Gone Without Trace Read online

  GONE WITHOUT

  TRACE

  C.J. CARVER

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ALSO BY C.J. CARVER

  More in the Jay McCaulay series:

  Back With Vengeance

  The Honest Assassin

  The India Kane series:

  Blood Junction

  Black Tide

  Standalones:

  Dead Heat

  Beneath The Snow

  This book is for all those dedicated to the fight against human trafficking. You are making the difference.

  One

  Jay was chatting to Lily when she saw him. It was just a glimpse out of the corner of her eye, but she knew she wasn’t mistaken from the way her body reacted. Electricity brushing the surface of her skin. Her gut tightening. She had learned from her army days never to ignore her physical instincts. She had the scars to prove it.

  Wondering if she was imagining things, she squinted against the bitter wind to study the man’s squat, brick-like shape. For a moment she went numb with the shock of recognition, but then her brain kick-started. Holy crap, she thought, her eyes widening. It really is him.

  Milot Dumani. She could barely believe it. Five years had passed and he’d put on weight. The hard jawline was now soft and loose, his saddlebags pronounced, but the set of his mouth hadn’t changed. It looked as small and hard and mean as ever.

  Jay took shelter behind Lily’s generous form as she showed her another photograph of a different girl. Lily ponderously shook her head. ‘Jo,’ she said – No. Lily’s real name was Liljana, and when they’d first met she’d been surly and rude until Jay had spoken to her in her native language, Albanian. Being a linguist had its uses, and never more so in breaking the ice with immigrants, legal or illegal.

  Today, Lily was wearing a lime-green spandex body suit with silver platform shoes and a man’s yellow jacket that came down to her knees. How the woman hadn’t frozen where she stood was a miracle. Jay had only been on the street for an hour and her face was already beginning to chap from the raw February weather howling straight from the Atlantic and across the Bristol Channel into the city centre. It was a miserable day, with a sky the colour of metal filings and the air clogged with traffic exhaust. Cars had their headlights on, and people walked with their shoulders hunched, faces pinched.

  ‘Do you know that guy?’ Jay pointed out Milot. He’d stopped halfway down the street and was talking to one of the girls.

  Lily shook her head. ‘Why? Do you?’

  ‘Not personally, but I saw him a few times, in the Balkans.’

  Lily studied Milot. ‘I wouldn’t take him on no matter how much he paid me. He’s got that look about him, like he’d enjoy hurting you.’

  Jay was impressed at Lily’s perspicacity. The last time Jay had seen Milot was in Tetovo in 2002 – post-conflict Macedonia – where he’d been laughing with his cronies, hanging out in a coffee bar. He was a pimp-cum-trafficker who had shot one of his girls in front of the others to keep them in line. He had then hacked off the girl’s head and roped it on the front of his car like a trophy. The girl had asked if she could telephone her mother. She hadn’t even turned sixteen.

  All Jay could remember was her scalding, white-hot fury at seeing him driving around town with the girl’s head on his fender. She was filled with savage rage, for Milot Dumani was untouchable. No policeman, no army officer, no NATO bigwig had the power to arrest him. The Mafia had ruled Tetovo back then. She could picture the girl’s severed head as if it were yesterday, her skin soft as molten candle wax, the blood seeping from the scraps of torn flesh at her neck, her milky dead eyes staring dully ahead. The anger Jay had felt still made her breathless, as though she’d been hit with a tyre-iron against her heart.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  Jay jumped when Lily offered a pack of Rothmans. She shook her head.

  ‘You’ve given up?’ Lily looked surprised.

  ‘Trying to.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  Jay swallowed. No way would she start smoking again just because the past had reared its ugly head. That would be too stupid. She tried to ignore Lily lighting her cigarette but she couldn’t miss the delicious whiff of smoke before it was whipped away by the wind.

  ‘You sure?’ Lily was watching her.

  Jay firmed her resolve. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘You want a toffee instead? I’ve got some treacle dabs.’

  Despite her tension, or perhaps because of it, Jay’s sweet tooth perked up. Stuff her promise not to snack.

  ‘Lily, I love treacle dabs.’

  She had just popped one in her mouth when Lily said, ‘How’s your gorgeous detective inspector, then?’

  ‘Er, I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not staying with him this weekend?’

  ‘No. Not this time.’

  She usually timed her trips from London to Bristol to coincide with the weekends so she could spend more time with Tom, but after their difficult dinner last weekend she had no idea where their relationship stood. She hadn’t dared ring him. She hadn’t had the guts.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ Lily was surveying her with a frown.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Jay said, trying to lie and, as usual, failing.

  ‘You’ve broken up? What happened? Did he have an affair with one of his pretty little constables? Or was it an ex-girlfriend? They’re the worst. They know all the right buttons to press.’

  To Jay’s relief a Vauxhall Cavalier pulled up next to them, distracting Lily from fantasising any further.

