Stranger Child

by Rachel Abbott

  ‘I met your dad through my fiancé,’ she had told Tasha. ‘He was doing some work for your dad’s company, and we went to a few charity events together. Your mum was there too. She was very beautiful, Tasha. I really liked her. We nearly always found that we were at the same table, and we had some good times together. She talked about you a lot, told me that you were the best thing that had ever happened to her.’

  Emma risked a glance at Tasha. Her back was rigid. She was listening, though.

  ‘I didn’t know about the accident for a long time. My fiancé and I had split up, and I took myself off to stay with my dad in Australia. I didn’t want to know about anything or anybody for quite a while. When I came back to Manchester, there was an article about you in the paper. It was a year to the day that you had disappeared and your dad was making another plea to people to try to find you. I got in touch to offer him my sympathy. He tried so hard to find you, you know. He was shattered, Tasha.’

  That was the wrong thing to say. Tasha hadn’t turned round, but her voice was harsh, as if the words were being dragged from deep inside her.

  ‘You really don’t know, do you? You actually believe what you’re saying.’

  Emma was shocked. Every word of her story was true. She tried to interrupt, but Tasha shook her head.

  ‘Whatever happens next, it’s his fault. You need to remember that.’

  What did she mean? Tasha had refused to say.

  That was three hours ago, and now they felt like a family divided. David was in their rarely used sitting room, Emma and Ollie were in the kitchen, and Tasha had barricaded herself back in her room.

  Emma’s profound sense of failure was compounded by her own feelings about this stranger who had exploded into their lives. All she wanted was to return to the peace and harmony she had known just days before, and she hated herself for the thought.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked away the burning sensation at the back of her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. Ollie couldn’t see her upset again – it wasn’t fair on him. She picked her baby up from where he was playing on the floor, ignoring his disgruntled ‘Ay’, and hugged his warm little body to her, hiding her red eyes by holding his head close to her chest.

  She took him into the sitting room at the front of the house, quickly wiping the heel of her hand across her cheeks. She could hold on for a moment longer. But when she saw David sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall, her forced composure nearly shattered. He looked round hopefully, but seeing his wife and baby, he turned back, disappointed. She understood. She knew with all her heart that it wasn’t a lack of love for them, it was simply that – more than anything – he wanted his daughter to come to him.

  She put Ollie on the rug, knowing he would crawl to David. Perhaps time with his son would help, and Emma knew she had to be alone for a moment, to let the lid off all the emotion she was bottling up inside her.

  Without a word, she turned and left the room, holding her breath until she reached the sanctuary of their bedroom. She didn’t want Tasha to see her distress any more than she wanted Ollie to, although the girl’s bedroom door was still shut.

  She walked into the bedroom and closed the door, biting back a sob. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she pulled open her bedside table drawer, groping for her tissues. They weren’t there.

  Emma wiped her tears on a corner of the duvet, and peered in to the drawer. The tissues were there – but they were on far side of the drawer, not next to the bed where Emma always kept them.

  That’s funny, she thought, her tears forgotten.

  She stood up and walked over to the dressing table, pulling out the top drawer. The contents were as messy as usual – but she could see instantly that this wasn’t her mess. David always said he didn’t know how she ever found anything in the jumble of unused lipsticks, eyeshadows and facecreams, and yet she always knew exactly where everything was. Nothing seemed to be missing, but there was no doubt everything in this drawer had been moved.

  She opened each of the other drawers in turn. Every one was the same. Nothing obvious had been taken, but every item had been touched, moved, examined. And then replaced.

  It could only have been one person, and Emma had no idea what to do about it.

  Who was this child? What had she become?

  15

  By the end of the day, Tom’s head was spinning. It had been his unpleasant – but necessary – task to attend the post mortem and he had not been at all surprised that the pathologist had found signs of sexual trauma, but no semen. Sadly, because of the state of the body, it wasn’t clear whether the sexual activity had taken place around the time of her death, or in the days leading up to it. There were plenty of used condoms in the nearby tunnel, but who knew whether any would turn out to be relevant to the girl’s death.

  She still hadn’t been identified, and the list of candidates was growing since Philippa’s news bulletin that morning. It seemed Becky might have been right about the cause of death being hypothermia, though.

  ‘It’s always somewhat problematic to identify hypothermia as the definite cause of death,’ the pathologist had said. ‘But I’ve ruled out just about everything else. We won’t be certain until the toxicology results are in, of course. The fact that her anorak was thrown to one side and the front of her nightdress ripped does support this theory. I’m assuming this was a case of paradoxical undressing – very common with hypothermia deaths.’

  Tom wasn’t so sure about the pathologist’s explanation. He had come across this rather bizarre effect of hypothermia before, where the victims feel as though they are burning up and remove their clothes, but there was an equally plausible theory.

  ‘Isn’t it just as likely that she was drugged, raped, had her clothes ripped and was left for dead? And the cold got her in the end?’ he had asked.

  ‘It’s possible, yes, but let’s wait and see and not make any final decisions until we get the tox results. She may have injected the ketamine herself, and we still don’t have an answer to that.’

