Child Taken: A chilling page-turner you will be unable to put down

by Darren Young

  The mother fought back tears as she explained that she’d been in the card shop, had been standing in the queue waiting to pay with her daughter next to her, but, when she had paid for her cards and bent down to put her purse in her bag, her daughter had gone.

  ‘Gone?’

  The woman looked guiltily at the detective sergeant. ‘I only took my eyes off her for a minute or two.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything?’

  The woman shook her head and looked at DS Knowles again; the detective raised her eyebrows as if to silently say to her, you wanted to talk.

  ‘Has she ever done this before?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone who might have—’

  ‘My ex. Becky’s dad. We’ve been seeing a solicitor about custody. He isn’t allowed to see her.’

  Laura scribbled on her pad. ‘And you think he might have taken her?’ she said, looking at the detective as she said it.

  Knowles frowned and stepped between them. ‘Look … Laura, isn’t it? I get you have a job to do, but we don’t have any facts yet, so can we not speculate, please?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  DS Knowles leaned in closer so only Laura could hear her. ‘Am I on record here?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to be,’ said Laura, and lowered her pencil and pad.

  ‘Rebecca’s father has got a bit of history. He came second in the custody battle and we think he might be trying to scare her.’

  ‘Looks like he’s succeeded.’

  They both looked at the girl’s mother: she was shaking, and every passing minute seemed to add another crease to her forehead.

  ‘He hasn’t done this before, but that was before the last hearing. They had quite a bust-up by all accounts.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll do anything stupid?’

  ‘No. Chances are he’ll turn up in an hour and it’ll all blow over.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We’ll detain him overnight, probably charge him while they have time to get a court order against him. That’s the way it goes, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t turn up?’

  ‘Then you have your story,’ Knowles said with a half-smile, and for the first time Laura suspected it was the detective who had called the paper, hoping to control the story.

  ‘And I can quote you if that happens?’

  ‘If it gets that far – and I’m sure it won’t – you can quote me all you like. But for now, help us do our job, and then I’ll help you do yours.’

  Laura nodded and closed her notepad. Kelly had told her that the police often preferred to keep the press on-side by feeding the story they wanted to tell, rather than risk losing public confidence. This was the kind of story where public relations was especially important, and they agreed that they would keep each other updated with any new information. Laura handed the detective a business card and thanked her for her help.

  ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ Knowles told her, but Laura knew she’d only get what the detective sergeant needed her to know. And her expression seemed unconcerned, as if she’d seen it a hundred times before. Laura thought she’d probably also seen the wide-eyed keenness she’d arrived at the centre with, the hope that this might be her big break, and wanted to manage her expectations.

  Now, as she trudged away from the detective, Laura was expecting it to turn into another non-story by early evening.

  18 | Laura

  Laura decided to find something to do while she waited for an update.

  The shops would be closing in less than an hour, and on a cold midweek night the town centre would be desolate and she didn’t want to stand around outside. She thought about David Weatherall and considered what he would do.

  Anticipate what will happen next, she muttered to herself. He was always saying that, and, even though she thought he was a miserable sod who mistrusted anyone under the age of twenty-five, he knew a thing or two about following a story.

  His oft-repeated mantra during her first twelve months was about thinking where the story might end, and being prepared, so that, if it did, you were already ahead of the competition. There didn’t seem to be a lot of competition on this one – Laura had noted that she seemed to be the only member of the press who was even aware of Becky’s disappearance – but she also knew that would change quickly if the girl didn’t turn up soon.

  If that happened, then it would be a major news story, with lots more police and a huge amount of public interest. She’d need to be ready because the window she would have in which to break the news would be tiny, even if Detective Sergeant Knowles was as good as her word. She hoped the girl was OK, but she also knew it was an opportunity.

  She left the shopping centre and found a corner seat in the coffee shop over the road – the only one that was open until eight o’clock – whose large floor-to-ceiling windows afforded her a clear view of any comings and goings through the main entrance.

  She quickly plugged in her laptop and began to type an article – so far, one full of holes and missing information, but at least it was an outline, although she was careful not to make the mistake of jumping to conclusions. DS Knowles and Becky’s mother might be confident about who took her, but they didn’t know for sure, and if she wasn’t found tonight then, in theory, anything could have happened.

  Laura found that the first five hundred words came very quickly, and she left gaps or red-font questions where she needed more. But when she read it back, even with the gaps filled, it still felt like an extension of the headline, which she wouldn’t get to choose. It lacked context, quotes, and above all depth, so she began making notes of the people she would like to speak to if the girl didn’t turn up, starting with the mother and any other relatives and friends. She needed people who could really shed some light on the situation, and maybe offer some theories on what might have happened.

  Her phone rang and she snatched it from the table, but it was David asking for an update.

