The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  ‘How badly?’ Hanlon said. By that she really meant, was

  he still alive?

  Childs shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He’d been hit in the head and the body. I know that.’

  Oh God, thought Hanlon, a head shot. Childs had obviously done his best. The blood that soaked him was testimony to that. Behind Childs three SOCO officers had arrived and were busy suiting up. In a minute they’d be starting on the house and Whiteside’s flat. Now that the crime scene had been preserved, other officers were gathering at both ends of the now sealed-off road to search that perimeter. She could see Ludgate pointing at houses in the street and sending officers off for house-to-house enquiries. She couldn’t fault Ludgate for efficiency, that was for sure.

  She turned her attention back to Childs. The uniform had stood aside to let them be together. Childs looked immensely vulnerable. Tears rolled down his face. ‘I did my best, ma’am.’ He started to shake and sat down heavily on the pavement, as if he was going to faint.

  Hanlon sat next to him. She wanted to put her arm round him. She wanted to squeeze him tightly to her, heedless of the sticky blood that adhered to the youngster’s body. But she couldn’t. Not yet. She made gentle, soothing noises like you do to calm a child. In the distance she could hear the bad-tempered officer shouting, ‘Where the hell are those temporary barriers, I want this road properly sealed off, and tell those idiots over there to get back inside. The whole road’s a crime scene until I say otherwise.’ Windows down the length of the street were open and faces were looking out, intrigued by the commotion. ‘It’s not your fault. You did everything you could have done,’

  she said.

  Childs’ head was bowed and she could smell the heavy, ferrous tang of Whiteside’s blood. She saw his shoulders heave as he sobbed and she thought, he’s only nineteen. Her grim-faced colleagues were taping off Whiteside’s door at what was now the centre of a crime scene.

  A sergeant approached Hanlon hesitantly. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I’ll take Tom back to the station now, if that’s OK.’

  She nodded. She herself would have had Childs down there practically immediately. Theoretically, Childs, the discoverer of the body, was a suspect. It would be time for him to make a formal statement and doubtless for his hands to be tested in a kind of embarrassed way, for GSR. Hanlon spoke softly to the boy and Childs nodded and stood up. The tracks of his tears had put streaks in the dried blood that smeared his cheeks. He looked at his blood-covered hands and arms almost in surprise.

  ‘Go with the sergeant, Constable,’ she said gently. ‘I’ll be round to see you later, but just now I’ve got work to do.’

  Childs nodded and the sergeant led him away to an unmarked car. Hanlon straightened up and looked for someone she knew. A senior officer who she recognized, DI Clarke, waved her over to him. As she walked towards him she was stopped by Sergeant Thompson, who’d been there with her for the Cunningham bust. ‘Sorry, ma’am, I know you’re busy, I just want to say how gutted we are.’ Thompson was shaking with suppressed emotion.

  ‘Do you know how he is, Sergeant?’ asked Hanlon. She knew that Thompson was a friend of Whiteside’s. They were sports fans and drinking buddies. They’d go and watch cricket together in the summer, rugby in the winter. Thompson shook his head. ‘No, ma’am, not yet. I know one of the paramedics who attended but there was no time to talk. At least he’s still alive. The one good thing is that young Childs over there found him shortly after and called it in. Otherwise Mark’d be gone by now. But gunshot trauma is really a hospital job, they got him there as soon as possible. When I know more I’ll text you. I’ve got your number.’

  ‘You do that, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘You do that.’

  Thompson said, ‘I don’t know who’ll lead the investigation but I hope it’s you, ma’am. I hope you get the bastard who did this.’

  Hanlon had been looking at the activity around them while he was speaking. Now she looked directly at him and the sergeant saw into her eyes for the first time. He knew her well enough and obviously their gazes had met in the past, but this time it was as though a darkened window had been opened and he could see the real Hanlon. The rage that burnt there was frightening. Later, when trying to describe it to a colleague,

  all he – a Catholic – could come up with was, ‘like the fires of hell’. Now she didn’t need to reply. She blinked and it was as if the shutters had come down again, and Thompson was looking into her habitually expressionless eyes.

  He knew then with a quiet certainty that Hanlon would make someone pay. He was grateful for that. Whiteside was his friend.

  Hanlon moved towards DI Clarke and Thompson breathed again. He noted, almost without surprise, that he was standing as rigidly as if he’d been on ceremonial parade.

  23

  Annette’s husband came home with her son, Sam, about one o’clock. They were both gleaming with that healthy, overwashed glow that swimming gives you and smelt strongly of chlorine. Sleek from the pool, they were like upholstery that had been steam-cleaned, or a valeted car. By contrast, there was a tangible air of gloom in the untidy sitting room.

  ‘You OK?’ he said to his wife, who looked unusually preoccupied. Declan wondered if something bad had happened to her mother, who wasn’t in the best of health.

  ‘In a minute,’ she said, holding her hand, palm up to him to forestall any conversation, then, ‘Sammy, darling, did you see Peter at school yesterday?’

  Sam looked puzzled. ‘Yes, Mum, but I didn’t get to speak to him. We had that football match in Southgate, and he’s not in the team, and then when we got back, like after lunch, he was in the field for biology looking at their insect traps, Bradley McDonald got a stagbeetle! Everyone was like, a stagbeetle, and we’re in different sets for maths. Why?’

