Stolen

by Paul Finch

  ‘On top of that, she’s never been entirely convinced that you’re doing these houses up yourself,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘She doesn’t believe you know the first thing about DIY. Isn’t that why you spent a million quid getting someone else to fit that new bathroom in your mansion down Alderley Edge?’

  ‘So you’ve been watching me for a few weeks,’ Dean said. ‘But you haven’t reported back to Lydia yet? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘That’s the sum of it,’ Trenchcoat replied. ‘Want to know why?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s not because you like football.’

  ‘You guess right where I’m concerned,’ Beard replied. ‘I fucking hate it.’

  ‘I, on the other hand, do like it,’ Hatchet Nose said. ‘I’m even a Man U fan. But the Reds were great before you, Dean, and they’ll be great again after.’

  Dean’s eyes flitted from one to the other. ‘So …?’

  ‘So we want to get paid twice,’ Beard said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your wife’s giving us two hundred grand to tail you for four months,’ Trenchcoat explained. ‘To find out exactly what’s been going on, and whether or not it’s dodgy … and if it is, to provide indisputable evidence. Now, we’ve got that evidence, as you’ve seen. But, you see, here’s the thing … we don’t like to ruin people’s lives. We only do it if we absolutely have to. So, our normal method, once we’ve collected said evidence, is to give the guilty party an opportunity to buy it back.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ Dean said, with a dull, sinking feeling.

  ‘Course you understand,’ Trenchcoat replied. ‘But do it our way, and it all works out beautifully. We go back to your missus, tell her you’re clean as a whistle. You then go home and get hugs and kisses instead of a solicitor’s letter. Everyone’s happy. And we get paid twice.’

  ‘And how much is this going to cost me?’ Dean asked.

  ‘Well, your wife’s paying us two hundred. We thought the very least it’d be worth to you, given that your kids won’t see Mummy and Daddy split up, and the Chelsea boot-boys won’t suddenly have a whole new generation of nasty names to call you … maybe four times that.’

  ‘Eight hundred grand?’ Dean was stung, but he could easily afford it.

  ‘Makes it a round million.’ Hatchet Nose grinned. ‘And we only get taxed on a fifth of it.’

  ‘You look surprised, Lightning,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘No doubt you thought, as someone who earns two hundred grand a week just for showing up, the cost would be a lot more. Well … the sad fact is there’s always a danger that something could slip out to the press at a later date. Not straight away, obviously. But we’ll still have your best interests at heart, so every so often it’ll be worth us checking in with you … just to ensure that it’s a false alarm.’

  Dean nodded. It was unbearable of course, but he had no choice.

  ‘Okay.’ Trenchcoat’s tone lightened, almost became friendly. ‘Well, that’s it. There’s nothing else to discuss. We’ll be in touch shortly, about how and when this needs to happen.’

  He turned and walked away, Hatchet Nose going with him. But the larger, bearded individual remained, hovering like an ape in the half-darkness – before lurching forward, coming close to Dean, nose to nose.

  ‘You got off easy,’ he grunted. ‘No one on this fucking planet thinks you and those other prima donnas are worth the fortune you earn. You may reckon they love you, superstar, but don’t be fooled. Away from the footy ground, if half of them saw you lying in a gutter burning, they’d rescue your wallet before even thinking about calling the Fire Brigade.’

  Then he turned and lumbered away too, vanishing into the gloom.

  Chapter 8

  The woman was called Janet Dawson, and she was het up. Lucy met her at her father’s house just after ten that morning. She was in early middle age and tubby, with curly fair hair running to grey, and a pale, worried face.

  The address was 8, Atkinson Row, and it belonged to an OAP called Harry Hopkins.

  ‘I’ve been ringing Dad for the last three days,’ she said, ushering Lucy down a short hall into the interior of a terraced house so neat and tidy it could have passed for a show home. ‘I’ve been asking around too. His friends and the locals down the pub. No one’s seen him.’

  ‘He keeps a tidy home,’ Lucy said, looking around the lounge and then heading upstairs.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The woman followed. ‘He’s always been very house-proud.’

