Stranger Child

by Rachel Abbott

  She felt the back of her eyes sting but fought it. She might be wrong about Izzy. Maybe it wasn’t her body that the police had found. She should never have told Izzy about the job, though. It was dangerous and stupid. But she had needed somebody to tell her she was doing the right thing.

  Now the police had that CCTV footage on the train. She’d been such an idiot, smiling at him like that. If it ever got out – got back to them – they would kill her. They would never trust her again.

  Emma didn’t trust her either. For one awful moment when Natasha had come back into the house that morning, she had thought Emma was going to search her pockets. But she had refused to take the fleece off and had escaped up here, still wearing it. She had managed to hide everything, but it had been close.

  Tonight she was going to have to sneak downstairs when they were asleep and do what she’d been told to do. The kitchen and the sitting room. Those were her instructions. She knew what to do. She’d already sorted David and Emma’s bedroom, and everything seemed to be working just fine.

  Natasha knew she should be happy – this was payback time. But now the police had come nosing around, and she wasn’t supposed to let that happen. She would be punished. Surely she’d suffered enough?

  And whose fault is that? a little voice whispered in her ear.

  She knew the answer. She knew who was to blame for all of it.

  She was getting soft, living in this world where people played at being nice to each other. Nobody was nice really. She knew that – she’d seen it all her life. One minute nice as pie, next minute beating the shit out of each other.

  Emma played at being nice, but Tasha knew what she really thought. She thought Tasha had disrupted her perfect life. Emma had replaced Tasha’s mum in this house and now she didn’t want to have to live with the daughter, even though she pretended otherwise.

  If you think your life’s been messed up, Emma – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  Tasha’s mum really had been nice, though, and Tasha had to hang on to that. She had to remember she wasn’t just doing this for herself. She was doing it for her dead mother.

  You didn’t deserve to die, Mum.

  21

  Tom was struggling to concentrate on his work and he really needed to get his focus back. He kept thinking about that SD card and the spreadsheet. He had finally told Leo about the password-protected file the night before; he had no idea why it worried him, but it kept niggling away like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he muttered, pulling his phone towards him and pressing the number for Becky’s extension.

  ‘Becky – update, please. My office.’ Quite why he was taking it out on Becky, he didn’t know. He took a deep breath.

  Becky’s normally cheerful face was looking worried as she poked her head round the doorframe.

  ‘Is it safe to come in?’ she asked, flushing slightly as if she regretted her slightly facetious tone.

  Tom gave her a lopsided smile of apology, and Becky pulled over a chair and sat down.

  ‘Okay, here’s where we’re at,’ she said, consulting the file she had brought with her. ‘The local guys have tracked down the boy Natasha spoke to briefly at the station and they found nothing on him at all. They asked why he’d taken the backpack she’d left on the bench, and he said he’d taken it to ask his mum what to do with it. The station was an unmanned one, so he had nobody to give it to. But he said he bumped into some mates on his way home, so he dumped it.’

  ‘Course he did. No doubt he can’t remember where exactly.’

  ‘The locals think he’s taking orders from somebody, but their guess is that he doesn’t know who. They think the kids have been shipping skunk grown somewhere in Manchester. Oh, and this isn’t random. It’s organised.’

  Tom had suspected that would be the case, and he sighed inwardly. Serious and organised crime was a daily reality costing the country billions each year, causing immense damage to communities and individuals through violence, drug use and child sexual exploitation. He hated it, and all those involved in it, with a passion.

  Becky was watching him carefully, and he adopted a neutral expression, signalling that she should continue.

  ‘We showed Natasha a picture of the other boy on the train – do you remember him? The lad that looked like a young and slightly chubby-faced Tom Cruise before he got a chin. Not only did she recognise him, but the fact that we had his picture and we’d seen her smiling at him seemed to scare her. Anyway, Transport Police think they may have a lead on him. He’s been seen before. There was a definite sense of a message being passed between him and Natasha. If he’s part of the same gang, we’re hoping we can find a link and discover how Natasha fits into the picture. But all this new information has got me thinking.’

  Becky leaned forwards and rested her arms on Tom’s desk.

  ‘The most logical interpretation of events six years ago is that Natasha was found in the aftermath of the accident – a cute little girl – and somebody decided to keep her. So why let her go now? Did she escape from whoever had her, or did they want to be rid of her? I keep going round in circles, but the drugs give the initial abduction a much more sinister slant, don’t they?’

  Tom tilted his chair back to listen to Becky’s ideas, his gaze on a blank area of innocuous beige wall, his mind one hundred per cent on Natasha Joseph.

  ‘Being realistic, Tom, what are the chances that this little girl, on a dark winter’s night on a country lane, just happened to be picked up by members of some organised crime group? A crew smart enough to use kids as mules to get their skunk out to the sticks? What – were they out on a jolly that evening and happened upon her? There’s more chance of being hit by a flying tortoise, I’d have thought.’

  Tom smiled. ‘You’re right, but it could have been some local scumbag who found her. Somebody at the bottom of the pecking order? Maybe thought he could use her – demand money from her father for her safe return. That would make sense, although with all the police activity at the time, they would have had to wait a while to have any chance of success.’

