The Stolen Children

by Oliver Davies

  “Agreed.” Dr King gave me a nod that I judged to be in approval before she stepped away to talk to the rest of forensics, relaying where we should start looking.

  A couple of small, yellow flags had already been driven into the soft ground and, carefully, I headed towards them. At first, I was unable to see anything there and frowned down into the grass, which was tangled like long hair. But when the clouds shifted in the sky, and the milky illumination brightened into sunlight, I saw the glimmer of metal.

  “What is it?” Stephen asked.

  I stepped back, letting him look. “Empty shell casings. A small gun, I’d say.”

  Stephen hummed. “Yeah, handgun, maybe.” He straightened up with a frown. “They’re harder to get hold of, especially out here. You think it was Mr Wooding’s or one of the gang’s?”

  “No way of knowing yet,” I said regretfully. “We’ll see what the lab says on these.”

  “So we can assume that they were here, as they’d been told to be, and someone fired a gun,” Stephen said, pressing his mouth into a thin line.

  “Aye. More than once,” I gestured to the two other flags forensics had put up, “which isn’t promising for the fate of Lawrence’s parents.”

  “No.”

  We kept out of the way as King’s team continued to search, but as an hour passed by and nothing else was turned up, I began to think that wasn’t anything else here.

  I walked back and forth beside the road to keep the blood moving in my legs. They were still slightly achy from my run, but hadn’t taken as long to recover as I’d feared, so maybe I wasn’t as badly out of shape as I worried I was.

  Stephen stood silently, watching the forensics team at work. They were right up beside the river now and had almost completed their fine combing of the area King and I had outlined as most likely.

  “I’m going to head over,” I told Stephen, and he joined me as I set off to join Dr King over by the river bank.

  King gestured for us to keep off the mud as we approached and we came to an obedient stop. The river water was muddy, and I couldn’t see the bottom. It was perhaps a meter and a half in width, and I considered it.

  “How deep do you think that is?”

  Stephen considered. “It looks flooded with the recent rain,” he said, “so it’s probably higher than usual. Maybe a meter or two?”

  “I wonder whether there was heavy rain when the Wooding’s went missing,” I thought aloud.

  Dr King came over to my side. “You think they could’ve been thrown in the river,” she said, having clearly overheard our discussion.

  “It’s a possibility. The river gets wider further down. They might’ve gotten swept up and carried away.”

  “If the killers were lucky,” King agreed, “or if they weren’t, the bodies could be snared anywhere along the riverbanks.”

  That would involve a hell of a lot of searching and resources to find out, I thought, and grimaced. I very much doubted that Gaskell would sign that off for a missing persons case, even if it was tied up with a kidnapping.

  I turned back to King. “Found anything else?”

  She shook her head, her neat braids swinging. “No. It’s difficult terrain to search though, and it’s been a month. Blood washes away, crushed grass recovers, and muddy footprints disappear in that time.” She indicated towards the riverbank which had no marks I could see.

  I sighed. “Alright. Well, we’ve confirmed that a gun was fired off here, which is much better than nothing.”

  “We’ve gathered up a sample,” she said. “We’ve found three shell casings in all, and they look to be identical.”

  “From the same gun,” Stephen mused.

  “Or several guns but the same brand,” I cautioned, and Stephen gave a nod of acknowledgement. I looked back over to King. “Is it okay for me to have a ramble around now?”

  She exhaled a laugh. “Yes, but watch where you put your feet, just in case.”

  “Will do.” I took a look around, the stone wall catching my attention as the only upright structure in the vicinity. “I’ll take this way, and you look over that way?” I said to Stephen, gesturing behind us.

  “Sure,” Stephen said, though I could tell from his grimace that he didn’t relish the prospect of tramping through marshy grass.

  I left him to it, following the winding line of the river up towards the stone wall which met the river at a ninety-degree angle and continued on the other side. I kept my gaze on the ground, scanning the area for anything that forensics might’ve missed, but nothing caught my eye before I reached the stone wall.

