Gone by Mo Hayder Page A

tray.’
    ‘Little Chef,’ said Caffery.
    ‘That’s what I meant. Little Chef.’
    Simone frowned. ‘There aren’t any Little Chefs around here.’
    ‘There are,’ the CAPIT officer said. ‘In Farrington Gurney.’
    Caffery went to the desk, pulled the map over. Shepton Mallet. Farrington Gurney. Right in the heart of the Mendip Hills. From Bruton to Shepton Mallet wasn’t a long way, but Cleo had been in the car forty minutes. The jacker had driven her in zigzags. He’d gone north, then hairpinned back south-west. And in doing that he’d gone past the road that led to Midsomer Norton. The place the convenience-store manager had mentioned. If they had nothing else for the jacker at least they could put a pin in the map on the Midsomer Norton and Radstock area. And focus on it.
    ‘They do waffles there,’ said the CAPIT woman, smiling at Cleo. ‘I have my breakfast there sometimes.’
    Caffery couldn’t keep still. He pushed the map away and sat at the desk. ‘Cleo, in all that time you were with the caretaker, did he talk to you? Did he say anything?’
    ‘Yes. He kept asking about my mum and dad. Kept asking what their jobs were.’
    ‘And what did you say?’
    ‘I told him the truth. Mum’s a financial analyst, she earns all the money, and Dad, well, he works to help little children when their mums and dads split up.’
    ‘You sure there’s nothing else he said? Nothing else you can remember?’
    ‘I guess,’ she said unconcernedly. ‘I think he said, “It’s not going to work.” ’
    ‘It’s not going to work?’ Caffery stared at her. ‘When did he say that?’
    ‘Just before he stopped. He said, “It’s not working, get out.” So I got out and went to the side of the road. I thought he was going to give me my bag with my T-shirt in it but he didn’t. Mum had to buy me a new one because we never got our car back, did we, Mum? We got the T-shirt at the school shop. It’s got my initials and it’s . . .’
    Caffery had stopped paying attention. He was staring at a point in mid-air, thinking about the words:
It’s not working
. Meaning it had gone wrong. He’d lost his nerve.
    But if that was true for Cleo, it wasn’t true for Martha. This time it was different. This time the jacker had kept his nerve. This time it was working.

9
    By three o’clock the cloud cover had broken in places and the low sun shone obliquely across the fields in this corner of north Somerset. Flea wore the jacket with reflective strips for her afternoon jog. She’d got her dumb nickname as a child because people told her she never looked before she leaped. And because of her irritating, incurable energy. Her real name was Phoebe. Over the years she had tried systematically to iron the ‘Flea’ part out of her character, but still there were days when she thought her energy might burn a hole through the ground she stood on. On those days she had a trick to calm herself. She ran.
    She used the lanes that laced through the countryside near her home. She’d run until sweat poured from her and there were blisters on her feet. Past stiles and half-dormant cows, past stone-built cottages and mansions, past the officers in uniform who poured out of the Ministry of Defence base near her house. Sometimes she’d run late into the night, until all her thoughts and apprehensions had shaken themselves loose and there was nothing left in her head save the desire for sleep.
    Being physically in shape was one thing. Maintaining that fitness and control all the way through to the inside was another. As she turned the corner on the last leg of the run, she was picturing the Bradleys’ Yaris screeching out of the car park in Frome. She kept thinking about Martha Bradley sitting in the back seat. Flea had got a friend from Frome station to read her Rose’s statement. In it she’d said Martha had been leaning overfrom the back seat to tune in the radio when the car took off. So she wasn’t strapped in. Had she been