by LJ Ross
The car was packed and they were ready to go, but for a final nappy change. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, Anna realised they’d run out of nappies. How that could have happened, she didn’t know—but it had.
“I’ll head down to the shops,” Charles offered, checking the time on his watch.
Twenty past eight.
The corner shop would be open, as it always was in the early mornings, and it would only delay them by ten minutes at the most.
He’d take the car, to speed things up.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said, casting an eye around the empty landscape.
Not another person or car in sight.
Good.
“Lock the doors,” he said, for good measure.
When he heard Eve bolt the door, Charles walked swiftly to his car—now packed to the rafters with baby gear—and fired up the engine.
A moment later, and he was on the road.
* * *
A thought struck Anna as she was checking her office for any stray nappies that could be used to refresh what was beginning to smell like a toxic explosion inside her daughter’s Christmas onesie. Her attention diverted, she shifted Emma to her other hip and reached for one of the textbooks on her bookcase, flipping through the pages until she found the image and the reference she was looking for.
…atop the highest throne…
“That must be it,” she said to herself, and Emma made a humming noise in agreement. “We’ll ring your daddy from the road and let him know but, for now, I’ll leave the page open here.”
Downstairs, Eve walked through the various rooms to check all the lights had been switched off, giving herself something to do while they waited for Charles to return.
As she stepped out of the living room and back into the hallway, she caught a flicker of movement through one of the glazed side panels on either side of the front door.
There was no time to react.
Wood splintered as a battering ram broke through its sturdy locks, and the door flew open on its hinges to reveal four masked men, dressed entirely in black.
Eve had always wondered how she would react in a fight or flight scenario, and that day she had her answer.
She fought.
“ANNA!” she screamed to warn the girl, and made a grab for the vase of flowers on the hallway table.
Two of them came for her, dark, faceless figures who saw her not as a person, but as a number.
She swung at them—a glancing blow that missed its mark.
Seconds later, she hit the floor, knocked down by a single, brutal blow to her face.
* * *
Anna heard Eve’s warning shout, and knew immediately.
They had come.
Adrenaline surged through her body, and she heard the quick tread of footsteps climbing the stairs. There were four rooms to search before they reached her study, and she needed to make sure they didn’t get that far.
Thinking quickly, she knew there was only one thing to do.
Hands shaking, she fumbled for the emergency dummy she kept in the pocket of her jacket, and slid it into Emma’s mouth.
“Shh,” she said, and walked quickly to the tall storage cupboards they used for spare jackets and coats.
Down the corridor, she heard the crash and bang of cupboards being searched.
Struggling out of her coat, knowing it would have her comforting scent, she spread it as a makeshift bed and laid the baby on top of it.
“Shh, baby girl, shh,” she said, tapping a finger to her lips.
With one last, loving look, she closed the cupboard door and hurried out of the room and into the corridor, in time to intercept the two men who were on the cusp of searching the final room on that floor.
Anna held her arms aloft, in a gesture of surrender.
The two men might have admired her grit, if they had the capacity to feel any empathy at all.
Her wrists were tied behind her back, her mouth was gagged, and a dark hood placed over her head.
“Stay smart, and nobody needs to get hurt,” one of them said, in a voice entirely without emotion. “Now, walk.”
CHAPTER 33
Charles was on his way back up the hill towards the house when the van came hurtling in the opposite direction, and he knew instantly what had happened.
What he had allowed to happen.
Viciously shoving aside his feelings, he swerved towards the front of the van, trying to force it into the hedge, but its driver anticipated the move and increased his speed even further to avoid it.
Charles turned quickly to catch the number plate of the van, but it was smeared with mud, in a trick as old as the hills.
He gunned the engine of his vehicle and reversed with precision and speed back down the hill, but he was too late; the van had already disappeared.
Beside himself with guilt and grief, Charles raced back up the hill, swerving into the driveway with a squeal of tyres. He threw open the car door and made a grab for the weapon he had in the back, covering the ground at speed.
He saw the door hanging limply on its broken hinges and, beyond it, his wife, the mother of his children, lying face down on the hard, stone floor.
“Eve,” he whispered.
He was with her in seconds, placing two fingers on the side of her neck as he felt for a pulse.
Weak, but still there.
He turned her, and let out a gasp of pain as he caught sight of her face, bloodied and torn.
Ruthlessly banking down all the hurt and the anger that threatened to overwhelm him, Charles reached for his mobile phone with unsteady hands.
He called the ambulance, first.
Once he had been assured they were on their way, he was on the cusp of making the difficult call to his son, when a sound stopped him.
The distant sound of a baby’s cry.
Ears cocked, half thinking he’d imagined it, Charles listened intently.
There it was again.
“Emma,” he said, with a sob.
He placed a coat over Eve, to keep her warm, and then took the stairs two at a time, searching every room, following the sound of her cries. Finally, he reached Anna’s study, where the cries came loudly from the direction of a tall built-in cupboard in the corner.
