#taken

by Tony Parsons

  The car was parked right under a streetlamp. That was not good.

  ‘What happened?’ I repeated.

  She had her head in her hands.

  I stood before her.

  ‘Pat,’ I said. ‘Come on. What have you done?’

  She looked up at me and nodded, composing herself, ready for a hot debrief.

  ‘I was driving home,’ she said. ‘Round the back of King’s Cross. The area that didn’t get developed. Where it still feels like – I don’t know – a wasteland. Like the surface of the moon.’

  She looked up at me and bit her lip. There were tears in her eyes. I felt my heart falling. Whatever had happened tonight was something that she was going to live with for the rest of her life.

  ‘A kid on a scooter came out of the petrol station down there,’ she said. ‘Do you know the one I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He came out really fast. No indicator. No warning. No chance to miss him. It sounds like I’m making excuses, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I kept going.’

  A pause.

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  Silence.

  ‘Did you kill him, Pat?’

  ‘I don’t know! There was that moment where I could have stopped and I let the moment pass. And then it was gone forever. And nobody saw. And nobody came. And the kid – he looked like one of those delivery kids, Max, on a scooter – he was just lying there. And his scooter was at the side of the road and it had L-plates on, Max. He was just some kid on a scooter who still had his bloody learner plates.’

  I grabbed my keys and my coat and headed for the door.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she said.

  ‘Listen out for Scout,’ I told her. ‘She’s not going to wake up. But listen out for her anyway.’

  I left the Prius where it was under the streetlamp outside my home and I drove to King’s Cross.

  The area above the station that had somehow missed out on development covered a bleak, sprawling expanse of the city.

  But there was only one petrol station up there.

  I slowed the BMW as I drove past it. And I didn’t see anyone in the street. I didn’t see anyone at all. Whitestone was right. It looked like the surface of some uninhabited planet. Even the streetwalkers who used to patrol the area before the developers arrived further south in King’s Cross had moved on.

  I breathed out.

  And this is what I hoped.

  That someone had spotted the kid in the street and called for an ambulance. Or the kid himself had only been stunned and had got up by himself. And that, impossibly, everything had turned out all right.

  At the end of the street I did a U-turn and came slowly back.

  And that was when I saw the phones in the middle of the road. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds, scattered across that empty street. It took me a while to realise that they had been stolen, snatched from the hands of the owner by a scooter that mounted the pavement and was driven away at speed by a rider who knew the police were not going to follow him because they would get into trouble if he got hurt during a pursuit. Which was ironic.

  I pulled over and got out.

  A trail of stolen smartphones led towards the lights of the garage.

  And then I saw the scooter.

  It was on its side in the darkness of the old automatic car wash. Nobody used the car wash any more. People are cheaper, some garage owner in some other place had once told me.

  I walked towards the scooter.

  And now I was not hoping.

  Now I was praying.

  Praying that someone had found him. Praying that he was at this moment being treated in some emergency ward.

  But his body lay not far from his scooter, hidden in the darkness of that old car wash. I bent over him, doing deals with God.

  But there were no deals to be done on that lonely road, and his lifeless eyes stared up at the orange glow of an empty sky.

  The smell of coffee filled the loft.

  Whitestone looked at my face and she knew what she had done.

  She reached for her phone and started dialling 999.

  ‘Pat,’ I said.

  ‘Which service do you require?’

  I took the phone from her and turned it off.

  ‘I have to tell them what I’ve done,’ she said.

  ‘Too late,’ I said. ‘You had to do that when it happened or you can’t do it at all.’

  She shook her head. ‘No!’

  ‘Listen to me – hitting him was not your fault.’

  ‘I was on the Grey Goose! Of course it’s my bloody fault! I’m in the wrong, Max. And I’m sick to the stomach with it.’

  I smelled the vodka on her breath and in my home.

