The house was an unremarkable little box on a bedraggled windswept estate. For years it had been the local bobby’s, but now the force had no use for it and a weatherbeaten FOR SALE sign was planted in the unkempt garden. Today, probably for the first time in ages, there were lights on inside. The heating had even come on – the upstairs radiators and the gas fires in the living room were working. Janice had got the kettle on and made tea for everyone. Emily – who’d cried on the way over – had been allowed hot chocolate and a jelly and had cheered up. Now she was watching CBeebies in the living room, sitting on the floor and giggling along to Shawn the Sheep.
Janice and her mother watched her from the doorway.
‘She’ll be fine,’ said her mother. ‘A couple of days off school won’t hurt her. I sometimes kept you off at that age just because you were tired or grumpy. She’s only four.’ With her wide-necked Fair Isle sweater and her short, boyishly cut white hair pushed back off her tanned face, she was still beautiful. Periwinkle-blue eyes. Very soft skin that always smelt of Camay soap.
‘Mum,’ Janice said, ‘do you remember the house at Russell Road?’
Her mother raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘I think I can cast my mind back. We lived there for ten years.’
‘Do you remember the birds?’
‘The birds?’
‘You kept telling me not to have the window open in my bedroom. Of course I ignored you. I used to sit up there and throw paper planes out of it.’
‘Wasn’t the last time you disobeyed me.’
‘Well, we went away for the weekend to that campsite in Wales. The one with the cove at the bottom of the lane? I made myself sick on Opal Fruits? And when we got home there was a bird in my bedroom. It must have come in when I’d had the window open and when we shut them to go away it got trapped.’
‘I think I remember.’
‘It was still alive but it had babies in the nest outside the window.’
‘Oh, God, yes.’ Her mother put her hand to her mouth, half delighted to have this memory delivered to her, half horrified too. ‘Yes. Of course I remember. Poor little things. The poor mother. She was sitting at the window looking at them.’
Janice gave a small, sad laugh. Tears pricked the back of her eyes just thinking about the bird. At the time she’d felt sorry for the babies dead in the nest. She’d buried each one under a white pebble in the flowerbed, crying with guilt. She’d had to grow up and have her own baby to understand that the greatest suffering had been for the mother bird, watching its babies die. Not being able to do anything to help. ‘Yesterday when the car drove off I just couldn’t stop thinking about that bird.’
‘Janice.’ Her mother put an arm around her, kissed her head. ‘Sweetheart. She’s safe now. It might not be very nice here, but at least the police are looking after us.’
Janice nodded. She bit her lip.
‘Now, you make yourself another cup of something. I’m going to clean that awful bathroom.’
When she’d gone, Janice stood where she was for a long time, the door half open, her arms crossed. She didn’t want to go to the kitchen. It was tiny and depressing, and Cory was sitting in there with a cup of coffee and his iPhone, answering work emails. All morning he’d been at it. He hated having to take time off work – just hated it. He’d spent a long time muttering darkly about lost hours, about the recession, jobs being hard to come by and about ingratitude, as if he resented Janice for what had happened to them, as though she had planned the upheaval just to keep him away from work.
In the end she went upstairs to the small bedroom at the front. There were two single beds, hastily made up with sleeping-bags she and Cory had grabbed as they left the house and sheets that Nick had managed to rustle up from somewhere. She looked at the beds: it would be the first time in ages that she’d sleep on her own. Even after all this time together, and all the things they’d been through, Cory still wanted sex. In fact, if anything, he seemed to want it even more since Clare had been on the scene. Even when all Janice wanted was to lie still and silent in the dark and let dreams play out across the backs of her eyelids, she’d still let him do what he needed to. It spared her the bad moods, the veiled insinuations that she wasn’t living up to the wife he’d hoped for. But she was silent when it was happening. She never pretended to enjoy it.
Outside a car stopped. Instinctively she went to the curtain and lifted it. It was parked on the opposite side of the road, with a dog – a collie – on the back seat and DI Caffery in the front. He killed the engine and paused for a while, looking across at the house, his face expressionless. He was good-looking, any idiot woman could see that, but there was something contained and guarded in his face that made her feel out of her depth. Now he was oddly still and it dawned on her that he wasn’t just gazing into space but focusing on something in the garden. She put her head to the window-pane and glanced down. Nothing odd. Just her car parked in the driveway.
Caffery got out of his car, slammed the door and looked up and down the deserted street, as if he suspected a sniper was trained on him. Then he pulled his coat round him, crossed the road and stopped on the driveway in front of the Audi. It had been cleaned before it was returned to them – the dent on the offside front wing where the jacker had crashed it wasn’t that bad. But something about it had caught Caffery’s interest. He was studying it carefully.
She opened the window and leaned out. ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’
He turned his face up to hers. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Can I come in? We need to speak.’
‘I’ll come down.’ She pulled a sweater on over her T-shirt, jammed her feet into her boots, not bothering to zip them up, then went lightly down the stairs. Outside, in the freezing drizzle, Caffery was waiting. He was facing her, his back to the car as if he was guarding it.
‘What is it?’ she hissed. ‘You’ve got a weird look on your face. What’s wrong with the car?’
‘Is Emily OK?’
‘Yes. She’s just had her lunch. Why?’
‘You’re going to have to interrupt her. We’re moving on.’
‘Moving on? Why? We’ve only just got . . .’ And then it dawned on her. She took a step back into the shelter of the porch. ‘You’re joking. You mean he knows where we are? He’s found this place too?’
‘Can you just go inside and get Emily ready?’
‘He’s found us, hasn’t he? He’s out there, watching us now. You’re telling me he’s found us.’
‘I’m not telling you that. You’ve been very helpful so far, so, please, keep calm. Go inside and get everything packed. I’ve got an unmarked car coming down from Worle. It’s completely normal in cases like this. We move people from time to time. It’s standard practice.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
A burst of static from Caffery’s radio. He turned his back on her, pulled away his jacket and bent his head to mutter into it. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she caught a couple of words from the other person: the name of the street and ‘lowloader’. ‘You’re taking the car again. Why? What’s he done to it?’
‘Just get back inside and get your daughter ready, please.’
‘No. You tell me what it is.’ Angry now, angry enough not to care if the jacker really was out there with a bloody rifle trained on her, she stepped on to the driveway. She glanced up and down the empty street. No one. She went to the back of the Audi and crouched to inspect it, looking at it carefully, wondering what she was missing. She went around the side, not touching, but leaning close enough to pick up the smallest anomaly. It hadn’t been easy, getting into the car so soon after the jacking. Yesterday when she’d got it from the unit car park she’d found herself seeing the interior with new eyes. Trying to trace, on the handles and headrests, a shadow of the man who’d taken Emily. But there’d been nothing physically different about it. Now she went past the passenger door, around the front, past the dent in the right bumper, back past the driver’s door. She stopped where Caffery stood, arms folded. ‘Could you step back? I want to look at this bit.’