Charles crossed the room in three long strides and snatched open the door, to find his granddaughter’s face staring up at him. She’d been crying, but not too long, if he was any judge, and his trained eye spotted Anna’s coat tucked around her, as well as the dummy lying discarded beside it.
She’d done her very best, protecting her child.
Overcome, Charles lifted Emma into his arms and held her close, blinking away tears.
“Grandad’s got you, darling. Shh, now, don’t cry. Grandad’s here.”
* * *
Ryan was nearing the junction that would take him off the A1 southbound and onto the A19 dual carriageway towards the east end of the city of Newcastle, where Northumbria Police Headquarters was now based, on Middle Engine Lane in an area known as Wallsend. It was a journey he took most days on roads he knew like the back of his hand.
He was approaching a roundabout, when the call came through from his father.
I’m sorry…
Anna has been taken…
Ryan said very little; he couldn’t have found the words to express what he felt in that moment.
He could only act.
His body took over, shifting the car into another lane and then accelerating around the roundabout to return to the A1 and retrace his journey, this time at the kind of speed he’d been trained to use in emergency scenarios, such as this.
He switched on his blue lights, and rang the office.
Back at his desk, Phillips answered on the first ring. “DS Phillips.”
“They’ve taken Anna.”
Phillips thought he had misheard. “What? What was that?”
“Anna. They’ve taken her.”
Ryan undertook
a vehicle doing seventy, and returned to the fast lane. The landscape whipped past him in a blur of blue and green, but he saw nothing except Anna’s face when he’d left her this morning.
He’d left her…
“When?” Phillips demanded. “Where?”
“The house, less than ten minutes ago,” Ryan said, in a horrible, toneless voice he barely recognised. “Send help.”
Phillips was already keying in the order to the Control Room to dispatch squad cars, and planned to contact the forensics team as soon as he’d spoken to Morrison.
But, first, he needed to be sure Ryan wouldn’t drive himself off the road.
He needed to keep him very, very calm.
“Where are you now,” he asked, in an even, unthreatening voice.
“Morpeth junction. A1, northbound.”
“Good. All right. Do you feel competent to drive? If not, you need to pull over.”
“I need to get there. Time is slipping away.”
“I’ve got squad cars on the way, and an ambulance, if one hasn’t been dispatched already,” Phillips said.
Across the bank of desks, Lowerson and Yates had fallen silent, listening intently to the one-sided conversation with growing alarm. When MacKenzie entered the room with cups of vending machine coffee, Yates held up a hand to warn her something was amiss, and she hurried across to take a seat beside Frank.
Spotting her, he wrote a single word on his notepad, and circled it twice.
‘MORRISON’.
Rising again, she hurried from the room to fetch their Chief Constable, hardly knowing what to tell her, except it was a matter of extreme urgency, judging by the pale, horrified expression on her husband’s face.
There could be only one reason for that, and she could hardly bear to speak it aloud.
“Ryan, give me an update. Where are you now? What speed are you doing, son?”
“Passing Longwitton,” he said, in a voice that was barely audible. “Sixty or seventy.”
“All right, I need you to slow that down, you’re going through a village. I know you don’t want to cause any accidents. I’ve just been told that the ambulance has arrived, for your mum.”
Ryan heard the words from far away, as if he were swimming underwater, but some part of him recognised the good sense in what his friend had said, and he eased his foot off the accelerator.
“She’s gone, Frank. They’ve taken her; she’s gone.”
Phillips closed his eyes, knowing this particular nightmare only too well.
“We’ll get her back, you just wait and see. Keep that speed under forty for the rest of the way, now.”
“All right, Frank,” Ryan said, and kept his friend on the line until he reached Elsdon.
CHAPTER 34
Ryan arrived home soon after the ambulance, bringing his car to a jerky stop beside it. He walked unsteadily to the front door, trance-like, not quite in command of himself in that moment, so great was the shock of her loss.
He stepped through the broken doorway to find his mother being tended to by a couple of paramedics, her face covered with blood which had spattered across the wall. His father stood a short way away, holding Emma in his arms while she fed from a warm bottle of milk.
Even in the midst of it all, he had looked after the child.
Spotting Ryan, his father’s face crumpled, and tears began to fall.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I failed you, son.”
Ryan shook his head and stepped inside the house, moving like an automaton.
“Nobody touches this doorway,” he said, in a faraway voice. “Nobody touches anything, until the forensics team arrive.”
“Ryan?”
He held up a hand for quiet, and moved closer to speak to his mother, who was conscious again.
Seeing the damage done to her face, he flinched and closed his eyes for a moment, turning away. Bearing down, Ryan turned back again, and became the murder detective, his face shuttered against the pain of a loss so great, it could not be quantified.
“What did you see?” he asked. “Mum? What did you see?”
A description, he thought. I need a description.
“Son, now isn’t the time—”
“There is no more time,” Ryan said, simply.
“Black masks,” Eve mumbled, lifting a hand to shove her oxygen mask out of the way, ignoring the protests from the paramedics at her side. “Tried to warn Anna, but…they were too quick. Four of them, all men. Shorter than you, taller than Anna. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
Ryan knelt beside her and clasped her shaking hand.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Rest now, Mum. Let the doctors look after you.”
