#taken

by Tony Parsons

  Anne was studying me. There was mocking amusement in her eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you say it?’ she said. ‘What’s really on your mind. Go on, Max. Knock yourself out. I know you want to.’

  I nodded. She was right. She knew me so well, I’ll give her that much.

  ‘And I don’t know you,’ I told Roberto. ‘No offence, pal, but who are you? I never met you. I never saw you before today. And I’m meant to let my daughter go on holiday with you?’

  Stan lifted his huge round eyes.

  Well, he seems like a really great guy to me.

  Cheers, Stan.

  But then our dog loved everyone – two legs, four legs, cats.

  ‘I’ll wait in the car,’ Roberto said.

  We let him go.

  ‘Do you really think you have the power of veto over who I see?’ Anne said. ‘Or who I go to bed with?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care who you see. Or who you go to bed with. I did once. Not any more. But Scout can’t go on holiday during term time because the school doesn’t allow it.’

  ‘Oh, fuck the school and its petty rules!’

  ‘You must join me at the next parents’ evening, because they would love you,’ I said. ‘And she can’t go on holiday with some guy you just met in the gym. Because her father doesn’t allow it.’

  ‘Yoga class, actually. Not the gym. And Roberto does an awesome Downward Facing Dog.’

  I could have made a cheap joke, but I rose above it.

  We stared at each other without understanding or affection and I struggled to remember that there had once been a time when we had stayed awake all night long and felt so close to each other it was hard to tell where one of us ended and the other began. Or perhaps that had all been a dream in some other lifetime.

  ‘What happened to your marriage?’ I said. ‘You seemed happy. Settled.’

  ‘Everything ends, Max,’ she said, heading for the door.

  ‘Apart from being a parent,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see it? That never ends.’

  When I carried the poetry book into Scout’s bedroom, Stan was once again stretched out on her duvet in the classic Cavalier pose, his paws stretched out ahead of him, like he was preparing to come off the high diving board. Scout was sitting up in bed with The Rough Guide to Italy on her lap.

  ‘I’ve got a good poem for tonight,’ I told her.

  She didn’t look up at me.

  ‘It’s about a dog,’ I said.

  A poem about a dog! How could she refuse?

  Every night I read Scout what we called our bedtime poem. The poems about dogs always went down well. In fact, poems about dogs had been all I had read for quite a while. It was part of the routine that every family life is built upon. I knew I could rely on poems about dogs. But not tonight. Everything ends, as my ex-wife pointed out.

  ‘I don’t need a poem tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m going to read my book.’

  I watched her for a while.

  ‘It’s my job to look after you the best I can, Scout. Taking you out of school to go to Sicily is not a great idea.’

  She wasn’t listening.

  ‘Getting around Sicily can be a protracted business,’ she read.

  I kissed the top of her unresponsive head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to spoil your fun.’

  ‘But you already did,’ she said.

  And I realised that Scout’s grown-up teeth must be coming through.

  Because she wasn’t lisping any more.

  In the morning she was fine.

  In the morning she was my Scout again, and we busied ourselves with breakfast, and feeding the dog, and getting ready for school, and working out who was picking her up.

  Children are like dogs, I thought. Living totally in the moment.

  But she never let her Rough Guide to Italy get far from her side, and there was a guarded look in her brown eyes that made me think that the children of divorced parents are different.

  All of them are diplomats, every one of them, because they have to be, never letting slip what they really feel about the mess and chaos they must negotiate, adept at moving between different homes and adults who have decided that they don’t love each other after all.

  Scout was hefting her school bag when Pat Whitestone called.

  ‘We got a ransom demand,’ she said, her voice thick with something.

  It could have been a bad night’s sleep. It could have been a hangover.

  ‘No shock after that press conference,’ I said. ‘How much do they want?’

  ‘They don’t want money,’ she said. ‘They want Harry Flowers.’

  7

  Later that morning TDC Joy Adams drove Harry Flowers in from Essex.