  It was more fallen down than upright, and I figured that it wasn’t much needed by any local farmers, because even a lamb could hop over the places where it had collapsed.

  Moving away from the river, I strolled alongside the haphazardly piled stones, heading towards the road. I didn’t spot anything interesting here either, though I kept a close eye out. Then, more because I was cold and enjoyed stretching my legs after standing still for so long, I stepped over the wall beside the road and walked down the opposite side.

  I was so focused on looking for other casings or any small clues hidden in the grass that I almost stumbled when my boots hit the disturbed ground. I looked up and inhaled sharply.

  I turned to look over the wall to where forensics were starting to pack up. “Dr King!” I called, my voice fighting with the wind to stop it being swept away. Down by the river, with the sound of the water, she didn’t hear me, but a colleague by her side did and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned towards me, and I waved her over. Stephen had looked up, too, and made a beeline in my direction.

  I looked down at the freshly overturned ground by my feet and kept myself still so I wouldn’t disturb it anymore. While there was a low-level excitement at having found something, the moment I’d seen the rectangular patch of badly covered up soil behind the wall, I’d made a guess about what could be under it. Whoever had done it had tried to cover up the dark, peaty soil with cut heather and grass, but the wind had blown some of it up against the wall, and it was obvious when viewed up close. But, seen from the road, it probably would’ve been enough.

  “What’ve you got?” King asked eagerly, hopping neatly over the wall to my side. Her eyes widened when she saw the patch of earth, and after only a moment’s pause, she got to work gathering her team over.

  I stepped back out of her way, and Stephen came to my side. “Not dropped in the river, then?” Stephen said quietly, the solemnity of his tone offsetting his light words.

  “Looking that way.”

  We watched as forensics started the careful excavation of the site, and I was so focused on what they were doing that my phone’s sudden ringing startled me.

  I turned away from the digging and pulled my phone from my pocket, accepting the call from a number I didn’t recognise with chilled, stiff fingers.

  “Mitchell speaking.”

  “It’s Keira Andrews. Are you on your way back yet?”

  My heart had sped up when Keira’s voice came over the phone, before I processed what she’d said. “Not yet,” I said, before checking my watch. It was getting towards twelve o’clock.

  “The superintendent said you were out in dales,” Keira said before I could ask her why she was asking, “but we’ve had some new information in.”

  I glanced back at Dr King and her team and figured that they were doing a fine job and could let us know what they found.

  “We’ll be about an hour, if we set off now. What’ve you found?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Keira corrected me. “When a person is missing, there’s an automatic marker put on their bank account.”

  “Bank account?” I repeated. “One of the Wooding’s have used their card?”

  There was a brief pause. “Yes, Mitchell, I was about to say so, before you cut me off.”

  I winced. “Sorry. Just, er, glad to hear we’ve got a tip-off.” I looked back at the soil being carefully dug up
and dared to hope that something was buried there that wasn’t a body. The use of this card suggested that either or both of Lawrence’s parents might be alive, though why they hadn’t come forward yet, I had no idea.

  “Yes. The card belongs to Mrs Wooding. She took out the max amount the ATM allowed, two hundred, from a service station. I haven’t looked into whether there are cameras yet, before you ask,” she added.

  That had indeed been my next question. “You never told me you read minds,” I teased, before holding my breath, wondering whether I’d been too unprofessional.

  But she laughed quietly. “What’d be the fun in that if I went around telling people?”

  “Sneaky, I approve,” I said, smiling. We exchanged small talk for another minute before I hung up and turned to Stephen and Dr King, who’d turned towards me once I was off the phone and was waiting expectantly.

  “We’ve got something to attend to at the station. You mind if we head off and leave you to it?”

  King looked amused. “I think we can handle it.”

  “Never doubted it,” I said warmly. “Thanks for your help.”

  Stephen and I walked back over towards the car, me catching Stephen’s arm when he almost twisted his ankle on a patch of uneven ground.

