The Family Lie

by Jake Cross

  Middleton turned to look at him for the first time since parking up. ‘What help? Is this why you wanted this damn silly secret meet? You don’t want the police to know because you think you can make everything all right. You think you can save everybody. But keeping the police out of this puts my daughter and granddaughter in danger, you fool. What can you do?’

  That final sentence had been almost spat out in contempt. Nick paused a second to let rising anger subside. ‘Look, I know I’m not the ideal man for Anna in your eyes. I’m just some grunt with no desire to rule the world. I’m not obsessed with money and power and I don’t want people to bow at my feet. You think Anna can’t cope without you because she failed in London, and that I’m not the right person to look after her, even though we’ve been fine for years. If only she’d married a judge or famous novelist, eh? I don’t care what you think. All that matters to me—’

  ‘And what about what matters to me? I don’t want you making things worse by—’

  Jane had been silent for a time, but no longer. ‘Stop this, you two,’ she yelled. ‘It ends now between you. I heard what Nick said to you back at the house and he’s right, Father. You cut her off thinking she’d regret her decision to settle down. It’s not going to happen. Josie is the best thing that ever happened to her, to any of us. And even if she left Nick, she’s not going to suddenly decide to start a career. Stop blaming Nick because Anna didn’t become the daughter you wanted. And you, Nick, stop blaming Father for finding it hard to accept that Anna chose a different path. Both of you! Fighting when Josie and Anna are out there somewhere and in danger. I’m sick of it!’

  That silenced both men. Jane rubbed her chest in a calming motion, and wiped a tear away. ‘I agree with him, Father. He wants to find Anna before the police do. There’s a chance this is all just wrong. We need to hear Anna’s story before she gets arrested. I think we’d all prefer to see her without being surrounded by police and solicitors. Especially if it’s going to be the last time alone as a family.’

  Middleton rubbed his forehead. Nick tried to eject an image of Anna staring at him through the iron bars of a cell as he was forced to walk away – back to an empty home.

  Jane said, ‘Nick, what message are you talking about? You said they got a secret message to Anna.’

  Middleton said nothing. His chest rose and fell fast. Nick took it as willingness to hear him out, so he said, ‘I think their message gave her the idea for the one she left you.’

  Despite her blindness, Jane actually turned in her seat, as if to stare at him. ‘Braille?’

  Nick picked up the phone, just as Anna had, and immediately felt stickiness on his fingers. From the inside of the handle. He saw a slight residue, as if from a now-gone sticker. He handed the phone to Jane, standing in the phone box doorway, who ran her fingers along the hard plastic. Behind her, Middleton paced on the pavement.

  ‘My God,’ Jane said. ‘There was a sticker here. Just like on the kettle. But the message is gone.’

  She bent down and ran a hand across the floor. Before Nick could process why, she stood up, and in her fingers was something. Black, the same colour as the receiver. Jane started to unfold it. A little scrap of black tape, scrunched up, and discarded. He saw lumps and bumps, and he just knew. Her fingers ran over its surface.

  ‘Is it Braille?’ he said, all urgency. ‘What does it say?’

  She ignored him, dropped the scrap of tape, and started to feel under the shelf.

  ‘Silence. Under shelf,’ she said. And then, ‘More stickiness. But there’s nothing here.’

  And he believed that, because Jane had a far more sensitive touch. But still he ran his own hands over the underside of the shelf, hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t. No message, and nothing else on the floor. His shoulders slumped. He’d been hoping to find a clue to her location. An idea of what the hell these bastards wanted from Anna. Failure put a painful void in his gut.

  ‘A bigger message,’ Jane said. ‘Something that wouldn’t fit on the handle. But how would they have known to do that?’

  Because they knew all about Anna and her family.

  ‘They must have returned here to get rid of the message,’ he said. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘But what do they want? They got the money. What can they want from us, Nick? Is this something to do with the burglary at Father’s garage?’

  Nick hadn’t connected that event to this, but it had caused DS Bennet to wonder. And the burglary had occurred not long after Anna vanished. Any other day… Prompted by elevating hope, Nick remembered a line from Anna’s secret message to Jane.