  ‘It’s Harry,’ Lily said, brightening. ‘I know Harry – he’s a regular. I’ll see you when you’re next down, shall I?’ She squeezed Jay’s arm affectionately. ‘Lamtumirë, sweetie. Farewell.’

  Lily was the only person who ever called Jay sweetie. She’d been called many things – including stubborn, impulsive and insane – and the diminutive made her smile.

  ‘Lamtumirë, hon.’

  With half an eye on Milot, Jay watched eleven stone of underdressed prostitute heave herself into the passenger seat. Lily’s customer looked half her age, a white-collar worker with a spare shirt on a hanger in the back, not the type of guy Jay imagined going for a lank-haired and badly dressed tart with pudgy feet crammed into high heels two sizes too small, but since Lily’s theory was that clients deliberately went for women who were total opposites from their partners at home, it made sense. Lily had to be the perfect antidote to any BMW driver’s image of a brittle, too-thin and gym-obsessed wife.

  While Lily was driven away, Jay saw Milot turn from the girl and start walking down the street. Jay stared after him. A sense of foreboding tightened in her chest. Could she let him go? Allow him to vanish as though she’d never seen him? What if she heard of a girl’s body found floating in the Bristol Channel with her head sawn off?

  Switching her mobile phone to vibrate, Jay set off after Milot. She would see where the scumbag was going and then make a report to the local police, alerting them to the fact they had a thug, a brutal Mafia lapdog in their midst. That’s if the cops didn’t already know him, of course.

  Milot was walking purposefully, looking straight ahead but occasionally glancing at his wristwatch. A man with an appointment. A man without a map of the city and – more worryingly – who looked as though he knew his way around. It wasn’t his first visit. She could tell he felt comfortable here by the relaxed set of his shoulders, the lack of paranoia in his actions. No darting glances over his shoulder or sudden turns to throw off anyone behind him.

  Sucking on her treacle dab, Jay put herself in trigger position, staying close to the target, senses alert, blood humming, and although Milot didn’t know her, she knew she’d be lucky to follow him a hundred yards without getting pinged. Sadly, she’d never been able to ‘go grey’, which her intelligence course instructor regretted when he trained her. At five feet eleven inches she was too tall to go unnoticed, too long-legged, and with the distinctive saddle of freckles across her nose and her curly mane of conker-coloured hair she blended into any crowd about as well as a horse standing on a railway platform. Men always came back for a second look. Even when she’d had a buzz cut and was wearing muddy fatigues and boots big enough to stamp the li
fe out of an elephant, men still looked.

  She was so intent on Milot she almost missed the patrol car cruising past, but at the last minute she shrank back, checking to see who was inside. Please God, not Tom. If he spotted her she didn’t know what he’d do. Leap out and manhandle her into the back of his car, probably, for an in-depth interrogation.

  She didn’t recognise anyone in the squad car and brought her attention back to her quarry. The wind gusted sleet into her face, razor-sharp cold. It was so bitter, she felt as though she could be on an assignment in Moscow. Near the Market Gate footbridge she spotted a small-scale drug dealer. Another black guy, hoodie raised, was hanging around, possibly thinking of buying. Skin and drugs: you could be in the middle of an ice age and there would always be punters.

  She saw Milot’s right foot turn out a fraction, indicating he was going to change direction, but she didn’t dive into a shop or try to hide. It was too late. He’d already stopped and glanced over his shoulder.

  He was looking straight at her.

  Two

  Jay didn’t break her stride. She kept walking, her body language loose and relaxed. Her thumb was hooked nonchalantly over the strap of her handbag, her gaze fixed in the distance. She could see the traffic banking at the traffic lights ahead, hear the engines roaring beneath the underpass, but she didn’t take it in. Every sense was concentrated on Milot.

  She felt his eyes slide over her without pausing.

  One second, two seconds, three.

  She could feel his stare running from the ground up, checking out the length of her legs, her ass and her waist, her breasts.

  Jay stalked past him. She was so close she could almost see his nose hairs. She wondered if she imagined the smell of cigars wafting from him, that stench of nicotine and cheap cologne that followed the Albanian Mafia wherever they went, and then she was past him.

  A quick glance showed he was still watching her. She was surprised; usually his sort preferred girls in their teens or early twenties, and she was pushing thirty. A horn blared nearby and he was instantly distracted, his head jerking around, his hand automatically brushing the front of his jacket. She wondered whether he was armed, or if it had been a purely reflexive gesture. She had no intention of finding out, if she could help it.

  Milot turned and followed in Jay’s footsteps. She increased her pace a little. Following a target from ahead was tricky but not impossible, unless your target wanted to screw you. However, there was another way she could look at the situation. She was so obviously not part of a surveillance team; he couldn’t dream she’d be following him.

  Soon they were in the back streets of St Pauls, a myriad dirty alleyways and neglected streets with potholes and cracked pavements. It was the roughest end of the city, full of drug dealers and petty criminals. There were bars and clubs with no hoardings outside, no advertisements – places where you knocked on the front door and someone checked you out from behind the curtain before letting you in. Jay recognised a couple of private clubs as she passed, where girls she knew worked. Girls from Moldova, Poland and Lithuania. Beautiful girls, young girls. Girls who had a university education but couldn’t find work anywhere else.

