Stolen

by Lesley Pearse

  Within the hour Adam’s confidence in both the police and their neighbours began to dwindle. No one living or working around the lane had seen anything. The police quickly brought in a forensics team to check the flat and the spiral staircase outside. But with no sightings of the men or the vehicle Lotte was taken away in, finding her would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  Adam rang Marchwood Manor before the police arrived because he had found Dale’s mobile phone on the sofa. She hadn’t arrived back at the spa, and Scott said she had intended to catch the four-thirty bus from Brighton, which meant she should have arrived some ten minutes earlier.

  Scott was deeply shocked and worried about Lotte, but at that point there was no sense in assuming Dale had been snatched with her. She could after all have missed the bus, and decided to go back later by taxi, though if that was the case it was odd she hadn’t returned to Simon’s for her mobile. Simon rang David then, feeling desperate to put everyone who cared about Lotte in the picture.

  David arrived at the flat within the hour while the forensics team were still there. He had beads of perspiration on his forehead, his dark business suit was crumpled and there was fear in his eyes.

  ‘I suppose she just forgot to look at the screen before opening the door,’ he said as he stood in the hall with Simon and Adam watching the forensics men still out on the balcony. ‘But that suggests to me she thought it was a friend. Maybe Dale running back to get her phone?’

  ‘I suppose that could be the answer,’ Simon said. ‘But how did they know Lotte was here anyway?’

  ‘The place Scott and Dale work at was mentioned in the newspapers. They could have followed Dale here in the morning,’ David said.

  ‘They’ll kill her, won’t they?’ Simon’s lips began to quiver.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ David replied but his voice lacked conviction.

  ‘Come on! What other reason could they have for snatching her but to make sure she can never tell the police all she knows?’ Adam butted in.

  ‘But what can she know that is bad enough for anyone to take such risks?’ Simon asked, shaking his head in bafflement.

  One of the forensics team found a partial fingerprint on the hand rail of the staircase and some sand on the two lowest steps.

  ‘I’d say there were two men and they both started off wearing gloves,’ the tall, thin man with droopy eyelids said. ‘There are several places on the banisters which are very clean, consistent with a gloved hand grabbing the rail. But the man holding the girl probably took his off on the way down because he’d got something fiddly to do. Tying her up maybe, unlocking the vehicle. The sand is interesting, I think it’s been brought here on a shoe, from a beach rather than builder’s sand.’

  ‘Will you be able to pinpoint the area it came from?’ David asked.

  The forensics man shrugged. ‘Only a fairly general area. But we’ll do our best.’

  DI Bryan came round a little later and looked grim when he heard Dale still hadn’t arrived back at Marchwood Manor.

  ‘It looks as if she’s been taken too,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair distractedly. ‘We’ll check all CCTV footage around the town immediately and make inquiries at all the shops and flats around here. If these people followed Dale from Marchwood, they hung around here most of the day waiting, so someone must have seen them or the vehicle they were in. Dale received a text message on her phone at three-fifty, and replied to it, so we know she was still here then. Simon came back at five-fifteen. So that gives us a frame of one hour when the girls could’ve been snatched.’

  ‘Most of the shops and offices are closed now,’ Simon pointed out.

  ‘We’ll check them out first thing in the morning,’ Bryan assured him and suggested Simon and Adam waited indoors, promising he’d let them know immediately if there were any developments.

  ‘Have you thought any more about what I said the other day? You know, believing the boat Lotte was pushed out of, or escaped from, came from somewhere around Chichester harbour,’ David asked, fully expecting Bryan to dismiss his opinion.

  But to his surprise Bryan said he thought he could be right. ‘Few people would take the chance of sailing in the dark in the open sea unless they were a very experienced sailor. But people who moor in the harbour and tend mostly to sail around there, might feel confident enough to go just outside the harbour in an emergency. Dumping someone in the sea amounts to that, I’d say, and maybe they did the same with the baby.’

  David shuddered at that prospect. A young baby couldn’t survive very long in a cold sea, and it could’ve been swept away from Lotte. Would any mother want to get the memory of that back?

