Far Cry

by John Harvey

  'It's personal, isn't it? With him. Getting back at you any way he can.' She moved a piece of gravel around under her foot. 'Maybe if you hadn't pushed him so hard, going after him the minute he got out ...'

  'What was I supposed to do? Do nothing?'

  'You needled him. Got under his skin.'

  'Of course I got under his fucking skin! You want another Christine Fell out there? Another Martina Jones?'

  'No, but this way ...'

  'This way, what?'

  'Maybe that's what we've got.'

  Will threw the contents of his cup, virtually untouched, towards the verge and started back towards his car.

  'Will, for God's sake ...'

  Handle on the car door, he stopped: his breathing was heavy in his chest and he could feel the accelerated beat of his heart.

  Helen held her tongue: pushing Will any further would only make him more defensive still. She took a last drag at her cigarette and stubbed it out. 'Our meeting with Duncan's at ten?'

  'Quarter to.'

  'We'd better go.'

  The office of the Gypsy and Traveller Liaison Officer was a Portakabin round at the back of the main police headquarters building. Somebody's idea of a little joke.

  'It's only temporary,' Duncan Strand said, when he stepped outside to welcome them. Wispy hair hung too long over his collar and, wearing faded brown cords and a grey cardigan over a plaid shirt, he could easily have passed for a traveller himself. Which was almost certainly the point.

  'How long have you been out here?' Helen asked.

  'Best part of three years.'

  There were small advantages. On days like this, Strand and his part-time civilian assistant could keep the doors and windows closed and, with the aid of a couple of small oil-fired radiators, build up a pleasant fug inside; tea and coffee they could make whenever they wanted; if they chose, they could unplug their phones and let the rest of the world go by and not too many people would be the wiser.

  Detailed maps of the county and its borders were pinned to the walls, sites used by groups of travellers, along with patterns of travel, were clearly marked: those which were licensed by the local authority and those which, although unofficial, were returned to again and again.

  'Since you rang,' Strand said, 'I've done some asking round. About Roberts, like you said. It's difficult to pin anything down. A few people grudgingly admit to knowing him, no more than that.'

  Will was looking at the map. Amongst the unofficial sites was the one near Littleport, where Martina Jones' grandfather, Samuel, and the rest of the extended family had made camp, just a few fields away from where Mitchell Roberts had his garage at Rack Fen.

  'Jones,' Will said, 'nothing linking him and Roberts? That you know?'

  'Samuel Llewelyn? It was Roberts who assaulted his granddaughter, wasn't it?'

  'Yes. Went down for it as well.'

  'And you think Jones'd befriend him after that? With the girl maybe still around?'

  'Who knows?'

  'Very much the old-fashioned patriarch is Samuel. Likes to rule the roost. Not the kind to forgive easily, I'd have thought.'

  Will looked back at the map. Jones and his clan sometimes travelled quite large distances, out of the county both north and south; but, closer to hand, they seemed to trace a familiar circuit across the Soke of Peterborough and the Bedford Levels. In his mind, Will superimposed the locations of crimes in which he thought Roberts might have been involved: Ely, Wisbech, Peterborough itself.

  'You know where Jones is now?'

  Strand went and sat by one of the computers. 'Last we heard, he was back Peterborough way, just north of Flag Fen.' He crossed to the map. 'Off this B road here, the 1040.'

  'And this was when?'

  'Few weeks back now.'

  'So he could still be there?'

  'Or gone.'

  'You won't object if we drive up?' Will said. 'Take a look?'

  Strand held out both hands, palm upwards. 'Be my guest.'

  The encampment was bigger than before: seven caravans in various stages of disrepair, two ageing camper vans and a flatbed truck. The usual assemblage of barefoot kids, mangy dogs and half-wild cats; adults who melted from sight the moment Will and Helen arrived. One of the children, eight or nine years old with a lean face and large eyes, was squatting by a smouldering fire, attempting to cook a small fish he'd hooked out of the stream that trickled near the field end and impaled on a stick.

  'Fuck off, coppers,' he said quietly as they walked past.

  'They learn early,' Will remarked.

