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

by Darren Young

  As she pulled off the driveway with a final wave, she felt the butterflies in her stomach, and they stayed there as she got to the main road and the woman’s voice told her to take the third exit at the roundabout. She stopped to fill up with petrol just before she joined the motorway, then, as she was halfway down the slip road, her phone rang and she saw Kelly’s name on the screen.

  ‘Shit.’

  She ignored the call and a minute later it rang again, but she was already in the middle lane of the motorway overtaking a lorry and didn’t have a hands-free kit in the car, so she decided to wait until she reached the next services and call her back.

  Her phone beeped to tell her she had a voicemail message.

  She hoped Kelly was ringing her to wish her luck.

  She drove another two miles, then her phone beeped again, this time to tell her she’d received a text message from Kelly. She carefully held the wheel with one hand, checked her mirrors for any police cars and read the message on the screen.

  laura if on way stop becky found safe and well :) kelly

  The car swerved, its tyres trespassing across the raised markings on the hard shoulder and making a grinding sound, and she straightened it back on the carriageway and threw the phone on to the passenger seat in frustration. ‘Fuck!’

  She banged her palm against the steering wheel. No one wanted anything other than a successful conclusion to the story, but she wished it had happened twenty-four hours later than it had. She pulled in at the next services and sent a cheery reply to Kelly through gritted teeth and went inside.

  She realised she wouldn’t have to call for an update. The story was the headline on the twenty-four-hour news channels on the big screens inside the services, and she watched as the breaking story unfolded before her.

  As it happened, another twenty-four hours would have been problematic for Becky Holden, as she and her father had been picked up in Dover when a couple alerted police after seeing them at the port. Although it was unclear how he would have managed to get her on board a boat, with all the authorities on alert and everyone looking for them. If he had, the consequences could have been far worse. As it was, he had not put up a struggle when he was apprehended, and Becky’s mother was already on her way to collect her. It had pretty much been exactly as DS Knowles had predicted, Laura thought as she watched the interviews and saw a clearly relieved DI Jenkinson answering questions; just over a slightly more protracted time period.

  But it had still worked out well for all concerned.

  Laura took her phone from her bag and made the call she was dreading. The receptionist at the High Cliffs House transferred her straight through to the manager.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to cancel, Mrs Stanton,’ Laura told her after they’d exchanged pleasantries, ‘so would you be able to speak—’

  ‘Whoa, hang on right there,’ said the manager, her voice turning quite hostile. Laura stopped talking and she heard the manager call out, although it was muffled; she must be holding her hand over the phone. Then she was put on hold and classical music was pumped into Laura’s ears for a few minutes. Finally, the music stopped.

  ‘Hello.’ The voice sounded frail.

  ‘Sandra?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Laura Grainger, We have an interview set up for this afternoon.’

  ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘It was. But I’m going to have to cancel, unfortunately.’

  Silence. Laura grimaced.

  ‘The missing child has been found this morning,’ she said.

  There was an even longer silence, then, ‘That’s good.’

  Laura could feel some of her pain, even from two hundred miles away. ‘I’m so sorry to mess you about, Mrs Preston. Really I am.’

  More silence.

  ‘Mrs Preston?’

  ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to explain.’

  ‘I do. You see, my editor would never agree to me coming all that way to interview you now that she’s been found.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Mrs Preston?’

  ‘Look, Laura,’ the woman said wearily, ‘I’m pleased she’s been found. And I appreciate your showing an interest.’

  ‘I want—’

  ‘I could have done with reporters like you when she was taken.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be; it’s not your fault.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s different now. These days, a child goes missing, the whole world knows about it within a few minutes. Every time the news is on, or you pick up a paper, it’s there. And that’s the way it should be. But tell me, when was the first time you heard about Jessica?’

  Laura paused. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘And that’s more than most. Hardly anyone even knows her name. She went missing at the wrong time. It’s probably just as well you didn’t interview me. I doubt anyone would have read it.’

  Laura stayed quiet.

  ‘‘Cause they didn’t care what I said then,’ Sandra continued, ‘so why would they care now?’

  23 | Laura

  Laura walked up to the double doors that led into the Gazette’s second-floor offices and took a deep breath.

  It was mid-morning, and the first time she had been into the office since she broke the story of the missing child. Now, shaken by Sandra’s comments and full of disappointment that she’d not been able to interview her, she just wanted to get to her desk and start something new.

  ‘Here she is,’ she heard a voice say quietly as the doors opened, and everyone in the room turned at the same time to look at her. She smiled, and a spontaneous round of applause broke out that accompanied her all the way to her desk. As she sat down, embarrassed, she looked over at David’s office, and he nodded and just about raised a smile.