  ‘All I can say is that if she’s been living with somebody associated with organised crime at any level, it must have been a shit life. You’d have thought she’d be seriously relieved to be out of the place, wouldn’t you? As it is, she seems to be hanging in there by a thread at the family home.’ Becky paused. ‘But I still keep going back to the night of the accident. What if we’re missing the obvious? What if she was a target?’

  ‘The idea had occurred to me, but a target for what?’

  Becky shrugged. ‘No idea, at the moment. Whatever happened and whoever took her, we need to know whether they let her go or she managed to escape. If she’s run away, they’ll be looking for her. If she’s been running drugs for them, the chances are she knows too much. We need to seriously consider if this child is in danger.’

  *

  Tom and Becky’s discussion had finally been brought to an abrupt halt when Becky realised it was time for the evening briefing. Tom went with her and sat at the back of the incident room, watching her run through the evidence on the dead girl, giving the team instructions on the next steps.

  She was good. Thorough, and always prepared to listen to ideas from members of her team.

  Tom quietly left the room before the meeting ended, giving Becky some space. There was little more he could do that evening, so he grabbed his coat and gave Leo a quick call to say he was on his way.

  It had taken Tom a long time to pluck up the courage to start a new relationship after his marriage failed, but then he had moved into his Cheshire cottage and fallen for Leo Harris - the sister of his next-door neighbour. Tom smiled at the thought. He had, without a doubt, chosen the most difficult, commitment-phobic woman in the north of England. There were times when it felt as if she would never entirely trust him, and Tom wasn’t always sure he could live with that, but Leo’s father had led a double life with two wives for many year
s, and it was understandable that she found it difficult to have faith in a man.

  Tonight they were going to meet at Leo’s apartment because she was working on a paper for her psychology degree, so Tom had agreed to call round and cook her supper, spend a couple of hours with her and then leave her to get on with her work.

  He had stopped at the supermarket on his way to Leo’s and bought the ingredients to make a quick stir-fry, and as he let himself into the apartment he thought, not for the first time, how well Leo had chosen her home. A large open-plan space in an old converted warehouse, the defined cooking, eating, relaxing and working areas all blended together against the bare brick walls and the polished wooden floors.

  Leo was focusing intently on her computer screen but turned to flash Tom a smile. She started to push herself up from her seat, but he walked over and bent down to kiss her.

  ‘Carry on with whatever you’re doing. I’ll make a start on the supper. Do you want a drink?’

  Leo reached out an arm and wrapped it around Tom’s hips, pulling him closer. She rested the side of her head against his waist.

  ‘You’re my saviour, you know that, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘What, because I’ve made you realise that not all men are bad?’ Tom stroked her hair gently.

  ‘No,’ Leo swatted him on the bottom. ‘Because you feed me – without you I would live on toast and yoghurt.’

  ‘Hah – well then I’d better get on with it. Are you going to take a break now or wait until the food’s ready?’

  Leo pushed the keyboard away from her and stretched.

  ‘I think I’m ready for a break, and there’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  Tom raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’ll talk. You cook.’ Leo stood up and started to push Tom towards the kitchen area, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.

  He grabbed a beer from the fridge, and lifted one towards Leo, but she shook her head.

  ‘If I drink, I’ll never finish my paper. But I want to talk to you about Jack and the SD card.’

  Thoughts he had been pushing to one side started to invade Tom’s headspace, and he was momentarily irritated with Leo for spoiling the evening. He almost wished he hadn’t told her about the file.

  ‘Don’t pull that face, Tom. I know you’re trying to ignore this. Now that we’ve found something potentially interesting you’re trying to shove it back into that box marked “no-go area”.’

  Tom opened a cupboard and started hunting around for the soy sauce, but he didn’t respond.

  ‘Don’t you get it? Until you’ve solved this problem and found out what somebody was looking for in Jack’s papers, it’s going to be lurking at the back of your mind. We need to unravel the puzzle – find out the truth – and then you can deal with it. Squashing it isn’t dealing with it.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Leo – are you treating me like one of your case studies now? Am I some kind of psychological phenomenon?’

  ‘Oh piss off. Of course you’re not. I’m only thinking of you. You know that.’

  Tom could sense Leo’s exasperation, and she was right. He said nothing and waited, knowing she hadn’t finished.

  ‘Okay – talk to me about passwords. Do you or any of your techie guys know how to break them?’

  Tom smiled at that. If Jack had wanted to make something impenetrable, nobody would be able to break it. He was being unfair to Leo, though. He had a fair idea of what the password might be – he just hadn’t been sure he wanted to open the file, for reasons he couldn’t explain even to himself. It was something to do with the name Silver Sphere.

  Leo was looking at him closely.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ she asked.

  Tom pushed the carrots he was chopping away from him and rested his hands on the worktop.

  ‘Jack had a method with passwords. Simple, but effective. He taught me years ago, although he may very well have changed the way he did things before he died. But I guess it’s worth a shot. I’ve used a version of it ever since – but with a few modifications of my own.’

  Leo looked at him with her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide, as if to say: ‘Were you ever going to tell me this?’

