The headlights fell on the hedge next to her. She put her face down into her chest, the phone and the torch jammed hard against each other. The car swept past and disappeared until all that was left was the residual sound of tappets and music in the silent night.
When it had rounded the bend she dropped forward on to her knees and looked at the phone. Dark and silent, she hadn’t switched it on accidentally. She let out all her breath at once, put her head back against the tree-trunk and stared at where, hovering in the air above the tyre tracks, like a feather caught in the airstream of the car, a single hair caught the moonlight as it seesawed down. White and kinked, it yawed and pitched through the air currents.
She knew the head it had come from. Misty Kitson’s. Not alive and open-eyed, tottering down the silent lane clutching her handbag and mobile phone, but silent, finished. Caked in body fluid and lying secretly in a bath ten miles from here.
26
It was gone midnight. Caffery found two flagons of cider in the pantry, pulled on his RAB jacket, locked all the doors and got into the car. He put the radio on loud and drove without a plan, not thinking where he was going, letting instinct take over. He was drawn to minor roads, the ones that laced around the Mendips and out east almost as far as Wiltshire. Every field he passed, every lane entry, he let the car slow, craning his neck to see over the hedgerows. Nothing – no red firelight, no flicker of flame in the dusk.
When Caffery had left the Met he’d chosen Bristol for one reason: to track down the person they called the Walking Man. The Walking Man had been convicted of torturing a paedophile named Craig Evans, who had killed his daughter. In Caffery’s head this detail teamed himself and the Walking Man, because if Caffery knew one thing it was how to live with revenge in your heart. Ivan Penderecki, the ageing Polish paedophile who’d lived on the other side of the railway track from the Cafferys, had got away with Ewan Caffery’s murder, and with concealing his body, and this had rotted Jack’s spirit for years. Then, when Penderecki died, the revenge he’d never taken took over rotting his spirit.
So he’d come here to meet someone who had taken revenge, the sort of revenge he should have taken on Penderecki. What Caffery hadn’t expected was the strange, limping friendship that seemed to be starting between him and the Walking Man.
He found himself on the B-road running straight through the area that had been covered by the team searching for Misty Kitson. It ran along the bottom of the hill, straight past the entrance to the Farleigh Park Hall clinic: a vast lit-up mansion, with sparkling colonnades and imposing steps. He slowed, trying to imagine Misty coming out of that building, turning right, or was it left? Ironic, he thought, looking at the sign at the foot of the driveway glinting in his headlights. How ironic that Lucy Mahoney had been missing about the same length of time as Kitson and that while the force had thrown all their horses at the Kitson case, the whole of the high-powered MCIU engine, Lucy Mahoney had just one fashion-plate model of a DI, who hadn’t even stayed for the post-mortem, and a family liaison officer too lazy to let her relatives know she’d been found until she’d had every piece of her insides hauled out by Beatrice Foxton, weighed, sliced, tested and crammed back inside her ribcage.
Caffery drove slowly, past a rapeseed field that led up the hill and to the lake Flea Marley’s team had searched. The lights of a small hamlet opposite twinkled in the trees. He was out of the search radius now. He hit a road lined with poplars, like a European road, and speeded up. Got to the main crossroads and did a left. Drove another five miles then saw a lane he recognized on his left. He’d been there at the beginning of the week with the Walking Man.
He locked the car, climbed over a farm gate and, using the little flashlight on his key-ring, walked up the long hill, his bluish torchlight small and insignificant in the weight of the darkness. In the distance Bristol threw a halo of sodium orange into the sky. He stopped at the place the Walking Man’s campfire had been a few nights ago, buttoned his jacket, knelt on the cold ground and sniffed the faint residue of charred earth. It was cold.
‘Hey,’ he murmured into the dark. ‘Are you there?’
Nothing came back, just the distant movement of wind weaving through the trees. No Walking Man.
He went back to the car and reversed it along the rutted track. Retracing his steps, he turned left on the A36, then after half a mile took a right on to a small, meandering lane and drove for almost ten minutes. He caught glimpses of his own eyes in the rear-view mirror. Blue. Dark-fringed. His mother’s eyes. She had been a good Catholic girl from Toxteth. He hadn’t seen her for more than twenty years, not since she’d last given up on Ewan and left London – putting it all behind her. Even choosing to forget her younger son, Jack. Now he didn’t know if she was dead or alive. But he knew one thing for sure: if she was dead she’d gone to her grave with the rosary wrapped round her fingers and no one would have thought anything of it. He pictured a bracelet made of human hair to ward away bad spirits. ‘Crude beliefs’, had been Powers’s words. There are lots of paths to God, Caffery thought, fingering the back of his head where the hair was missing. A whole world of different routes.
He slammed on the brakes. It had been such a small glow that he’d nearly missed it. Somewhere in the fields down to his right, down where the riverbanks were thick with mud and bulrushes, there was a fire. He reversed the car up the silent lane, levering himself up in the seat to see over the hedge, put the car into a three-point turn and nosed it down the first farm track he saw, letting it bump on to a field, the exhaust banging on the furrowed earth. He turned off the engine and the lights, and for a moment he was still, looking out at the fire.
The Walking Man.
He’d heard Caffery’s car but he didn’t look up, just sat nonchalantly next to the fire, scratching his oily beard and staring into the flames as if they’d been telling him a story and now he was giving it some thought. His belongings were arranged around him, lit red by the crackling fire: his sleeping-bags, his all-weather gear, his plastic bottles of cider. Two plates sat ready for the food he was cooking in the pot. Two plates, Caffery noticed. Not one. He was expected. This was the way with the Walking Man. It wasn’t possible to just find the Walking Man: he decided when the time was right, then – as if their shared histories chimed on some element – exerted a casual magnetism on Caffery. He threw out an invisible lariat and drew him in.
He got out of the car, taking the two-litre flagons of cider with him.
‘Took a long time to find me,’ said the Walking Man, as Caffery approached. He took good care of his feet and his clothing was expensive outdoors gear, but to look at him you’d think he’d been soaked in tar: he was black from head to toe as if he slept in the charcoal of his campfires. ‘You’ve been looking for me for two hours now.’
‘How do you know that?’ Caffery said, though it didn’t surprise him.
The Walking Man didn’t answer. He stoked the fire and edged the tin plates closer to the flames. Caffery set down the cider. The Walking Man had more than two million pounds tucked away in a savings account somewhere yet he drank scrumpy cider, the worst the local apple presses could cough out. And he never, ever slept under a roof. It was just his way.
‘I’ve plotted your routes on a map.’ Caffery unrolled the piece of bed foam the Walking Man had waiting for him, warming next to the fire. ‘I can see the beginnings of a pattern.’
The Walking Man snorted. ‘Yes. Of course you’d feel the need to study me. You’re a policeman.’