  Fortunately, suicide was very rare for children of this age in England, and yet they couldn’t rule it out. It appeared this girl had left home without, as far as they could tell, any money or clothes, suggesting she had either been taken from her bed by somebody – maybe under duress – or she had run away of her own volition in the middle of the night.

  Becky had contacted the child sexual exploitation team to see if they had any information that might relate to the girl, but Tom couldn’t shake the thought that somebody had dressed her in that white nightie. He struggled to believe she had chosen to wear something so old-fashioned herself.

  He was about to pack up his files and turn off his computer when Becky herself appeared in his open doorway.

  ‘Time for a quick catch-up?’ she asked, walking in and sitting down in anticipation of his answer. ‘Natasha Joseph – she’s saying nothing, and her attitude to the police is not good. Having said that, there was one point when I thought we might be getting through to her. But it was a fleeting moment. We have no idea where she’s been or how she got back.’

  ‘What options have you considered?’ he asked.

  ‘Given that we are getting nothing from her right now, I think we need to go back to the accident.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Agreed. Go on.’

  ‘Okay. I’ve been over the reports several times, and it seems that Caroline Joseph steered the car across to the other side of the road. There was no sign of a skid until after she came back down from the bank. Why would she steer to the other side of the road?’

  ‘I can only think of two reasons,’ Tom said. ‘Either she was avoiding something – maybe an animal on the road – or she was distracted. We know she received a call on her mobile seconds before the crash, so maybe she lost concentration. Unfortunately, the call was from an unregistered mobile, so we don’t know who she was speaking to, but whatever happened, the car ended up upside down.’

  Becky nodded.
‘Everybody has always assumed Natasha climbed out of the car and ran off, frightened by what had happened. They thought she must have been lying dead in a ditch somewhere, or fallen down some unknown pothole, crawled into a disused shed, whatever. The view was that everywhere possible had been searched, but there’s no such thing as one hundred per cent coverage. So now we know she wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, we have to assume that somebody took her in. Maybe somebody who wanted a child – and apparently she was a beautiful little girl – found her, and kept her. They would have had to hide her – because there’s no doubt at all that they would have known who she was, given the media coverage.’

  ‘What about abduction from the scene?’ Tom asked.

  Becky leaned back and dragged a strand of her dark hair across her face, twisting it around her finger. For a moment, Tom thought she was going to put it in her mouth, the way his daughter Lucy did when she was thinking. Becky must have caught his amused glance, because she dropped the hair and leaned forwards again.

  ‘I wish I knew, but it seems highly unlikely that somebody wanting a child so much would just happen to be driving past on that particular road at precisely the right moment. The whole situation is extraordinary. The only other thing I wondered is whether Natasha witnessed something that had happened. Maybe some drunk caused the accident, and, fearing that the child might be able to give evidence, they thought the best thing would be to take her. If they were really drunk, that might have made sense.’

  ‘It’s as plausible as any other scenario at the moment. What ideas do you have about why she’s back now?’

  ‘Maybe as a young child she couldn’t remember where she lived. Maybe something reminded her, gave her back the memory of her home. Perhaps she thumbed a lift, but it’s an isolated spot, so there wouldn’t be much in the way of traffic.’

  ‘Or then again, maybe somebody brought her back – her appeal had gone.’

  ‘Possibly. That might make more sense, given that she’s rejecting her family. If she’d chosen to come back, why the hostility?’

  ‘Because she feels as if she doesn’t belong? She’s a stranger to them, and them to her. Perhaps she’s not rejecting them. Perhaps she’s scared of being rejected. The only person who’s going to be able to tell us is Natasha. And she’s saying nothing.’

  *

  Leo’s car wasn’t in the drive when Tom got home, but he didn’t think she would be far behind him. For the second night running, he hadn’t felt like cooking and she had agreed to pick up the one takeaway that he loved. Fish and chips.

  He had been in the house for about twenty minutes when he heard the front door slam. He walked into the hall towards where Leo was shrugging off her coat.

  ‘Bloody raining again,’ she muttered, hanging the wet jacket on a hook. She turned and gave Tom a dazzling smile, holding up a white carrier bag from which steam seemed to be emanating.

  He pulled her to him and felt one arm travel up and round his shoulders, holding the nape of his neck and pulling his mouth towards hers. He could feel every inch of her body pressed against his, and was about to relegate the thought of food to the bottom of his list of priorities when Leo pushed back slightly, nipping his bottom lip gently with her teeth.

  ‘Food first. Come on. Nothing worse than soggy cold chips.’

  Tom groaned. ‘You’re a hard woman, Leo Harris.’ She raised her eyebrows and looked at him, saying nothing. He grabbed the bag of fish and chips and led the way into the kitchen.

  Not bad, Tom thought as he greedily devoured a piece of crispy battered haddock, although in his mind the flavour had never been quite the same since the days when everything was cooked in dripping. One of the tastes of his childhood. An image of Jack leaped into his mind. Fish and chips had been his favourite meal, and the one thing guaranteed to bring him out of his bedroom.

  ‘You’re miles away, Tom. Are you worrying about work?’ Leo asked.

