Hold My Hand

by M. J. Ford

  ‘How did they find out about his record?’

  ‘Who knows,’ said Phelps. ‘Social media makes the world a small place, right? And Aylesbury to his new place in Tring is only ten miles. Word spread quickly. It started off as name-calling and vandalism – dog crap smeared on his car, broken windows. Escalated to assault when he called the police. Someone broke his nose. He said he knew who it was but didn’t press charges. Moved out soon after.’

  ‘To Oxford? He had friends here, did he?’

  Phelps shook her head. ‘He knew the area,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want it getting out where he was. Asked me to continue to list the Tring abode. I didn’t see a problem with it.’

  Jo let the silence linger until it was uncomfortable.

  ‘I guess that was wrong,’ said Phelps quietly. ‘I had his phone number. We spoke a couple of times.’

  ‘We just need to find him,’ said Jo. ‘Did he have money?’

  ‘A small pension, yes,’ said Phelps.

  ‘So what makes you so sure he wouldn’t kidnap someone?’ asked Carrick. ‘Maybe he bottled up his urges for so long, and now he just … cracked.’

  Phelps sipped her tea. ‘He wasn’t like that. He just wanted to live his life. He had a bad time as a youngster with his stepfather, and I’d managed to get him referred to a counsellor in Bedfordshire before it went bad for him. I thought it might help him move on. It was working, just talking to someone. That was one of the worst parts for him when he left. He needed that sort of help. Professional, you know?’

  ‘And when you last spoke to him – sorry, when was that?’

  ‘Maybe a month ago.’

  ‘Right. How did he seem?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Phelps. ‘Positive. He had work, gardening. He told me he was looking into a new counsellor, and he’d found this new group that met once a week, a kind of support network for victims of abuse.’

  Carrick looked up sharply, and Jo knew his mind was in the same place as hers. An accomplice.

  ‘Where do they meet?’ asked Jo.

  Phelps looked flustered. ‘I don’t think I could tell you that, even if I knew.’

  ‘Ms Phelps – you said you weren’t familiar with the case,’ Jo said, ‘so I’ll help you a little bit. We have no doubt that Alan Trent first spotted his victim, Niall McDonagh, at the place he worked. He discovered that Niall would be at a local carnival, yesterday evening. Having purchased a disguise from a shop in Oxford town centre on Tuesday morning, he drove his car to a hidden spot, entered the circus, and lured Niall McDonagh away, assaulting another child in the process. Those are as close to facts as we can get, with a clear chain of evidence. We also believe that he did not work alone. So please, spare me your scruples and tell us what you know.’

  Phelps smiled, all the warmth gone. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If we find out …’

  ‘Detective, I didn’t have to come here,’ said Phelps. ‘And I won’t be here very much longer if you threaten me.’

  Jo sat back in her chair. Perhaps – despite the soft, Home-Counties mum-of-two exterior – there was more to Laura Phelps. Being a parole officer, she’d probably seen her fair share of the darker elements in life. Time to change tack.

  ‘I apologise,’ said Jo. ‘We’re all simply worried about Niall and, in all honesty, I don’t think that Alan was acting in character either. We think he may have been working with someone else – hence our interest in any known associates.’

  Phelps’ guard, she could see, was still well and truly up. ‘And like I said, I honestly do not know anything about the group he attended.’

  ‘But you think it’s genuine?’

  ‘Whatever Alan Trent is, or was, he’s not a liar.’

  With a double knock at the door, Stratton came in. ‘We’ve got an address from one of his work colleagues. We’re going in.’

  Chapter 10

  Jo had been on armed responses before, always planned drug raids, almost always pre-dawn. The intelligence was normally gold standard. They knew what they were getting. This couldn’t have felt more different.

  They took her car, because there was no way it could be tagged as police by locals or Trent. The AFO unit was travelling from the other side of the city, while Heidi Tan and George Dimitriou were with Carrick. Together they would converge on Warwick Close in the Headington area of the city. It was an area she’d visited once before, for a house party that got out of hand when she was sixteen. One of her mates had her stomach pumped. She remembered Mum’s dread silence as she’d come to pick her up from the hospital.