  'It's that air of authority,' Helen said. 'Recognise it anywhere.'

  'Well,' a voice boomed from behind them. 'Detective Inspector Grayson, as I live and breathe.'

  'See what I mean,' Helen said.

  Jones was wearing a patched coat and thick moleskin trousers and leaning on his stick, a scarf tied at his throat. His long, silvery hair was tied back. 'I would say, a pleasure, but I'd be lying. Police, never anything but trouble as a rule. Screw us any way they can. Jealous, see, that's what it is. Freedom. Lack o' rules. My rules aside.' Grinning, he shook his stick. 'You've likely not come to serve a summons though? A notice to quit? Far too important for that. Some other business altogether. Unless you're here to accompany the young lady, of course. Her protector.'

  He essayed a mock bow in Helen's direction.

  'The day I need protection from the likes of you,' she said, 'I'll quit.'

  When he laughed Jones showed a mouthful of uneven teeth, some capped with tarnished gold. 'Well said. Even though we both know it's not strictly true.'

  A dog barked and showed its nose at the caravan door behind him and he shouted for it to be quiet. 'Blasted animal! Should've had him put down years ago.'

  'Your granddaughter,' Will said, 'is she still travelling with you?'

  'Martina? Thanks be to God she's not. Followed her poor benighted mother up to Aberdeen, trailing after some lunatic Scot working the rigs. Not sorry to wash my hands of her. More trouble than she's worth.'

  'Your own kith and kin?'

  Jones laughed louder than before. 'If I was to take all my kith and kin, as you call 'em, under my wing, I'd need three times this many caravans an' more besides.'

  'How did she recover?' Will asked. 'After what happened?'

  'Wounds heal.'

  'Some,' Helen said. 'Some never do.'

  'Believe what you want,' Jones growled.

  'Mitchell Roberts,' Will said.

  'What of him?'

  'I didn't realise you and he knew one another. It never came up at the trial.'

  'Knew him how?'

  'Well enough to take him in, give him a bed, a roof over his head.'

  'You think I'd do that? After what he done to her?' Hawking up phlegm, he spat at the ground. 'Shows his face round here, I'd give him a beating he won't forget.'

  'Wasn't always that way, was it?'

  'What?'

  'You knew him before.'

  The expression on Jones' face changed, registering, just for an instant, the merest shadow of doubt.

  'Knew his interests, his little peccadilloes.'

  'What if I did?'

  'Depends how much they were shared.'

  'Not by me.'

  'No?'

  'No.'

  'Martina, she wasn't a virgin when Roberts got to her—'

  Jones swung his stick round hard and slammed it against the side of the caravan, causing the dog inside to resume barking. 'You get off my land, the pair of you ...'

  'Your land?'

  'I got nothin' more to say to you, now an' forever. You understand me? You understand?'

  Turning, he wrenched open the caravan door and, as he did so, the dog, an elderly black and white collie, jumped, slightly arthritically, to the ground and continued to bark.

  'Ezra!' Jones shouted from the doorway. 'Get your sorry hide back in here now!'

  Instantly, Will heard Janine's voice, shaky despite the inter
vening years, describing what had happened the day she was released, the moments before she was roughly bundled into the back of a van. The dog was there. Ezra ... he pushed his nose up against me, but the man shooed him away. The dog, a puppy then, thirteen years before, now old and slow. It was possible. '95. Where had Samuel Jones been in the summer of '95?

  The patriarch stood, defiant, on the steps outside his caravan, while behind where Will and Helen were standing, a dozen men, emboldened, were starting slowly to advance, some with makeshift weapons in their hands.

  'We'll be back,' Will said. 'This isn't over.'

  Together, he and Helen walked back through the cordon, which grudgingly opened wide enough to let them go.

  'The dog,' Helen said, once they were in the car. 'That's what you're going on?'

  'That and the look in his eyes.'

  They were back two hours later, three cars and a Transit, crammed, shoulder to shoulder, with uniformed officers. Not a moment too soon. Samuel Jones and his followers had just finished breaking camp and were getting ready to move.

