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ten other suicides here in the last four years. Suicide had that effect – always seemed to spread like a virus. Someone jumps off a bridge and before long it’s Suicide Bridge and people who’d never have heard of the place will drive through the night just for the honour of jumping off it. That was what this quarry was like, except they didn’t jump in. Just sat on the edges with their pills and their razors, probably looking at the stars.
    Jakes’s phone still hadn’t turned up, but the same team who’d worked on the Kitson case had analysed his signal patterns and worked out that the two calls after his death had been made from somewhere near here. The number wasn’t one Jakes had used before. Caffery had called it on the work phone and it turned out to be disconnected. It was a throwaway phone, pay-as-you-go, and he was pretty sure it had been disposed of already in a rubbish chute somewhere.
    Caffery picked up a stick and began to walk the perimeter, beating at the undergrowth as he went. The quarry had been searched when Jakes’s body had been found, but Caffery wanted to be sure there was nothing he had missed. No hidey-holes or evidence that someone else had been there on the night Jakes had died, maybe watching him from the bushes. He searched every square inch again, kicking around among the undergrowth, and after an hour the only thing he had found was a scooter lying on its side in the bushes.
    Someone had made an effort to conceal it – he had to crouch down and break branches to get at it. He dragged it out into the sunlight and set it upright, giving it a small shake. It had a tax disc, and petrol sloshed around in the tank. Jakes hadn’t had a scooter, Caffery was sure of that. He took a pen from his pocket and pulled back the callipers to check the brakes. No rust, so it had been used in the last twenty-four hours. He laid it on the ground, slapped his hands together to get the dust off and was about to turn back to the car when he noticed something else.
    About ten feet away to his right something blue and white was snarled in the roots of the buddleia. It was police tape, wrapped around the twigs. He went to it, pulled at it, and saw a length of blue butyl lying on the ground. It was about ten inches long and had come from a tube of some sort. He picked it up and studied it. At three-inch intervals letters had been stamped into it: USU. Underwater Search Unit. He knew the unit, and their sergeant, Flea Marley. She’d been the support unit officer who’d made the arrests on Operation Norway with him. Pretty. When Caffery had come out here to the West Country he’d made a pledge: he’d left a couple of lives ruined in London and he wasn’t going to do it again. There would be no more women in his life. Not without serious thought. But he hadn’t made any promise not to notice if someone was pretty.
    He pulled out his phone and called Kingswood. DC Turnbull, one of the men Powers had assigned him, answered. ‘I was just about to call you,’ he said, spruce and eager. ‘Got a couple of things. First off the Tanzanian in the bin, the one who keeps telling us his name is Johnny Brown? We’ve got a name. Clement Chipeta. Interpol had him in Dar Es Salaam until he came off their radar about a year ago. He was in serious trouble out there, not just with the law but with the gang he was working for.’
    ‘Who did what?’
    ‘Trafficking. They dealt in the ingredients for traditional medicine, mostly from endangered species, but some of it from humans. Which, I assume, is why the Operation Norway muppets found a use for him when he turned up here.’
    ‘You’ve let the custody officers know?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘OK.’ He turned away from the quarry, his finger in his ear so he could hear over the lousy signal. ‘Listen, Turnbull, I need you to do three things. Give me a PNC on this number, will you?’
    He gave him the plate number for the scooter and Turnbull tapped keys, getting into