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

by Darren Young

  She was glad she was setting off early, before any snow began to fall more heavily and slow her down even more – she wasn’t going to reach the hotel until well into the evening as it was – and a few minutes into the journey, as she sat waiting at a red light, she put her phone on to speaker mode and called Danni. ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘I thought you said you were leaving in the morning.’

  ‘I changed my mind. There’s heavy snow forecast here.’ ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘I got the last room at the hotel by you.’

  ‘OK.’

  There was an awkward silence. Laura sensed Danni wanted to tell her something. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, and Danni hesitated before answering her.

  ‘I’m going to dinner with my dad tonight.’

  ‘That won’t be easy,’ Laura said, a little surprised.

  ‘I arranged it with him earlier. I can’t do this without at least seeing him first.’

  Laura knew she couldn’t stop her. ‘Just be casual.’

  ‘It feels like the Last Supper,’ said Danni, and laughed nervously, unable to help it. ‘Just before I stab him in the back.’

  ‘It’s a meal, and you aren’t stabbing anyone anywhere.’

  The conversation turned to Sandra, and Laura gave Danni a quick reminder of the arrangements. ‘Just one thing. Don’t take it personally if she spends all the time staring out of the window. That’s just what she does.’

  ‘I guess she’s got no choice but to look at me,’ said Danni.

  Laura laughed. It was a really good point.

  65 | Danni

  Danni knocked on the door at her father’s apartment.

  She felt like a door-to-door saleswoman, and she had no emotional connection to the place, but she realised it was more than that: it was her too. She felt nothing like a daughter at that moment.

  ‘Come in, it’s great to see you,’ he said as he opened the door, a navy and white butcher’s apron covering his crisp light blue shirt, and a bottle of red wine in his hand.

  Danni sat down on a kitchen stool while he continued preparing the food: beef Stroganoff. He had chosen one of her favourite meals, and the smell that was wafting around the apartment was making her hungry. He put a glass of wine in front of her and poured a water for himself.

  They talked, mostly about her father’s work and her new job in Southampton, until the oven clock pinged to say the food was ready. Thomas warmed the rice in the microwave and served up a big plate for each of them. Over the meal, they talked more, but Danni found herself wanting to ask the questions that sat on the very tip of her tongue.

  When she finished her wine, her father topped up her glass and refilled his water. ‘I’ll run you home later.’

  ‘I can get a taxi if it’s easier.’

  She had walked there, a journey of little over a mile by road, but that had taken longer than she’d expected because a strong wind was whipping in from the sea and she had been walking straight into it. Light rain had begun to fall just as she reached the apartment. The rain was much heavier now, and, as her father took some bread from the cupboard and put it between them, they could hear the large spots bouncing off the decking outside.

  ‘Is it OK?’

  Danni nodded. ‘Lovely, thanks.’

  Danni finished all but the tiniest portion of her meal and her father suggested they go to the living room to eat dessert. The room was a huge open-plan area with a lacquered dark wooden floor and the minimal amount of furniture he could get away with. There were two large grey suede sofas and they each sat on one. Other than that, there was the large flatscreen TV on the wall that Sam had helped him to put up, and a tiny table in the corner with a lamp on it.

  ‘You’ve really settled in here. It looks nice.’

  She meant it. It might never feel like home to her, but her father had done a fantastic job of making it homely and inviting.

  ‘I like it. If I’m going to write all day, I might as well have a good view.’

  ‘Do you miss the house?’

  He looked uncomfortable and sighed. ‘Of course I do.’

  Danni nodded.

  ‘But I was right to move.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked into his half-empty glass as if the answer was somewhere inside. ‘Too many memories in the house. It was hard to see them every … more wine?’

  Danni tried to cover her glass but he insisted.

  ‘Surely the memories are good ones,’ she asked.

  He smiled sadly. ‘Of course. But that doesn’t make it easier.’

  ‘I want to remember her all the time.’

  Danni knew she was goading him into a discussion he didn’t want, but she couldn’t help it. Her mouth was saying words before she had time to think about them.

  ‘I can remember her in here,’ he said, and tapped his chest, ‘but, in the house, it was one constant reminder of what was missing from it.’

  Danni felt a tear form in her eye. ‘I still find it hard to believe she’s gone.’

  ‘I know,’ her father said, and sank back into the sofa. The rain sounded heavier still, battering against the patio windows while the wind howled in from across the beach. It reminded Danni of the night they had sat waiting for her mother to come home.

  ‘Do you think Mum really did lose control of the car?’

  His back visibly stiffened and he frowned at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think it was an accident?’

  ‘Of course it was.’

  He seemed annoyed with her, but her mouth seemed to be making decisions on its own and she noticed her third glass was already finished.

  ‘We don’t know for certain.’

  ‘She must have lost control, Danni. She went off a cliff.’

  ‘Or someone made her?’

  ‘What?’

  Danni looked him directly in the eye and didn’t reply.