  I know what they want. I’m going to get Josie back.

  Nick stepped inside carefully. He needed to be quick, because he knew the police were sending someone to fingerprint the busted door. But he also needed Middleton out of the way.

  Amongst various items strewn around the garage floor, Nick noticed his lucky milk bottle, broken into a thousand pieces. He didn’t care: it couldn’t be deemed to have any power if Josie and Anna were still missing.

  He picked up a piece of the glass. ‘I’m still keeping this. Have you got a small box and a dustpan and brush?’

  Middleton had doubted the kidnappers had busted into his garage. The whole street knew he had money and a busy outdoor life but no wife and a daughter who wouldn’t be very good at providing a description: no secret, then, that his property was often unattended. If what the kidnappers wanted was in his garage, they could have broken in anytime. So why take Josie and then come kick in the door anyway? Plus, there was nothing of worth, nor was there anything missing.

  Sold. Nick had agreed with the older man’s theory, but asked to see the garage anyway. By the time they’d arrived, he was doubtful. Once inside, and looking at nothing but junk across the floor, he was certain he was on a wild goose chase.

  And then he spotted something.

  When Middleton was gone, Nick picked up the item that had caught his attention. Right then he knew where this whole mess would end, although he had no idea what treasure could be at the end of this rainbow. Jane was by the door, watching but not. But she heard the slight scrape of something dropping to the floor.

  She asked.

  He lied: nothing. But then he said, ‘Tell your dad I’m sorry.’

  ‘What do you mean? Sorry for what?’

  ‘He said he’s sorry for taking your car,’ Jane said sixty seconds later, when her father was by her side in the driveway and he was staring at a blank space where his forty-grand Jaguar wasn’t.

  ‘That bastard,’ Middleton hissed. ‘What did he say? Did he find something?’

  ‘He picked something up.’

  Because standing in the bare driveway, despite it being part of her home, was like being adrift in a vast ocean, she reached for him, meaning to grab an arm with both of hers, to anchor herself. But found the space where he should have been empty. The crunch of gravel told her he was headed back to the garage. Once there herself, she heard the beep of his phone keypad.

  ‘Father, what are you doing? You can’t call the police.’

  ‘Anna and that bastard might think they’re trying to save Josie, but their damn vigilante ideas might get her hurt.’

  ‘No, don’t call the police just yet. Anna will be arrested. Maybe Nick has found something.’ She grabbed his arm.

  He shrugged it off. ‘And I intend to know what. I took a picture.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  What he meant, but didn’t say, was that he’d taken pictures of the garage as it lay following the robbery, to document the damage. Now, he pulled up one he’d taken from roughly this very spot and which captured the entire interior. He held it so he could see picture and subject with only a flick of the eyes.

  In this game of spot-the-difference, there was one anomaly. One thing, but not missing, only moved a couple of feet. He stepped inside and picked it up. A velvety A5 folder embossed with JEFFERSON’S, which had been Anna’s way back, when she wa
s Marc Eastman’s PA. It contained a card key and paperwork for a safety box in a private London bank, where Eastman had insisted she stored sensitive files after his office was burgled. The box hadn’t been used since she emptied it and left London; the folder, like other unneeded junk, had gone into a box and made the journey north, but since that day hadn’t budged from its dusty spot in the garage. Until it got tossed on the floor as burglars threw things about while seeking valuables.

  And it had moved again when Nick picked it up.

  Thirteen

  10.58 a.m.

  The moment she picks up the receiver in her left hand, what she feels beneath her fingertips is as potent as a live wire. She takes a deep breath and realisation hits.

  ‘Hello, my master. I am so scared,’ she says. She is reminded of the order to hold the receiver in both hands – not so she can’t press record on a tape machine, but because one hand needs to hold the receiver while the other slides along what she knows is a Braille message on the inside of the handle. Her heart races.

  ‘Pay careful attention to what you feel. It will help you do the right thing. Remember that any trickery and your kid doesn’t see old age.’