  ‘So why haven’t you done a boat-to-boat search?’ he asked.

  ‘We have questioned hundreds of boat owners, but we’re talking about an enormous area, David. Eleven square miles of water, over three and a half thousand moorings, fourteen sailing clubs and some twelve thousand craft visiting each year.’

  ‘What about doing a house-to-house search?’ David suggested. ‘If this person moors his boat there, he could be living around there too. It’s not such a formidable task. Itchenor, for instance, has only got two hundred and six dwellings. Some of the other villages are even smaller. So don’t you think it’s time you started on it?’

  ‘There’s no hard evidence she was there to justify a house-to-house search,’ Bryan retorted, looking a little irritated now that David was telling him what to do.

  ‘A baby is missing,’ David pointed out forcefully. ‘Doesn’t that justify pulling out all the stops, regardless of evidence?’

  ‘Lotte could have had her baby absolutely anywhere, it might not have even been in England,’ Bryan said wearily. ‘I’ve already told you we’ve checked all registered births around the time we believe it was born, and all of the babies are accounted for.’

  ‘It could’ve been born in a garden shed, an outhouse or somewhere, without any medical attention. Maybe it was stillborn or died soon after the birth, and Lotte’s abductors disposed of it,’ David said wildly, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘I haven’t got any answers, but I have got a hunch Lotte was held in a seaside house.’

  Bryan put his hand on David’s shoulder in sympathy. ‘Our best shot right now is with that partial print from the stairs, or her abductors’ van being on a camera. We’ve already started checking that out. We were too late for an appeal for witnesses on the six o’clock news, but we’ll make sure it’s on at ten. First thing tomorrow we’ll be stopping people on their way to work.’

  ‘You have considered that they are going to kill her as soon as possible?’ David said in desperation. ‘They won’t linger over it, they’ll do it and then fuck off out of it.’

  ‘I would agree with that if they only had Lotte, but it looks like they’ve got Dale too,’ Bryan said, looking at his phone as if willing it to ring with good news. ‘I don’t believe they intended to take her, and that must have thrown a spanner in the works for them. And I think Dale and Lotte together could give anyone a run for their money.’

  Bryan left soon after, and he’d no sooner gone than Scott turned up. He was pale and shaken. Dale had not arrived back at Marchwood, and he said everyone there was frantic. Simon made more coffee and the four men sat down in the sitting room to discuss what to do.

  ‘I think we should do our own house-to-house,’ David said. ‘If we divided up the area into four, I reckon we could cover most of it in a couple of days.’

  Simon and Adam weren’t sure about that. They felt it might put the police’s backs up.

  ‘Well, I think it’s a sound idea,’ Scott said, supporting David eagerly. ‘I can’t go back to work while they are missing. And I’d get out there right now and start searching if I could.’

  Simon and Adam looked at each other. ‘OK,’ Adam said. ‘Si and I will do it too. To hell with upsetting the fuzz, the girls are far more important.’

  Scott fished in his jacket pocket a
nd brought out a photograph of the two girls together. ‘Have you got a scanner so we could print up some of these to show round?’

  Adam said he had and took the picture. It was one of the girls in a restaurant, looking very tanned and model-like. David looked at it and frowned.

  ‘It’s a lovely picture but I doubt Lotte looked like that while she was held captive. I’m pretty good with a computer; if you’ve got a picture of her looking more ordinary, without makeup and stuff, maybe with her hair tied back, I could probably superimpose more frumpy clothes on her, like that dress she was wearing when I found her.’

  ‘If she was locked away no one would have seen her anyway,’ Simon said, looking a bit bewildered.

  ‘She might not have been locked away right at the start,’ David replied, proving he’d spent a great deal of time thinking about this. ‘The police know she was in London for a while because she bought new clothes with her bank card. What we don’t know is whether she went there with this person, or people, or met them there. Either way she almost certainly went somewhere else with him, her, them, afterwards, and somehow I don’t think that was against her will.’

