‘Wait here. You can see everything, just wait here.’
Both pulleys were turning on the tripods. A head in a caving helmet appeared, and a man scrambled out on his knees, holding a drip bag. He turned on the lip of the shaft and waited for the surface team to haul the stretcher on to the ground, settling it a few feet from the hole. It was Martha, swaddled in an aluminium blanket, her face rigid, bewildered by the sights and sounds and the light. A woman in green trousers and a huge waterproof jacket was yelling something and, out of nowhere, paramedics were swarming everywhere. Rose made a loud noise, like a choke, and broke past the two men, ignoring the hands trying to hold her back; she dropped to her knees next to the stretcher and fell across Martha’s chest, babbling and crying.
In the shaft someone else was yelling. The second surface crew were leaning down into the hole. Another head in a red caving helmet appeared.
‘And haul,’ someone shouted. ‘That’s it – haul.’
Jerkily the man’s head shot up another few feet. Janice couldn’t breathe. His face was tilted, concentrating on what was happening below him, sweat dripping down his neck. Another wrench on the pulley and the back of the stretcher appeared, bumping and turning against the edge of the shaft. The pulley attendant reached down to take the weight. As he did the stretcher pivoted slightly and Emily’s face was there.
The hard bundle of grief and terror that had been trapped against Janice’s heart broke. It flowed around her body. She had to put out a hand to keep her balance and stop herself falling to her knees. Emily’s hair was wet, smoothed back against her head, and her face was pale. But her eyes were bright and alive. Darting all over the place, up and down, taking in what was happening, the great drop beneath her, the people gathered on the edge of the shaft. The man next to her on the pulley said something to her, a gentle joke. She turned, looked into his face and smiled.
She smiled. Emily smiled.
As Janice stood on the grass, she felt a warmth go up her spine, encase her head in a glow. She felt the warmth unzipping her chest, letting her heart rise up and breathe. Just like in the dream she’d had. Emily looked at her – right into her eyes.
‘Mum,’ she said simply.
Janice put up her hand and smiled. ‘Hey, baby,’ she said. ‘We missed you.’
83
The pharmaceuticals compound lay in a slight dip on the arid plateau land of south Gloucestershire – a pocket of industrialization dwarfed by the royal hunting estates that haughtily covered much of the county. The police units had used GPR – ground-probing radar – and body dogs brought in all the way from London. All day long they’d worked, gridding the place out, using laser theodolites, then methodically treading every inch, moving machinery, if necessary, working along the wall of the warehouse.
Locally the little huddles of trees that were scattered around the area were known not as copses but by the quaint nineteenthcentury name ‘covert’. The nearest, slightly elevated one was known as Pine Covert and tonight, lit gold and red by the sunset but unnoticed from the factory, two men stood in the shelter of its trees and watched the progress of the team silently. DI Caffery and the man they called the Walking Man.
‘Who do they think they’re searching for?’ said the Walking Man. ‘Not my daughter. They wouldn’t be taking this much care if they thought it was my daughter.’
‘No. I told them they were looking for Misty Kitson.’
‘Ah, yes. The pretty one.’
‘The famous one. The biggest monkey on my unit’s back.’
All afternoon the sun had crawled obliquely across the sky, lighting but never warming the earth, and now that it was sunset, the team began to break up from the debriefing. They trickled out of the perimeter gate under the great arc lights, back to waiting trucks and cars. Caffery and the Walking Man couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they could guess.
‘It’s empty.’ The Walking Man stroked his beard ruminatively. ‘She’s not in there.’
Caffery stood shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘I did my best.’
‘I know. I know you did.’
The last of the search teams pulled out of the lane leading to the compound and now it was safe to light the fire. The Walking Man turned away and went a few paces back into the covert where he’d gathered some wood into a pile. He took lighter fuel from under a log and shook it on the branches. Chucked on a match. There was a moment’s silence, then a loud whoomph. An orange flame fattened to a ball, thinned and unrolled itself up into the branches, sending a blazing finger of red heat and smoke through them. The Walking Man went to another log and began pulling things out from under it – bedrolls, tins of food, his customary flagon of cider.
Caffery watched him distantly, thinking about the map on his office wall. The Walking Man always had these supplies waiting for him, no matter where he made camp. Somehow this – the gargantuan undertaking, the never-ending search for his daughter – was all planned meticulously. But how could it be otherwise? A search for a child: it would go on for ever. The search that would never end. Caffery thought of the look on Rose and Janice’s faces when they saw their lost children come back. It was a look that might never cross his own face. Might never cross the Walking Man’s.
‘We found that nonce. You know. The one who wrote the letter.’
The Walking Man poured the cider into plastic beakers, handed one to Caffery. ‘Yes. I saw you had from your face the moment you walked across that field. But he wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hoped.’
Caffery sighed. He looked across the fields to where the town of Tetbury sent an orange glow up against the clouds. Sapperton tunnel was beyond the town, out in the unlit fields. In his mind’s eye he saw the two girls being taken towards the helicopter. Two stretchers, two little girls. And between the stretchers a bridge. A pale, delicate bridge made by the girls’ arms as Martha, the eldest, reached across the gap and took Emily’s hand in hers. For nearly forty hours they’d been lying together in a storage trunk buried under the floor of the tunnel. Hugging each other like twins in a womb, breathing their fears and secrets into each other’s faces. When they’d got to hospital and had been examined they were in better shape than they should have been. Prody hadn’t touched them. He’d made Martha remove her underwear and had given her a pair of his eldest son’s jogging pants to wear. He’d put cartons of apple juice in the trunk and told them he was the police – that this was a top-secret operation to hide them from the real jacker. Because the real jacker was the most dangerous man imaginable. A trickster who would do anything, pretend to be anyone. That under no circumstances should the girls make a sound in the trunk if they didn’t want to give themselves away – no matter what guises he took on.
Martha had taken some time to believe him. Emily, who’d been introduced to Prody as a police officer in the safe-house, had swallowed the story. He’d given them sweeties when he told them all this. He’d been kind. He’d been handsome and strong and easy to believe. That was just the way it sometimes went when a child was abducted.
‘Sit.’ The Walking Man brought out plates from under the log. ‘Sit down.’
Caffery sat on a thin bedroll. The ground was freezing. The Walking Man placed the tins and the plates near the fire to start cooking when the fire was ready. He poured his own beaker of cider and settled down.
‘And so . . .’ He waved his hand at the enclosure the team had searched. ‘For this? For doing this for me? What do I give you? Not my anger, that’s for sure. Have to take back my anger and swallow it.’