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

by Darren Young

‘Unless … ‘ Danni interrupted her, and Laura stopped talking. ‘Unless he got someone to do it for him.’

  40 | Laura

  Laura felt the knot tighten in her stomach.

  When she’d read them, the police and coroner’s reports had both raised as many questions as they answered about Patricia Edwards’ death, but she wondered if she’d gone too far by causing Danni to think of the idea of a third party.

  ‘Remember, we’re talking about your dad,’ she reminded her.

  ‘Like you said, we can’t rule it out.’

  ‘We can’t make accusations either.’

  ‘It was you who said—’

  ‘I just asked the question. We need actual evidence. And only your mum knows what really happened that night.’

  ‘And the other person, if there was one.’

  ‘If there was one.’

  ‘And maybe—’

  Laura cut her off and suggested she let her do some more investigation before they said anything else. ‘We can talk all night, but it won’t get us further forward. Let’s sleep on it.’

  Danni agreed but, even then, Laura knew it was not going to be an easy investigation. There were no witnesses who had come forward, and no evidence had been found at the scene to suggest foul play.

  The email, on the other hand, might, and she knew she would have to tell Danni about it soon enough. Laura ended the call but had no intention of sleeping on it; not right away anyway.

  She located the photo folder on her phone and found the one she had taken of Danni. It was a nice picture, clear and in good light. She zoomed in closer, looking at every line and skin imperfection. Danni was a pretty girl, Laura thought. Prettier than her. They were not dissimilar in height and build but Danni’s features were sharper and more pronounced, her hair longer; Laura made a mental note to not let her hairdresser talk her into a shoulder-length cut as he had always done in the past.

  She emailed herself a copy of the image, flipped the top of her laptop up, and opened it on the bigger screen. She stared at it closely, zooming in on Danni’s jawbone and slightly protruding ears until the pixels became too big to see clearly. She went on to Google and found the best image she could of Jessica Preston, taken a few weeks before she had disappeared and put the two pictures alongside each other.

  After twenty minutes of looking at them, her head hurt.

  She continued to stare at the two images until her eyes began to tire. There was no doubt that there were similarities. On Google Images, alongside the picture of Jessica were some artists’ impressions of what she might look like, as a five-year-old, a ten-year-old, and in her late teens. They had a lot of similarities to Danni’s photograph, but Laura started to wonder how much of it was wishful thinking.

  She copied the image of Jessica aged two and a quarter; the last photograph Sandra had of her, and emailed it to her phone. She’d installed an app called Oldify a day earlier for this specific purpose, and she loaded the image on to it, filling the circle in the centre of the screen with Jessica’s smiling face. She pressed the button that would age her by twenty years and watched as a new version of the missing girl slowly took shape. When it was complete, Laura looked at it and shook her head, with disappointment and, even more, with embarrassment. It was essentially the original image, only with slightly wider facial features and a few lines added to the forehead. The app had more or less transposed the same haircut that Jessica had when the photograph was taken, and the final version made Laura slump down in her seat and groan. What had she been thinking? She was using free software on her phone, software designed for children to have fun with. To understand what a grown-up Jessica might look like, she really needed the type of software the FBI used.

  But it wasn’t just the technology. She had no real understanding of how a child’s face might alter over time, the way the shape of a head might change; how jawbones grew, for example. She knew lots of people whose facial features had completely changed by the time they reached adulthood. And her own limited research had already told her that the blue of Jessica’s eyes was a colour shared by not only Danni, but more than half the female population of the UK, including herself.

  It all highlighted what a pointless exercise it was, and she slammed her laptop shut and tried to get some sleep instead. But for an hour after she closed her eyes the images of Jessica and Danni haunted her; mocking her inexperience and naïveté, until she was glad of the distraction as a car door slammed. She looked at her clock – it was ten past midnight – and she went to the window and watched her mother and father as they walked from the garage to the house, holding hands and smiling. She listened as they walked in, laughing, and she could tell her mother had enjoyed a few glasses of the complimentary champagne that was always available at those functions. She heard them clumsily get ready for bed, their whispering and giggling; and later she heard them making love: the sound of the springs in their mattress and her mother telling her father to be quiet in case she heard them.

  Laura suddenly felt guilty. Not for hearing them – it would have been hard not to – but because they were so present, such a big part of her life, and still very much in love and capable of acting like a couple of teenagers even as they approached their fifties. She realised what Danni had lost, how her life had been shattered, and for the first time she truly appreciated how difficult it must be for her, not knowing for sure who she was or who her parents might be.

  And now, Danni was trusting her to give her the answers.

  For the first time since she had found the story of Jessica Preston on the internet, Laura began to feel horribly out of her depth.

  41 | Laura

  Two days later, a struggling Laura reneged on her promise to call Danni back with an update and sent her a text instead to buy some more time. A further two days.