  ‘Why not?’ Simon asked.

  ‘It would be very hard to keep someone a prisoner for the best part of a year,’ David said. ‘And she got pregnant during that time too. So it could’ve been a love affair which went horribly wrong.’

  ‘But we’ve got no way of knowing that she was brought down this way,’ Adam said.

  ‘No, we don’t, but it’s likely that she was. She could’ve been offered a job, lured into some crank religion, or just got hung up on some guy who offered her love and security. But whatever the reason, I’m betting she came down here willingly.’

  ‘With all due respect, David,’ Simon said politely, ‘you’ve only known her for five minutes. How would you know that?’

  David made a kind of expansive shrug with both shoulders and hands. ‘She struck me as a cautious girl, not a madcap who could be lured off on a promise of something exotic or exciting. I don’t think she’d even move away to an area she wasn’t familiar with. But Chichester would seem safe. It’s not far from her home town, she knew what it was like.’

  ‘David’s right about her being cautious. It took for ever to persuade her to sign up for the cruise,’ Simon said, as if he’d suddenly remembered that. ‘Right up till the day before she left I half expected her to back down.’

  ‘What made her want to do it in the first place?’ David asked.

  ‘Mainly money,’ Simon said. ‘She wanted to get enough for a deposit on a flat of her own. The reason she didn’t back out was because we all kept teasing her and saying she would. I think she felt she had to do it to save face.’

  ‘David hit the nail right on the head,’ Scott said. ‘Lotte isn’t what you’d call bold. Unless she was thumped over the head and locked up somewhere, she would have only agreed to go with people she trusted and to a place she felt was safe. So that in itself suggests she wasn’t under lock and key, at least not at first. There is a strong chance, then, that people may have seen her around.’

  ‘OK, so we’re in agreement. We know from the dress she was wearing when I found her on the beach, and from purchases of other clothes while in London, that she was unlikely to have looked like a fashion plate.’ David paused and stabbed his finger at the photo. ‘So no one would connect this glamour puss with the frumpy little mouse they might have seen. I reckon one of the biggest mistakes the police have made was releasing that picture of her looking gorgeous.’

  ‘We’ve got lots of pictures of her on the computer.’ Simon got to his feet. ‘Let’s go and look for suitable ones.’

  ‘Are you really all up for going out tomorrow to look?’ David asked. ‘What about your jobs?’

  ‘Lotte is worth more than a poxy job,’ Adam said, and Simon grinned at him affectionately.

  ‘I daresay Marisa will have me hung, drawn and quartered,’ Scott said. ‘But Dale and Lotte are like my sisters, and my two best mates. I can’t let them down, so I don’t give a toss about the job.’

  At eight the following morning David met up with Scott in the car park by the café at Chichester marina as they’d agreed to do the night before. Scott was wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt; David felt a bit overdressed in chinos and a checked jacket.

  ‘Any trouble getting the day off?’ he asked Scott as they walked into the café.

  Scott wrinkled his nose. ‘It didn’t go down too well with the manageress – she’s never liked Dale. But I think she might have a strike on her hands if she sacks me; all the other spa staff are right behind me. What about you?’

  ‘Well, I more or less choose my own hours,’ David said. ‘I’ll just have to work a bit harder when this is over.’ He was about to order coffee for himself and Scott when Simon and Adam walked in. ‘Make that four coffees,’ he said to the girl behind the counter.

  The previous evening Simon had found the perfect photograph of Lotte. Adam had taken it without her realizing, while she was gazing reflectively into space. She had no makeup on, her hair was in two plaits and she was wearing a pale blue round-necked sweater. She looked quaintly old-fashioned, shy, vulnerable and just a little troubled.

  With the headline ‘Have you seen her?’ above the picture and a brief reminder that she was the girl found on Selsey beach, but that she’d been kidnapped again and it was thought her life was in danger, it sent out a powerful and emotional message that anyone who had seen her, however briefly, should ring the police immediately.

