*
Across the road from the Slaters’ house, two men sat in a dingy flat above a shabby hairdresser’s. The persistent high-pitched cries of women shrieking to be heard above a background of hairdryers from the salon below was only marginally masked by music blaring out from speakers situated just below the floorboards of the first-floor room.
‘God, this music is doing my head in,’ said one of the men. ‘If I have to listen to another track from bloody Adele, I’ll go down there and personally pull the plug on whatever’s playing that frigging music and crush it underfoot.’
The other guy laughed. ‘Well, it says something that you recognise her music, Jim. Not sure I would admit to that if I were you.’
‘The wife’s favourite – I don’t have much choice at home, but I didn’t think I’d have to suffer that noise all day as well. Mind you, maybe it’s better than the racket those women make. Wah, wah, wah – it’s relentless. What the hell do they find to yabber about?’
The question hung unanswered in the dank air of the drab room in which they were sitting. The dirty, yellowed woodchip wallpaper was peeling away from the plaster, its discolouration enhanced by the number of cigarettes the two men had smoked in the week or so that they had been sitting there. An old brown sofa was pushed against one wall, stuffing escaping from the arms. There was a folding card table and a couple of bent-back chairs that looked as if they had been made in about the same year as the row of shops had been built. As rooms went, it had to be one of the most depressing that either of them had seen for a while.
The lack of home comforts didn’t matter to the two men, though. They had brought their own chairs. Right now, they were both on high alert, a state that Jim put down to the acrid fumes of cheap hair lacquer that seemed to permeate the room. He was sure it was making him high, but at that moment he had other things on his mind.
‘Who the fuck is that?’ he asked, peering through the binoculars set into a stand. With one hand he pressed the trigger release for the camera on a separate tripod. He didn’t need to check the viewfinder – the telephoto lens was permanently focused on the house opposite.
‘I don’t know, but I’m more interested in that van parked outside the halal butchers. It’s been there for forty-five minutes and nobody’s got in or out, and nothing’s been delivered. Given its position, I’d say it’s surveillance. And I’d say it was on the Slaters.’
‘Bloody marvellous. If that’s the case, what’s that other idiot doing walking right in there? Stupid bastard – he’s going to bugger everything up if he’s not careful.’
Jim pushed himself back from the window and the wheels on his chair propelled him to the table behind. He grabbed a packet of cigarettes and wheeled himself back to the window.
They watched for a few more minutes until the man came out of the house and walked up the road.
‘He’s not even glanced at the van, and he’s talking. He’s wired. Give it a minute or two.’
They waited. Finally the side door of the van slid open, and a tall man in dark-blue jeans and a black jacket emerged on the side away from the Slaters’ home.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Jesus. It’s Tom Douglas. He’s a DCI in the Major Incidents Team. What in God’s name is he doing here?’
Jim muttered a string of expletives.
‘We’ve got to stop them before everything goes tits up. Bollocks. This is all we need.’
The man picked up his phone and dialled a number.
35
The table was covered with the remains of three uneaten breakfasts, and the room smelled temptingly of the bacon that remained untouched on plates. Cooking was something that Emma felt she could do to keep her body occupied while her mind spun in circles. Just sitting had never been something she had managed easily, and any problems in her past had always resulted in bursts of energy. It wasn’t only that, though. Unlike David, she was aware that the conversation in the kitchen was being listened to, and much as she was determined to work on Natasha, the girl wasn’t going to weaken when she knew she would be heard. And she could hardly drag her off into the bathroom.
She pushed her chair back and started to grab plates.
‘I’ll do that, Em,’ David said. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t done justice to your breakfast. I think if I try to swallow anything solid it will choke me.’
‘I wonder what they’ve given Ollie for breakfast,’ was all she said. ‘I hope they understand what babies of his age like to eat. Do you think they do, Natasha? Or will they be feeding him salted peanuts, or whole grapes with pips in?’ She looked pointedly at her stepdaughter, who looked pale this morning. The girl had spirit, though, she had to admit, as Natasha gave Emma a defiant stare.
Emma slammed the plates down on the worktop with such force that she was surprised they didn’t shatter. She spun round and leaned back against the counter, folding her arms.
‘Right,’ she said with as much bravado as she could manage. ‘We’re going for a walk. All of us. Get your coats.’
‘What?’ A response from Natasha at last. ‘I’m not going nowhere. You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.’ Bravely said, Natasha, Emma thought.
‘Wrong, Natasha. I’m the grown-up, you’re the child. You may be capable of doing some terrible things that even in my wildest dreams I wouldn’t stoop to …’ Emma ignored David’s look of horror, ‘… but you are not going to stop me from going for a walk, and your father is coming with me. If you want to spy on us you’d better come too, or we might escape into town and call the police.’
‘Em, what happens if somebody calls?’ David asked, clearly wondering what she was playing at.
‘Nobody’s going to call, are they? They’ll phone Natasha on that mobile that never leaves her right hand. The one I presume she smuggled into the house in the pocket of my fleece.’