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing out of place?’ Lucy asked, looking into the two bedrooms.

  ‘Nothing obvious. Oh … apart from out at the back. Do you know about that already?’

  ‘Yeah, I was told about that before I got here.’

  What had really panicked Janet Dawson, on calling to see her father this morning and discovering the house empty, had been the back door and back gate, which were both wide open. She’d quickly called the police. Uniform had arrived first and, not liking it either, had passed the info to CID.

  ‘We’ll look down at the back in a sec,’ Lucy said, still checking around upstairs.

  She noticed a large, circular cushion on the carpet next to Harry’s bed. A well-chewed rubber bone sat in the middle of it.

  ‘Your dad has a dog?’

  ‘Yes. Milly … she’s a Pekingese.’

  ‘Does he take her out a lot?’

  ‘Yeah. She gets at least two walks a day. But he leaves her in when he’s off to the pub or the bookies, or something like that.’ The woman’s voice trembled as she spoke.

  Lucy pondered. She didn’t say it aloud, because she simply wasn’t sure, but the absence of the dog made foul play a little less likely. If you were going to abduct someone, would you really go to the trouble of abducting their pet too? It seemed more possible that something had happened to the old guy while he was out walking the dog, but if there’d been an accident, or he’d dropped dead from a heart attack, someone ought to have found him by now. And then there was the mystery surrounding the back door and the back gate.

  ‘Could your father have left her here, forgotten to lock up at the back, and she’s just run away?’ she asked.

  ‘I honestly don’t think she’d run away,’ the woman replied. ‘And I’ve never known Dad make a mistake like that before. Plus, why would he go out without his hat and coat?’

  They went downstairs and through into the lounge, where the television was playing away to itself, a range of Saturday-morning chefs producing a selection of mouth-watering dishes.

  ‘And that’s not like Dad either,’ Janet Dawson said. ‘The telly being on.’

  ‘It was on when you arrived here this morning?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could he not just have left it on as a security measure while he was going out … you know, to make thieves think he was in?’

  ‘Yes, but he only does that at night.’

  The implication was evident.

  ‘What time did you arrive this morning?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Just after eight.’

  ‘So you’re worried the television might have been left on all night?’

  The woman looked even paler than before. ‘I can hardly bear to think what that might mean if it’s true.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t own any other property that we might look around?’ Lucy asked. ‘An allotment with a shed perhaps? A garage?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lucy walked back through the house to the kitchen, where she halted next to one of the spotless worktops. A mug containing a dry teabag and an unused spoon sat alongside the kettle. This was more suggestive than anything she had seen at the house so far.

  Most telling of all, though, was the open back door.

  Lucy pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Janet Dawson moaned.

  ‘It’s just a precaution.’ Lucy checked along the door’s edge and down the edge of the door-jamb. ‘
There’s no sign of any damage here.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone forced entry. I mean, there’s no damage anywhere. And it’s not like there’s any sign of a scuffle. Nothing’s broken, there’re no blood spots or anything.’

  ‘So, if someone came into the house this way,’ Lucy said, ‘your father must have let them in willingly.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Janet Dawson gave a weak, forced smile. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

  Lucy didn’t mention that most of the violence in modern society was inflicted by persons known to the victim. Instead, she said, ‘How many of your father’s house-callers are in the habit of coming to the back door?’

  ‘I must admit … I can’t think of any who would do that, or why.’

  They crossed the garden together. It was smoothly turfed aside from a crazy-paved path, with a brick platform on the right covered in potted plants. At odds with all this neatness, the back gate hung ajar.

  ‘The gate was like this, this morning?’ Lucy asked, again noting an absence of damage, which meant that this hadn’t been forced open either.

  ‘Exactly like it is now.’

  ‘We shouldn’t necessarily read something bad into this,’ Lucy said. ‘There are lots of possibilities here at present.’