  Simon had printed off hundreds of copies, and the boys’ plan was to show it to people and talk to them about Lotte, and to leave the picture in places where people congregated, like this café.

  ‘I suggest we start by each taking one of the jetties,’ David said. ‘Show the picture to anyone aboard each of the boats, ask them about owners of neighbouring boats too, if they were down here when Lotte was washed up on the beach on the sixth of May. Take the name and telephone number of anyone who was here then, or anyone who thinks they’ve seen Lotte before.’

  ‘We’ll be here all day,’ Adam said, glancing out of the window at the huge number of yachts moored in the marina.

  ‘Just don’t get into pointless chatting,’ David said. ‘We’ve got to cover as much ground as possible.’

  Simon and Adam walked along to one end of the moorings to start there, and David and Scott took the other, so they would meet in the middle. It was a dull morning and there was a stiff breeze which made it seem quite cold, and most of the people aboard the boats were having breakfast.

  David found on his jetty that people were interested and helpful, at times a bit too much so, and he had a job to get away from them. No one recognized Lotte, though, and some of the people who weren’t local didn’t even know the story of her being discovered on the beach. In two hours David had found only one person who had been here around the time she was washed up at Selsey, and he hadn’t sailed out of the marina.

  Scott reported much the same when they conferred around mid-morning.

  ‘They were all too keen to gossip about other boat owners,’ he said gloomily. ‘One guy kept rabbiting on about a man who brings a new girl down with him every weekend. I asked him how the man killed them, and he said, “Oh, he don’t kill them, only shags them.” He was so thick he didn’t even realize I was being sarcastic!’

  David smiled, but he was beginning to feel daunted by the formidable task they’d set themselves. With over 3,500 moorings around the harbour, it could take weeks to check them all. But maybe they could do this whole marina today, and start knocking on house doors tomorrow.

  It was almost six-thirty when the boys joined up, having spoken to every boat owner aboard. They’d only grabbed coffee and a sandwich for lunch and kept on with the questions. Not one person had seen Lotte, but between them they had the names of five people who had been here around the time Lotte was found at Selsey.

  ‘Shall I hand the names
over to Bryan?’ David asked the others as they walked back to the car park. They had planned to go and have an Indian meal together, and Scott was going to stay over with David in Selsey.

  ‘Good idea,’ Simon said. ‘It might make him sit up and take notice. God only knows what his men are doing!’

  Scott and David arrived back at David’s house from the Indian meal around ten. Simon and Adam had just left them to drive back to Brighton. David got them both a beer from the fridge and talked a little about Simon and Adam. He admitted he’d never spent any time before in the company of gay men.

  ‘I’ll never be homophobic again,’ Scott said with a little chuckle. ‘I never even thought about them being gay all evening, they were such good company. They care so much for Lotte, like she’s their sister. To be honest, I’d sooner be with them than half the straight guys I know. They can talk about something other than football, they are sensitive and have a cracking sense of humour. I used to get that good buzz being with Dale and Lotte too. We’d laugh and laugh till our sides ached.’

  ‘Weren’t you ever tempted to go for something more than friendship?’ David asked. ‘I mean, they are both lovely girls.’

  ‘I was in the beginning,’ Scott admitted. ‘But getting involved with anyone when you work on a cruise ship can be a minefield. Besides, they never so much as hinted that they wanted to be anything more than just friends, and that suited me. I could pretend one of them was my girlfriend if some other bird started coming on to me. But if I wanted to flit off they didn’t mind that either. I could confide in them, lark around with them, it was great. I’d give anything to have them both here again now.’

  David nodded. He’d had a few revelations about friendship today too. He didn’t know any other gay men, and Scott was the kind of muscle-bound hero who normally made him feel inadequate. Yet he’d felt bound to these three men today. He’d even been able to admit over dinner that he thought he had fallen in love with Lotte. He’d seen nothing but understanding in their eyes either, no resentment that he was taking the lead in their search, not even any irritation that he’d known her such a short time. In fact, they acted as though his feelings for her were even stronger than theirs.