  At the paper, David had filled her time with a mountain of mundane assignments, as if he was punishing her for having time off, and she’d had to work later than usual and found herself already tired by the time she got home and began her other research. She also realised how difficult it was in practice to work on the story when she was so many miles from the people involved and the locations where she needed to be. As useful as the internet and mobile communications were, there was no substitute for looking people in the eye and being able to retrace the steps they had taken. But she also knew there was one person she needed to sit down with again before she could take any more significant steps herself, and that was Sandra.

  She had to show her the picture of Danni, because that might be enough. Sandra might see, or not see, something that confirmed without doubt that Danni could not possibly be her missing daughter.

  Or, she dared to think, she might see something that made her know that it was her.

  On the Monday morning, she waited until David and Sue were deep into their weekly planning meeting and printed a large copy of the picture she had taken of Danni, using the office’s expensive laser printer rather than her more limited one at home. She put the print in a folder and hid it in her laptop sleeve, taking one more look at the girl as she did. Danni’s face stared back at her and made her feel guilty again, and she knew she needed to help her quickly, because it was the not knowing that was hurting her the most. Even if Sandra said she couldn’t be Jessica, that would be a step forward, and she could try to discover her parents’ secret without this distraction.

  The next day began early as usual when Laura’s alarm buzzed at six, and, as she dressed in several layers of suitable dog-walking attire, she saw her father roll his car up the drive and off into the misty darkness and towards his bacon sandwich. She went downstairs and opened the back door for Mimark so he could relieve himself while she ate a toasted slice of her mother’s home-made bread and sipped on a cup of hot tea. From her window she had already seen the murky coastal fog sitting on the beach, and the weather app on her phone was telling her it was minus five degrees outside, so she wrapped a thick woollen scarf around her neck, zipped
up her padded winter coat, put on her fur-lined boots and ventured out.

  Mimark didn’t mind the freezing temperatures and wagged his tail excitedly by the back gate as she clipped the lead to his collar and led him up the frosty pathway. Before old age had caught up with him, he’d have pulled her up it with sheer enthusiasm and let her jog along to keep warm while he ran alongside. Nowadays he let her pull him, and it took twice as long to reach the entrance to the coastal path and walk down to the edge of the beach and back, because he felt the need to stop and sniff at every bush and tree stump along the way. When she unhooked his lead he slowly criss-crossed the path as he went along it, occasionally stopping to consider chasing a rabbit that had put its head out of a hole, but always deciding against it.

  ‘C’mon, boy,’ Laura said as they reached the stile that led on to a small field and another path that stretched down to the steps that would take you on to the beach. The dog squeezed under it as he always did, while Laura climbed over, and they walked in near pitch dark. She had done the walk almost every Tuesday since she was eighteen so it held few surprises, and she’d stopped taking a torch years ago and relied on her eyes adjusting to the darkness in the winter months. If it was a clear morning, the moon would show the way, but on a gloomy morning like this she had to trust her memory and instincts.

  As usual, Mimark was proving to be an unreliable walking companion, ducking out of sight and not heeding her when she called him. As they reached the turn, about fifteen yards from the beach, she could hear the waves crashing on to the pebbled shore even though she couldn’t see them. She had to raise her voice to call her dog.

  ‘C’mon, Mimark.’

  She peered through the gloom but couldn’t see the little terrier anywhere, and the noise from the sea drowned out any sound he might make.

  ‘Mimark!’

  She knew he’d been heading towards the steps, so she made her way to the top of them and was about to call again when she heard a rustling from behind a thick shrub to her right and stepped forward to admonish the dog for ignoring her.

  A tall figure, all in black, stepped from behind it, and Laura jumped. The shadowy figure had its collar pulled up as high as it would go and a woollen hat pulled down to eye level, leaving the thinnest of gaps where the face was visible.

  ‘Whoa, you scared me,’ she said, taking a backward step.

  The man didn’t answer. Laura had done this walk, at this exact time, every Tuesday for five years, give or take a few holidays and one day when she was ill, and she could count the times she’d run into someone on one hand.

  ‘You haven’t seen a dog, have you?’ she asked tentatively.

  The man said nothing. Laura felt an overwhelming urge to run.

  There was more rustling, this time from her left, and Mimark came out from behind a bush and trotted towards her.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, relieved, and began to step away from the man, but her dog moved past her hands and went up to him instead, sniffing curiously and wagging his tail. The man bent down and Laura relaxed as he patted the top of her dog’s head gently.

  It happened so quickly.

  In one sudden movement the man’s hand clamped down on Mimark’s collar and lifted him into the air, making the dog squeal in panic and Laura shriek with fright. He held him, dangling in between them, whimpering frantically.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She could see menace in his eyes but Laura stepped closer to protect the dog.

  ‘Leave him!’

  ‘First, you listen,’ the man said, and held Mimark away from her, collar digging into his throat as he hung at head height, whimpering. ‘You need to forget about Jessica Preston.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Otherwise, it won’t be the dog next time.’

  Laura could feel her heart close to bursting in her chest. ‘What do you—?’

  The man flung Mimark to the ground and he scarpered, faster than his little legs usually carried him, and with scant regard for Laura as he headed towards the house. The man nodded in the direction the terrier was travelling. ‘I know where you live. You and your family.’

  She was paralysed with fear.