  With two hands, one to hold the receiver, and one to read, she says nothing.

  ‘So you understand the message I’m giving you. Good.’

  She does. The message says:

  Silence. Under Shelf.

  ‘I will do whatever you want,’ she says, to relay her own message: that she understands. There will be another message under the shelf, because a tiny phone handle offers no room.

  ‘We don’t want you to do this. We want your husband to bring the money. Go home and we’ll call again.’

  Click.

  She drops the receiver. She leans on the phone book shelf, gripping it tightly, her fingers feeling beneath. Rubbing. Reading.

  Escape the police at 12.25 p.m. Get to Bex Park. Bring your Forcefield. Destroy the messages.

  She stands. Picks up the receiver again. Says ‘Hello’ into it, but this is just cover so she can rip away the ticker tape as she hangs up and withdraws her hand. Both hands come together, mashing the two messages together.

  Forcefield.

  The bigger message, the size of a postcard, is on paper, so it can be destroyed easily; the smaller, though, is on thick ticker tape so that it can withstand the friction of palms that used the phone before she took hold. This piece of plastic refuses to gel with the paper and skips from her rubbing hands. She sees it tumble to the floor. She cannot retrieve it, because the camera is watching. But it’s tiny, scrunched up, and no one will see anything but a piece of litter. She leaves the phone box with the other message squashed in her fist. Carefully punched holes in the paper now ruined by her hands, it will tell no one anything even if they find it on the floor of her already-littered car.

  Forcefield.

  The shock of it is like an icy lake dousing, but she holds her outward demeanour firm, for the police watching and listening, as she walks back to her car.

  Forcefield.

  A simple, single word, but all-powerful, and all-encompassing.

  Because now she knows who took her little lady, and why…

  Across the road at the end of the alleyway behind her neighbour’s home is Bexland Park, and a pedestrian side entrance via a lichgate just a short way to her left. She takes it. The park is empty because kids and jobless mothers like herself prefer the park down the road. This one doesn’t have much to offer because it’s just a green the size of a football pitch with benches and a road cutting it in half, all enclosed in head-high hedge. That means she knows the Ogres will be able to take her, and nobody will see a thing. But there is someone here, a council worker with a hedge trimmer. At least he’s far away, his back to her as he pretties up the hedge. And the noise of his hedge trimmer means he doesn’t hear a car zip quickly inside as she approaches the road slicing the park in two. Some drivers use the road through as a shortcut, and the vehicle certainly has the speed to suggest it isn’t going to stop. Until it does with a screech of tyres right before her.

  No chance to back out now. But she wouldn’t anyway. High trees around the edge of the park seem to lock her in with the car, casting gloomy shadows and creating just the sort of scene a novelist might imagine for a kidnap. But she knows she would let this happen even if it were one of Jane’s burning beaches full of bathers. That car, no matter the dangers it might hold, is the portal to Josie.

  A back door opens and a man in a baseball cap pulled low steps out. She can see only his mouth, which makes big horse-like chewing motions. With no face to look at, her eyes drop to his hands. Clothing, which he drops to the ground.

  She instantly recognises Josie’s Daffy Duck pyjamas…

  A moan escapes as she stumbles forward and bends to grab Josie’s clothing. She knows it’s a trick to get her close, because they’re right at his feet, but what she knows and he doesn’t is that no trick is needed. She is going through the portal, no matter what, but she is desperate to do so with Josie’s belongings in her arms. No special necklace here, so thankfully her little girl might have been allowed to keep it.

  Ball Cap grabs her ponytail and yanks her up. His other hand slaps over her mouth to stifle a scream that was never part of the plan. He turns and forces her into the car, grunting with exertion he doesn’t have to use. She sprawls across the back seat. In a flash of a second before he’s inside, on top of her, forcing her head down, she glimpses the back of the driver’s head: ginger hair with shaved sides.

