Stranger Child

by Rachel Abbott

  Suddenly, Emma felt as if an icy blast had swept into the room and the surface of her skin tingled with cold and fear.

  ‘And Ollie? Is this you too, David? Have you let them take my baby to save yourself from some other stupidity?’

  She heard Natasha gasp, ‘No,’ but her eyes were on David’s face. She thought she could read the answer in his horror-struck gaze – but maybe she didn’t know him at all.

  The momentary silence was shattered as Natasha’s mobile rang.

  *

  David and Emma hurried to the kitchen at Natasha’s insistence. She thought their voices should be picked up by the bug in there, and they walked in, playing their parts, although Emma wanted nothing more than to grab David by the neck and shake him until he told her everything. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to control the sick feeling lodged deep inside her. Whether David had anything to do with Ollie’s abduction or not, if he hadn’t set this ball rolling six years ago, none of this would be happening now.

  She banged a few dishes around and switched the tap on, so the listeners would know they were there. She couldn’t bring herself to talk to David.

  Natasha followed them into the kitchen a minute later.

  ‘David – they’re on the phone. They want to speak to you. On speaker.’

  Natasha laid the phone down on the table and a distorted voice echoed around the room.

  ‘Write this down. At 2.30 a.m. you will drive to Joseph & Son. Inside the back porch you will find a duffle bag. Take that with you. Let yourself into the main building foyer the back way. You know the code. At 3.01 a.m. you will type the following number into the security keypad at Joseph & Son’s door: 1563974. This will give you access to the vault. The time locks have been dealt with. Wedge the door open. If it closes, it will restart the timing system and you won’t be able to get out.’

  David scribbled frantically. Emma made her own notes – they couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  ‘Open the door to the key room and take the key to box 2909. Empty the contents of the box into the sacks you’ll find in the duffle bag, and put them in your car. You have exactly 58 minutes to do this before the security system does its automatic check for breaches. You have to be out of the building with the door closed by that time. If not, the police will catch you and you’ll never see your son again. Do you understand?’

  David looked up at Emma and she nodded. She could remind him of the details and they could go over them together. There was time.

  ‘We will call on this phone at 4.10 a.m. when you must be back in the car. We’ll tell you where you’ve got to go to make the delivery. Wear black – head to toe. There will be no lighting at all in the vault.’

  Emma looked at her husband and felt a moment’s sympathy. The idea of going into that place alone, at night, below the streets of Manchester, in a building that had been there for years and held who knew what secrets was enough to make the strongest man blanch.

  ‘Have you understood all this?’

  ‘Yes,’ David answered.

  ‘And you, Emma?’ the voice said.

  ‘No. When do I get my baby back?’

  ‘When the job’s done. Natasha comes back to us and the baby comes back to you. We’ll let you know where you can find him once the girl’s back with us. He’ll be safe.’

  Emma turned horrified eyes to Tasha. She had always said she would have to go back, but Emma had never thought it would really come to that.

  The man was speaking again.

  ‘Are you listening, Emma?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered softly, still staring at Natasha’s pale face.

  ‘Good – because David’s not the one doing this job. It’s you. You’re the one who’s going into the vault – if you want your son back.’

  The line went dead.

  51

  It had been easier than Becky had imagined to locate the house where they believed Ollie was being held. The Titan team had confirmed that Finn McGuinness’s wife ran the burger van, and the supposedly respectable couple had a house in a surprisingly prosperous area of Salford, on a street of beautiful detached homes. That in itself was a relief, because a covert operation in a road where houses were crammed together with neighbours within two metres of each other was a nightmare.

  Becky had been banished to her car, parked down the street beyond the outer cordon set up by the firearms team, and she tapped her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. McGuinness was an organised crime group’s enforcer, so there was every chance of finding a gun in the house. Unfortunately, that meant Becky couldn’t just barge in and demand Ollie back. The firearms silver commander was responsible for putting the operation together and making all the decisions now, leaving Becky temporarily redundant. All she could do was wait for the all clear – the moment when she could go in and rescue Ollie.

  She was too far away to check what was happening, and anyway she could barely see through the windscreen as the individual fat drops of rain joined together to create silver rivers down the glass. She couldn’t draw attention to herself by putting her windscreen wipers on, so she peered out of the side window at the black silhouettes of trees lining the narrow cul-de-sac, hiding the expensive properties that were set well back from the road.

  It didn’t seem right that one of these lovely houses was Finn McGuinness’s home, and Becky thought about all the lives that had been ruined by drugs and God knows what else to pay for this lifestyle. She had seen pictures of McGuinness. He was not what she expected. He looked strangely like a bank manager – a man who would fit easily into this middle-class street. Apart from what appeared to be a perpetually worried frown, his face was fairly lacking in memorable features. His short, well-groomed grey hair was receding at the front, but there were no discernible signs of the life of crime he was purported to have led. He wasn’t even a big man at five feet ten inches, and in each of the photos she saw he was wearing a smart overcoat and a snazzy red tie. A businessman through and through.

