Free Gone by Mo Hayder

coughed, embarrassed. ‘Uh – read it first, Boss. Wiltshire faxed it over. They’re getting their own SOCOs to drive the original down to us personally.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘A letter. It was on the dashboard, rolled up inside some of her clothing.’
    ‘What clothing?’
    ‘Uh.’ He gave a long sigh.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Her underwear, Boss.’
    Caffery stared at the paper. His fingers were burning. ‘And what does it say?’
    ‘Oh, Christ. Like I said, Boss, maybe you should read it.’

11
    The man crouched at the edge of the camp, the fire lighting his filthy face and beard red, making him look like something born not of woman but of a volcano. Caffery sat a few feet away, watching him in silence. It had been dark for four hours already, but the man was busy planting a bulb in the frozen earth. ‘There was once a child,’ he said, trowelling the earth away. ‘A child called Crocus. Crocus was a girl child with golden hair. She loved to wear purple dresses and ribbons.’
    Caffery listened in silence. In the short time he had known the vagrant, whom the locals called the Walking Man, he’d learned to listen and not to question. He’d learned that in this relationship he was the pupil and the Walking Man was the teacher – the one who chose most things about their encounters: what they talked about, where and when they met. It was six long months since they’d last sat together, but maybe the twentieth time Caffery had searched for him. Those hunts had been long lonely nights, driving lanes at five miles an hour, stretched up in the driver’s seat, craning his neck to see over the hedgerows. Tonight, almost the moment he’d begun looking, the campfire had sprung up like a beacon in a field. As if the Walking Man had been there all along, watching Caffery’s efforts with amusement. Waiting for the time to be right.
    ‘One day,’ the Walking Man continued, ‘Crocus was taken by a witch and condemned to live trapped among the clouds where her parents could neither speak to her nor see her. They still don’t know for sure if she’s alive, but every spring, on her birthday, theyturn their eyes to the sky and pray that this spring will be the one their child is returned.’ He patted the ground around the bulb and dribbled some water on to it from a plastic bottle. ‘It is an act of faith, to continue to believe their daughter is still there. An act of absolute faith. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them never to know for sure what had happened to their daughter? Never to know for sure if she was dead or alive?’
    ‘Your daughter’s body was never found,’ Caffery said. ‘You know how they felt.’
    ‘And your brother’s wasn’t either. So that makes us twins.’ He smiled. The moonlight caught his teeth, which were even, clean and healthy in his blackened face. ‘Peas in a pod.’
    Peas in a pod? Two men who couldn’t have been more different. The insomniac lonely cop and the bedraggled homeless guy, who walked all day and never slept in the same place twice. But it was true they shared things in common. They had the same eyes. Astonishingly when Caffery looked at the Walking Man he saw his own blue eyes staring back at him. And, more importantly, they shared a story. Caffery had been eight when his older brother Ewan had disappeared from the family’s back garden in London. The ageing paedophile Ivan Penderecki, who lived over the railway tracks, was to blame, Caffery had no doubt, but Penderecki had never been charged or convicted. The Walking Man’s daughter had been raped five times before she was murdered by an itinerant offender on probation, Craig Evans.
    Craig Evans hadn’t been as lucky as Penderecki. The Walking Man, who in those days had been a successful businessman, had taken his revenge. Now Evans lived in a chair in a long-term care facility near his family home in Worcestershire. The Walking Man had been precise about the injuries he’d inflicted. Evans no