  Tom smiled. ‘No, it’s the food – fish and chips bring back a lot of memories of when Jack and I were kids. It was the one meal we were allowed to eat on our knees when Blake’s 7 was on the TV. We were both addicted.’

  ‘To the chips, or to Blake’s 7?’

  ‘Both,’ Tom answered with a smile.

  ‘You’ve never talked about Jack much, you know,’ Leo said. ‘You might not want to talk about how you felt when he died but as I’ve been helping with the papers, can you at least tell me how he first got started in the world of computer security?’

  Tom took a sip of his wine. Having spent years trying to avoid talking about Jack, his nerdy brother, it was a difficult habit to break.

  ‘It’s hard to know where to start, really. He was a bit of a law unto himself, but once he was bitten by the computer bug, he became a gaming fanatic whose only desire was to hack the code to find out how each game was constructed so that he could build something bigger – better. We always thought he would end up as a games programmer, but he was bored with that by the time he was sixteen. Then something happened which seemed to refocus him.’ Tom paused for a moment, remembering the day that everything seemed to change. ‘He knew this kid from school – quite how he knew anybody from the odd day or two that he bothered turning up for lessons by that point, I don’t know. I think the lad’s name was Ethan – that’s it, Ethan Bentley. Jack used to call him Posh Guy because he had the same name as a posh car, and, unlike the rest of the kids at our school, he had a wealthy dad who ran a rather dodgy hotel – called Bentley’s, obviously.’

  ‘Dodgy?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Everybody knew about Bentley’s. They didn’t exactly rent rooms by the hour, but it was certainly the favourite hotel for the great and the good of Manchester when they were having an affair, or just fancied something a bit different.’

  Leo screwed her face up in distaste as Tom continued.

  ‘I think Mr Bentley procured various services that nobody would want to be caught acquiring for themselves, if you get my drift. Ethan came to see Jack – told him that somebody had hacked into his dad’s computer system and accessed customer records. Fortunately, the hacker had only managed to get one or two bits of information, but he was blackmailing the dad – asking for money – said he would reveal the names to the press. So Ethan had a word with Jack, who went in and made Bentley’s computer network watertight. Jack said it was a doddle. Ethan’s dad told all his top customers that he could now guarantee their privacy thanks to his wonderfully secure system, and then a few of them contacted Jack to request his services. He went from strength to strength. Ethan, or Posh Guy, was always round at our house after that.’

  ‘You scowled when you said that, you know. Didn’t you like him?’

  ‘He was pretty vile to me – told me to fuck off if I ever went into Jack’s room when he was there.’

  ‘Charming. What did Jack do?’

  ‘Confrontation wasn’t his thing. He just looked a bit sheepish as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. He used to mutter, “See you later, little brother,” or something to take the edge off it.’

  ‘Oh well, in spite of keeping such bad company, Jack certainly made good – with knobs on.’

  Tom was quiet. This was probably the moment when he should have told Leo about the file on the SD card, and the fact that it was password protected. Not to mention the other fact – that the filename was Jack’s hacker alias. But he couldn’t. Not yet, at least. He knew she would push him to check it out, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.

  16

  Day Three

  The kitchen seemed a cold place to Emma the next morning. She and David had had a row before he left for work and since then the warmth had seeped from her bones. She couldn’t remember them ever falling out in all the time they had known each other. Theirs was a marriage without turbulence or stress, and they had both eagerly welcomed the peace of an undemanding relationship.

  Last night they had held each other tightly and she had listened as David talked about how h
e felt.

  ‘Every time I look at Tasha I see Caroline, and the guilt comes rushing back,’ he’d said.

  Nobody could have known what would happen to Caroline and Natasha that night, and Emma had spent years trying to convince David that life was a series of coincidences – some good, some bad. A split-second decision to go a different way home could result in a person meeting the love of their life, or tripping over a kerbstone and ending up in hospital. Life was made up of these alternative paths, and on the night in question David had made the decision not go with his family for valid reasons. Now, it seemed he was questioning that decision all over again.

  As they had lain whispering in the dark room, Emma had tenderly stroked David’s hair in a way she knew he loved. He was beginning to relax into sleep when Emma felt her body tense. She’d heard something.

  David muttered, but she had stroked his hair again, murmuring ‘Shh’ against his ear as he drifted off.

  The open doorway was lit by a faint glow from the nightlight on the landing and Emma watched the space, mesmerised. Nothing. But still she watched, holding her breath.

  She counted. If she saw nothing after she had counted to ten, she would relax. She reached ten, and there was still nothing. She counted again.

  David snored softly against her shoulder, but Emma was on her side, facing the door. And then she saw it.

  Soundlessly, a shadow, backlit by the nightlight, came to stand in the open doorway. It took first one step and then another into the room.

  Despite the baggy pyjamas, Emma recognised the slender figure of her stepdaughter. She could hear her own pulse, pounding on the pillow, but for some reason she waited.

  Tasha took another step and Emma could just make out the whites of the girl’s eyes, firmly focused on David’s back. Finally Emma spoke, her voice sounding unnecessarily loud in the silent bedroom.

  ‘What do you want, Natasha?’

  The girl stood still for a second, then turned and walked calmly from the room without saying another word.