  ‘Then maybe hitting him was your fault,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. And nobody is ever going to know. Certainly leaving the scene is on you, Pat, and it will always be on you. But this is the cruel truth – confession doesn’t help anyone now. Not that dead boy. Not you. Not your son. And not Jessica Lyle. If we lose you, then we are all finished. If you go down for this – and you will go down if you tell them what you did – then it’s all over. I need you, Pat. And your boy Justin needs you. And Jessica Lyle needs you.’

  She was not convinced.

  Her every instinct was to tell the truth about what she had done. Her every instinct was to face the punishment for her crime. She was a decent woman. I did not tell her that the boy she had killed probably didn’t have a decent bone in his body.

  Because Pat Whitestone would not have cared.

  ‘What if someone saw me? What if they ask you what I did, Max?’

  ‘I’m never going to lie for you,’ I said. ‘But I will never rat you out.’

  She shuddered with the horror of it.

  ‘This is what is going to happen,’ I said. ‘You are going to go home to Justin. And in the morning, you are going to take your car into the garage and get it fixed. And you are never going to talk about this to anyone. Not even me.’

  ‘But it’s wrong,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it just wrong, Max?’

  ‘Not if we find Jessica Lyle,’ I said.

  15

  Stan was on dog time.

  I had never bought the notion that one dog year equals seven human years, but as we walked into the café and Stan looked around with the calm, peaceful air of the seasoned café goer, I saw the truth – my dog was already on the cusp of middle age. How quickly their lives go, I thought. How heartbreaking that a dog’s life rushes by so fast. Stan looked around the café with his huge, melancholy eyes, as if contemplating the mystery of where the time goes. And then I realised he had merely caught a whiff of someone’s cheese-and-ham toastie.

  My ex-wife was waiting at a corner table. Anne looked good. Tall, lean and suntanned after ten days in the jewel of the Mediterranean. But something was subtly different. She was looking older, suddenly older, after the collapse of her second marriage. Divorce takes it out of you.

  ‘I don’t think it’s allowed in here,’ she said.

  Stan and I exchanged a look.

  It? Who’s it? She’s not really talking about me, is she?

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘All the kids who work in these places have got dogs back in Rome or Budapest or Warsaw or wherever it is they come from. London baristas love dogs.’

  Stan took a few tentative steps backwards.

  ‘What’s it doing?’ Anne frowned.

  Stan only engaged his reverse gear for one reason. He was about to scratch his bottom. Stan’s unshakeable belief was that by taking a few steps backwards, he put himself closer to his bottom, and so would find it far easier to scratch. I saw no need to explain this to my ex-wife. Scout and I thought it was an adorable habit, but to Anne it would have just seemed dumb.

  ‘How’s Fernando?’ I said, changing the subject.

  She sighed. How many sighs in our marriage? And how many more sighs since the divorce? A land
of exasperated sighs. A planet of slowly exhaled irritation.

  ‘You know it’s Roberto, Max. Why do you insist on calling him Fernando? Is it a ham-fisted attempt at humour, or are you just being gratuitously rude?’

  ‘I knew it was an Abba song.’

  ‘Did Abba do a song called “Roberto”? I don’t think so, Max.’

  We considered each other. And I saw now that her sun-kissed skin – and she glowed in the cool twilight of that café – was not merely the result of ten days in Sicily. Anne’s tan had been topped up closer to home.

  ‘How’s Scout?’ she said.

  I stared at her. You are missing so much, I thought. She changes every day and it is so fast that I find it hard to keep up. Such a smart, kind, curious little girl. How can you live a life that is separate from her? How can you stand it?

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I want to see her. This weekend. Pick-up at ten.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Is it fine, Max? Is it really? Oh, good. Because I get the impression you want to use our daughter as a stick to beat me with.’

  I shook my head. I had thought about this a lot.

  ‘I want her to have some kind of normal relationship with you,’ I said. ‘Not because it will be good for you. But because I know it will be bad for her if she doesn’t. If we – you and me, Anne – are too stupid or too angry to work that out.’