  Her boots echoed on the pavement, the mist of her breath drifted past her face in the freezing air. To her surprise, he didn’t react when she dropped back and allowed him to overtake her. She gave a narrow little smile. He had got complacent while putting on all that weight. He was losing his touch.

  She made a couple of surveillance checks to see if anyone else was keeping tabs on Milot; looking for multiple sightings of the same person. She saw an elderly man a few times, and a young woman with a pushchair who could have been his backup, but it was too easy to get things wrong in this situation and when Milot turned into George Street a few minutes later, she wasn’t surprised when they were nowhere to be seen.

  Everything was textbook-perfect until Milot ducked into an alley. Traffic roared in the distance as Jay peered after him. His stumpy, overweight figure scrunched rubbish and grit underfoot. Pausing next to an industrial-sized wheelie bin, he raised his fist and banged it three times against a blue metal door. The door opened and he slipped inside without looking back or checking over his shoulder. The door clanged shut behind him.

  Jay waited a couple of minutes before moving after him. She didn’t expect the metal door to sport a company logo, but she wasn’t going to leave without a closer inspection.

  As she’d suspected, the door held few clues. No bell, no number, not even a handle; just an average-sized keyhole. Steam wafted from a kitchen vent alongside, smelling of curry. Jay glanced inside the wheelie bin to see bulging black plastic sacks nestling alongside a couple of broken garden chairs. There were flattened cardboard boxes of potato chips, pre-cooked broccoli and carrots. A Frisbee that looked as though a dog had chewed it. A melted kitchen spatula.

  She would, she decided, phone Trinity Road cop shop. She wouldn’t speak to Tom, but his trusty PA, Anne. However, if Anne knew Jay was just around the corner, she would be hurt that she hadn’t popped in. Jay checked her watch – twelve o’clock – and wondered if Tom would be at lunch yet. Then again, he might not even be there. He might be investigating a murder on the other side of town, but she didn’t want to risk bumping into him. Not until she’d straightened out her head.

  Somewhere, a footstep echoed off the damp brick walls. A single step, no more, as though someone had been standing, waiting for a long time, and had finally given in against the interminable boredom and shifted their position.

  Instantly she forgot about Tom.

  Shit, she thought. Her skin started to tingle.

  She looked both ways, up and down the alley, but couldn’t see anyone. She took several deep breaths and told herself she wasn’t on the front line any more, that there were no gunmen waiting to shoot her, nobody about to chuck a grenade at her. Shaking her head, she replaced the wheelie bin lid. Jay hadn’t been in a war zone for five years, not since her tour in Iraq, but she still reacted to things that other people didn’t register. Like dodging plastic bags in the road in case they contained a roadside bomb, or obsessively checking the car behind her in case it was driven by a suicide bomber.

  One day she hoped to walk down the street without flinching. Or sit anywhere in a pub instead of insisting on the chair with its back against the wall and beside the nearest exit. Survival habits died hard.

  Jay thought she’d calmed herself until her mobile vibrated in her pocket.

  ‘Jesus,’ she muttered, fumbling to answer it. She was almost overwhelmed with longing for a cigarette. It was a rude reminder of how infrequently she had an adrenalin rush these days.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  It was Nick, her boss for the past two years, calling from London and expecting her to recognise his voice as usual.

  She said, ‘Hi, Me.’

  ‘Any luck with the photos?’

  ‘No, but the girls will keep their eyes peeled.’

  ‘Damn. I was sure we’d find them there. All the evidence pointed to Bristol . . .’ There was a sound of rustling paper, then Nick said, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In St Pauls, checking out a restaurant wheelie bin.’

  Brief silence.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I saw Milot Dumani slip in a back door beside it.’

  ‘You what?’

  She was about to fill Nick in when she became aware of a man standing at the entrance to the alley, silhouetted against the pale grey daylight. She glanced left to see another man at the other end. They both started walking towards her.

  Dark-skinned and unshaven, they wore jeans and sneakers and thickly padded windcheaters. Big, confident guys who looked like truck drivers except for the fact that one of them appeared to be holding some sort of weapon close to his body. From the way he was carrying himself, she took it to be a baseball bat.

  She felt a momentary rush of shame. Pure humiliation.

  Milot hadn’t lost his touch after all. He had been aware of her following him all that time, and had called for backup.

  ‘Nick, two men are approaching me. They don’t look friendly.’ She spoke rapidly, telling him where she was. ‘Call the cops, would you?’

  ‘On it,’ Nick said.

  She hung up, put her phone in her pocket and swung right. No point in dialling nine-nine-nine with Nick on her case; she didn’t want the distraction. There was little doubt her opponents would win if it came to a fight. She might be tall and relatively strong, but these guys had at least eighty pounds on her.