  'Going somewhere, Samuel?' Will asked, unable to stem the smile breaking out on his face. 'Freedom of the open road.'

  'Go fuck yourself!'

  'Maybe later. Now get in the car.'

  For some moments it looked as if some of the travellers might be about to intervene, but the police presence was such that they stood their ground and merely scowled, letting off the odd curse. Duncan Strand would stay put, along with the bulk of the officers, and handle the questioning, doing his best to deflate the animosity as he did so.

  Unfettered, the collie limped after the car taking Samuel Jones away, barking loudly.

  69

  Though Duncan Strand's records didn't go back as far as 1995, there was evidence of Jones and his followers staying in the Wisbech area in both 2001 and 2004, on an unofficial site north-west of the Middle Level Main Drain which bisected the land between Wisbech and Downham Market. The site in question was on a piece of low-level ground partly shielded by trees and no more than a mile from the farmhouse in Outwell where Janine Prentiss had reappeared after her abduction.

  According to what Janine had said at the time, the van she had been carried in had driven for a long time—almost as long as a school lesson—before she had been let out, still blindfolded, at the end of a lane.

  Thirty minutes? Forty? An hour?

  Had the van driven straight there or gone round and around?

  She wasn't sure.

  The journey could have begun as much as fifty miles from where she was dropped off or as little as five. A search for buildings similar to the ones Janine claimed to have seen yielded four. Farm labourers' cottages, no longer occupied and left to rack and ruin, were scarcely a rarity.

  Of those, two had attracted the most police attention, one close—little more than a mile north of the site the Jones clan had used—the other, further east, across the Drain and within easy distance of the village of Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, where Christine Fell had been found tied to a baler.

  Look for a pattern, wasn't that what the profilers said?

  But both of these cottages had shown signs of having been temporarily used: fires lighted, rubbish strewn around; condoms, cigarette packets, scraps of clothing, animal bones. Neither yielded anything which said without contradiction, this is where Janine had been held.

  Samuel Jones sat across from Will and Helen, defiant, head back, clear-eyed, a heavily veined nose that had been broken and reset several times. Lacking his usual stick to hold, he clasped the edges of the table with horned hands.

  'Get on with it then! Stop wasting my blasted time.'

  'You've got somewhere to go?' Will asked mildly, his voice a contrast to Jones' roar.

  'Out of here. Out of this ... this blasted box. Shut in. Shut in like this, this poxy room.'

  'Answer the questions,' Helen said, 'and then you can go. Simple as that.'

  'What bloody questions? Roberts? More about him? I told you time enough already, I in't seen him in years, not since I saw him in court the day he was sent down.'

  'We believe you,' Will said. 'About that, at least. For now.'

  'Then what in blazes am I doin', still cooped up here?'

  'Waiting to tell us about before.'

  'What before?'

  'Let's start with '95.'

  'Ninety-five what?'

  '1995.'

  'What about it?'

  'You were staying on a site just north of Outwell, not far from Holly End.'

  'Was I? You know more'n I do, then.'

  'The same site you used in '01 and '04.'

  'What of it? Even if it's so.'

  'Roberts stayed with you.'

  'Did he?'

  'Tell me.'

  'Can't tell you what I don't know.'

  ''95. The summer of '95.'

  'Can't recall.'

  Helen leaned forward a little, getting his attention. 'You know we're talking to people you travel with? Family, hangers-on. You think their memories'll all be as bad as yours? And then there's your daughter, Gloria. Martina's mother. Shouldn't be too difficult to trace her up in Aberdeen. She'll remember Roberts, I dare say. Just a kid, wasn't she, when she had Martina? Fifteen, sixteen? Reasons, maybe, to remember Mitchell Roberts well.'

  Jones' hands were no longer gripping the table, but his thighs, fingers pressing down deep against the bone. The colour was fading from his weathered cheeks.

  'No call,' he said. 'No call for any of that.' He cleared his throat. 'Roberts, I met him afore that. When you said. Some few years before.'

  'How many?'

  'You want me to tell this or not?'

  'How many years before?' Will asked again.