“But, what about—”
He stood up again, and signalled that the paramedics should move in. Both men watched as Eve was strapped to a stretcher and lifted outside, where she was taken to the ambulance.
“You should go with her, Dad,” Ryan said.
“I can’t leave you like this,” Charles said, scrubbing a hand over his swollen eyes. “Not like this.”
“She needs you,” Ryan said softly, and held his arms out for the baby.
Charles looked down at the child, then at his son, and wondered if she might be the one to help him, as a kind of talisman to ward off more of the evil that had already tainted their lives.
He transferred Emma into her father’s arms and took his son’s advice, knowing that Eve would be suffering from shock and needed him beside her.
He’d never felt more torn.
Then, a kind of miracle happened.
Charles looked back to see Emma reach up her little hand to touch her father’s face, and something thawed inside him, breaching the defences Ryan had erected in order to make the journey home. He held her close, rocking her as they waited for his team to arrive.
Before he left, Charles needed to tell Ryan one more thing.
“Anna was the one who protected her,” he said. “Not me. Not us. It was Anna who hid her inside the cupboard in the study, so they wouldn’t find her. She wrapped Emma inside her coat, so she wouldn’t catch cold.”
Ryan didn’t turn around.
He couldn’t.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, because he felt it was important. “It was mine.”
Charles shook his head. “No—”
“The ambulance is waiting, Dad.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Charles said, and turned away, having aged ten years in the space of an hour.
* * *
“Say that again, Frank.”
“The bastards have taken Anna,” Phillips said, as he reached for his coat. “Fifteen minutes ago, from their house in Elsdon.”
Morrison prided herself on being one of the coolest customers around, but this was too much, even for her.
She turned away to stare blindly out of the window, trying to imagine what Ryan must have been feeling in that moment, but failing.
“Control—?”
“Squad cars are on the way,” Phillips told her. “Ambulance has been and gone, and the docs are taking care of Ryan’s mum, who suffered facial injuries and is probably concussed.”
“The baby?”
“Safe and well,” Phillips replied. “I spoke directly with Ryan’s father, Charles, who wants me to get up there as quick as I can. I hope you don’t mind, ma’am, but I authorised the CSIs to attend the scene—”
“Don’t insult me, Frank. I’m authorising a full search. Anything and everything you need.”
That Ryan needs, Morrison amended, privately. It was the least she could do for him.
“Thank you,” Phillips said. “I’m going to make my way up there now, so he’s not left alone for too long.”
Morrison drew herself up to her full height, sufficiently in command of her emotions to turn around again. “Lowerson, Yates? I want you both firing on full cylinders to push ahead and find this son of a bitch. Call in all the help you need from neighbouring co
mmand units, and freeze all other non-urgent business. I want APW’s for all vehicles matching the description of the van and I want CCTV from all ANPR and other cameras in the vicinity.”
Lowerson and Yates nodded, their eyes over-bright with unspoken emotion.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“MacKenzie? You go with Frank, and stay there as long as you need to. Pass over anything useful to Jack and Mel, and be with your friend.”
Denise nodded, and gained a new level of respect for the woman standing before her.
As they turned to leave, Morrison threw a final remark over her shoulder.
“Man the phones,” she said. “They’ve taken her for a reason, and we’ll find out what that reason is, soon enough.”
CHAPTER 35
“What do I say to him? What can I tell him, to make this better?”
MacKenzie looked across at Phillips from the driver’s seat of their car, and then back at the road.
“What did he say to you, when I was taken?” she asked him, softly.
Phillips’ chin wobbled, and he turned to look out at the passing landscape.
“He told me we’d find you, together.”
“He was right.”
Phillips nodded, swallowing tears. “We were dealing with a different kind of animal, back then. We knew what the Hacker was, and that was terrifying, but there was a level of understanding. This is a walk into the unknown.”
“Then, we’ll learn,” she said, firmly. “We’ll do whatever it takes, because that’s what he did for us, Frank.”
She sucked in a tremulous breath.
“If we think, even for a moment, that Anna won’t survive this—or, if we let Ryan believe that—she’s as good as dead. Do you understand me, Frank? She’s alive, and she’s going to stay that way.”
Anna was her friend, and MacKenzie wasn’t about to lose the woman who’d been a sister to her, for the past five years.
“She’s alive,” Phillips repeated.
“That’s right. We’re nearly there, so put your game face on.”
Phillips would later recall his wife’s unshakable conviction, and think of it as a defining moment in the hours that followed.
Forty minutes after leaving Police Headquarters, they climbed the hill leading up to Ryan and Anna’s home, where they found Tom Faulkner had arrived just ahead of them with several members of his team. The Senior CSI was already in the process of tucking his hair into a hairnet before tipping up the elasticated hood on his polypropylene suit. A squad car was parked nearby, its officers already inside taking statements from Ryan and his parents—his mother having refused, point blank, to remain at the hospital in the nearby town of Rothbury.