  Even in a two-dimensional static image, though, the eyes said it all. Nothing could disguise the flat, black stare that Becky was sure – if cast upon you – would turn your legs to jelly – and not in a good way. She hoped and prayed that she wouldn’t be finding out tonight.

  A light in an upstairs window was on, suggesting somebody was home, but as yet nobody had seen any movement or heard a sound. She knew the team was getting into position but it was a delicate operation with too many unknown factors for Becky’s liking.

  A sudden downpour of rain washed the windscreen clean, for a moment forming a solid sheet of water that enhanced the image through the glass. Peering at the distorted view, Becky watched as a member of the team approached the house cautiously – little more than a dark shadow, keeping close to the wall.

  The listening devices were being put in place. They needed to hear Ollie or Julie. If they got this wrong, Ollie might not get out alive.

  *

  Emma locked herself in the bathroom. She couldn’t let either Natasha or David know how she was feeling about carrying out the robbery, but the look of horror on Natasha’s face had said it all. She hadn’t been expecting this. David’s expression of relief that it wasn’t going to be him sickened her.

  Was this the man she had married? Images of their life together flashed through her mind – of times when she had perhaps misinterpreted her husband’s actions. She had always assumed his inability to face the harsh realities of life was down to his optimistic nature. Now she was sure that it was more a case of hiding from the truth. Right now, he would be convincing himself that it was fine for Emma to do this. He would have devised a list of reasons to justify why it was better for Emma to go down into that dark, silent vault. That way, he didn’t need to feel guilty about it.

  Whatever he was thinking, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how terrified she was.

  She had visited David’s company in daylight hours, when the half dozen people who
worked there had been around. Even then, she had found something spooky about the place. It was months since she had been there – not since the time she went to show Ollie off to David’s colleagues just after he was born – and she tried to visualise the place, to fix the layout in her mind.

  The customer entrance was on the main road, but she had been told to go in the back way – an entrance she didn’t know. It didn’t matter, because everything – the offices, the reception, the safe deposit boxes – were all in the bowels of the earth, under the streets of Manchester.

  There was a long flight of narrow steps leading down to a small reception area, with just enough space for a couple of security men and a bank of CCTV monitors behind a counter. A door led from there into the key room.

  Then there were more stairs down into the tile-lined spaces below. David’s office was in this part of the building; he always said that he felt a bit like a mole, buried beneath the earth all day. In the winter, he never saw sunlight during the week. There were no windows - they were too far underground.

  There had been one moment during her last visit when she had been left on her own while David went to answer the phone. Emma remembered having the same sensation that she’d once had on a deserted underground platform in London. The silence had a dead quality to it, and there was the sense of being watched by the hordes of people who had passed that way before.

  Then David had come back and shown her the individual rooms that led off the cavernous central space, each one lined with row after row of safe deposit boxes. There was a tiny viewing room where customers could take their boxes to examine the contents – to add or remove whatever they were storing there. It sat, like a polished, wooden coffin, at the side of the room: a place to hide your secrets.

  The vault was like a rabbit warren – room after room hidden round corners, opening up into unexpected spaces. She knew it had been used as an air-raid shelter during the war, and Emma pictured people huddled against the walls, listening to the blasts as the bombs of the Manchester Blitz destroyed the Palace Theatre only a few hundred metres away.

  She shuddered. It wasn’t a place she wanted to visit on her own, even with all the lights on. She had no idea how she would cope in the dark. But it was for Ollie. She would do anything for Ollie.

  She perched on the side of the bath, knowing she was going to have to phone Tom, but she couldn’t decide how much to tell him. Should she tell him about David – about the deal he had made six years ago? Would it make a difference to what happened now? She didn’t think so, but it might. She didn’t want to tell him – she felt such a deep sense of shame.

  She couldn’t regret David, though. Without him there would be no Ollie, and even if David wasn’t prepared to fight to the death for his wife and take her place in the vaults he knew so well, she was damned sure she would battle to her last breath for her baby.

  Using her Australian phone, she pressed the call button.

  ‘What’s happening, Em?’

  *

  Tom listened as Emma repeated the instructions and told him all she had learned since she had arrived home.

  Emma’s revelation about David was sadly no real suprise to Tom; it certainly explained some of his actions and Natasha’s attitude.

  ‘Do you think he’s got anything to do with what’s going on this time, Emma?’

  He had to ask, even though the thought might not even have entered Emma’s head.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, without a hint of shock at the suggestion. ‘He genuinely looked horrified that I could think that, as if it was a totally ridiculous idea.’

  He heard Emma’s voice catch and wondered how much more she could take.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, Emma. We can do another swap; somebody else can go into the vault for you.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, Tom. I’ll walk over hot coals for my baby if I have to. If somebody else does this and it goes wrong, I’d never forgive myself. And besides that, they need my fingerprint on the locks.’

  ‘Bollocks, I’d forgotten the biometric locks. Why are your prints stored?’

  Emma explained that it had been a precaution when David was ill once. The gang must have hacked the system to clear the time lock so no doubt they found out about her prints at the same time.