  Internally, however, she’d closed in on three main ones: a) an intruder had approached the house from the rear and had got inside that way, because Harry Hopkins had forgotten to lock up; or b) Harry Hopkins had gone outside himself, leaving the property by the back door and the back gate, and for some unknown reason had still not returned; or c) neither of those unpleasant alternatives had happened, and he was simply going about his everyday business, absent from home at this moment, again having neglected to lock up (and having left his hat and coat behind), and by pure coincidence had also been absent every time in the last three days when his daughter had phoned the house.

  You wouldn’t earn a police commendation for working out which of those options seemed least likely.

  Lucy stepped through into the back alley. ‘How often have you tried to contact your father in the last few days, Janet?’

  The woman followed her out. ‘First it was every few hours, but then … I mean yesterday and last night, it was once every ten minutes.’

  ‘Is your father hard of hearing, by any chance?’

  ‘He wears a hearing aid, but no … he can hear when the phone’s ringing. He normally answers straight away.’

  Lucy surveyed the alley. It was narrow, cobbled, and little more than a service passage running behind the row of houses. At present, it was clear of vehicles, or bins, or sacks of rubbish. On the other side, a high red-brick wall rose about ten feet, screening off the rest of the estate.

  Lucy wasn’t comforted by this. A narrow backstreet hidden from view on one side.

  She turned back to the gate – and stopped in her tracks. Like the house’s front door, the back gate had been painted a bright canary-yellow, but on the outside it had been spattered top to bottom with dried black trickle stains.

  ‘This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’ Janet Dawson looked genuinely surprised. ‘Dad’ll go mad if he sees that. He hates scruffiness.’

  ‘He’d scrub it off, would he? Even though it’s on the outside?’

  ‘Certainly. As soon as he saw it.’

  Which likely means this has happened since he went missing, Lucy thought to herself. Or did it happen at the time he went missing?

  She wondered what might have caused it. A vehicle travelling at speed would have kicked up ground water, spraying the gate, though not today of course; it was sunny today, unusually warm for mid-September. She glanced around. The cobblestones were bone-dry. Thinking about it, the last time they’d had proper rain – the sort that would leave proper puddles – was on Tuesday afternoon.

  Three days ago.

  Alan Rodwell was somewhere in his late twenties, bald, bespectacled and bearded. He stood barefoot on his front doorstep, wearing mismatched shorts and a T-shirt, blinking at Lucy’s warrant card as she explained who she was and why she was here. A few seconds later, his wife, Sam, came down the hall from the kitchen. She was about the same age, a petite woman, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but with flipflops on her feet. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and plain, pale features still marked with makeup from the previous night.

  ‘We haven’t seen Harry for a couple of days,’ Alan Rodwell said, shaking his head.

  ‘When do you think you last saw him?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Could be a week ago, easily. I don’t keep a record.’

  ‘So definitely not since last Tuesday?’

  ‘Nah, no way.’

  ‘Do you ever hear him?’ Lucy asked. ‘I mean through the dividing wall between the houses?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ This time it was the woman who answered. ‘In fact, you can hear his TV now. It’s been on for ages. It was on all night last night, and … oh?’

  Only belatedly did this seem to strike her as strange.

  ‘It was on all night?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘And the night before, I think. And … maybe … hell, I don’t know … maybe the night before that, as well.’

  For the last three days in fact, Lucy thought.

  ‘It never occurred to you, maybe, to go and knock on his door?’

  Oddly, the couple glanced at each other with half-smiles, as if they were harbouring some mischievous secret.

  ‘We don’t really like to complain,’ Alan Rodwell said. ‘I’ll be honest, Harry does that quite a bit with us.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Whenever we’ve got friends round,’ Sam Rodwell explained. ‘During the summer holidays usually. He gets upset if our barbecues go on too late and comes around, making a fuss. We don’t want to do that back to him … he’d just think it was retaliation.’

  ‘And, you know …’ Alan Rodwell shrugged. ‘Complaining’s not really our thing.’

  Lucy looked at them askance. ‘I didn’t mean knock on his door to complain, I mean to check if everything was all right.’