  ‘I’m glad you include yourself in the equation.’

  ‘But I’m not going to let you hurt her,’ I said, and I had thought about this a lot too. ‘If this was a nice normal divorce – if you and I were like everyone else – or how I imagine everyone else to be – then none of this would be difficult. But you come and you go, Anne. That’s the truth. You do your thing. You start a new family and then that’s over and Fernando is flying off to Sicily with you and Scout is expected to just try to keep up with the changes and understand that you’ll fit her in when you can. And maybe I’m too hard on you and me – perhaps the world is full of divorced idiots just like us who allow all this other crap to be put ahead of their children. But that doesn’t work for Scout.’

  She smiled with what looked like real amusement.

  ‘You don’t get it yet, do you? You can’t control my life!’

  ‘I’m not trying to control your life. I don’t care about your life. If you’re with the husband or the new boyfriend – I don’t give a damn, Anne. But I have a duty of care to Scout. And I just want …’

  My voice trailed away, and I looked down at Stan sleeping at my feet. What did I want for my daughter? What did I want?

  ‘I want her to have a happy life,’ I said. ‘I want her to grow up knowing she’s loved, and with something resembling normality. Routine. Stability. And if that disrupts any plans you have with Fernando, that’s too bad.’

  ‘Scout’s fine,’ she said, the useless soundbite of the absent parent.

  ‘But she’s not fine,’ I said. ‘Sports day is coming up …’

  Anne stared at me with disbelief.

  ‘Sports day? What – the egg-and-spoon race and hours spent lolling about on the grass before they start handing out the sausage rolls? You’re telling me that sports day is a problem?’

  ‘Sports day is hard for some kids,’ I said. ‘It’s hard for a girl who was born in the summer and just made the cut for her year. A girl who always – and I mean always – tries her best and runs her heart out but always comes last against older, bigger, faster kids.’

  ‘And Scout is prettier than all of them,’ Anne said. ‘And she is smarter. And she is nicer. Let them get their medals for the stupid sack race. Fat lot of good it will do them in the real world.’

  ‘You don’t get medals on sports day. You get stickers. Gold, silver and bronze stickers. And they give them out even in the heats, Anne. So all the kids who are no good at sports – the fat kids, the slow kids, the nerdy kids – all go home with something. But not Scout, because she has always come last, even in the heats. And she doesn’t complain, and she doesn’t cry, because she’s a brave little girl, and she shrugs it off as something she has to get through. But it is tough for her. And it hurts her. I know it does. And you don’t because you are never there, are you?’

  ‘I’ll come to bloody sports day, OK, Max? I’ll be there this year. I’ll cheer her on. And maybe she will even get a sticker. How about that?’

  ‘See you there,’ I said.

  Anne stood up.

  She was sick of looking at me.

  ‘Ten. Saturday. Have her ready for me.’

  ‘OK.’

  But there was one last thing on her mind.

  ‘As far as I can make out, Max, your closest relationship in the world is with that flea-bitten mutt,’ she said. ‘You spend all your spare time in that stinky boxing gym, hitting things as hard as you can. There was a girl you liked but now she’s gone and you don’t have the heart or the balls or the will to find another one.’

  ‘Fair comment,’ I said.

  ‘Then why the hell am I the unhealthy one?’ she said.

  The most exclusive prostitution ring in London is run from a small office above a Peking duck restaurant on Gerrard Street, Chinatown. You go up a short flight of stairs, your mouth watering at the scent of the roasting duck below, and there is a white door with a simple sign.

  SAMPAGUITA

  Social Introduction Agency

  Named after the national flower of the Philippines, Sampaguita is the former home of Ginger Gonzalez, founder and sole proprietor of the business. It has no online presence.