  The door slams. The car jumps into action. Already, she is closer to Josie, and tension disperses like smoke in the wind. Ball Cap is unaware of this and forces her off the seat, into a lying position on the floor, face down. Her nose thuds the carpet, and it’s this impact that ejects a yelp from her lips. Ball Cap, though, misreads yet again and jams his feet hard into her back and tells her she’s going nowhere. Amid the maelstrom of emotions, her brain finds opportunity to recognise the same thick northern accent from the phone calls.

  At first, the engine is loud, the turns sharp, but soon everything calms down as the vehicle exits a perceived danger zone. Ball Cap starts to speak around a wad of gum in his mouth.

  ‘No police, you silly mare. Remember?’

  ‘Where’s my daughter? A neighbour called the police. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t half cause a hassle, woman. You were supposed to wake up in the morning to find a nice little note in your girl’s bed, and then we’d go do this all quiet, no problem. But your bloke, what the hell was he doing up? Who’s awake at that time of the morning, eh?’ He seems to find this funny. ‘And no cops, that was meant to be part of it. Scrambled that one up, too, didn’t you? You’d have had your kid by now, so you went and messed up, didn’t you? Caused us to get our thinking caps on. Are we going to have any more spanners in the works?’

  Josie’s pyjamas are still in her hands; she forces them into her face, inhaling her smell. The pain in her nose vanishes.

  ‘That’s better,’ the other guy, the driver, says. Dominic Watson-Bruce, she remembers. She is glad she hasn’t yet seen his face, or him hers.

  Ball Cap turns her head with a fist in her hair, so she can see something his other hand is holding close to her face.

  ‘This was a wasted note. I hate waste, so now—’

  She sees a piece of paper the size of a postcard. Scrawled words:

  WE HAVE YOUR KID. NO POLICE. TELL SCHOOL SHE’S SICK. WILL CALL YOU AT TEN

  ‘You’ll eat it.’

  And he’s serious because he forces the paper against her mouth, pressing so hard it hurts her gums and lips, and she knows there’s no point in trying to refuse. So she opens her mouth, and accepts his rough fingers forcing the paper inside. She blocks her throat with her tongue, unsure if he’s going to force the ransom note all the way.

  ‘Don’t be a twat,’ Dominic says.

  Some kind of point proven, Ball Cap releases her and sits up.
She spits out the paper. The man seems to drum a beat on her back with his feet, as if to a song in his head. She knows that this journey through the portal will go more easily if she doesn’t speak, simply does as she’s told, but she needs to know Josie is okay. She means to try to ask about her daughter pleasantly, as if enquiring about how she’s adapting to a new school, but the pyjamas Josie was wearing are in her hands, and a terrible fear about what that could mean transforms her enquiry between brain and mouth.

  ‘What have you done to my baby, you bastards? Where is she? Why did you take her pyjamas?’

  ‘We changed her, that’s all,’ Ball Cap said. ‘She said she’s not allowed to wear pyjamas once she’s up. You think I’m some sort of weirdo?’

  That was right, she’d been taught to get dressed as soon as breakfast was over, but surely she wouldn’t undress in front of these Ogres. Had they forced her to…?

  As if reading her mind, the guy beside her says, ‘We haven’t harmed her one little bit, okay? As is, it’s a kidnap. Imagine if the police happened to burst in and find a naked kid? That’s a sexual aspect right there, and you know what that means? Solitary confinement for my own safety. Not a place on earth I wouldn’t be hated. Especially for a little girl. Imagine that, everyone everywhere wanting to hurt you. And the prison screws would over-salt every meal I ever had. Think I’m stupid? I can hide from the killers. Can’t hide from the salt. So your kid’s dressed and she’s… let’s say she’s not unhappy. Except with you, that is. She’s annoyed at you. She thinks you sent her to us for being naughty before bedtime.’

  Josie had spoken with these Ogres? She was a sociable girl, but…

  ‘I want to see her. I want to see my daughter now.’

  Dominic speaks this time. ‘Have you got what we want, countess?’

  Still, thankfully, she can’t see his face, but that word, countess, puts an ancient image in her mind: a yelling boy, a runaway bicycle, and herself rushing forward. She shuts it down before the scene can display her performing a mistake.