  ‘Okay,’ Tom said. ‘I should have mentioned it before, but I had to try to remember how Jack’s version works.’

  Leo waited for about ten seconds. ‘Well - go on then,’ she said.

  ‘You take the name of the file or of the website that’s asking for a password – in this case SILVERSPHERE – all one word. Then you replace every alternate letter with a symbol or number. I’m not sure if I can remember them all, but the password would start with the original letter – a capital S in this case - and then a symbol for the letter I – which I’m fairly certain is an exclamation mark. Then capital L, and I think he used the backward arrow for V. But I can’t remember what he used for R. H was definitely the hash tag – oh no, we don’t need that, do we. We need P. I think that was the pounds sign. E was the euro – can’t remember what it was before we had euros, though.’

  ‘You lost me at backward arrow, I’m afraid,’ Leo said.

  Tom walked over to the table and picked up a pen.

  ‘Okay, here we go,’ he said.

  S!L
  ‘The good thing about it is that you can have a different password for every site, but you never forget what it is – as long as you remember the symbols, of course.’

  ‘So is that it, then?’ Leo said.

  ‘Sadly no. I can’t remember what he used for R. It has to be a standard symbol, or it won’t be recognised.’

  Tom stared at Leo’s keyboard for a moment, mentally going through each of the possible symbols.

  He pulled the SD card out of his trouser pocket, slotted it into Leo’s computer and clicked the file icon.

  ‘I think I know what it is,’ he said, his voice soft and hesitant. ‘I think R might be a right hand bracket.’

  He typed in the password, pressed ENTER and waited.

  It was wrong. The password was rejected.

  ‘Bugger. I was sure it was a bracket.’ Tom said, drumming his fingers on the table. He looked at the keyboard again.

  ‘I have an idea,’ he said, quickly making a change to the password. He pressed ENTER, and an Excel workbook opened on the screen.

  ‘Bingo. It was a curly bracket, not a normal one,’ he muttered, as the screen displayed the first page of the file.

  Honegger, Wyss & Cie

  A/c no 53696C76657220537068657265

  It was a title page, and it meant nothing to Tom. But there was a separate tab and he clicked on that. The second page displayed three columns – dates, names and numbers. There was a pound sign above the numbers column.

  Leo was leaning over Tom’s shoulder.

  ‘Scroll down a bit,’ she said. He knew what she was looking for. The total.

  At the bottom of the number column, under the pound sign, there was a figure of a little over four million. The last date in the list was four years before Jack had died.

  Leo looked at Tom and shrugged, her interest gone. ‘Given that you’ve already had all of Jack’s money, I guess this is just a record of some of it. Not as exciting as we thought,’ she said, walking to the kitchen to fetch Tom’s beer bottle.

  Tom opened a search engine window and typed in the name Honegger, Wyss & Cie. The answer didn’t surprise him. A Swiss bank. That explained why there was no account name – only a number. And in Tom’s experience, people only had numbered accounts when they had something to hide.

  And Leo was wrong about the account. Tom had never seen it before. It wasn’t included in Jack’s estate, so even his solicitor had known nothing about it.

  What were you hiding, Jack?

  Tom looked at the list of names and felt his skin grow cold.

  The first entry was Bentley. The amount two thousand, five hundred pounds, the date was November 1982.

  Tom suddenly knew exactly what Jack had
been hiding; this was one secret his brother had buried deep.

  22

  Day Four

  ‘I’m a selfish cow,’ Emma muttered as she pushed her laden trolley round the supermarket. After David’s disbelief that she had heard Natasha talking and crying yesterday evening, Emma had decided she needed to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the house for a couple of hours. David had agreed to stay at home for the day, and she had told him he could have both kids – she was going shopping.

  It was probably childish, but the peace had gone from her home. Even with Natasha in her bedroom, Emma felt they were just waiting for the next revelation, or the next refusal to cooperate. It was as if a black cloud was hanging over the house, waiting to swoop down and envelop them. Even Ollie had started to look at her with a more serious face; this morning he had reached out his hand and stroked her cheek, saying ‘Ah’ just like she did to him if he was crying.

  Nevertheless she felt bad about going out and leaving David. Maybe she should give him a call and ask what he fancied for dinner that evening. She needed to make more effort to get things back on an even keel.

  Emma pushed her trolley to a quiet corner and reached into her bag for her phone. Checking first to see that she had a good signal, she pressed the screen to call David. Nothing happened. Her battery was showing seventy-one per cent, and she had an excellent signal. But she couldn’t get her phone to respond to anything she pressed.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, winning herself a look from an elderly gentleman in a trilby. She stuck the phone back in her bag and decided to get the ingredients for David’s favourite chicken curry.

  Loading her purchases into the car, Emma drove home from the supermarket full of resolutions to make an extra effort. The balance of her relationship with David had shifted in the last few days and Emma felt as if she had lost him somehow.

  She had never been jealous of Caroline before – how could you be jealous of a dead woman? Now, though, she found herself wondering if David would ever love her as much as he had clearly loved his first wife. And Natasha reminded him, every single day, of what he had lost.