow Street Runners with your truncheons and your dunce’s hats. He is so much more than he seems.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know.’ He unfurled his bedroll and laid it out. He began to arrange the sleeping-bag. His face was hard. ‘Don’t ask me more – don’t waste your time. For the love of God, I’m not a psychic. Just a man.’
Caffery took another swig of cider and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He studied the Walking Man’s face as he got ready for bed. Cleverer than any of the others. He thought about what the jacker had said: It’s started now, hasn’t it, and it ain’t going to stop just sudden. Is it now? He knew what the words meant: he was going to do it again. He was going to choose another car at random: any car, any driver. The only important thing would be the child in the back seat. A girl. Under twelve. He was going to steal her. And all Caffery had to go on was that it would, in all likelihood, happen within a radius of ten miles from Midsomer Norton.
After a long time of staring at the darkness on the edge of the firelight, Caffery picked up a foam mattress and unrolled it. He got out his sleeping-bag and settled on his back, the bag tucked around him to keep out the cold. The Walking Man grunted, and did the same. Caffery looked at him for a while. He knew he wouldn’t speak again tonight: it was the end of the conversation and from that moment on not another word would be uttered. He was right: they lay in their respective sleeping-bags, looking at their own section of the sky, thinking about their own worlds and how they were going to battle through what life brought them in the next twenty-four hours.
The Walking Man slept first. Caffery stayed awake for several hours, listening to the night, wishing the Walking Man was wrong, that clairvoyance or a supernatural power did exist and that it was possible to divine, just from the noises out there, what had become of Martha Bradley.
12
When Caffery woke, aching and frozen, the Walking Man was gone. He must have got up and dressed in the dark, leaving nothing but the blackened fire and a plate with two bacon sandwiches on it next to Caffery’s bedroll. It was a hazy day. Cold again. An arctic breath in the air. He waited a few minutes for his head to clear, then got up. He ate the sandwiches standing in the field, chewing thoughtfully and looking down at the patch of earth where the Walking Man had planted the bulb. He cleaned the plate with grass, packed up his bedroll and stood again with the things under his arm, studying the way the land lay: the fields stretching away, grey and dull at this time of year, bisected and criss-crossed with hedgerow. Although he knew little about the Walking Man’s movements, he did know there was always a place near by, a protected place, that he could store a few things: things to be used the next time he passed. Sometimes that place was as far as half a mile from the camp.
The clue came from the grass: grey and stiff with frost. The Walking Man’s footsteps were black, leading clearly away from the campsite. Caffery half smiled. If he hadn’t been meant to follow them, those footsteps wouldn’t be visible. The Walking Man never left anything to chance. Caffery set off, stepping carefully inside them, surprised to find his feet fitted exactly.
The footsteps stopped a third of a mile away at the far end of the next field and there, tucked secretly in the hedgerow, was the usual assortment of supplies covered with polythene: tinned food, a cooking pot, a flagon of scrumpy. Caffery tucked in the bedroll and the plate and secured the polythene around everything. When he straightened to leave he noticed something: about a yard along the hedgerow, tight under the hawthorn, a tiny patch of ground had been disturbed. When he crouched next to it and gently moved away the earth he found the bruised, tender tip of a crocus bulb.
Every person in the world had habits – Caffery thought later that morning as he pulled into a pub car park six miles away in Gloucestershire – from the obsessive compulsive who had to count every pea he ate, every light switch he touched, down to the drifter who seemed to have no aim and no direction yet could always find a good place to make camp and sleep. Everyone moved in patterns to some degree or another. Those patterns might be all but invisible, even to the persons themselves, but they were there, nonetheless. The Walking Man’s patterns, the places he stopped, the places he planted crocuses, were slowly revealing themselves to Caffery. And the jacker? Caffery turned off the engine and opened the door, looked at the police vehicles: the forensics van, the four Sprinters belonging to the search units. Well, the jacker had patterns too. And they’d become clear. Given time.
‘Sir?’ The police search adviser – the POLSA – a small guy with neat John Lennon glasses, appeared next to the car. ‘A word?’
Caffery followed him across the car park and through a low stone doorway into a room the landlord had set aside for the police to use. The games room, it smelt of stale beer and bleach. The pool table had been pushed to one side and replaced with a row of chairs; the dartboard was invisible behind a flip-chart stand where a series of photographs had been mounted.
‘The briefing’s in ten – and it’s going to be a nightmare. This area the soil man’s given us – it’s massive.’
Every forensic test known to man had been thrown at the Bradleys’ Yaris. There were signs of a struggle in the back seat – the upholstery had been torn and there were strands of Martha’s pale blonde hair in a window seal, but the car hadn’t yielded any fingerprints that didn’t match a member of the Bradley family. The latex gloves, of course. No blood either and no semen. But there had been soil lodged in the treads of the tyres and an expert in forensic soil analysis had spent the night analysing the samples. He had put it together with how many miles the Bradleys estimated had gone on the clock, and decided there was only one place a car could have picked up a soil signature so unique: before the jacker had dumped it in Wiltshire he’d stopped somewhere out here in the Cotswolds, somewhere within a radius of about ten kilometres from this pub. Half the police force, it seemed, from the vehicles in the car park, had descended on the area.