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

by Darren Young

  Danni and Sam had formed a strong friendship at junior school that had strengthened through senior school and beyond and throughout those years, Sam had always wanted to spend time around Danni’s parents and immerse herself in their way of life. She’d often said that Danni didn’t know how lucky she was that her mum could spend time with her rather than working three jobs, and that she knew her father at all.

  So for her to now begin unpicking that life that she’d always taken for granted, and base her doubts on an overheard argument, a newspaper article and a faded leaflet, was not the kind of thing Sam would want to hear.

  But it didn’t stop her reading the article again, or looking at the photograph.

  It was still on her mind at the weekend when she drove the short distance to the family home to collect a few extra items of clothing. When she walked in the front door, her father was surrounded by cardboard boxes in the hallway and he had to unstack the chairs in the kitchen for her to sit down.

  ‘Things are moving quickly,’ she said, not hiding her annoyance.

  The walls were bare – a strange sight, as her mother had always filled them with paintings when she was alive, and now all that remained were large squares in a different shade of paint that the sun hadn’t faded. Her father explained that he wanted to get to the new place quickly – the builder was looking for a quick sale and they’d agreed a cash deal that both parties were happy with – so he was packing up everything he wanted to take with him, including most of the paintings. While in the mood, he had sorted the entire contents of the house into boxes that were now in two neat piles in corners of the living room.

  ‘Can I have some photos of Mum before everything goes?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not going. That pile is for the apartment,’ he said gesturing to the smaller of the two sets of boxes, ‘and that one is for storage.’

  He began rummaging around in one of the boxes, until he found what he was looking for near the bottom of it, and pulled out a small silver box, which he handed it her. ‘I put them all together,’ he said, ‘so I could take some with me too.’

  Danni took the box from him and smiled. She opened it and began to thumb through several plastic wallets, each with the contents of the packet written in black marker pen on the side. A holiday in Florida, several Christmases, a long weekend in Paris when she was fifteen, birthday parties and other occasions. Other packets were more mundane, random collections thrown haphazardly together. She opened one and flicked through the twenty or so prints inside; her mother’s beaming smile was on most of them. Danni took out a photograph of her mother, placed it on the table, put the rest of the pack back into the box and continued to check the headings.

  ‘How come there aren’t any of me as a baby?’ she said.

  Thomas laughed. She couldn’t tell if it was genuine. ‘There must be.’

  ‘Not that I can see here.’

  He began looking in the other boxes. ‘There must be other packets somewhere.’

  Danni’s phone beeped; it was another text from Euan, which she read and quickly deleted. ‘I thought you put them all together.’

  ‘I’ve obviously missed some,’ said Thomas, but there was a telltale crack in his voice; he was such a meticulous filer of everything that it was very unlikely that he had. He could always lay his hand on a piece of writing, no matter how old or random, at a moment’s notice. She felt like pressing the point but stopped herself.

  ‘If you come across them,’ she said, ‘let me know.’

  Her father nodded, but he seemed miles away.

  ‘Did you put Mum’s old address book in storage too? The one from the hall? The leather one.’

  He looked up and frowned. ‘Can’t remember seeing anything like that. Is it important?’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Danni left him looking among the larger of the two piles and took the photograph, two clean jumpers, a pair of jeans and some underwear back to Sam’s. On the short journey she tried to remember any photographs she had seen of herself as a baby. There had been plenty of her at four, five and older, maybe even some when she was a bit younger, but she couldn’t recall seeing any where she was in her mother’s arms, or in a pushchair or even just crawling along. When she reached the house she went straight upstairs and opened her handbag, taking her copy of the Herald and straightening it out as best she could on the bed until the corners were flat enough for her to open it up and read the article again.

  If Jessica Preston was alive, then she had absolutely no idea who she was. She would be a twenty-three-year-old now, she thought, who lived with people she thought were her parents but that were hiding the truth from her.

  What if her two and two really did make four?

  The next morning, when she woke, she tapped the telephone number of the newspaper’s offices into her mobile phone; a few rings later, a man answered.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Laura Grainger,’ she said.

  35 | Laura

  ‘Do you think Jessica Preston is alive?’

  Danni had asked the question before Laura had a chance to introduce herself or find out who she was. The Herald had called Laura to tell her that someone else had contacted them about the article and asked for her details. As a matter of policy, the Herald wouldn’t give out the number, but had passed on Danni’s details, and Laura had called her as soon as she was able.

  ‘Can I get some background first?’ she said, her training kicking in.

  ‘Please just answer the question.’

  Laura bit her lip; not sure what to say. She tried to deflect it. ‘Sandra Preston does. And—’

  ‘Do you?’

  Laura realised that this was the first time she’d been put on the spot about this and she let her answer come out instinctively.

  ‘Yes. I do. Why?’

  Now there was an even longer pause.