  The way Sampaguita worked, Ginger made contact with men of a certain income bracket in the bars of high-end hotels – the American Bar at the Savoy, the Rivoli at the Ritz, the Coburg at the Connaught, the Fumoir at Claridge’s, the Artesian at the Langham – and then she put them in touch with her ever-changing stable of girls.

  She grinned as Stan and I came into her office, throwing open her arms, revealing the tattoos that run down her lower inner arms.

  Never for money, said one.

  Always for love, said the other.

  ‘To what do I owe—’

  Her smile faded when DCI Pat Whitestone walked in behind me with TDC Joy Adams.

  ‘We’re looking for a girl, Ginger,’ I said.

  Ginger Gonzalez was my friend. She had helped me when we were breaking open a ring of child abusers in one of those old abandoned mansions on The Bishops Avenue. I had helped her when a couple of Kray twin obsessives were shaking her down for protection money.

  I liked her.

  But this wasn’t a social call.

  ‘This is about that woman on the news,’ Ginger said, her eyes watching Whitestone as she wandered over to the window and stared down at Chinatown. ‘The one they took by mistake.’

  ‘No,’ Whitestone said. ‘This is about the woman they meant to take. Show her, Joy.’

  Adams placed a blown-up passport photograph of Snezia Jones on Ginger’s desk.

  Ginger studied it and looked up at Whitestone.

  ‘Did this woman ever work for you?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘She’s a dancer,’ Ginger said. ‘East European. From Montenegro, I think. Tallest people in Europe.’

  ‘You get many dancers up here?’

  ‘We get all the glamour professions,’ Ginger said. ‘Dancers. Models. Actresses. A lot of actresses. Any job where it’s either feast or famine. Mostly famine. Romantic novelists. Poets. Bloggers.’

  Whitestone indicated the photo of Snezia Jones, who was one of the few people I had ever seen who looked good in their passport photograph.

  ‘So she did a bit of whoring for you, did she?’

  Ginger pushed the photo away. ‘I didn’t say that, did I? And this is a Social Introduction Agency—’

  Whitestone raised her hand for silence.

  ‘You can call it a lonely-hearts club if you want to, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I know that Max here is fond of you, but to me you are just another pi
mp. You might be a female pimp. And you might get your johns in bars where they charge £30 a time for a glass of sparkling wine.’ Whitestone took off her glasses, rubbed a spot of grime from one lens, and put them back on. ‘But to me you’re still a pimp.’

  ‘This woman has never worked for me,’ Ginger said. ‘We were only in preliminary talks.’

  ‘Christ,’ Whitestone said. ‘Preliminary talks? Who do you think you are? Microsoft?’

  ‘I heard she had found a gig at the Western World,’ Ginger said. ‘And then I heard she had found a sponsor.’ She looked at me. ‘So they meant to kidnap her, did they?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe Jessica Lyle was just taken for no reason beyond the fact that some men liked the way she looked. And so they took her.’

  ‘But if Jessica Lyle was raped and murdered after her abduction, then we would almost certainly have found her body by now,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘We think Jessica is alive,’ I said. ‘Alive and locked up somewhere. And that’s why we’re here.’

  Silence in the small white room.

  ‘We’re not asking you if any of your johns are into a bit of slap and tickle,’ Whitestone said. ‘We’re not interested in sado-masochism, bondage and discipline. Nanny smacking very naughty boys on the bottom? We don’t care. This is the hard stuff. This is a woman being held against her will for the gratification of whatever sick bastard is holding her. And – of course – his special friends and possibly paying customers.’

  ‘Ginger,’ I said. ‘Have you come across any men who are into that kind of thing?’

  She hesitated, her tongue touching her lips, and Whitestone saw it.

  ‘Who is he?’ she said.

  Ginger Gonzalez shook her head, anxious to backtrack.

  ‘Some men want to make their own pornography,’ she said. ‘They fantasise about going into some cell with a woman who can’t say no. A woman who is not pretending – who is not playing some BDSM game – but who really has no choice. But that’s not what we do here.’