  ‘Nothing much happening,’ she said, ‘but police reckon she’ll turn up soon.’

  He told her to keep him in the loop and, if she felt the police might be wrong, to let him know so he could send someone to help her.

  ‘Will do,’ she said, and ended the call. Laura knew exactly what that meant: he would send Kelly and she’d take over completely.

  She decided to add some context to the would-be story while she waited, so she connected to the café’s wi-fi and opened up a web browser and typed into it: ‘child abductions northwest england’. There were plenty of results, but nothing that matched her search with much accuracy. The only connected matches were a false alarm five years ago and a family-related abduction three years before that. She got as far as the second page on Google and gave up and went back to the search bar: ‘child abductions uk’.

  She expected more, but the first page was entirely made up of the names of organisations that could help you if your child was missing or abducted. On page two it was full of national statistics, and she realised as she browsed that children went missing often but child abductions were incredibly rare, and almost always involved a relative or someone the child knew.

  She moved on to page three and was just about to go back and try a different search when an entry, two-thirds of the way down the screen, caught her eye. It was about a missing child, not recently but more than twenty years ago – the article was marking the twentieth anniversary the previous year – and not a local story but one in the southwest of England.

  Laura read the article and followed the link to a newspaper local to the incident, where she read the story of Jessica Preston, a two-and-a-half-year-old who had vanished from a beach on a summer’s day and never been seen again. There were related links at the bottom of the story that gave more details, and the police clearly believed she had drowned, a theory that the girl’s mother strongly disputed, claiming instead that she had been abducted, although Laura couldn’t find any information either way and the cove
rage on the internet seemed fairly scant.

  She continued clicking on to other links to follow the story, although there wasn’t that much on it and what did exist was limited to extracts from newspapers at the time, but she became absorbed in it nonetheless. Although there was a good deal of repetition, she gradually filled in blanks and pieced together what had happened, or at least what people believed to have happened, given that there were no eye-witnesses and no evidence.

  As she devoured any information she could find – such as the fact that the child’s mother had suffered from mental health issues recently and that her other child had been taken into care – she found a story about the child’s father, and was about to open the link when she was disturbed by her phone. She groaned, expecting David again, but it was a mobile number she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Miss Grainger?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Detective Sergeant Suzanne Knowles from Lancashire Constabulary.’

  Laura’s pulse began to quicken. ‘Has she turned up?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘We are doing a press statement at seven,’ the police officer told her matter-of-factly, then lowered her voice. ‘So if you want to get ahead and break the story first, now’s the time.’

  ‘No word from the father?’ Laura asked, genuinely concerned for the girl despite the rocket-fuelled boost this would give her profile at the Gazette.

  ‘No. I still think she’s with him, but we need people to start looking out for her. Right away.’

  ‘Shall I quote you as a police source?’

  ‘If you like, but they’re sending someone from the city to take the case. Looks as though she’s officially a missing person now.’

  ‘Do you know who they’re sending?’

  ‘Jenkinson. That’s all I know. Now if you’ll excuse me …’

  ‘Thanks for the heads-up.’

  Laura ended the call, took one final glance at the page of the article she had been reading, bookmarked it and went back to her document on Becky’s disappearance. She had phone calls to make, people to talk to and a very current story to complete – quickly, before anyone else got a sniff of it.

  She would have to forget all about Jessica Preston for now.

  19 | Laura

  Laura had enjoyed her brief moment of glory, even though it was over before she had time to even tell her parents to look out for it.

  She’d finished her article in the café, called David and run it by him, and within minutes the two of them were on a conference call to the Gazette’s website editor, who uploaded the story on to the paper’s website with the headline that David had insisted upon: CHILD TAKEN.

  Less than twenty minutes after the story went live, with Laura’s name sitting proudly underneath, Detective Inspector Ian Jenkinson had started his press conference, where he asked for the public to help in the search for Rebecca Holden. It hadn’t taken that long for the story to sweep across the internet, with the BBC, Sky and nearly all other UK news outlets putting the breaking story on their websites too.

  Then chaos. As Laura had expected, the small town was descended upon by a media circus: reporters from several newspapers and TV stations arrived in vans loaded with crew, cameras, sound booms and artificial lighting. There had been nothing like it in the town before, with roads closed off, and a crowd gathered outside The Seasons that quickly grew into the hundreds even though it was a very chilly night.

  David Weatherall had called in all available staff to field calls from other news outlets, and everyone was asking to speak to Laura, although David shielded her from the spotlight. He wanted her to continue to work at the scene and she had been allowed to ask the first question at the press conference, amid all the lights and flashing cameras. Laura didn’t mind one bit that the attention was now all focused on the detective inspector; she’d put her name and that of the Gazette well and truly on the map, and David was quick to praise her when it had settled down.