  ‘My friend read your article,’ Danni finally said, slowly, ‘and she thinks her parents were keeping some big secret from her.’

  Laura scribbled down shorthand on her notepad. She underlined a word. ‘Were keeping a secret?’

  ‘Her mum died. Now her dad’s acting, like, really weird.’

  ‘If his wife died, isn’t that normal?’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ Danni said carefully. ‘He’s avoiding questions, moving house, fighting with her all the time. All sorts of stuff.’

  ‘But why does she think they’re keeping a secret from her?’

  ‘She overheard them.’

  Danni explained the outline of the conversation but as if it had been told to her. ‘She thinks they might not be her real parents,’ she added at the end.

  ‘There are lots of secrets in families. It’s a big leap to get to abduction.’

  ‘She isn’t saying—’

  ‘You said there was all sorts of other stuff,’ Laura interrupted; she was interested by the call, but she needed more than eavesdropping on a conversation.

  ‘The girl that went missing – she’d be roughly the same age as her, lives close to the beach where she disappeared; she even looks similar and there—’

  ‘Lots of girls would look similar.’

  There was a pause. ‘OK, look, I know how this sounds. I’m sorry I bothered you—’

  ‘Sorry,’ Laura said quickly. ‘I’m trained to be sceptical. You were saying?’

  ‘There was a missing persons leaflet, with Jessica on it.’

  Laura’s eyebrows lifted. She scribbled it down, now very interested. ‘Where?’

  ‘In her mother’s address book.’

  ‘She has it?’

  ‘No. It’s gone.’

  Laura sighed. She checked the time. ‘Look, I’d like to talk more but I have to get to work.’

  She wasn’t sure if the girl was disappointed or relieved to end the call, but Laura promised she’d call her again later that day. She checked the time again on her phone. ‘Shit!’

  When she got into the offic
e, David was standing in his office doorway and made a point of looking at the clock when he saw her. She hesitated, not sure whether to go straight to her desk and hope for the best or acknowledge her lateness and apologise, which would mean going to him and having to lie. In the end she compromised.

  ‘Sorry, David,’ she called across the heads of people already into their working day, ‘car was playing up.’

  The editor gave her a weary look that suggested he either didn’t believe her or didn’t care, so she threw her coat over her chair and powered up her computer, kicking herself for not having a much better excuse prepared in advance. Her monitor lit up and she entered her password and clicked on the button to load her new emails; there were over fifty. One of them, near the top, immediately caught her eye.

  It was from someone using a Gmail account and the email subject was Please Stop. It looked like the kind of email she would normally delete straight away, from someone trying to use an intriguing subject line in the hope that she would open the email and attachment, and they had been warned about such emails recently when someone had tried to hack into Kelly Heath’s account after pretending to be her bank. But this didn’t have an attachment, so she casually glanced around to make sure no one was watching her and opened the email.

  Laura read it twice. And then a third time.

  The email address of the sender didn’t contain a name. She knew the normal practice was to alert David so he could get someone to look into it and maybe even report it to the police, but that would mean having to tell him what she had been doing, and she wasn’t ready for that yet, so she filed it in an innocuous-looking folder and carried on with her work.

  Occasionally, as the morning ticked by, she opened it and read the words again, questioning herself and her motives.

  Did Sandra have a friend outside the unit who might be looking after her interests? Was it the ‘anonymous donor’? Was she really doing more harm than good by highlighting Sandra’s story? But her article had only retraced an old story and painted a picture of a woman in a very fragile state who refused to accept the version of events that everyone else put before her. Sandra hadn’t seemed to be upset by her visits or article, Laura thought, so why would anyone else be?

  An image formed in her head. A piece of paper, faded and tatty but with a face on it: the face of Jessica Preston.

  She ran down the stairs into the street below the newspaper’s office, took out her phone and pressed the contact page on her phone that she had assigned to Danni Edwards.

  Now it was her turn to start the call with a direct question.

  ‘When did your … friend’s mother die?’

  ‘What?’

  Laura didn’t say anything and waited for Danni to answer.

  ‘Just under two months ago.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Car crash.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘She went off the road, in heavy rain.’

  ‘Can we meet?’

  ‘You want to meet my friend?’

  ‘We can keep pretending if you want to,’ Laura said.

  There was another long pause before Danni answered her.

  ‘Where?’

  36 | Laura

  David Weatherall didn’t sound impressed when Laura called him to tell him her car had stopped working completely on her way home and she wanted to book the next day off as holiday so she could get it sorted. But she had plenty of annual leave left and he could hardly say no, as, without her car, she wouldn’t be able to do anything outside of the office, so he agreed to it.

  It gave her twenty-four hours to meet Danni and see what she had to say.

  ‘Does David know?’

  Helen put her car keys next to Laura’s. They were swapping cars so that the journey would be more comfortable, and Laura didn’t want her own car to be seen on the road, since it was supposed to be in the garage for repairs.