  Following Whittaker’s list of contacts, one of the other gardeners – a Lucas Hardy – revealed he’d dropped Alan Trent at home after work a few weeks ago. He couldn’t remember the house number, but he knew the road, because it made him think of the singer Dionne.

  ‘This is AR7,’ came the voice over the earpiece. ‘We are in position. Over.’

  ‘We’re approaching Warwick Close now,’ said Carrick, as Jo slowed the car.

  ‘This is Unit 1,’ said Stratton. ‘Unit 2, ID the house if you can. We’re looking for a maroon ’93 Vauxhall Cavalier Estate. Once you’re positive, call it in. AR7, await my signal. Over.’

  ‘This is Unit 2. Roger,’ said Carrick.

  ‘This is AR7. Roger,’ said the armed response leader.

  Jo switched off the engine and they climbed out.

  The estate was only a couple of miles from the city-centre grandeur, but couldn’t have been more different. Pokey sixties terraces with tiny windows. Messy front gardens strewn with rubbish. Jo saw an elderly couple walking a dog dragging one of its back legs, but otherwise the road was deserted. A side road opened onto a row of garages.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Jo.

  She and Carrick walked slowly through, and she saw the car immediately. A dirty reddish estate of a make and model you rarely saw on the road. It even had a chipped dent just above the fender on the right-hand side. The garage it was parked beside had no number, but the one next to it belonged to 12.

  Carrick spoke into his chest mic. ‘This is Unit 1. He’s number 14 …’

  ‘Confirm one-four,’ said AR.

  ‘Confirm, one-four. Over.’

  ‘This is Unit 1,’ said Stratton. ‘Stand by Unit 2 at the rear of the property. AR7 – primary objective is extraction of Niall McDonagh. Eleven years old. Secondary objective is the arrest of Alan Trent. After that, secure anybody else in the house. Over.’

  ‘This is AR7. Roger.’

  ‘This is Unit 1. You have permission to go. Over.’

  ‘This is AR7. Roger and out.’

  Jo’s heart was pumping as she followed the alley running between the row of garages and the rear gardens of the properties. A discarded washing machine lay on its side, and a child’s plastic trike blocked the way.

  On the other side of the house she heard the rumble of the AFO van before it stopped. Then about ten seconds of silence. She held her breath.

  A door smashed, and then the shouting started.

  ‘Armed police! Armed police!’

  Screams.

  ‘Get on the ground. You! On the fucking ground!’

  A moment later, there was a cry of pain at the rear of the house, just over the fence, then a young Asian man burst through the gate in front of her, bare-chested and wearing tracksuit bottoms. He crashed into the wall on the other side, saw Jo and Carrick and sprinted the other way down the alley.

  ‘No you don’t!’ said Carrick, after him in a flash.

  The kid tried to vault the fence at the far end, but Carrick grabbed him by the legs and hauled him down, accidentally exposing his backside at the same time. There was blood spattering thickly on the ground, but she couldn’t see where it was from.

  ‘Get off me, man!’ shouted the kid.

  ‘Stop fighting then,’ said Carrick. He prised an arm back and knelt in the small of the suspect’s back.

  ‘This is AR7,’ crackled the radio. ‘W
e have Trent.’

  ‘And Niall?’ said Stratton.

  ‘Negative, sir … House is secure.’

  ‘You got him?’ said Jo, nodding to the bare-arsed young man. ‘He’s injured.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carrick. ‘You go.’

  Jo headed into a small back yard laid to flagstones. Other than two bins and a crate of empty glass bottles, there was nothing but a washing line. More fresh blood on the ground, presumably from the youth in custody.

  An armed officer looked out at her through the kitchen window and she held up her badge.

  ‘We got one running through the back,’ she said.

  She went through the open back door into a kitchen heavy with the smell of spices. A narrow corridor with a thick carpet. Gold-framed family photos on the wall. In the front room, a man and a woman in their fifties, Indian heritage, lay on the ground, the TV showing a talent show. They looked petrified to be surrounded by gun-wielding officers.