  ‘There’s a chance you might not have to do this at all,’ Tom said. ‘If we get Ollie before your deadline, that’ll be the end of your part in it.’

  He heard a whispered plea from Emma and gave her a moment.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not going to mess this up,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know. There’ll be somebody with you every step of the way, Em. Just remember - we’ve got your back.’

  52

  ‘All set, Boss,’ Finn said, looking at the younger, taller man standing warming himself in front of an open fire.

  ‘Confident?’ the man Finn called ‘Boss’ asked.

  ‘Yeah, I think so. The wife’s not going to blow it. Didn’t trust the tit of a husband to get it right, but she’s a bit more solid. Timing’s an issue. If she doesn’t get out the alarm will go off and we’re fucked – or rather she is. But I doubt she’s going to let that happen.’

  ‘Is the hacker on standby?’

  ‘Yeah – he’s confident he can override the alarm to get her out, but he’s had no way of testing it. He’s probably got a window of a couple of minutes to free up the auto locking of the doors before the police arrive.’

  ‘The buyer? You checked him out?’

  The Boss moved away from the fire, briefly rubbing the back of his trousers with both hands. He reached for a glass of clear liquid on the table. A couple of ice cubes bobbed around on the surface, clinking against the side.

  ‘As much as I could. He’s given us eyes on his money – so we know he’s got it. That’s as much as we can be sure of.’

  ‘It’s time to get rid of Rory, Finn.’

  ‘Yeah - he’s a fucking liability. We need him for this job, but after that … He didn’t manage those kids well. Rick and Shelley caught on camera, and then there’s the other one – Izzy.’

  ‘Are we sure it’s her?’

  The Boss drank the whole glass of liquid. Finn knew it would be water; the Boss never drank before a job.

  ‘Ninety per cent. According to the intel, she was wearing the right clothes – the nightdress that Julie gave her. They think she was pumped full of ket, too. That sounds about right. Could have picked that up at Julie’s.’

  ‘Well – at least she’s dead. That’s one less to worry about.’ The Boss looked pleased, and it was Finn’s job to keep him that way.

  ‘Shelley shouldn’t have blabbed to her. If Izzy hadn’t already been dead …’ Finn didn’t need to say more. ‘Speaking of Shelley, we’ve got a couple of hours before the handover. I’m going to pull her out. She did okay with the baby, but she’s made some stupid mistakes and she needs to pay for them. She nearly fucked up the whole thing, and she’s not to be trusted any more.’

  Shelley Slater was about to find out what happened to people who crossed Finn McGuinness. He hadn’t quite decided what to do with her – how severe to make the punishment. But Julie wouldn’t want her marked. She said Shelley could net them a fortune.

  ‘Back here in one hour, then – when you’ve sorted her,’ the Boss said.

  Finn nodded, pulled on his leather gloves and made his way out of the door.

  53

  When Tom arrived at the control room in Salford West there was an air of restrained tension. Operators sat at computers, quietly and efficiently getting on with their jobs. In spite of the apparent calm, though, Tom knew that every person in the room would be feeling a tightening in their gut at the burden of their responsibility.

  A bank of monitors along one wall was showing three simultaneous operations, and the silver commander of the firearms unit was issuing instructions to the operational team on the gr
ound at Finn and Julie McGuinness’s home. But nobody as yet had heard the sound of a baby.

  Two screens were being set up to monitor activity in the vicinity of Joseph & Son. A team would be standing by in case Emma got into any kind of trouble.

  Three further screens were displaying images from a location that Tom didn’t recognise. Paul Green was staring at them intently, and Tom realised that these must be related to the Titan operation.

  ‘Where are we?’ Tom asked, turning to Paul Green and pointing to the screens.

  ‘A cemetery just off the M60. They’ve chosen well. No CCTV and several fast exit routes. It’s where we believe the goods are going to be handed over to their buyer, and the word is that the big man likes to be there. He doesn’t trust a soul, it seems.’

  ‘They haven’t told Emma where she has to go after she leaves the vault, so I presume your informant has given you this location?’

  ‘Yeah, he has. I hope to God he’s not been pulling my plonker on this. But I don’t think so.’

  Tom suddenly felt a crushing need to know more. It wasn’t just about Emma – although she and Ollie were his priority – but this was so closely related to the events of six years ago, and he desperately wanted to know what Jack’s role had been back then. He’d clearly known something the night Caroline died, and Jack had installed the security system at Joseph & Son in the first place, his company chosen because the system had been hacked by somebody who left messages on people’s desktops.

  There was no longer any doubt in Tom’s mind where the money in his brother’s secret – and now empty – account had come from. The link between the sources of his funds and his clients was too strong. He had been hacking into people’s computer systems and then selling them his services, and Tom knew exactly how Jack would have justified that.

  ‘If I could do it, so could somebody else.’ Tom could hear him saying it now. But Jack didn’t have to cheat people. He could have done it legitimately by pointing out the weaknesses in their systems.