  ‘Not yet. I don’t think this is going to go anywhere, but, if it does, I’ll tell him then.’

  Laura noted the disapproval in her mother’s eyes.

  ‘I just need to speak to her first.’

  Helen raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘OK. I get it.’

  For a moment, she considered telling her mother about the email but decided against it. She knew she wouldn’t be anywhere near as supportive if she knew someone was trying to warn her off, and she’d insist on her telling David about it. That would lead to a much longer conversation and she didn’t have time for that; she was already planning on driving there and back in a day, as staying overnight wasn’t an option. Even if she could have afforded it, she needed to be at her desk the next day or David would start to lose patience.

  Laura put her breakfast bowl into the dishwasher and gave her mother a hug.

  ‘Let’s not mention this to your dad,’ Helen said.

  Laura looked at her.

  ‘He won’t like you lying to David. And he’ll only worry if he knows you’re travelling so far by yourself.’

  Her mother smiled and Laura kissed her on the cheek. ‘OK. If that’s what you think.’

  Laura set off in her mother’s estate car, feeling every inch a proper journalist in search of the truth. She knew the odds were against her and she’d even wavered a little in the cold light of day when she got up and thought of the two hundred plus miles ahead of her, but, she told herself, if every reporter turned their back on a story at the first hint that they might be wasting their time, then a lot of stories would go untold.

  And the email had really helped to make her mind up to carry on for now.

  It was the first time that it had happened to her. Kelly Heath had recounted a few occasions when she’d been subjected to abuse and threats in her career, but no one had taken any offence at Laura’s innocuous stories until now.

  ‘It shows you must be on to something,’ Kelly had said to her about her own experiences.

  As each mile passed, she began to wonder if she was on to something.

  The email had implied that the writer was looking out for Sandra. But she had spent the past fifteen years in a mental health unit, staring out of the window and no closer to any closure, so she could only benefit from some answers.

  Anyone looking out for her would do well to address that first.

  Sandra had plenty of opportunity to object; even the unit’s manager had said that Laura’s interaction had helped.

  And, if Jessica Preston had been taken and was living under another identity, surely she deserved to know the truth too.

  By the time Laura was on the outskirts of the village, she had reached a conclusion. The only people who would benefit from hiding Sandra’s and Jessica’s story were the people who had taken her.

  She realised that she was now fully convinced that the girl who disappeared from that beach over twenty years ago definitely hadn’t drowned.

  And she was really looking forward to meeting Danielle Edwards.

  37 | Laura

  Laura arrived early at the café where she had arranged to meet Danni, and went to the ladies’ while she waited for her to arrive. On the way out, she saw her reflection in the mirror.

  The girl looking back seemed at least five years older than Laura was, with bloodshot eyes and dark bags under them. She dabbed cold tap water on her face and tied her hair up. The early start and four-hour drive without a stop had left her aching, sleepy and hungry, and she could only do something about one of these things right now, so she ordered the unhealthiest breakfast she could find on the menu and ate it as she re-read her notes from the telephone conversation with Danni.

  She finished it a few minutes before their scheduled meeting time and sat watching people as they walked by or entered the café. Laura was used to meeting people without seeing them first – it was an occupational hazard – but she was also used to researching them beforehand. She had, however, soon found that Danni had no online presence at all, and Laura had
been unable to find a photograph of her anywhere on the internet, so she was now relying on her assumptions.

  And she knew that, if Danni didn’t resemble Jessica at all, then the journey would have been a waste of time.

  She checked her phone and the clock had moved a few minutes past the hour. She was just beginning to get a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that Danni might have changed her mind about meeting her when a girl walked into the café. She was twenty-something, with wavy blonde hair under a woollen bobble hat, and, although she was a few inches taller than Laura had expected, everything else was exactly as she’d imagined. The girl picked up a sandwich and checked the ingredients on the back of the packet, and Laura looked across, hoping to catch her attention. She was impressed by her appearance: a long, expensive coat and high-heeled leather boots; she’d certainly made an effort.

  She was about to call her when she heard her name.

  ‘Laura?’

  Two girls were standing next to the table. One was a tall girl of mixed race and striking features. Next to her stood a girl who fitted the image Laura had had in her mind of Danni; she was the same height as she was, wearing well-worn faded jeans and a black jumper with her blonde-brown hair tied up in a neat ponytail.

  ‘Danni?’

  The girl held out her hand and Laura shook it.

  ‘This is my friend, Samantha.’

  ‘Sam,’ said Danni’s friend curtly, but didn’t offer her hand. ‘I brought her along for support,’ said Danni. ‘I only told her on the way what I was doing.’

  Laura smiled; they sat down and the lady from the counter came over to take their order. For a few minutes, until the drinks arrived, they made small talk about Laura’s journey and then about the village the girls lived in. Once they were sipping their lattes, Laura opened her notebook to a new page and looked at Danni.