by Jake Cross
‘But Dominic is in Sheffield and you told me the text message Anna got about the Bongo Bingo club was traced to Sheffield. So maybe Anna was right and Josie is still here, and this guy’s watching over her. The calls being made from a vehicle heading south could be a diversion, because they’ll know you can trace the phones.’
‘We don’t know how many people are involved, or if it’s one team, two teams. Josie could be with the south-travellers, or they could be a diversion. I’m sorry, we just don’t know. But this Dominic is a petty lawbreaker and not experienced enough to be left in charge of a kidnap victim. And there’s no guarantee that the south-travellers are headed to Northampton just because one of their team hails from there.’
Nick knew that but had hoped for a more positive answer. So Josie could basically be anywhere. He gave a frustrated laugh and lay on the seat again.
A moment after handing back Bennet’s mobile, it rang.
‘Mitigating circumstances, or whatever the lawyers call it,’ Nick said. ‘What’s the least jail time you get for revenge killings? What would happen if I tied them all up in a line and gave Josie a gun and a pound for every decent headshot?’
No answer. Nick raised his head to see the detective with his phone clamped to his ear. Just listening. A few moments later, he hung up and cursed. He pulled the car into the kerb and gave Nick a long glare, clearly reading him.
‘What’s going on?’
‘What is going on, Nick? Where’s your wife gone?’
‘Gone? What do you mean?’
‘Right around the time you were on the train, she went across the road to see a neighbour. He says she went to pick beetroot in the backyard. My detective just went to get her back. The beetroot’s there. She isn’t. Where is she?’
Nick sat up. ‘What? She’s vanished? Why did you people let her go out? She’s not herself. Jesus Christ. Get driving. Get me home.’
Bennet’s eyes softened, as if his suspicious tone had been an act designed to make criminals crumble during interview. He got the car moving. ‘We’ll find her. She seemed to just need to get a break from the house. Nobody knew this was going to happen. Do you have any idea where she would go? Or why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nick said, but he had a suspicion that Anna was off trying something heroic. Had she figured out something the detectives had missed?
Did she know where Josie was?
Bennet drove like a lunatic, but not by a long shot was he the most eager to return. Even before his car had stopped around back of the Carters’ bungalow, Nick was out and running. Detectives were in a scramble in his living room, much as he imagined they had been when he escaped the house to confront a child molester. He’d been building up to unloading his anger on Miller, who was top dog and thus responsible for these people and their mistakes, but that changed when he saw Jane pressed into a corner, as if she feared a single step would send one of the frantic detectives barrelling into her. Ignoring Miller, he pushed through the crowd, grabbed Jane’s wrist, and dragged her away from the mêlée.
In the bedroom, she hugged him and said, ‘I’m so sorry about Josie, Nicky. But they’re trying hard to find her. I’m sure she’ll be back soon.’
He’d had time to somewhat acclimatise to Josie’s disappearance, while Anna’s was still a fresh and bleeding wound. ‘Thank you. You’re right. But what about Anna? Have you any idea where she went? What happened?’
‘I didn’t see her leave. She was supposed to be across the road with a neighbour, but then I heard she had gone. She’s not answering her phone, Nicky. It just rings and goes to voicemail. She knows it’s me, so why wouldn’t she answer? Oh, where has she gone, Nick?’
Bennet called his name, so he slammed the bedroom door. ‘Did she say anything while I was gone? Give any clue? I wonder if she’s gone to try to find Josie. Maybe she knows something? Some clue she got when she went to the ransom call? From the man’s voice maybe. I felt her attitude changed after that call.’
‘Changed? What clue? How would she know something? We all heard the phone call. Those men didn’t say anything to her about where Josie is.’
She was right. But he couldn’t dispel the idea that Anna had gone to try to find Josie herself. ‘Where’s your dad?’
‘In the kitchen. He’s calling people. The police have gone looking, but they wouldn’t let us out. But should we go look?’
