Caffery locked the car, shrugged his jacket closer and went to stand at the quarry edge, peering into the water. Beyond his reflection the water was a clear twilight blue. A yellowish haze of embryonic plants clung to the rock edges and below that, about twenty feet down, the vague suggestion of something misshapen. A boulder maybe, or submerged pumping equipment, or the quarry wall, following the hewn-out rock edge.
Africans believed the Tokoloshe was a river-dweller. They believed he hung around the banks, made nests in the rushes and could stay submerged for hours. Whatever the witnesses in Bristol had seen, one thing they were all clear on: it had come out of water, from rivers and quarries, once even from Bristol ’s floating harbour. They swore it had simply ‘surfaced’, as if it had been under the water for some time, lolling on the bottom, rolling content as a crocodile in the mud. And there was no breathing apparatus – the witnesses were adamant on that point: the hellish face was naked. So how the hell had the Operation Norway gang managed to fake those unexplained submerged minutes?
Caffery straightened and looked across to the hills of grout. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and for a while something heavy seemed to hover over the water, as if the air itself had got darker. Ben Jakes had been at those slopes when he’d killed himself. A bit of old police tape was still hanging in the bushes and some dead flowers in cellophane that some of his university buddies had brought. There had been ten other suicides here in the last four years. Suicide had that effect – always seemed to spread like a virus. Someone jumps off a bridge and before long it’s Suicide Bridge and people who’d never have heard of the place will drive through the night just for the honour of jumping off it. That was what this quarry was like, except they didn’t jump in. Just sat on the edges with their pills and their razors, probably looking at the stars.
Jakes’s phone still hadn’t turned up, but the same team who’d worked on the Kitson case had analysed his signal patterns and worked out that the two calls after his death had been made from somewhere near here. The number wasn’t one Jakes had used before. Caffery had called it on the work phone and it turned out to be disconnected. It was a throwaway phone, pay-as-you-go, and he was pretty sure it had been disposed of already in a rubbish chute somewhere.
Caffery picked up a stick and began to walk the perimeter, beating at the undergrowth as he went. The quarry had been searched when Jakes’s body had been found, but Caffery wanted to be sure there was nothing he had missed. No hidey-holes or evidence that someone else had been there on the night Jakes had died, maybe watching him from the bushes. He searched every square inch again, kicking around among the undergrowth, and after an hour the only thing he had found was a scooter lying on its side in the bushes.
Someone had made an effort to conceal it – he had to crouch down and break branches to get at it. He dragged it out into the sunlight and set it upright, giving it a small shake. It had a tax disc, and petrol sloshed around in the tank. Jakes hadn’t had a scooter, Caffery was sure of that. He took a pen from his pocket and pulled back the callipers to check the brakes. No rust, so it had been used in the last twenty-four hours. He laid it on the ground, slapped his hands together to get the dust off and was about to turn back to the car when he noticed something else.
About ten feet away to his right something blue and white was snarled in the roots of the buddleia. It was police tape, wrapped around the twigs. He went to it, pulled at it, and saw a length of blue butyl lying on the ground. It was about ten inches long and had come from a tube of some sort. He picked it up and studied it. At three-inch intervals letters had been stamped into it: USU. Underwater Search Unit. He knew the unit, and their sergeant, Flea Marley. She’d been the support unit officer who’d made the arrests on Operation Norway with him. Pretty. When Caffery had come out here to the West Country he’d made a pledge: he’d left a couple of lives ruined in London and he wasn’t going to do it again. There would be no more women in his life. Not without serious thought. But he hadn’t made any promise not to notice if someone was pretty.
He pulled out his phone and called Kingswood. DC Turnbull, one of the men Powers had assigned him, answered. ‘I was just about to call you,’ he said, spruce and eager. ‘Got a couple of things. First off the Tanzanian in the bin, the one who keeps telling us his name is Johnny Brown? We’ve got a name. Clement Chipeta. Interpol had him in Dar Es Salaam until he came off their radar about a year ago. He was in serious trouble out there, not just with the law but with the gang he was working for.’
‘Who did what?’
‘Trafficking. They dealt in the ingredients for traditional medicine, mostly from endangered species, but some of it from humans. Which, I assume, is why the Operation Norway muppets found a use for him when he turned up here.’
‘You’ve let the custody officers know?’
‘Of course.’
‘OK.’ He turned away from the quarry, his finger in his ear so he could hear over the lousy signal. ‘Listen, Turnbull, I need you to do three things. Give me a PNC on this number, will you?’
He gave him the plate number for the scooter and Turnbull tapped keys, getting into the Police National Computer.
‘And when you’ve done that go online and look something up for me. Ever heard of free diving?’
‘Free diving? Sorry, boss, I’m from Birmingham. We don’t do sea, water, rivers. We like our concrete.’
‘Look it up when we’re off the phone. I want to know how long someone can hold their breath. How long they can stay under.’
‘Free diving.’ He could almost hear Turnbull frowning. The computer bleeped. ‘PNC’s back. The scooter’s a TWOC.’
TWOC – Taking Without Consent.
‘When?’
‘This weekend. From a driveway over in Bradley Stoke. Nothing else.’
‘OK – let them know I’ve found it. Then speak to someone in the support unit. Find out what the underwater search unit were doing in quarry number eight, over in Elf’s Grotto.’
Silence.
‘You there, Turnbull? Give someone in Support a call.’
‘I don’t need to, boss. I can tell you what the search unit was doing. They were searching for a misper. A woman. Yesterday.’
‘Did they find her?’
‘Not in the quarry. But they have now. That was the other thing I was going to call you about. They’re not far from you. Eight minutes if you drive legally. Four if you don’t.’
7
Lucy Mahoney had been missing for three days. Judging from the state of her she’d been dead for most of that time. Her body had been found by hikers out in the Mendips on the banks of the Strawberry Line, the abandoned railway the Victorians had used to transport strawberries from the fields around Cheddar. The countryside there was pretty, the poppies already out in the linseed fields, a pollen heat haze hanging over it. But there was nothing pretty about the corpse: visible from a hundred yards away, a tower of shifting flies hovering above, a blackened pile of clothing and skin.
She was lying on her back. Dressed in a distinctive stripy sweater, skirt and flower-printed Doc Martens covered with leaves, she had already decomposed enough for some bones to protrude through the discoloured flesh. Flea led the team through the wrapping of the body: batting away the flies, pulling carefully to unstick the corpse from the fluids on the ground, log-rolling it into a linen sheet, and lifting it into a white body-bag – face up because the mortuaries hated corpses arriving face down. Mahoney had been well built and, even decomposed, she wasn’t easy to lift. Inside the suits the team were sweating: Flea could see the rivulets running down Wellard’s face.