  ‘Why do you insist on torturing yourself?’ he asked her. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Accidents can be terrible, but they still happen.’

  ‘She was a great driver.’

  ‘Great drivers can go off the road. The weather was worse than it is now, the roads … we’ve been over this so many times.’

  ‘But what if someone was there? What if someone made her lose control?’ Danni’s head was spinning a little.

  ‘The police and the coroner both—’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what they said.’

  ‘Danni!’

  ‘They weren’t there.’

  ‘Neither were you. No one was.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  Her father looked at her, angry but also, she thought, a little sad. Danni’s eyes glistened as she looked straight into his. ‘Why are you hiding things from me?’

  ‘What? Why would you say that?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘What did Mum really mean by she’ll find out eventually?’

  He took a deep breath. Danni noticed his hand was trembling. ‘I can’t remember her ever saying that.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘Danni!’

  ‘No. I’m not leaving here until you tell me.’

  They stared at each other. Her father looked down and sighed. His eyes welled with tears and he took another deep, long breath. ‘OK, OK … ‘ he muttered, and breathed in, so hard that Danni thought he wanted to suck all of the oxygen from the room.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You had an older sister,’ he said; she was sure he didn’t mean it to but it sounded incidental and matter-of-fact, the way it came out.

  Danni’s pulse quickened. ‘A what?’

  He put his head in his hands. She waited for him to continue.

  ‘You were too small to remember her. Your mother had her when she was young.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But she died when you were just a baby. Your mum always blamed herself and couldn’t talk about her. It made her s
o depressed. That’s why the funeral was so hard for me: it brought it all back. That’s why I don’t have photographs of you back then; it was a hard time.’

  Danni stared at him, shaking her head. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Julie.’ A tear rolled from his eye.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What?’ he said. He looked more shocked now than upset.

  ‘You just decided to tell me this now? I’m not having it.’

  ‘Danni?’

  ‘You’re hiding something else. I know you are.’

  ‘Why would I lie about something like this?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you’re not telling me the whole story.’ He looked away but, before he did, he looked as guilty as she imagined anyone could.

  ‘Mum isn’t really my mum, is she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is she?’ Danni screamed the question, her eyes filling with tears of anger.

  ‘What’s come over you?’ He stepped towards her.

  ‘Did you have her killed?’

  The question hung in the air for what seemed like minutes. Danni held her stare but she was shaking. Her father’s breathing had become erratic and he was shaking too, unsteady on his legs; as if he was about to have a heart attack.

  ‘Did you?’

  Her father looked down and then back at her. He had stopped shaking but he looked different, his expression contorted with anger. His eyes looked as red as her wine.

  ‘How dare you.’

  ‘Did—’

  He lunged forward, his eyes bulging and wide. He had never hit her in his life, but he seemed to want to now. She rolled to one side to avoid him and jumped to her feet, stumbling a little on unsteady legs and ran to the patio doors.

  He moved towards her, his hands in front of him, seemingly out of sync with the rest of his body. It was as if they had decided to strangle her, no matter what the rest of him wanted to do. Danni desperately pushed her hand down on the handle, and it opened and she fell out on to the wet decking, only just managing to stay on her feet as she scrambled towards the steps.

  ‘Danni! Stop!’ her father shouted, but she ran to the corner of the decking and down the steps on to the heavy sand.

  The wind was so strong it almost knocked her off her feet. She had left her coat hanging in the hallway of the apartment, and her shoes on the shoe rack, and the cold rain lashed against her bare shoulders as she started to run away from the steps and towards the middle of the beach.

  ‘Danni!’ she heard her father call, but it was muffled by the wind and rain.

  She didn’t turn around but kept running, her feet sinking into the cold, wet sand, as the rain soaked her clothes to her skin. It was too dark to see where she was stepping and the rain was driving into her, slowing her down; after a few minutes she stopped and gasped desperately for air. She reached the end of the sandy part of the beach, and the street-lights from the village gave her some sense of her bearings. She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone, dropping it on to the grass verge that separated the beach from the road.

  She picked it up and wiped it dry with her sleeve. She found her recent calls list and pressed the name LAURA.

  ‘Where are you?’ she panted before Laura had a chance to say anything more than hello.

  ‘An hour away – what’s wrong?’

  ‘Just hurry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My dad’s trying to kill me.’

  66 | Danni

  Even in the few minutes she’d been on the beach, the storm seemed to have worsened, and the rain was near-horizontal as it swept along the coast, with a wind that was as cold as it was fierce.

  Because of her bare feet Danni kept to the grass verge as much as she could, but it was quickly turning into a bog underfoot, and eventually she had to move on to the footpath as she pushed on against the driving wind towards the lights of the village, half a mile away. The rain was already beginning to change into sleet and hurt her face and shoulders as it hit her, thrown by the seventy-mile-an-hour gale. Her feet hurt on the concrete and then became so numb from the cold that she lost any feeling in them, other than the sharp throb from her little toe, which she’d struck on a rock as she climbed from the beach to the road and which was now split and bleeding and forcing her to walk on the other side of her foot.