  Tan and Dimitriou, both vested and helmeted, came through the smashed front door ahead of Stratton.

  Jo held back as they headed up the stairs, then followed.

  She dreaded what she’d find, but her feet carried her onwards. An open door straight ahead led to a bathroom, then on the right was a master bedroom surrounded by copious wardrobes. Two armed officers stood by the far door, at ease, and looking in.

  There was no noise on the other side.

  Jo passed a room with a door smashed off its hinges. Inside, the window was open, and there were various movie posters on the wall and the faint smell of cannabis. Jo quickly put two and two together. The open window, the blood out back. The stupid kid had jumped.

  She walked on, to where the other detectives were disappearing into the final room.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Stratton.

  Jo caught up and looked in.

  On the floor was a mattress, and beside it a sports holdall and a few items of clothing. A transparent plastic bag contained a toothbrush, paste and a bar of soap. The only furniture was a plywood wardrobe.

  A bare bulb cast everything in harsh light and dark shadow, including the man hanging from the wardrobe pole, almost in a sitting position – legs out in front of him, heels on the floor, but backside a fraction off the ground. He’d tied a sheet around his neck and the pole, and his head was lolling to one side. Despite his face being almost blue, it was clearly Alan Trent.

  * * *

  Ben and Jo had once engaged in a macabre competition: who’d seen the most dead bodies in the line of duty. Looking back, it was grossly insensitive, but when they’d started the game, they’d both been relatively new to the job. You could even call it small talk, a language of courtship that came naturally to two young police officers. It was probably a coping mechanism more than anything, a way to face the horrific things the day-to-day threw at them. Auto accidents, electrocutions, the elderly who’d met their end alone and neglected. Jo recalled a date in the early days when Ben had arrived an hour late, only to announce he’d taken the lead, having come from a scene where a tree surgeon had misjudged his balance and broken his neck falling from fifteen feet.

  As the years wore on and the single-digit scores grew to double, then into the twenties, they’d both stopped playing. But, as she looked at the bloated, strangulated face of Alan Trent, Jo found herself vaguely wondering who was winning now.

  An ambulance had come to take the injured boy to hospital – he had a laceration to his upper leg and a suspected broken ankle. There was some drug paraphernalia in his bedroom, which might have explained the otherwise idiotic decision to leap from a first-floor window. Heidi Tan and George Dimitriou were downstairs talking to the boy’s mother and father. It looked like they were in the clear. Jo heard their protestations from the upstairs landing.

  ‘He was just renting the room,’ said the husband. ‘We put an ad in the window of the newsagents.’

  ‘He always paid on time,’ said the wife. ‘What is it he’s done?’

  ‘He’s wanted in connection with a missing child,’ said Heidi.

  A gasp. ‘Not the boy at the carnival in Jericho?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. We’re going to need to ask you a few questions, to see if we can establish his movements over the last few days. Why don’t you take a seat?’

  ‘Is our boy Balreick in trouble?’

  ‘We don’t think so,’ said Heidi.‘It looks like we startled him – he’ll be looked after.’

  ‘Alan was just a lodger, you know? Kept himself to himself.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Heidi. ‘Shall I make us all a cup of tea?’

  Stratton told them to get started without forensics. This was in all likelihood a secondary crime scene. As Carrick and Jo worked, the mood was sombre and mostly silent, not owing to any respect for the recently departed, who for the moment remained as they’d found him, but because of what it undoubtedly meant for Niall McDonagh.

  Alan Trent had few possessions. A couple of sets of spare clothing, a pair of work boots, and the trainers his corpse was wearing. His Gloucester College baseball cap was hanging from a peg on the back of the door.

  DCI Stratton, having dismissed the AFO unit, was pacing the hallway outside, probably wondering how he was going to break the news to the McDonaghs.

  The wardrobe pole, a wooden rod spanning three feet across, was bowed under Trent’s body weight, but he’d managed to tie the torn sheet to two anchor points in a V shape, to split the load and avoid it breaking. It struck Jo as almost comic. Carrick carefully unhooked the pole and let the body sag to the ground.