  Over the next ten minutes, several members of staff shouted over to her or came to her desk to congratulate her on the story before she could put on her laptop and read the website article and Kelly’s cover story on how Becky had been found. Then David’s assistant came up behind her with a cup of coffee; another first in Laura’s time at the paper.

  ‘Shame about the interview,’ she said softly, and pulled up a chair next to Laura. ‘It would have been a brilliant angle.’

  Laura smiled and thanked her for the drink, quickly realising that Sue had been assigned pep-talk duties by the editor. ‘Better that she turned up safe and sound,’ she said briskly. She had decided to put that positive spin on her disappointment, and it was true, she’d wanted that outcome from the start. But having Sue console her did mean one thing: she’d made it into David’s more trusted inner circle of reporters.

  As the office chatter began to die down and everyone got on with their jobs, Laura found it harder to focus on anything except the interview, and at lunchtime she found herself staring at an empty screen and daydreaming about how it might have worked out differently. She called Kelly to talk about the Becky story and tell her how good she thought her piece was, but David’s favourite reporter told her she was too busy to talk and cut her off abruptly. So much for her new-found respect, she thought.

  At lunchtime, when David had finished eating a sandwich that Sue had taken to him, he called Laura into his office.

  ‘Did I tell you how well I thought you’d done?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. So you’re free to begin work again whenever you want to,’ he said over the top of his spectacles as he proofread an article.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The story. It’s done. The girl’s safe.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So you need to stop dwelling on it and move on.’

  ‘I’m not … dwelling.’

  The editor continued talking as if she hadn’t uttered a word. ‘There was some kind of dispute at yesterday’s market. The police were called in the end but I want you to see if there is anything still there or if it’s blown over.’

  The town had a weekly market with
two dozen stalls that got a lot of footfall if the weather wasn’t too bad.

  ‘The market?’ Laura said, and immediately regretted the way it came out: as though it was too mundane for her now. David seemed to give her the benefit of the doubt and handed her his trademark manila folder with some details inside.

  ‘Probably nothing in it, but the injured party thinks there is, so just see what you can find out.’

  Laura nodded, almost feeling the bump as she came back down to earth. ‘On my way.’

  ‘And don’t bother coming back,’ David said as she was halfway through his door. She turned and looked at him blankly and he smiled, pleased with himself for getting the reaction he’d looked for. ‘Take the rest of the day off when you’re done. If there’s a story, type it at home and email me.’

  ‘Really?’ Laura hovered in the doorway; this was not something he did as far as she knew, and certainly not for a trainee.

  ‘You’ve had a busy week, and I don’t want you coming down with that bug. So we’ll see you on Monday, OK?’

  He was already engrossed in the next page of the article he was checking, so she thanked him and skipped back to her desk, tucked the folder into her bag with her laptop and walked out of the office again with her head held high, enjoying her elevated position in David’s pecking order.

  The early-afternoon sunshine warmed her cheeks as she made her way to the car and checked the details on the paper in the folder. The person she needed to see lived on a road that was more or less on her route home, and when she got there and spent a few minutes talking to the man she quickly realised that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion and there was nothing for her or the Gazette in taking it any further. She made a few notes anyway, so that the man didn’t get that impression. Laura wondered what the police had thought, being called out to what was little more than a shouting match over a garden ornament.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ she said as she left the man’s house with most of the afternoon ahead of her.

  ‘Will I be in the next edition?’ the man asked, and she smiled.

  ‘I don’t make that decision.’

  She got back in her car and thought about Sandra Preston. If things had turned out differently, her interview and the article would have sat in a prominent position in the next edition, and on the website. A lot of people would have seen it, and her name under it.

  She turned her key, and her car’s engine spluttered and choked in the cold. She was about to do it again – it often took more than one attempt – when an image crossed her mind: a vivid image of a woman sitting in a chair, waiting for her, with disappointment and frustration etched across every inch of her face. The picture had been there since they’d spoken earlier; and the woman’s words played over and over in Laura’s mind.

  She shook her head and went to turn the key again but the image wouldn’t go away, and neither would the words. She took her phone from her bag and pressed a number on her ‘recent calls’ list. A woman answered, and Laura asked if it would be possible for her to speak with Mrs Preston. There was a pause, then the manager came on to the line and Laura repeated how sorry she was for what had happened earlier.

  ‘I only agreed because I thought it might help her to talk.’

  ‘As I said, I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know what—’

  ‘Could I talk to her now?’

  There was a silence. Laura didn’t think Mrs Stanton would appreciate being interrupted, and she checked her phone to make sure she hadn’t hung up on her. Then she heard a tired sigh. ‘Let me ask her,’ the manager said, and put Laura on hold, classical music filling the vacuum.

  ‘Hello.’

  The voice was familiar but frosty; Laura felt the chill down the line.

  ‘Mrs Preston,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry for cancelling our meeting.’