  She stopped to take a breath and checked the time on her phone. It was almost ten o’clock and she knew the village would be busy at that time, and that she’d be safe when she got there, but it still looked a long way off and every step was becoming a challenge.

  There was only one road in and out of the village on this side, a winding single carriageway that led up and out along the coast until it reached the houses where her father lived, and split into two wider roads. It had poor drainage, or at least it did when there was a deluge like this, and not only was the sleet beginning to stick to the tarmac, but the edges of the road, where it met the footpath on one side and grass on the other, were now hidden by flowing water; every few feet the footpath was completely covered, and she had to splash through it.

  Danni looked back down the road towards her father’s block. With so much rain, it was impossible to see anything except the dim glow of street-lights and lights in the row of three buildings. As she watched, breathing heavily, she saw the headlights of a car coming down the hill from that direction, moving slowly and still at least five hundred yards away. She checked her distance: she was roughly halfway between the village and the houses, and she decided to try to flag the car down and ask the driver to take her the rest of the way, or, better still, to the police station.

  But, as the car got closer, she recognised it.

  It had distinctive headlights, with a row of smaller lights along the top of the glass so that, when the headlights were on, each looked just like an eye and a narrow eyebrow.

  It was her father’s car.

  It was crawling along, and she stepped back off the footpath on to the grass behind it and watched as the car rolled along towards her. It was going very slowly, and she knew that that wasn’t because of the treacherous conditions but because the driver was looking out of the windscreen and windows on both sides.

  Looking for her.

  It was about three hundred yards away now and she had nowhere to go. The footpath was exposed, and when the car made the next bend she knew she would be visible in its headlights, so she looked beyond the grass. It was so dark she couldn’t see any more than what appeared to be a narrow ditch running adjacent to the road, probably dug to house pipes or cables that hadn’t been installed yet. She scrambled towards it, and, as the car straightened after the bend, she climbed into the trench – which was just over two feet wide – and ducked down out of sight.

  The ditch was three-quarters full of ice-cold water. It was dirty water that had been topped up by the rain, and it took her breath away as her shoulders went under and only her head remained above the surface. Her teeth chattered furiously and the coldness began to bite her limbs until she cried out in pain.

  The car was close now, and she kept her head as low as possible so as to not get picked out by the beam of the headlights, and listened as it rolled past.

  He hadn’t seen her.

  She heard the wheels splosh through the rainwater that covered the kerb and move on without stopping, so she waited until it sounded as though it was a comfortable distance away, and then pulled herself up out of the water, her fingers digging into the fresh mud on the side. She was so cold, she felt as if her body was paralysed, but now she was out of the water she began to regain the feeling in her arms and legs.

  The car continued its slow journey towards the village and she realised that it was only a matter of time before her father worked out that she couldn’t possibly have got that far so quickly, and turned around. If and when he did, she would have to hide again, and she couldn’t bear the thought of getting back into the ditch.

  She took her phone from her
pocket. The screen was black and no matter what buttons she pressed it stayed like that. As she wiped the water off the screen she saw tiny bubbles forming around the edge and knew it was hopeless.

  Calling Laura, the police or anyone else was now not an option.

  ‘Shit!’

  She looked at the car. It was no more than four hundred yards in front of her and its brake lights came on, bright red through the gloom. It stopped, and then began to make a three-point turn. It was coming back. He’d worked it out.

  Beyond the ditch was a fence and then a field. It was too dark to see anything more, but in the distance, maybe another quarter of a mile, she could see the faint, flickering neon sign outside a building that could only be the hotel. It was the only one the village had, and she remembered that Laura had told her she’d booked a room in it.

  The car began to increase speed. The field didn’t look much more inviting than the rain-filled ditch but she knew she had no choice. She jumped across the trench and climbed over the fence. When she landed on the other side, her feet sank into thick mud, which felt both horrible and comfortingly warm.

  Her jeans were sodden, heavy and stuck to her thighs. Her thin top was soaked right through and her arms and shoulders were beginning to go numb. Ahead, all she could make out was a black, square shape that stretched as far as the hotel, and she began to move forward, her feet sinking with every step as if she were wading in treacle. For what seemed like hours she ploughed on, the mud sucking her feet down and making her use muscles and strength she didn’t even know she had. Then, at last, the neon sign, which for minutes on end had seemed to stay the same distance away no matter how hard she pushed forward, finally got closer, and eventually she reached the fence in front of it and climbed over, collapsing in a heap on the other side.

  Her breathing was heavy and erratic. She could see the hotel building, just beyond the sign on the other side of the car park, but her exposed and shattered body wanted to give up, and she lay on the grass as the icy mix of rain and snow battered her, almost to submission. There was no one around. Everyone was inside sheltering, and, although the entrance was so close, it felt as if even one more yard was beyond her limits; her body had begun to shut down as her final reserves of energy ran out.