  When they walked into MIR-1, Whitestone held out her hand for his phone.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Mr Flowers,’ she said.

  He gave the phone to her, his face impassive apart from a hint of amusement around the mouth.

  ‘It’s on WhatsApp,’ he said.

  ‘Which has end-to-end encryption,’ Adams said. ‘Meaning the message can be read at either end but by no one in between. I can get it checked by NCCU.’ The National Cyber Crime Unit is part of the National Crime Agency. ‘Some tech guys believe end-to-end encryption still leaves a forensic trace.’

  ‘You can encrypt your end-to-end until the mad cows come home,’ Flowers smiled. He flexed his massive neck, taking in his surroundings. ‘The smart money says that message was sent with a burner that has since been chucked in a skip or dropped down a drain. Your computer boffins are not going to be much use if the message was sent on a one-use phone.’

  ‘Is that how it works, Harry?’ Whitestone said, reading the message.

  His expression didn’t change. ‘That’s exactly how it works.’

  Whitestone read the message and then passed his phone to me. WhatsApp was open.

  Come for your whore after dark, H.

  Down Street station at midnight.

  Are you free? Bring what you stole, H.

  But bring the law then there is no more whore.

  We are serious men, H. You know us.

  ‘It looks like they still think they’ve got your special friend, Mr Flowers,’ Whitestone said. ‘That’s bad news for Jessica Lyle. And bad news for everyone.’

  Harry Flowers settled himself at a workstation, easing his bulk into a chair that seemed child-sized with him in it.

  A man with big appetites, I thought again.

  He looked around, taking his time, as if he had choices, and I guessed that this was not the first time he had been inside West End Central. But his previous visits had all been in an interview room or a holding cell.

  ‘Mr Flowers,’ he said to Whitestone. ‘It’s Mr Flowers now, is it? I like it. You need my help, so it’s Mr Flowers.’ If he had been a more boorish man he would have put his feet up on the desk, but he contented himself with a small smile, an almost delicate turning of the lips. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I always like to assist the police with their enquiries.’

  Whitestone stepped quickly to his side.

  And the open palm of her right hand cracked hard across his face.

  He blinked up at her, a red welt high on one cheekbone.

  ‘You think this is funny?’ Whitestone said, and I saw how much she loathed him. ‘You find this amusing? There’s a young woman who has been taken from her child because some cretins believe she’s involved with you. And wherever she is as we speak, it’s nowhere good. I don’t know if we’re going to get her back alive. And I don’t know if she’s dead already. So please don’t find it funny, or so help me God I will bury you alive,’ she said. ‘Mr Flowers.’

  He placed his hands behind his neck, inhaled, and let it go slowly, like some kind of yoga man.

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ he said, the red mark growing on his face. ‘And I’m trying to help.’

  ‘Who calls you H?’ Whitestone said.

>   ‘Nobody has called me H in years,’ he said, flinching at this social faux pas. ‘I don’t care for it.’

  I stared at the phone in my hand.

  ‘But they know your number, Harry,’ I said. ‘How did they get your number?’

  ‘How would I know? Perhaps I gave it to them – these people who call me H. Many moons ago.’

  ‘Where’s Down Street station?’ Whitestone asked me. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  We looked at the giant map of London covering one wall of MIR-1 and I pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of Mayfair, bordered by Park Lane and Piccadilly.

  ‘Down Street is a tube station in Mayfair that hasn’t been used for nearly a hundred years,’ I said. ‘There have always been plenty of other stations nearby and the well-heeled locals in that neck of the woods were never big on public transport anyway. It closed between the wars and in the early days of the Second World War it was Churchill’s deep-level shelter until the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall were completed.’

  Whitestone held out her hand for the phone. She read the message again.

  ‘You say you’ll help us bring this young woman home, Mr Flowers,’ she said. ‘Are you prepared to put yourself in harm’s way?’