  Jo patted down Trent’s pockets. In one she found his wallet, which contained a driving licence, a bank card and a blood donor card. In the other was a mobile phone, which had clearly run out of battery. There was no charger that she could see.

  His back pocket contained a set of car keys, a Yale which she guessed opened the front door and a small key that looked like it was for a padlock or bike lock.

  ‘We need to check his car,’ she said.

  They formed a slow procession downstairs, through the back door and out to the garages where the Vauxhall Cavalier was parked. The central-locking electrics had gone, so Jo opened the car manually. Carrick walked purposefully to the boot and popped it open. It was empty apart from a toolbox, a pair of gardening gloves, and some bolt cutters. Carrick pulled up the shelf over the spare wheel.

  And there, looking back at them, was a clown mask.

  ‘Get this whole place cordoned off,’ Stratton said to the uniforms. ‘No one else touches it until the forensics get here.’

  It was close to midnight, but lights had come on in pretty much all the surrounding houses. There were a few people out in dressing gowns, and a group of teens in hoodies with their bikes. Someone asked if ‘Bal’ was in trouble, to which Jo replied he wouldn’t be jumping out of another window any time soon. It didn’t look like he had any involvement at all, but a few routine questions at the A&E would clear that up.

  They regrouped with Tan and Dimitriou back in the kitchen.

  ‘What now?’ said Stratton.

  ‘We check the phone for recent records,’ said Carrick.

  ‘We’ll get proper statements from Mr and Mrs Singh,’ said Dimitriou. ‘They’re understandably a bit confused at the moment, but they must be able to give us more on Trent’s movements over the last week.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Niall’s parents in the morning,’ said Stratton, and Jo didn’t envy him for a second.

  * * *

  Stratton said she could go home, but there was no way she’d go knocking on her brother’s door at this time of night. For one thing, she couldn’t face their questions. She said she’d go back to the station and see if there was anything else in the files that could help indicate where Trent might have taken his victim. No one said it explicitly, but she sensed the shift: the search for a living, breathing boy was over.

  We’re looking for a body now.

  As she walked back down W
arwick Close, she caught a flash, and looked up. And there, across the road, was the sporty Audi she’d seen back at the Bradford-on-Avon worksite.

  ‘Oi!’ she said, but the window was already winding up. She marched across the street, only to see the car pull away at speed. ‘Fucking bitch!’ she whispered, memorising the plate for good measure.

  When she got back, the front desk clerk said Laura Phelps had left an hour ago, but with a message saying that they could call her day or night. The clerk also said that Lucas Hardy was still in IR3.

  ‘Sorry, who?’ said Jo.

  ‘The bloke who gave us the address,’ said the clerk. ‘I wasn’t sure if we could cut him loose.’

  Jo went through to the back, and found an athletic-looking man with golden curly hair asleep at the table, head resting on his folded arms. She nudged him awake and he straightened up blearily. He looked to be in his late twenties and there was a comforting, sun-kissed smell about him.

  ‘You can go home now,’ she said.

  ‘Did you find Al?’ he asked.

  ‘We did,’ she said. After the day she’d had, she almost told him straight, but something about the concern in his voice softened her. ‘Are you close?’

  ‘Nah – he’s a good worker though.’

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you he’s deceased,’ said Jo.

  The man blinked, mouth agape. ‘You’re having a laugh.’

  ‘Depends on your sense of humour,’ said Jo grimly.

  ‘Bloody hell. You’re serious. Al’s dead?’

  ‘Afraid so.’ She was knackered. Ready to drop, but she felt a sense of responsibility after breaking the news. ‘How well did you know him?’ she added conversationally as she held open the door.

  ‘Barely at all,’ said Lucas. ‘Drove him home a couple of times, that’s all.’ Jo waited by the door as Lucas shambled over. ‘Fella could tell a story.’

  ‘Such as?’ Jo remembered the victim impact statements in the file. I bet he didn’t tell you about the time he snuck his hand into little kids’ sleeping bags at night, stealing their childhoods away.

  Lucas grinned, looking like a puppy. His green eyes were quite startling against his tanned skin.