  The paper’s website, accustomed to less than a thousand visitors per week, received ten thousand hits in the time between the story breaking and the press conference. Within the next hour those hits had gone past fifty thousand, nearly all of them landing on Laura’s article. David had assigned Kelly Heath to the story at that point – she’d made a miraculous recovery after calling in sick the day before – and she joined Laura at the shopping centre just as the press conference was drawing to a close.

  ‘Well, you certainly struck it lucky here,’ Kelly said as Laura met her outside for a discussion on what to do next. Not that she needed telling, because David had made it clear when he’d last spoken to her that Laura was to assist Kelly; but the older woman quickly established the hierarchy too, in case she hadn’t got the message.

  ‘I’m going to talk to the family,’ she said. ‘You try to find anyone else who knew her and is prepared to share something.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Anything they’re prepared to tell you. Family history, gossip, I don’t care. Anything we can use.’

  ‘Not dirt,’ said Laura firmly.

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘They have a child missing, Kelly. They don’t need us raking up stuff that’s got nothing to do with that.’

  ‘I’ll judge what it’s got to do with,’ she said.

  Laura made a mental note not to tell her anything she’d consider to be unconnected ‘dirt’. But she knew she would also be feeding on mere scraps; Kelly wouldn’t let her get within a mile of a family member or close friend if she could help it.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant enough, but I found a story that we might be able to use.’

  Kelly frowned, but showed enough interest for Laura to continue. She gave her a brief précis of the Jessica Preston case.

  ‘I know it’s over twenty years ago, but it will help readers identify with what Becky’s mother is going through.’

  Kelly ran it over in her mind. Laura fully expected her to quickly dismiss it but her face lit up instead. ‘Let’s go with it. We can put it on one of the pages as a look what can happen if she doesn’t show up piece.’

  Laura nodded suspiciously and then realised it was a perfect ‘win-win’ scenario for Kelly. If it improved the narrative then she’d get the credit and, either way, it would get Laura out of the way for a while and allow her to completely take over the story.

  ‘Well, go on, then.’ Kelly was already wandering off to talk to the family and had no need for her. The area was cordoned off and only a few reporters were being allowed past the barriers – strictly one per news agency – so Laura slung her bag over her shoulder and made her way back to the coffee shop she had used to write the breaking story, to search again for more details on Jessica Preston. David had given explicit instructions to have all pieces ready for print early the following morning, so they could go straight into the first few pages of that week’s edition and on to the website even sooner.

  The coffee shop had stayed open after the story broke, and the owners had been rewarded by nearly a week’s worth of custom in a few hours as the crowd and press used it as an unofficial refreshments station and place to get warm. Nearly every seat was taken, so Laura squeezed into a gap by the window, ordered a coffee and opened her laptop.

  She went back to the story about Jessica’s father, her brother, and some of the theories that had come out at the time and since from the authorities, mainly the police detective who had led the search until it was called off after five years. It seemed that the majority of commentators had concluded that the police were right and that she must have drowned; only the child’s mother had remained in opposition, and fervently maintained that it was an abduction. Even twenty years later, in the anniversary article, the mother had been adamant that Jessica was still alive, but Laura noted in one passage that she had been admitted to a mental health unit, not far from Weston-super-Mare, not long after the search had been officially call
ed off, and, as far as she could tell from the limited information, she was still there.

  She began to type some words but struggled to find a suitable link to what was happening now. This appeared to be a clear case of child abduction, whereas the Jessica Preston case did not. The Seasons Shopping Centre, cold and dark, felt like a very different place from a sunny August beach with a dangerous rip-tide. After half an hour, Laura found herself having managed only six lines, her mind constantly thinking about the mother of the child, Sandra Preston.

  She found a picture of her, taken the next day when she’d made an appeal on the news. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked bewildered, as though everything that was happening around her made no sense. That all she wanted was her little girl back.

  She was the link. She looked exactly like the mother in The Seasons.

  She looked at Sandra Preston’s face, trying to imagine what it was like to have no closure, to always be wondering what happened. Laura felt guilty for wondering if she really believed her daughter was abducted, or if it was her way of hiding from the awful truth. She clicked through more images and found one of her, taken earlier when she was twenty-five, the caption said, and Laura noted how happy she looked, so unaware of what lay ahead.

  She could feel her heart aching for the woman. She checked her phone for any updates from Kelly but there were none, so she searched for more on Sandra Preston and, as she did, she realised exactly what she wanted to do.

  She put into Google the name of the unit where it said the woman resided. A telephone number came up on the screen and she typed the number into her phone and called it.

  A receptionist answered within two rings, remarkably friendly and helpful given that it was so late. Laura apologised for that and explained who she was and, to her surprise, she was transferred straight through to the unit’s general manager, a Mrs Stanton. She seemed friendly enough, but Laura still anticipated a negative reaction when she told the manager what she wanted to do.