  He laughed. ‘You think I’m scared of someone who would do this to a woman? I’ll go down there for you. But I am going to take a couple of my people with me.’

  I thought of the two hired hands I had seen him with in Fred’s gym. The black guy who I remembered from some boxing ring of long ago and the fat white boy who had asked me Scout’s age. Ruben Shavers and Big Dec. And I wondered again – why does a legitimate businessman need professional muscle on call?

  ‘That’s never going to happen,’ Whitestone said. ‘You will be accompanied by one of my officers.’

  ‘No law,’ Flowers reminded her. ‘Do you want to get this girl killed?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid,’ she said. ‘We are going to need a signed statement from you, Mr Flowers. And a waiver. TDC Adams will take that from you.’

  ‘A waiver,’ Flowers sneered. ‘Yes, you have to cover your butt in case it all goes wrong, don’t you?’ He stood up. ‘I’ll sign any bit of paper you put in front of me. But they’re not getting any money from me.’

  ‘The message is a little vague on that subject,’ Whitestone said. ‘But I don’t think they want your money. Assuming this is not a hoax, I think they want to confront you. And I think that, quite possibly, they want to kill you.’

  When Flowers and Adams had gone off to do the paperwork, Whitestone stared at me.

  For the first time in a while, she seemed stone-cold sober.

  ‘Are we really going to use this maggot as live bait?’ she said.

  ‘The maggot is the only bait we have,’ I said. ‘And he’s not scared of what might be waiting for him down there, I’ll give that to him.’

  She stared at his phone in her fist, her knuckles white.

  ‘But is it real?’ she said. ‘Have they really got Jessica Lyle?’

  ‘They know him well enough to reach him.’

  ‘But they don’t know him well enough to know they took the wrong woman.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘But Harry’s WhatsApp message reminds me of a letter in the Black Museum that’s meant to be from Jack the Ripper. It’s a single sheet of paper, one hundred and fifty years old. It’s brittle and rust-coloured. Looks like it was pulled from a fire, looks like it would fall to pieces if you touched it. It was sent to George Lusk, the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. There are a dozen lines, mocking Lusk. The letter arrived at Scotland Yard with a kidney. And there are words misspelt, and it was written fast, almost in a fever. And it’s real. You can tell. You can feel it. It’s from Jack the Ripper.’ I nodded at the phone. ‘And this feels real, too.’

  ‘It reminds me of a different message,’ Whitestone said. ‘A cassette tape sent to a copper called George Oldfield in the Eighties. Ever heard of him? Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield of West Yorkshire Police. He led the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. And Oldfield was sent a tape from someone with a Newcastle accent claiming to be the Ripper.’

  ‘The I’m Jack tape.’

  She nodded. ‘The I’m Jack tape. And because the guy who sent it had a Newcastle accent, it had the law searching the north-east of England while the real Yorkshire Ripper was killing women in another part of the country. And everybody thought that seemed real, too.’ She shrugged. ‘You get a message like this and you are either Inspector Lusk, being taunted by the real thing, or you are Assistant Chief Constable Oldfield, being led up the Yellow Brick Road by some sick fantasist with nothing better to do.’

  ‘They do have Harry’s number.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they have Jessica.’

  ‘And they hate his guts.’

  ‘Get in the queue.’

  We went to the window and stared down at Savile Row, a winding canyon of a street through the heart of Mayfair.

  ‘Did you tell Jessica’s parents about the message to Flowers?’ I said.

  Whitestone shook her head.

  ‘You saw that circus we had here? It’s no good keeping the missing person in the public eye if you’re endangering their life. I know old man Lyle loves his daughter but he’s a dial-up copper in a digital world. I’ll call Jessica Lyle’s parents when I get their daughter back. One way or the other.’

  She turned her back to the street and stared up at the wall map.

  ‘If we do what they ask,’ she said, ‘and we send Flowers in there, how would you play it?’

  I had already thought about it.

