Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

head. Realistically there was only one person she could talk to about it. DI Caffery. At the end of her late shift she drove straight out to the MCIU offices in Kingswood.
    He was at the gate near his car, surrounded by yellow pools of light that bounced out of the office windows behind him and reflected up from the puddles. He wore a heavy coat and was standing quite still watching her approach. He was dark-haired, medium height, lean under the coat and, even if you didn’t know it from experience, which she did, you could tell from the way he stood that he knew how to look after himself. He was a good detective, a brilliant one, some would say, but everyone whispered about him. Because there was something a bit sideways about Caffery. Something a bit wild and alone. You could tell it from his eyes.
    He didn’t look pleased to see her. Not at all. She hesitated. Gave him an uncertain smile.
    He took his hand down from the security pad he’d been jamming numbers into. ‘How’s it going?’
    ‘Good.’ She nodded, still a bit thrown by the expression. There had been a time, months ago, when he’d looked at her completely differently – looked at her in the way a man is supposed to lookat a woman. Once or twice. He wasn’t doing that now. Now he was regarding her as if she disappointed him. ‘You?’
    ‘Oh, you know – same shit, different day. I heard your unit’s got some problems.’
    News travelled fast around this force. USU had botched a few things lately – an operation over in Bridgewater when they’d been diving for a suicide victim in a river and had swum straight past the body. Plus the small matter of a grand’s worth of diving equipment lost at the bottom of Bristol harbour. And other things – little mistakes and lapses that added up to the fat ugly truth of the Underwater Search Unit on its knees, performance targets missed, competency pay on hold, with only one person, the sergeant, to blame. This was the second time today someone’d thought to point it out.
    ‘Getting tired of hearing it,’ she said. ‘We’ve had our problems, but we’ve turned the corner. I’m confident of that.’
    He gave an unconvinced nod, and glanced up the road as if he was trying to see any good reason for them both still to be standing there. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind, Sergeant Marley?’
    She took a breath. Held it. For a moment she considered not telling him, just for the dull, unimpressed way he was communicating with her. It was like all the disappointment in the world was heaping out of him on to her shoulders. She exhaled. ‘OK. I heard about the carjacker on the news.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Thought you should know. He’s done it before.’
    ‘Done what?’
    ‘The guy who’s just taken that Yaris? He’s done it before. And he’s not just a carjacker.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘A guy, yes? In a Santa mask? He snatched a car. There was a kid in it? Well, this is the third time.’
    ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a second.’
    ‘Look, I can’t be the one who told you this. I got into shit over it the first time. I put my nose in it a bit too deep, eventually gota slap down from my inspector – told to lay off, stop hanging around the Bridewell station. No one got killed or anything so, really, I was wasting my time. None of this is coming from me. Right?’
    ‘I’m hearing you loud and clear.’
    ‘A couple of years ago, before you were transferred from London, there was a family down by the docks. Some guy jumps them, gets the keys and takes the car. Then again this spring. Do you remember I found that dead dog in the quarries up at Elf’s Grotto? That woman’s dog? The murder?’
    ‘I remember.’
    ‘But do you know why my unit was diving the quarry in the first place?’
    ‘No. I don’t think I ever even . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Yes, I do. It was a carjacking. You thought the guy had dumped the car in the quarry. Right?’
    ‘We’d had a call from a