‘I can’t.’ He really wanted to, but Bennet had already convinced him of what he now told Jane: ‘I have to stay here in case those people call about where I can find Josie.’
‘Yes, that DCI, Miller, she said that’s what will probably happen. They might want to get far away before they say where we can find Josie. Do you think maybe they somehow told Anna where Josie is and that’s where she’s gone?’
Possible. Bennet had suggested the kidnappers might just release Josie on to the street, but what if their plan had instead been to secretly give a location to Anna? Maybe they’d feared a five-year-old dumped on the street might get snatched again. It was only a theory, but the timeline gave it weight: Anna had run right around the time the money had been delivered.
It would be a dream come true if Anna returned with Josie in her arms, but what if she stumbled into the kidnappers? It didn’t bear thinking about, so he pulled the power cable on that train of thought. ‘You start calling friends. I’m going to find out if the police know more than they’re telling us.’
He got to the living room door when a voice said, ‘You two are up to something strange indeed.’
Nabi, the foul detective that Anna had had a problem with. The guy was in her cubbyhole, nice and comfortable, tapping away at the computer and not even having the decency to accuse Nick with his eyes.
‘What the hell did you say?’
Nabi didn’t even turn. ‘I’ll get to the bottom of this trickery. That’s not what I said, of course, but I’m saying this now. Where’s your wife gone?’
Nick started to walk towards him. Aware of this, or suspecting it, Nabi got up and turned.
‘Get out of my damn house before I throw you out.’
‘Got an anger problem, have we?’
Nick grabbed the guy’s arm, or tried to. Nabi slapped away the hand that reached for him, so Nick snaked out his other, but Nabi caught that one by the wrist. And in that position, as if about to dance, both men froze as a voice said:
‘You’re not giving a good impression here.’
Middleton. He appeared at the kitchen doorway, just inches from both men, who stepped apart like kids giving up a rumble at a teacher’s approach. Nick was ready to explode if Middleton said the wrong thing, but, surprisingly, it was Nabi who got his attention.
‘Your career rises or falls with your boss, Detective Constable. I heard her tell you to watch your attitude around the victims. I’m a boss, I know the score with insubordinates. Go against her, your superintendent will believe you’ll have the same attitude with him if you reach DCI status. Then the chief constable will think you’ll be the same as a super. So you’ll stop dead, right here, as a constable, with a brick wall ahead and a cliff behind.’
Nabi gave a little laugh and turned to walk away. Middleton did the same, not a word to Nick, and Nick watched him return to the kitchen table and sit. He could hardly believe what had just happened. He wanted to say thank you, but didn’t get the chance.
Because the landline rang.
Miller yelled for Nick, who turned so fast into the living room that he bounced painfully off the doorframe. She was standing by the phone, waving him over. She looked haggard, as if stress or lack of sleep was catching up to her. Everyone was watching him.
‘Be careful how you answer,’ she said as he approached, eyes glued to the phone plugged into a laptop, ‘in case it’s a neighbour or a reporter, and don’t—’
He barely heard: he snatched up the phone and said, ‘Anna?’
On speakerphone, they all heard a mechanical voice:
‘You have rec
eived a text message from 07…’
Anna’s number. A message from Anna, delivered by a computer that had no idea of the impact it was about to land.
Hi, babe, it’s Anna. You’re not her real dad. Sorry about the trick to get our going-away money. Hope YOU have got good pictures of her in your head. XXX.
Ten
‘Donna, it’s Nick. Is Anna there or have you seen her today? She went out and didn’t leave a note.’
‘Maybe she finally got sick of you and left, Nick. My John told you, you would end up driving her away. Can’t say I blame her. Or she’s gone out and just doesn’t want you to know where she is. Anyway, no, I haven’t seen her.’
Five calls to Anna’s friends, and nobody had heard from her today. One hadn’t been home and he’d left a message, but the other four had all had the same theme: Anna had probably finally left him. These were the same people Anna had frantically called late in the night about Nick and Josie’s disappearance, but follow-up contact by the police appeared to have allayed any worry. None knew about the kidnap and they’d eaten up his lie about Anna going out without leaving a note.