  ‘I would have a minimal presence around Down Street station,’ I said. ‘The heavy mob can’t be visible. One panic attack and Jessica Lyle is dead. And I would have surveillance officers at the three nearest tube stations backed up by teams of shots.’ Shots are SFOs – Specialist Firearms Officers. ‘Hyde Park Corner, Green Park, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly Circus are almost next door to Down Street. A bit further out there’s Marble Arch, and Oxford Circus. If the Chief Super will sign off on it, I would have surveillance and shots there too.’

  ‘Hold on – you seriously think the men holding Jessica are going to walk to Down Street from one of those stations?’

  ‘I don’t see how else they could do it. I think they’ve already planned their entry and exit.’

  ‘And is that a plan that could work?’

  ‘Oh, yes. If you know your way around down there – and anyone who ever worked for London Underground would know – then you could walk to and from Down Street station from any one of them. You’re talking about two hundred and fifty miles of track on London’s tube network, with two hundred and seventy working stations and forty ghost stations.’ I tapped the map. ‘The entrance is on Down Street Mews. But whoever sent that message is not going to be coming through the front door. If he comes at all.’

  Whitestone stared hard at the message.

  I saw that her hands were shaking.

  ‘Look how much he hates Harry Flowers,’ she said. ‘He’ll come.’

  8

  ‘Harry Flowers has bottled it,’ Whitestone said, her voice larded with contempt and vodka. ‘Some tough guy he turned out to be.’

  It was knocking on for midnight and we were at the window of an unfurnished studio apartment across the road from what had once been Down Street underground station.

  The entrance to the abandoned station is a grey service door, unmarked apart from a warning that this door is alarmed, private and entry strictly forbidden. It sits under three wide semi-circular windows just to the left of the Mayfair Mini Mart in a façade of glazed red terracotta blocks, the signature architecture of London Underground in the early twentieth century. Apart from the entrance door, Down Street is unchanged in the century or so since the station closed to the public, but the grey door is now used for engineering access and as an emergency exit from the London Underground.

 
And we had just watched Harry Flowers walk straight past it. He kept going down the street, and he could have been a tourist giddy with jet lag, out for a late-night stroll.

  ‘What did we expect?’ Whitestone said, slipping something out of her shoulder bag. A silver hip flask. She unscrewed the top, took a quick hit and then put it away. ‘There’s nothing in it for him,’ she said. ‘Why should he give a toss if Jessica Lyle lives or dies?’

  But then Flowers stopped at the end of the street.

  And he turned back.

  And moving awkwardly, his large body bulked up even more by the stab-proof vest he wore under his designer flying jacket, he came back to the entrance and went quickly through the unlocked, unmarked door.

  Had he simply missed the door, or was it last-minute nerves?

  It did not matter now.

  ‘All calls,’ Whitestone said into the radio attached to her lapel. ‘He’s in.’

  There were surveillance teams at the exits of the three nearest tube stations. Hyde Park, Green Park and Knightsbridge. They were all backed up with Tactical Support Teams of shots in their unmarked vehicles. And there were ambulances and paramedics in case it all went wrong.

  But Harry Flowers would not be alone down there. Because I was going down there with him.

  Whitestone glanced at her watch.

  ‘Let him have five minutes on you,’ she said, and nodded at Adams.

  Joy Adams had a map spread out on the floor but the light from the street was not enough to see it clearly. Whitestone found the stump of an old candle from the flat’s tiny kitchen and I realised that I still had the folder of matches that Flowers had given me. I handed them to Whitestone and she lit the stump of candle. She looked at the cover of the matchbox folder.

  ‘Auto Waste Solutions,’ she read, slipping the matchbox into her pocket, and we crouched beside Joy as her finger traced the Piccadilly line.

  ‘Last train westbound is at eleven forty-five and the last train eastbound is five minutes later,’ she said.

  ‘I thought the last train was in 1932,’ I said.