  ‘Understand?’ he asked.

  Laura nodded, a lump in her throat preventing any words coming out.

  ‘Good,’ the man hissed, his face getting closer.

  Laura felt a surge of adrenaline and turned on her heels and ran, looking for Mimark ahead of her; he was already out of sight.

  She had covered sixty yards before she felt confident enough to look behind her.

  Part Five

  Five years after she was taken…

  The things that happen during your life, where you’ll always remember where you were and what you were doing at the exact moment you heard them, are very rare.

  In fact, until that day, it had never happened to me.

  November the eleventh. Armistice Day. A Saturday and pleasant too for a change; it had rained for weeks, heavy, incessant downpours that had left some parts of the county under several feet of water and put the impact of the weather in the top two or three news stories of the day, every day. But on that Saturday the sun had come out, and the only clouds were thin, translucent ones that gently rolled past in the stiff breeze. There were still a few hardy leaves clinging for dear life to the trees in the garden. I was standing on the step, drying a cup I’d washed and looking out on to the back lawn where our daughter played with a friend on the soft grass while my wife and I finished our breakfast. I had told her to sit and relax while I tidied away.

  I remember it distinctly. My wife was worried that the lawn would be too muddy after all the rain but I was telling her it was actually much drier than she thought. The girls were skipping along, singing a song they’d learned at school, while ‘A Groovy Kind of Love’ played on the radio in the kitchen. Then they went to the hourly news and the person reading the bulletins out covered the usual storm damage updates that accompanied every report and it seemed as if they’d run out of things to say; so the final item sounded like an afterthought.

  But for me, it was the best thing I could have heard.

  ‘And police have officially called off the search for Jessica Preston, who went missing five years ago …’

  I didn’t hear the rest. We just looked at each other.

  It had been more than five years since my wife had walked in through the door and changed our lives for ever. Five years that had been a mixture of torment and looking over our shoulders and also of joy and happiness as we had watched her grow into a beautiful young girl.

  A girl for whom no one was looking any more.

  I listened to the reports properly throughout the day after that, and bought every Sunday newspaper the next day and located every paragraph or even individual line dedicated to the story. There wasn’t much; it seemed like a footnote in time. The police unit had been disbanded; there was still a telephone number to be used for information, but no one was going to be actively working on the case. It was common knowledge anyway that this team had dwindled down to a solitary detective in the last couple of years. And now that detective was retiring.

  The police didn’t say so in as many words, but they had given up.

  Eager to know as much as possible, I drove to the area surrounding the beach on the Monday and picked up the local editions of the papers that carried the story in more detail, but even still made little fuss of the announcement. One politician was trying to call for a new enquiry but everyone else seemed to want to move on.

  Well, almost everyone.

  There was one thread of the story that was hard to read. The girl’s mother had refused to give interviews until then, or accept the general consensus that she had been taken by the strong currents that day, but one of the larger regional papers had managed to speak to her and get a soundbite about the calling-off of the search. She had managed to get her local MP on her side, but many other people, including some edito
rial contributors and readers on the letters page, were scathing of her for refusing to accept responsibility for her daughter’s disappearance and for, as they saw it, using the abduction claim as a way of protecting herself.

  As one of the two people who knew the truth, it was impossible not to feel sorry for her.

  But when I looked out on the lawn, and shielded my eyes from the sun to watch the two girls dance and laugh and play, I didn’t see the girl from the beach.

  She was our daughter now. Not Jessica Preston.

  We were parents, with our own worries and issues and responsibilities. My wife had built an incredible bond with that child, much stronger than any that I could ever form. She seemed to know exactly what she needed and how she was feeling; you could be forgiven for thinking she’d carried her for nine months and given birth to her.

  And she was a different woman too. So confident, sure of herself, so healthy and happy; completely unrecognisable from the woman who took the child from the beach. I had never seen her look so well or appear so strong. Just to see her walking along, holding our daughter’s hand, or soothing her tears when she cried, comforting her if she had a nightmare, or cheering at school sports day, made the bad times we’d had not seem quite so bad.

  And now, the radio report had confirmed what we had suspected had been happening for the last two or three years. That child, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, was dead.

  We had a daughter; and she was everything we ever wanted.

  At that moment, after all we’d been through, it suddenly didn’t feel as if anything could go wrong.

  I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast this morning, but I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news.

  It was a Saturday, and Todd was sleeping off the night before, a night that had finished long after it had turned into the next morning, and I was putting some washing into the machine in the kitchen so I could dry it in the sun that would be stretched across the back garden by midday. The radio was on in the background and I wasn’t really listening because I was too preoccupied with keeping an eye on Stuart, who was standing talking to some of his friends on the corner of the street; I could see him from the kitchen window. He was nearly a teenager but since his sister had gone he’d become withdrawn, distant; he’d stopped talking to me and had turned into a pale shadow of the young boy who had kept us and his teachers on our toes with an endless supply of energy and an eye for mischief. So I worried constantly about him, and watched him like a hawk in case he fell in with the wrong crowd or began to do things he shouldn’t.