  ‘You already said that.’

  ‘I know I did. But if you’ll still see me … ’

  Laura paused. Sandra was silent so she continued hopefully, ‘ … then I’d like to come and do that interview on Saturday.’

  Part Three

  One year after she was taken…

  We didn’t know how to deal with information.

  To begin with, it terrified us. We avoided news of any kind; it reminded us of what we had done. The television became little more than a decoration, sitting on a wooden unit, for display purposes only; it might as well have not had a plug. The radio was never switched on, and if we were in the car we played cassettes; I erased all the stations from the radio’s memory. Newspapers were our biggest enemy and we steered clear of them at all costs. In the end it became easier to simply not go anywhere where information might be present, so for twelve months I rarely left the house other than for work, and my wife and our new child didn’t leave it at all until after we moved house.

  The move was central to our plan. I wanted to stay at the old house long enough that it didn’t arouse any suspicion, then move. But that first year was hard, sneaking around, hardly having any lights on, peeking out of the windows, hiding the child whenever the postman came within a hundred yards and going into a blind panic if anyone ever knocked on the door.

  It was the same at first when we moved to the new place. But we quickly realised that no one in the new location knew, or cared, who we were. They didn’t know if we had children or not, so it became easier.

  I wish I could say that about the move itself.

  We bought this ramshackle old money pit, with a fair bit of land around it, no neighbours close enough to bother us and which needed a lot of work. But it was also available at a knockdown price – the owner had died and their children wanted a quick sale – and I paid for it in cash. So we moved in the dead of night: the three of us and everything we could shove into the back of a transit van. We told a couple of our old neighbours we were moving to be closer to my wife’s mother because she was ill. That also explained why they hadn’t seen her for months.

  But they didn’t care either, and why would they?

  I took a short break from work, using the same excuse, and did the renovations we needed to make the house comfortable enough to live in. We hardly saw other people. No one visited, no one bothered us and I became something of an expert at DIY, but we never quite managed to live without the fear of a knock at the door.

  But that knock never came.

  And slowly information became more of a friend again. The house began to feel like a home, and we switched the tele vision and the radio back on. We let newspapers back into our lives too, and we quickly found that the news was more than just a friend; it was our window to the rest of the world. We could follow the case, the updates and any commentary on the missing child, but we could also see that the story was slowly but surely taking up fewer column inches; eventually it vanished permanently from the screens and news bulletins.

  Everyone had stopped looking for her.

  My wife just blossomed, caring for our child, now almost four years old, and raising this incredibly cute, clever and confident young girl.

  Now and again there was an appeal for fresh information but most of it was lip service. I remember clearly one breakfast bulletin when a police detective was interviewed and said in a resigned manner that he thought she had probably gone into the sea and been taken by the current.

  It was also the same morning that the child began to call my wife ‘Mummy’, and it felt like the first day of the rest of our lives.

  The hardest parts of the first year were the moments when I was caught off guard.

  The rest I learned to cope with: the stares, the sympathetic nods, the way people shuffled across on the pavement so they could avoid having to walk too close in case they had to speak to me; as if I was begging for spare change. That bit was easy. Truth be told, I didn’t want to speak to them any more than they wanted to speak to me.

  No, it was the things that I wasn’t expecting that got to me, and felt as though I had climbed a
mountain and at the top there was no oxygen and I was doubled over, gasping for any drop of air as if it might be the last I ever tasted.

  An example was when I was doing the laundry and I found one of Jess’s socks, all balled up at the bottom of the basket where we keep the dirty washing. It was just one sock on its own, not a pair, and that hit me harder still because I imagined her, all alone too, out there in the big, bad world with no one to look out for her. I cried and cried and cried when I found that sock.

  Cried until I couldn’t muster one more solitary tear.

  And there was the time I received a letter from the preschool I’d enquired about. I’d asked to go on their contact list so I could find out about the school and whether they had any places available when Jess was old enough. They didn’t know they were sending a letter about a child who wouldn’t go to their school after all, and I should have just thrown it in the bin when I saw the insignia on the envelope, but it hit me harder than finding the sock in the end. I read that letter until the words were almost worn off the paper and I could say them in my sleep.

  Then I couldn’t get rid of the damn thing because doing so would be admitting to myself that she wasn’t coming back and she’d never take up a place at that school; so instead I kept it in a drawer so that if she did walk through the door I’d have the letter all ready to go. And, of course, I kept opening the drawer and seeing it, usually by accident.

  But other times not.

  When I did, at first, I gasped so desperately for that air, but as time passed I told myself that the next occasion when I felt like that, the next time I was at the top of that mountain and the oxygen had gone, and my neck muscles had all but closed my airways up, I wouldn’t fight it but would just give in and let every last particle of air drain from my body and leave me with the darkness.