  ‘Oh …’ Their impish smiles faded.

  They shuffled their feet awkwardly but didn’t look guilty or afraid. Hardened criminals often had the ability to brazen things out when they were under suspicion; they could put on a front that even a seasoned detective might find it difficult to penetrate. But when ordinary people like these two had done something wrong, there were usually clear signs. Not so on this occasion. It was as though it hadn’t even struck them yet that they might be in the frame.

  ‘You’ve been hearing his television play continuously since – when?’ Lucy said. ‘Could it have been as far back as last Tuesday?’

  ‘Around then, I suppose,’ Sam Rodwell replied. ‘Tuesday night was probably the first night we heard when it hadn’t been turned off.’

  ‘That’s right,’ her husband agreed. ‘We were in bed and I could hear gunfire – like movie gunfire, you know. And cowboy film music. I said to Sam, “Christ, Harry’s pulling a late one.”’

  Lucy nodded, and scrawled some notes in her pocket-book, one of which was to check if there’d been a western on TV late on Tuesday night.

  ‘Is this going to take long?’ Sam Rodwell asked. ‘You see, we were just going to—’

  ‘It’ll take as long as it needs to, I’m afraid, Mrs Rodwell. We have a pensioner missing, and we’d like to get to the bottom of whatever’s happened to him. So, I’d like you both to throw your minds back to Tuesday. Not just the night, but during the daytime as well. Did anything unusual happen? Doesn’t have to be serious, but anything that seemed like a break from the norm, apart from the telly being left on?’

  Their faces turned blank as they tried to think it through.

  ‘You didn’t hear any raised voices, perhaps?’ Lucy prompted them. ‘Any shouting or even laughing?’

  They still looked blank.

  ‘Any vehicles coming
and going? Maybe at the back of the house?’

  ‘Oh yes, wait …’ Sam Rodwell said. ‘There was something like that. Hell, I think this was on Tuesday night too. We heard like a screeching of tyres along the Backs.’

  Lucy watched her carefully. ‘Definitely along the Backs?’

  The young woman nodded. ‘Like a vehicle was tearing away, you know. It was quite unusual, because it’s very narrow back there.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that now,’ her husband said. ‘Only lasted a second and then it was gone.’

  ‘What time would this have been?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sam thought about it again. ‘We weren’t in bed at that stage, so not too late. Half-past ten, something like that.’

  ‘You don’t really think something bad could have happened to Harry, do you?’ Alan asked, finally sounding concerned.

  ‘That, sir,’ Lucy replied, ‘is what I’m trying to discover.’

  ‘What do we think about the daughter?’ Stan Beardmore asked from Lucy’s laptop screen.

  Lucy sat back in her office chair. ‘I think she’s genuine. She took a long time coming around to check, but she lives in Blackburn, plus she’s a radiographer at the hospital there, so she works shifts. Sounds like this morning was the first chance she had to visit.’

  ‘And the neighbours?’

  ‘There’s no one in No. 6. An old lady owns it, but she’s in long-term care. The Rodwells, the couple who reported the speeding vehicle, live at No. 10. I don’t get any particularly bad vibes about them. Typical young suburbanites. Bit self-centred maybe, but who wasn’t at that age?’

  ‘These were the ones Hopkins didn’t get on with?’

  ‘I don’t think it was a case of him not getting on with them. Sounds more like the odd disagreement. Plus, if they were involved, wouldn’t they just have turned his telly off, locked the house up, tried to make it look like he’d gone away?’

  ‘Not if they wanted to make it look like he’d been attacked by an intruder,’ Beardmore suggested.

  ‘Outside his house at the back?’ Lucy said. ‘Late at night? If you were making a story up, would you seriously expect someone to buy that?’

  Detective Sergeant Kirsty Banks, who was sitting on the desk behind Lucy, now cut in. She was a hefty woman, with an unruly mop of blonde hair and a penchant for wearing big cardigans over her T-shirts and jeans, though as it was warm today and electric fans whirred in the otherwise empty CID office, the cardigan at least had come off.