At the top a large room was heated by a paraffin stove, and crowded with cheap MFI furniture and pictures. The team swarmed all over it, dragging out sofas, checking behind curtains and on top of a large cupboard. Wellard held up a hand flat – the unit’s signal for a clear. He pointed at the kitchen. They searched and cleared it. They continued down the corridor, switching on lights, past the bathroom: ‘I’d do them a favour and open a fucking window if I didn’t think he’d use it as any excuse to leg it,’ Wellard muttered, under his breath. They cleared the second bedroom and arrived outside a flimsy veneer door at the end of the corridor.
‘Ready?’ Wellard murmured to Caffery. He nodded to the bottom of the door, getting Caffery to register there was no light coming from under it. ‘This is it.’
‘Right – but remember. Expect the unexpected.’
Wellard turned the knob, pushed the door open a crack and stepped back. ‘Police,’ he said loudly. ‘We are the police.’
Nothing happened so he pushed the door wider with his foot, reached in and clicked on the light.
‘Police!’
He waited again. The team stood in the corridor with their backs to the wall, sweat on their foreheads, only their eyes moving, darting around, coming back to Wellard’s face. When there was no answer from inside Wellard gave them a signal and pushed the door wide. Immediately the team ran in, adopting the defensive stance behind their shields. From where Caffery stood in the hallway he could see the vague reflection of a room on their polycarbonate visors. A window, curtains open. A bed. No more. Behind the reflection, the officers’ eyes flicked back and forth, assessing what was in front of them.
‘Duvet,’ an officer mouthed to Wellard.
He leaned into the crack in the door and shouted, ‘Throw the duvet off, please, sir. Please throw the duvet on to the floor in front of my officers so they can see it.’
There was a pause, then the soft sound of it falling. Caffery could see it on the floor – a dingy cover with a geometric design.
‘Sir?’ The nearest man relaxed his hold on the shield a little. ‘It’s a compliant. You can come in.’
‘A compliant,’ Wellard told Caffery, pulling his quickcuffs from his body armour. ‘You can do the caution.’ He shouldered the door aside and paused when he saw what was inside the room. ‘Uh.’ He turned to Caffery. ‘Maybe you need to come in.’
Caffery put a hand on the door and stepped cautiously inside. The bedroom was small and smelt stale. Men’s clothing was scattered everywhere. There was a cheap chest of drawers with a smeared mirror. But it was the man who lay on the bed that was drawing everyone’s eyes. He was mountainous – and naked. He probably weighed close to thirty stone. His hands were at his sides and he was shaking as if an electric current was going through him. A high-pitched whine, a kind of stridor, came from his mouth.
‘Richard Moon?’ Caffery held up his card. ‘Are you Richard Moon?’
‘That’s me,’ he wheezed. ‘It’s me.’
‘It’s nice to meet you, sir. Do you mind if we have a chat?’
40
Janice insisted that Nick let them go shopping. She couldn’t sit around any more without some home comforts. She got the joint credit card out, and Nick drove them to Cribbs Causeway. She bought sheets, duvets and a Cath Kidston teapot in John Lewis and a carrier bag of cleaning equipment from a pound store at the end of the mall. Then they trailed around Marks & Spencer, buying anything that took their fancy: nightgowns for Janice’s mother, slippers with pompoms for Emily, a lipstick and a cardigan for Janice. Nick found a ‘Juicy’ T-shirt she liked and Janice insisted on buying it for her. They went into the food hall and loaded their baskets with exotic tea bags, Eccles cakes, a punnet of cherries, half a salmon she’d cook tonight with dill sauce. It was good, seeing the bright lights, the shoppers with their colourful clothes. Made her feel Christmas might be quite good this year.
When they got back to the little flat a man in a charcoal suit was waiting for them in a blue Peugeot. As Nick pulled up he got out, holding up his warrant card. ‘Mrs Costello?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I’m DC Prody, MCIU.’
‘I thought I recognized you. How are you?’
‘All right.’
Her smile faded. ‘What? Why are you here?’
‘I’ve come to see if you’ve settled in.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that all?’
‘Can I come in?’ he said. ‘It’s cold out here.’
She gave him a long, thoughtful look. Then she handed him a carrier bag and made for the front door.
The central heating was on and the flat was warm. While Emily helped Nick and Janice’s mother unload the shopping, Janice put on the kettle. ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ she told Prody. ‘I’ve been desperate for a decent cup and now I’m going to have one. Emily’s got some reading to do – she can do that with my mum while you sit down with me and tell me what’s happening. Because I’m not stupid. I know something’s changed.’
When she’d made the tea they went into the front room. It bordered on pleasant, with a modern brushed stainless-steel gas fire, a sea-grass carpet and clean furniture. A table near the window bore a bowl of silk flowers. Corny, but it made the place feel as though someone had actually spent some time on it. It was a little musty and cold but with the fire on it soon warmed up.
‘Well?’ Janice unloaded the cakes and the Cath Kidston teapot from the tray and arranged them on the table. ‘Are you going to tell me, or are we going to have a little dance first?’
Prody sat down, his face serious. ‘We know who it is.’
Janice paused. Her mouth was suddenly dry. ‘That’s good,’ she said carefully. ‘That’s very good. Does it mean you’ve got him?’
‘I said we know who it is. That’s a very significant step.’
‘That’s not what I want to hear – it’s not what I was hoping to hear.’ She finished unloading the tray, filled their cups with tea, handed him a plate and put a cake on her own. She sat down and looked at it, then put the plate back on the table. ‘So? Who is he? What does he look like?’
Prody reached into his pocket and brought out a folded sheet of paper. At the top left-hand corner there was a photograph of a man – the sort taken in photo-booths. ‘Ever seen him before?’
She expected the face to bring with it some emotional punch, but no: he just looked like an ordinary bloke. A chubby guy in his twenties, his hair cut very short and a constellation of spots at either corner of his mouth. She saw the neckline of a khaki T-shirt. She was about to hand the paper back to Prody when she noticed some details on the form. ‘Avon and Somerset’, it said. ‘What’s this? Some kind of arrest . . .’ she trailed off. She’d just seen the words ‘POLICE STAFF’ at the bottom.
‘I may as well tell you, because you’ll find out eventually, that he works for us. He’s a handyman.’
She put a hand to her throat. ‘He’s a . . . He works for you?’
‘Yes. One of our part-time staff.’
‘Is that how he put the device on our car?’
Prody nodded.
‘Christ. I can’t . . . Did you know him?’
‘Not really – I saw him around the place. He painted my office.’
‘You spoke to him, then?’
‘A few times.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no excuse – I was a prat. My mind was elsewhere.’
‘And what was he like?’
‘Unremarkable. Didn’t stand out in a crowd.’
‘What do you think he’s done to Martha?’
Prody folded the paper. Once, twice, three times, making the creases very neat with his thumbnail. He put it back into his pocket.
‘Mr Prody? I said, what do you think he’s done to Martha?’
‘Can we change the subject?’
‘Not really.’ The fear, the absolute rage, was building in her. ‘Your unit’s made a God-awful balls-up and I nearly lost my little girl through it.’ It wasn’t his fault, she knew, but she wanted to fly at him. She had to force herself to bite her lip and lower her face. She picked up the plate and pushed the cake around with her finger, waiting for the anger to fizzle away.