Without waiting for a reply, Emma stomped off into the hall, returning with three jackets of various sizes. She saw Natasha look askance at the red one that was thrown at her.
‘Put it on. It’s cold out there, and it was good enough when you needed deep pockets, wasn’t it? We need to move – to get some energy back. Come on, both of you.’
Emma opened the door to the back porch, stuffed her feet in a pair of green wellingtons and set off down the path, knowing that David would follow her.
She waited where the path met the lane, and sure enough a couple of minutes later David and his daughter came plodding round the corner, looking like a pair of reluctant hikers on a Sunday ramble.
She turned on her heel and marched off. She wanted them to be well away from the house before she started on Natasha. She waited at the start of a track that led across the fields to an old bridleway she had walked down a few times. Natasha and David caught up with her, and she ushered them onto the track.
‘I used to bring Ollie here when he was tiny,’ she said conversationally. ‘I used to strap him into a papoose type thing, but with him facing outwards so he could see what was going on. He loved it. I bet your mum brought you here when you were a baby. Isn’t that what you told me, David? That Caroline used to love walking with Tasha when she was little?’
After a brief pause, David seemed to realise what she was trying to do.
‘We all used to go together at the weekend. Do you remember, Tasha? And when you got your first bike you insisted you could ride it all the way. We said the track was too rough for a bike – particularly with stabilisers on, but you weren’t having any of it, and I had to push you. Had a bad back for weeks.’ David looked at Natasha and smiled, to show there was no resentment in his words.
‘How well do you remember your mum?’ Emma asked, as if this were the most normal family out for a walk. ‘I told you the other day that I met her – I could see how much your dad loved her.’
Emma had no knowledge of child psychology at all but felt that the more she played on the whole mum and dad thing, the more Natasha might feel a sense of belonging
and a commitment to Ollie.
‘I lost touch with them, though, when I went to Australia,’ she continued. ‘Then my ex-fiancé died – I didn’t tell you that, did I? I was a mess. It’s horrible when someone you love dies, isn’t it? You must have felt terrible when your mum died. Do you remember the accident?’
Natasha’s face had tightened. She was, after all, only a kid. A kid who had lost her mum in a horrible accident and then had been brought up by that awful Rory man. In spite of everything Emma wanted to hug her. So she did.
It only lasted a second, but she felt Tasha lean in towards her and then push her away and march off in front of them. Emma gave her a minute and then she speeded up too, so she was walking abreast of Natasha, with David slightly behind on the narrowing track.
‘When I met your dad a year after you’d disappeared, he was a total wreck. He missed your mum so much, but more than anything he missed you. For two years it was the only thing he ever talked about. He didn’t know what had happened to his little girl, and he blamed himself because he didn’t go with you that night. Your mum skidded the car and died, and you disappeared. She wasn’t a great driver, according to your dad. Maybe she lost control – was it because you were talking to her? Did she turn round to look at you and drive off the road? Is that what happened, Tasha? Because she loved you so much that if you had needed her she’d have turned round, I’m sure. Is that why you’re like this – because you think you caused the crash?’
Natasha mumbled something.
‘What did you say?’ Emma asked.
The girl lifted a strained face.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she shouted. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ She spun round and stared at David. ‘Tell her it wasn’t my fault.’
Just for a second, all three of them stood immobile, Natasha and David staring at each other, Emma looking at David’s haggard face, a nerve twitching above his left eyebrow. She had to break this tension.
‘It was nobody’s fault, Tasha. I was simply trying to understand what happened – how your mum lost control of the car.’
Emma reached out a hand to Natasha, but the girl moved out of the way. Turning her back on her father and moving as far away from both of them as she could get, she carried on walking, head down.
Emma felt she was getting nowhere. Surely there had to be something that she could say or do that would get through to Natasha? She was so focused on searching for the right words that she almost missed it when the girl spoke.
‘It was the man’s fault. The man on the phone.’
Emma carried on walking, not wanting to do anything to stop Natasha from talking. After a second or two, she carried on.
‘There was a car right across the road, and Mummy was stopping. Then her phone rang. I didn’t think she was going to answer it, but she did. Suddenly she speeded up. I heard her shouting into the phone “Why can’t I stop? What’s going on?” Then the car went mad – all over the road. She shouted for help – she shouted to the man on the phone, but it was too late.’
‘What did she shout, Tasha? Can you remember?’
‘Of course I can. I remember everything. I wasn’t a baby, and it’s not the sort of night you forget in a hurry.’
‘So what did she shout?’
‘Just a name. I don’t know what he said to her, but she shouted his name.’
Emma waited.
‘She was going to stop. If she’d stopped, she wouldn’t have died, would she? But the man on the phone frightened her. She dropped the phone and went really fast, round the car in the road. Then she shouted to him – but it was too late. It was all his fault.’
‘Do you remember what she shouted?’
David had turned white.
‘Of course I do. It was a name – somebody I didn’t know, but I hate him. Jack. That’s what she screamed. Jack.’