  “Thanks,” he said with a grimace.

  He flopped into the driver’s seat of the car with a sigh of apparent relief and turned the heating up. I climbed in beside him and cupped my painfully cold hands around the heating vent until they went red and tingly with the return of blood.

  Stephen got the car started up and clipped himself in. “So, I bet that was Andrews on the phone?”

  I almost wanted to ask how he’d known, but I knew that’d lead to him ribbing me for it, so I just told him, “Aye, there’s been activity on Mrs Wooding’s account.”

  “Bank account?” Stephen said, looking both surprised and pleased. “So she might be okay?”

  I grunted. “We’ll see, but it looks good, right?”

  He hummed. “No idea why she hasn’t come for her kid, though,” he said, frowning. “Nothing could keep me from my kid if he’d been bleedin’ kidnapped.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I agreed. “But who knows what she’s been through, if she was at this exchange and someone fired a gun. We’ll just have to see.”

  “Well,” Stephen said awkwardly, “I was still planning to head off-”

  I waved my hand. “Of course, of course, sorry. You go be with your family. I think I manage to look at some CCTV without your supervision.”

  He sent me a sideways grin before he took us around a corner at a speed that made me want to tighten my seatbelt. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe I should stay after all. Watching CCTV is notoriously dangerous, you might fall off your chair or something.”

  I rolled my eyes hard enough that my head hurt. “Says the man who almost broke his ankle walking across a field.”

  “Oh, shut up.” He punched my arm, and I yelped.

  “That wasn’t called for!” I protested, but I was laughing as I rubbed my arm. It was good to have my partner back, even if only for the morning. Of course, I wanted his daughter to get better for her and her family’s sake, but I couldn’t help the small, selfish part of me that wanted Stephen back at the station for myself too. He was good company, and I missed him. But right now, he needed to be with his sick child, and I respected that.

  We dropped into a service station on the way back, so that I could pick up a caffeine pick-me-up, and Stephen could get himself a decent cup of tea before he was stuck with the drain water the vending machines at the hospital kicked out.

  Back at the station, he hopped out of our car, waved me goodbye, and headed towards his own car. I leaned on the door as I watched him go before sighing, tilting my head back to look up at the station, which sat next to the car park like a blocky, grey tooth.

  Heading inside, I fixed my head on the job ahead of me, the memories of overturned soil in the dales fresh in my mind. I didn’t know yet what they’d find there, but I had to focus on figuring out whether it had been Mrs Wooding herself who’d used the ATM, or someone else with her card and pin number. Either would be helpful to find for our investigation, but I couldn’t help but hope that it would be Ellie Wooding herself, so that Lawrence might have his mum back safe and well. He had his aunt with him now, but no doubt he’d want his mother by his side if it was at all possible. If anyone deserved some good news, it was that teenager in the hospital.

  Ten

  I was on my lonesome again the next morning. Still, Stephen’s text message saying that his little girl was doing slightly better made me smile, and I got stuck in, feeling positive about the day.

  Yesterday afternoon, I’d contacted the service station where the ATM transaction using Mrs Wooding’s card had taken place and asked them to send me the relevant period on their CCTV cameras. They’d told me I was lucky it hadn’t been overwritten yet, as their footage was usually deleted after a month if it hadn’t been saved. The video footage had been sent over late last night, after I’d gone home, and I opened it now, leaning forward in my chair to study the fuzzy grey image.

  I checked the report Keira had given me with the time of the transaction and fast-forwarded to the right point, before rewinding slightly to see the darkly dressed figure approach.

  They had their head down, a hood pulled up, and I frowned at the video as if I stared hard enough at it, the figure would turn to look up at the camera. But they didn’t. Their head remained down and focused on the ATM as they quickly finished up and left. It was all done in less than a minute which didn’t help me much at all.