  Jones released a long, slow breath. 'Winter of '92, it'd be. One of the vans broke down. Peterborough way. Roberts, he was working in this roadside place, petrol and that, just doing odd jobs out back. Bloke in charge said they didn't have no mechanic, nothing like that. Wanted us out of there, not blockin' off his forecourt. Roberts, he said he could get it fixed. "Not on my time," the bloke said, so Roberts said, "Fuck you then, pay me what's due." Helped push the van down to the next lay-by and fixed it there and then. Enough to get us on our way. "What do you want," I asked him, "for that?" "Wouldn't mind a bed," he said. "Just a few days. Place to stay."' Jones ran his thumb over the broken ridge of his nose. 'Stayed a good while longer than that.'

  'You became friends.'

  'Never that.'

  'What then?'

  'He was a good mechanic, natural. Good with his hands. Caravans an' that, they'd taken a beating over the years, never been replaced. Roberts, he worked on 'em. Bought this little van for himself and drove all over, scrounging parts. Time he moved on, that'd be the spring, he had most every damned vehicle we had running like new.'

  'Spring of '93?'

  Jones nodded. 'Didn't see him for a good while after that. Year, eighteen months maybe. Bit of a state then, looked as if he'd been sleeping rough. Didn't stay long that time. Week, little more. Wandered off. Thought that'd be the last of him, but not so long later, another year maybe. Less. Got some money from somewhere. Workin' in a factory. Wisbech. Frozen food. Never stayed with us exactly, not then. Place of his own, don't know where. Still got the same old van.'

  'And this was when exactly?'

  ''95, '96.'

  'Which?'

  ''95.'

  'Sometimes,' Will said, 'when he went off in his van, the dog went with him?'

  'Dog?'

  'You know which one I mean. Your dog. Ezra.'

  Jones shook his head, the silver mane of hair shifting on his shoulders. 'Only a puppy then. Took to him for some reason, Lord knows why. Why Roberts wanted him, either? Always been more trouble'n he was blasted worth.'

  'Roberts,' Will said, 'wanted the dog for bait.'

  The site Samuel Jones took them to was neither of the ones they'd homed in on before, a different direction entirely. South past Three
Holes and Lot's Bridge, a quarter-mile beyond the course of the old Roman Road on the edge of Upwell Fen. Two labourers' cottages that had been built not long after the beginning of the previous century and slowly crumbled into decay; the one now little more than a jumble of bricks and mortar, only one retaining wall still standing, the other a largely burnt-out shell, with sections of the roof remaining, the rest open to the sky.

  'This was it?' Will said, cautious lest Jones were leading them astray.

  'Believe it or believe it not.'

  There were farm buildings on the horizon to both east and west, neither within earshot. The land flat and vast. Out here someone could scream loud and long and not be heard. Out here terrible things could happen unseen, unremarked.

  'Someone's been here recently,' Helen called from the interior. 'Cigarette ends. Empty cans.'

  'This is where he brought her?' Will said, swinging back towards Jones. 'Janine Prentiss?'

  'I never knew her name.'

  'But you were here?'

  He took his time about answering, weighing up, no doubt, the pros and cons. Things he didn't want the police to come back to, probe into too deeply.

  'Twice,' he said, eventually. 'When he was here with the girl. Twice.'

  'Share her with you, did he?'

  Jones let out a howl and, flushed with anger, took a step towards Will, fist raised.

  Unblinking, Will stood his ground. 'Tell us what you were doing here,' he said.

  Jones waited for his breathing to steady. 'The first time I come for the dog, simple as that. This place was in a fitter state then. Roberts had been living here, off and on, I knew that for a fact. I didn't know about the girl. Tried to keep her hid, didn't he, but I realised what was going on. Said she'd run away from home on account her father had been beating her and he was just giving her shelter. Temporary. Taking her to an aunt, over Newmarket way, that evening.'

  'You believed him?'

  Jones didn't answer. The wind was raw, cold on the face and hands, particles of dust and dirt in the air.

  'I came back out again,' Jones said, 'the next day. Brought the dog with me. The girl was still here. I got a look at her this time, a proper look. Told him if he didn't get shot of her I'd call the police.'