‘I can drive.’
‘Not the way this driver can.’
Janice was quiet. She looked at the blind. At the darkness beyond it. ‘You mean he can do evasive driving, don’t you? You think he might have followed us here?’
‘I wish I knew.’ Caffery picked up the phone. ‘Go and wait with Emily. Go on. Give her a hug.’
33
The team did a sweep of the rainy streets outside the offices and found nothing. No cars loitering. No dark-blue Vauxhalls, registration ending in WW. No one taking off at the sight of the cops and gunning it down the high road. Of course, there wouldn’t be. The jacker was too sharp for anything so predictable. The Costellos were calmed down and given a safe-house, this one down in Peasedown St John, thirty or more miles away from the Bradleys. A specialist driver turned up and drove the family car for them. He called Caffery half an hour later to say they were settled – Nick and a local PC putting on a protective show for them.
When Caffery sat and thought about it – about just how the hell the jacker had found the family – the headache that had dogged him all morning ratcheted up a notch. He wanted to close the blinds, switch off the lights and curl up on the floor next to the dog. The jacker was like a virus, changing and evolving at a terrifying rate, and Caffery couldn’t get all the unanswered questions to stop screaming at him. He had to turn away from it. Just for a while.
He took the yellow box file back to the review team – told them in future to let him know before they passed it out to anyone under inspector rank. Then he put Myrtle into the car and drove out through the miserable suburbs, along the ring road, with its soulless industrial estates and hypermarkets, past the multiplexes with their tinsel Christmas trees mounted above the billboards. He stopped in Hewish, where the jets flew low over the Somerset Levels, and parked outside a breaker’s yard.
‘Stay there,’ he told the dog. ‘And don’t cause trouble.’
Back in his probationary days in London one of the duties Caffery had liked least had been spot checks on the Peckham scrap-dealers. The sheer quantities of stolen metal that got fenced through the yards were awesome – lead from churches, phosphor bronze from lathes and ships, even cast-iron street manhole covers. In the last ten years the role had been passed to the local authorities so he had no authority in the yards now. Didn’t matter. The car that had hit Misty Kitson needed to be in the crusher, out of harm’s way.
He stopped just inside the gates and looked at the low light on the frosted mountains of metal, the huge hydraulic crusher crouched in the middle. In the distance the towering carcasses of scrapped cars rose like intricate metal termite mounds against the flat grey sky. The car he wanted was at the front of a pile of five shells stacked one on top of another. He picked his way towards it and stood for a while next to it in the freezing cold. A silver Ford Focus. He knew it well. The front end was destroyed, the engine block and the firewall crumpled. The engine was beyond repair – no one would be taking that for the reconditioned market. All that was keeping the car sitting there, waiting quietly for the end, were the other bits and pieces that could be scavenged: sills, door handles, instrument panels. Its decomposition had been slow so far. Caffery came here every week to check it, buying a door or a seat to speed its journey to the crusher. Nothing too obvious, though. He didn’t want to draw attention to it.
He ran a gloved hand over the crumpled bonnet, up the shattered windscreen and on to the roof. He let his fingers trail down into the familiar dent. He knew it like the back of his hand. He pictured Misty’s head colliding with it, bursting red in the night. Pictured her flying over the bonnet on a lonely country lane, making contact with the roof. A sloppy bag of slack muscle and bone by the time she hit the tarmac. Already dead, neck broken.
A German shepherd on a chain barked noisily as Caffery approached the reception building. Outside were parked three four-by-fours: Andy’s Asphalt and Fascias, their flanks said. Tiring and familiar to him. Still a cop wasn’t even supposed to think the word ‘pikey’. The job slang, with its way of getting round any obstacle, had shifted its terminology to TIB. Call them TIBs and they’d never know you were calling them thieving itinerant bastards. The TIB who owned the scrapyard was about as much the stereotype as you could get and not be in a cartoon: overweight, grease-stained overalls, a diddicoy ring in his ear. He sat behind the desk, a two-bar fire warming his legs, playing penny bets on the filthy, oil-stained computer. When Caffery came in he killed the screen and twisted round in the chair. ‘What can I do you for, mate?’
‘A tailgate. Ford Focus, Zetec. Silver.’
The man pushed himself off the chair and stood, hands on his sides, to peer up at the rows and rows of car parts ranked on the huge Dexion shelves mounted above the desk. ‘I’ve got a couple up there. Can do you either of them for a ton.’
‘OK. But I’ll have it from a car out on the yard.’
The owner turned. ‘One from out on the yard?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘But these are already cut.’
‘Don’t care. I want it from out in the yard.’
The TIB frowned. ‘Have you been in here before? Do I know you?’
‘Come on.’ Caffery held the door open. ‘I’ll show you.’
Disgruntled, the man came out from behind the desk, pulling on a stained fleece and following him out into the yard. They stood next to the silver Focus, their breath steaming white in the freezing air.
‘Why this one? I’ve got dozens of Focus tailgates inside. Silver ones too. The Focus is my biggest seller. It’s a clit car.’
‘A what?’
‘A clit car. Every cunt’s got one. And for me they’re arse cars too, because I’ve got them coming out my arse. Clits coming out me arse. I’m a biological marvel.’ He gave a phlegmy laugh. Stopped when Caffery didn’t join in. ‘But you want this one, you’re looking at another thirty on top. You want something specific you’ve got to pay for your tastes. With the merchandise inside, I don’t have to do anything, just pass them over to you. This one, I’ve got to get the boys out with the cutting torch.’
‘They’re going to do it anyway. Eventually.’
‘A hundred and thirty or walk away.’
Caffery looked at the dent in the roof. He wondered if he should warn Flea about Prody. He didn’t know what he’d say, how he’d go about it. ‘A hundred for the tailgate,’ he said. ‘But when you’ve taken it off I want to watch you crush the car.’
‘It’s not ready for crushing.’
‘Yes, it is. If the tailgate goes there’s nothing else. The gearbox has gone, the offside headlamp, the seats, the wheels, even the trims. Take the tailgate away and the car’s ready for the chomper.’
‘The seatbelts.’
‘Nothing special about them. No one’ll want those. Throw them in with the tailgate for a ton. There’s a nice man.’
The TIB gave him a sly look. ‘I know what your sort would call me in private. You call me a TIB. A thieving itinerant bastard. But the thing is you’re wrong. I might be itinerant but I’m not thieving – and I’m not thick either. And in my world when someone asks me to crush a car it makes alarm bells go off.’
‘In my world if someone bothers to cut cars up and stack the parts in a shed without getting any orders that makes alarms go off. Why the tidy lines inside? Why did you bother cutting them up before you knew they’d be wanted? And where are the shells? I know what happens in your midnight crushing sessions. I know how many VIN numbers get mashed up of a night out here.’
‘Who the fuck are you? I’ve seen you round here before, haven’t I?’
‘Just crush the car, OK?’
The man opened his mouth, then closed it. He shook his head. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What is the world coming to?’
34