  I swore quietly in frustration. I’d been harbouring hopes that the picture would be obviously Ellie Wooding and I could take the picture to Lawrence to show him. But, no, it wasn’t at all clear. I studied the video clip of the figure walking to the ATM over and over, studying how they walked and their dark hoodie and jeans. It could be a woman, or it could be a young man, I really couldn’t tell.

  Cocking my head, I continued to replay the clip of video until my eyes were aching.

  “There, what’s that?” I muttered aloud before looking around me. No-one was around to think I was nuts, and I focused back on the footage. I’d paused it just as the figure was getting their card out and tried to zoom in, but that just made the image more blurry.

  Not a wallet, I thought. The figure was definitely unzipping some kind of purse or handbag. It was much too bulky to be a wallet, and I reckoned I could hesitantly say that they were a woman. But that didn’t tell me whether it was Lawrence’s mum or not.

  I sat back in my seat and rubbed my chin. I fiddled about on my computer to find the footage we’d gotten from the Wooding’s house, which showed Mrs Wooding leaving the house on the last day she’d been seen. I pulled the videos up side by side and tried to see whether they walked in the same way, or if their mannerisms were similar.

  It was difficult to tell, with the woman at the ATM wearing flat shoes and Mrs Wooding decked out in tall heels, which altered her stride significantly. Watching the videos together, I began to see aspects that looked alike between the two figures. They both looked a similar height and build, for starters, as best as I could tell with the bad quality ATM camera. Then there was the way that both women had narrow shoulders pulled back as they walked. Even though the woman on the ATM video carried her head hanging down, there was still that stiffness to her walk, her back straight.

  None of this was exactly definitive, but my gut said that Ellie Wooding was alive and had visited the ATM. What I wanted was a second opinion from Stephen, but that would have to wait.

  Debating my next steps, I picked up my phone and scrolled through to find Alicia Kelley’s number, Mrs Wooding’s sister, and called her.

  She picked up almost immediately. “Hello?”

  “DCI Mitchell here,” I said. “I was wondering if Lawrence would be able to speak to me again today, we’ve had some recent developme
nts.” As I spoke, I remembered the grave-sized area we’d found in the dales and felt faintly sick. If that site turned out to be the worse option, it would be my job to relay the information to Alicia.

  “Any news of my sister?” she asked.

  I paused. “Possibly,” I hedged. “I’d prefer to talk to you and Lawrence in person, if possible.”

  There was a brief silence, where Alicia seemed to think over what I’d said. “I’m with him now,” she said. “I’ll text you the hospital’s address.”

  I exhaled. “That’s great, thank you.”

  Once I’d hung up, I transferred the ATM video over to one of the station’s tablets and tucked it into the large pocket on the inside of my coat. Alicia sent me the name of the private hospital she and Dan had had Lawrence moved to and, in the car, I plugged it into the sat-nav.

  I turned the car’s radio up to help me ignore Stephen’s empty seat and pulled up in the hospital car park half an hour later. There were no parking fees here, and the building looked modern and sleek. I couldn’t help a grimace at the difference between this and the NHS hospital. It was what it was, and I pushed my own feelings aside.

  There was no queue at the reception, and I was personally shown up to Lawrence’s private room by a friendly nurse. She knocked on the door, and Alicia called us in.

  “Hi,” I said, my gaze drawn to Lawrence, who still looked like a gust of wind might blow him over, but his face seemed a better colour, and he was playing on a game console with fierce concentration.

  “Hi,” Alicia said, a touch apologetically when Lawrence didn’t so much as look up. “How are you, Inspector?”

  I nodded. “Can’t complain, thanks.” I patted my coat, feeling the hard bulk of the tablet stowed inside, but I didn’t plan to bring that out just yet. Instead, I dug out my notebook and flipped it open, taking a seat beside Lawrence’s bed.

  He finally looked up, a cold expression sliding onto his face when he saw me. I hardly blamed him. I was here to ask him difficult questions, and I didn’t yet have any good news for him. As far as he knew, I might be here to give him the worse news.