36
The small team sat in Tom’s office, which was stuffy with the stale odour of too many warm bodies and too many half-drunk cups of coffee lying around on every vacant surface. Rory Slater hadn’t been at the bookie’s, but they had finally tracked him down and put a tail on him in the hope that he would contact his masters. His home phone was being tapped, but there was currently no mobile signal coming from the house. So for the moment all they could do was watch and wait.
They had looked into all Slater’s known associates, but that line of enquiry had revealed very little. As Becky said, those they had found were ‘run of the mill scumbags’, but none was capable of masterminding this – whatever ‘this’ was.
Becky’s nose was glued to her computer screen, and Tom had noticed her rub her tired eyes a couple of times. He knew from experience there was nothing worse than staring at a screen when you’d had precious little sleep.
‘Got her,’ she whispered, more to herself than anybody else. Despite her low voice, those left in the room turned towards her.
‘Donna Slater has a sister – Sylvia Briggs. Two daughters, one son. One of the daughters is thirteen, and she’s called Isabella. I think I need to pay Mrs Briggs a visit.’
‘Well done, Becky.’ Tom cast his gaze round the rest of the room. ‘We all know what’s at stake here, so let’s get on with it. And remember, even though I’d like to think nobody in this division would be in the pay of an organised crime group, with a baby’s life at stake we mustn’t assume anything.’
Tom’s office emptied and he rested his elbows on the desk and his chin on his cupped hands. More than anything he wanted to drag Rory Slater into an interview room and grill him until he admitted where Ollie was being held. But he didn’t think Rory would know. The baby would have been handed over to a middleman. Rory would be part of one small cell in a bigger organisation.
Tom turned to his computer to check his email. There would be nothing about Ollie Joseph on here of course, but he had other cases to think about. And he still had the Swiss bank to call back. For the moment, there wasn’t a single thing he could be doing to help Ollie, and Becky had the sad case of the dead girl well in hand.
He paused for a moment. It was Saturday, but then he remembered the message – call me any time – and he strongly suspected that for private clients with enough funds there would be access to the bank seven days a week.
He checked his mobile for the number he had used the last time and pressed call.
‘Good morning. My name is Tom Douglas. Could I speak to Mr Charteris, please?’ Tom hung on for a few moments as his call was put through.
‘Mr Douglas, good day to you. Can I go through some security checks with you, please?’ Tom hoped he could remember the ‘memorable word’ he had submitted so that he could pick out the third and eighth letter.
‘Okay, Mr Douglas. Thank you for calling us back. As I mentioned in my message, when the account was opened details of a beneficiary in the event of your brother’s death were provided, and it is indeed your name that’s on the documentation. Of course, if nobody knew there was an account with us it’s understandable that we weren’t informed its owner was deceased. I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you. You said there were some irregularities with the account that you wanted to discuss?’
‘Yes. Do you think your brother may have provided details of this account to anybody else other than you?’
Tom thought for a moment. Emma would be the most likely, but she would have mentioned it when he was trying to give her money all those years ago. Melissa was another option. She’d been living with Jack for about six months before he died, and she had moved heaven and earth to claim ownership of some of Jack’s estate because she said she was ‘owed’ it. If she’d had access to the four million, though, Tom wasn’t sure she would have continued to try to get the rest of Jack’s money. He had no idea where she was now. He had never been provided with her contact details and hadn’t seen her in person since Jack died. All dealings were through her solicitor – a man with too smart a suit for the job he was doing whom Tom didn’t trust as far as he could th
row him.
‘I can’t think of anybody. Why are you asking?’
‘Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the account is closed. The balance was withdrawn a few months ago – September, to be precise – transferred to an account in the Cayman Islands. I can, of course, provide the transfer details under the circumstances, but I doubt that will help you.’
Damn it. Another banking system with secrecy laws.
It seemed Tom had been right. Whoever had broken into his house in the summer must have stolen the login details of the account in Switzerland and cleared it out.
He was about to question Mr Charteris further when his internal line rang. Making his excuses and asking if it would be okay to call again, he hung up and answered his phone.
‘Tom Douglas,’ he answered vacantly, his mind running through the options for discovering who had taken Jack’s money.
‘Tom, we need to talk. My office, one hour.’
‘Philippa, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can it wait, please?’ he asked. Sometimes, Philippa’s high-handed attitude grated on him, although most of the time he accepted that she was the boss. But today he had other things to worry about than offending Philippa.
‘No. It can’t wait. I’ve had a call from the head of operations for Titan. One hour, please.’
The phone went dead. What the hell did the North West’s Regional Organised Crime Unit want with him?
‘Bugger,’ Tom muttered.
37
The only sounds were birdsong, a distant tractor and the squelching of three pairs of wellington boots on a track that had suddenly become a quagmire. Nobody had spoken since Natasha’s shocking revelation that her mother had shouted the name Jack, and each of them was lost in thought.
Emma didn’t know what David was thinking, but she could guess. Why would Caroline have called out another man’s name just as she crashed? Who was this Jack? Even as she wondered about it, Emma felt a chill creep up her back. Jack wasn’t such a common name. But if it was her Jack, why had he phoned Caroline? What had he said?
Stranger Child Page 17