That got him thinking. People drifting apart did that, didn’t they? Went places without informing each other. Her friends clearly weren’t on his side and if Anna had visited one, well, that wasn’t his business, was it? Especially if she’d gone for a heart-to-heart about the unfairness of life. So why would anyone tell him where Anna was even if they knew? He gave serious consideration to a series of house visits, just to make sure nobody was hiding her.
But the police wouldn’t let him leave the house. They’d told him not to go anywhere and had taken the car key. He couldn’t help but worry that they still suspected him of involvement in Josie’s kidnap. He and Anna both.
He didn’t understand this suspicion. Back when he’d been suspected of taking Josie, certain points had been raised: how would Josie attend school, or a doctor’s, or join any other part of society if Nick tried to keep their location secret? Impossible. And the same points negated the notion that Anna had run away with her daughter. She was certainly smart enough to have set this whole thing up, but also smart enough to realise it would be a fool’s errand. Anna had known Nick was innocent because of this, but the police hadn’t believed it; now Nick, for the same reason, knew she was blameless here. Again the police had serious doubts, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Knowing she was innocent meant also knowing something far worse:
That Anna was now in terrible danger, too.
When Miller called him inside with news, Nick felt relief. But it was only partly a desire for information. He was sitting at the garden bench and staring at Josie’s toys scattered in the turned earth in the corner. He’d expected to feel joy at seeing his girl’s things, like using photographs to remember a great holiday, but they were beginning to heighten his sense of loss instead. So partly it was to get away.
The detective was sitting in the dining/incident room, alone. When Nick sat across from her, she lifted a sheet of paper. An old photocopy of a sale receipt for Anna’s scrapped Fiat Punto, dated 19th September 2011, from their paperwork file in the cubbyhole. She was waiting for a response. Some kind of detective tactic, maybe.
‘Is this scrapyard connected to the kidnap?’ He made an impatient hand gesture for her to get to the point.
She tapped the business title at the top: Watson-Bruce Salvage, with a Northampton address.
His jaw dropped. ‘Dominic Watson-Bruce, he knows Anna?’
‘It’s a family-run business, has been for generations, and the owner, Dominic’s father, lives on-site. He’s divorced, but Dominic, according to his mother, lives there. Which means he was probably there in September 2011. But Dominic, he’s only nineteen, so he would have been eleven back when Anna scrapped her car. A child. But, my friend, this is intriguing because you both lived in London, yet Anna chose to scrap her car sixty miles away.’
‘But you think she knows someone from that scrapyard? Whoever took Josie? All she ever told me was that that place came as a recommendation from a friend. I don’t know who. I remember thinking it was a long way to go. I had to go with her the second time to drive her back.’
That hit some kind of sweet spot in the detective, he saw. She perked up. Second time?
‘She went down the first time about a week earlier. I remember it was the day before the 9/11 ten-year anniversary. When I got back from work, she still had the car, though. She told me the people there had refused to take it because of the hit-and-run that had happened.’
‘Ah. That’s been mentioned before, see. Tell me.’
A week before Anna’s first visit to Watson-Bruce Salvage, two hikers had been killed in Ealing on a remote stretch of road. Young students, mown down by a driver who didn’t stop. No cameras, no clues, but three days in the police, after some laboratory magic on paint flecks found on the victims, announced that they were seeking a lido blue Fiat Punto from 2003–2006. Same as Anna’s. Anna hadn’t known about the Punto enquiry, but mechanics at the scrapyard had and they’d told her she needed to keep the car until it was cleared by police. Five days later, police knocked on her door. After her car was checked and cleared of involvement, she returned to Watson-Bruce Salvage and legally scrapped it. Nick had accompanied her in his car in order to drive her back.
Miller nodded. ‘I’ve had my share of car enquiries. A pain to trace and eliminate. Thankfully I don’t have to do such footwork now, a hundred times asking, where were you on so-and-so night. Anyhows, where was Anna on the night of that hit-and-run?’
A question, he said, she had already answered for police in London. Her boss, Marc Eastman, had been driving to a function, some forty miles from the scene of the accident, and he’d called her to pick him up. Although by the time she got there he’d already decided to go by taxi.
‘Why Anna?’
She sometimes drove him in her car so he could remain inconspicuous. ‘So what’s the connection here, Detective? You think when Anna scrapped the car she might have mentioned how rich her dad was? The scrapyard has to be connected, that’s what you’re getting at. Maybe this Dominic overheard her talk about her dad, then grew up and decided he wanted some of that money. So he got her details from the files. Then he set this whole thing up. Maybe it’s a scam the scrapyard has going. Find out who’s rich and go rob them or—’
He stopped, already knowing it was a big reach.
Miller shrugged. ‘Connected, yes. Your theory… possible. But I should mention that my sergeant told me that Anna reacted to the name Watson-Bruce with shock. He believes she knew the name.’
He couldn’t miss the hidden accusation. ‘So? I remembered the name. I also reacted with shock, as you just saw. The name is memorable because of the story about the hit-and-run. What are you saying it means?’
‘Again, please, why did Anna scrap the car?’
He didn’t know where this was going, but he gave an answer.
‘She got disillusioned with London after she almost got carjacked in the street. She was driving home and someone cut in front and tried to steal her car. He threatened her with a knife, but she managed to drive off. So she wanted to scrap it. Bad memories maybe. Your point?’
‘Long way to go to scrap the car. Way out of London.’
‘I told you. She got a recommendation. Your point?’
‘Why did you leave London?’
He snorted with impatience. ‘We were thinking about kids, about a family, and London’s too expensive and too hectic. I’m sure Anna told your people this. What’s the relevance of any of this?’
‘Well, Nick, I apologise if it sounds like I’m interrogating you. Kids, family – the same story Anna’s father told one of my detectives. But Anna herself told my people a different story. She said her boss, Marc Eastman, the MP, kicked up a stink with some comment he made about Bovine TB. I looked online for it. It seems farmers get no compensation for killing their affected sheep, pigs and goats, and he wanted th
at to change. He was accused of trying to increase the animal kill rate. Anna told my detectives she left her job because of this backlash, which wasn’t restricted to a bashing in the media. Threats. Personal threats. Some of those animal welfare groups can be quite vindictive, see. Did she ever mention that to you?’
He was puzzled. ‘Well, yeah, I knew about that. But she didn’t often talk about her job and never really made it out to be a big deal. But I know once she’d left that job, she didn’t want to be associated with it. So… is this important? Are you saying this could be about all that animal culling stuff? Some animal rights idiot took my daughter? But it’s been eight years.’
She rocked back slightly, as if his words had physical weight. ‘It’s one thing, Nick, to not talk shop about new policies on unemployment or whatever. Quite something else to not tell your family you were reading death threat letters. It seems this was the reason she changed her name. It affected her that much. Did she tell you why she changed her name?’
Puzzlement was giving over to worry. ‘Why is that your biggest concern? That she downplayed this animal rights stuff? She probably downplayed it so as not to worry me or her family. She told me she wanted to change her name because her dad was angry she’d tossed the job, so if it was because of threats from silly activists, it was to avoid worrying me or her parents. Look, leaving London was because of a combination of things, that included. DCI Miller, I don’t like where this is going. You’re not looking for some freaked-out activist with an eight-year grudge, because you don’t think this is about all that, do you?’
‘I don’t know what to think, my friend.’
‘I disagree. You believe that text from her phone, even though one of the kidnappers also sent a stupid text from my phone. You believe it and you think she went AWOL, so the police don’t find out about a dodgy connection to Dominic. So give it to me straight. You think she got this Dominic to help her set this kidnap up.’