  ‘Oh, no reason,’ said Annette. So far, so good, she thought. Peter obviously wasn’t due to come here or Sam would have known.

  Her son went upstairs to play Black Ops or some such game on his Xbox. Declan had dropped the sports bag containing

  their towels, costumes and dirty clothes on the floor by the sofa. Bet he leaves it there, she thought, he’ll be off down the pub in a minute. He picked up the phone, the landline, and punched in the number to check any missed calls. She watched as his face grew puzzled. He put the phone back on its holder.

  ‘That was Kathy Reynolds. She was calling to tell Peter she’d pick him up from here later today. She’s abroad again. Is he staying somewhere else? He usually comes here, doesn’t he?’ Annette suddenly felt very sick indeed. Her head swam and she felt faint as the terrible implications sank in, her worst fears coming true. ‘Oh God, Declan,’ she said to her husband. ‘Oh

  my God.’

  Declan stared at her, uncomprehending, and Annette told him what she thought that meant. Jesus Christ, said Declan. Annette started crying while he tried to comfort her.

  For a couple of minutes they sat together on the sofa as they tried to think of something other than the obvious to do. Declan broke the silence. ‘We’ll have to call the police,’ he said. ‘And Kathy. Do you want me to do it?’ Annette sniffed and shook her head.

  ‘I’ll do it, darling. But I’m going round to her flat first, I want to check he’s not there. He might be there right now, you know, like Home Alone. He’s got a key, after all. Please, it’s only five minutes away.’

  Declan nodded and acquiesced. Why not? he thought. He had a terrible desire to shout at Annette, to attack her verbally. How could you be so forgetful? he wanted to shout. How could you have been so criminally stupid! He managed to control himself. He stood up and kissed her hair and squeezed her hand. She automatically squeezed his hand back.

  ‘Oh, Declan,’ she said. ‘What have I done. It’s all my fault.’ Yes, he thought. It is.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘Go round there, take your phone. If he’s not there call the police, Kathy, and then me, OK. I’ll be waiting here for your call. I’ll keep
an eye on Sam.’ She nodded and stood up. She left the room and returned a second later. ‘Have you seen my car keys?’ she asked. ‘I don’t

  know where I’ve put them.’ She started to cry again.

  Annette sat outside Kathy’s flat in her old, scuffed Ford Mondeo. The pockets in the door of both the driver and passenger side were full to overflowing with old parking tickets from machines and empty sweet and crisp packets. There was a child’s woolly hat on the floor in the passenger well, left over from March’s cold weather, and a stack of magazines that she’d meant to get rid of in the recycling but hadn’t.

  Her friend’s small, ground-floor flat looked immaculate. There was a tiny piece of front garden, the lawn a manicured strip of green between the flat and the road, and the path was swept, with a little tub of flowers. It was all so neat. Just like Kathy’s life.

  She thought of her own house. Its small, rusted, metal gate falling off its hinges, the path choked with weeds, and what was left of the lawn dotted with old plastic toys of Sam’s that she’d never got round to clearing away. The paint around her windows was flaking badly; she couldn’t afford to pay anyone and she didn’t have the time to do it herself. Annette felt as though she was slowly drowning in a sea of inescapable tasks while every day the tide rose higher.

  The hope that maybe Peter would be there after all had proved illusory. She had thought it would. No one had answered the door. Peter had gone.

  She took a deep breath and looked at her mobile. Its screen full of harmless apps seemed to mock her. They promised so much: cookery apps so you’d never run out of ideas or

  knowledge, restaurant apps so you’d always know where to go, games so you’d never be bored, search engines so you’d always know everything, Google Earth, so you’d always know where you were.

  But, she thought bitterly, it was all lies, wasn’t it. The cookery apps were pointless. Her food was 90 per cent convenience: pizzas, sausages, fish fingers, burgers, baked beans, the usual things that people actually ate and 10 per cent what the family as a unit would agree to eat together. Planning meals was like a Venn diagram, one would eat one thing, the others wouldn’t, and she didn’t have the time, patience or money to cook three different variations on a theme every night. The only unanimity lay in dishes like spaghetti Bolognese, chilli con carne and cottage pie. We’re a family bound together with mince, she thought. She couldn’t afford to go to restaurants, TripAdvisor, don’t make me laugh, so much for those apps, and she didn’t have time for games.

  And what use Google Earth with its pinpoint accuracy?

  Would it find Peter? No, it wouldn’t. Would playing Candy Crush distract her from guilt? No.

  Briefly, she wondered what the number was for non-emergency police calls, then she thought, if a twelve-year-old missing since end of school yesterday doesn’t qualify as an emergency, what does?

  Heart thudding, head throbbing, stomach knotting, she dialled nine, nine, nine and asked for the police, took a deep breath. ‘Hello, yes, my name’s Annette Fielding and I’d like to report a child missing.’ Tears started to run down her cheeks and she rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

  And in Stuttgart Max had ordered coffee and left the table when Kathy checked her voicemail and called Annette. Her

  conversation was short and to the point. Kathy didn’t cry, she didn’t scream, although she felt like doing both. She clicked her phone off. She looked around the restaurant in disbelief, as though she was amazed that life could carry on so normally. All thought was virtually suspended. Every beat of her heart said, this cannot be. She felt as if the roof had fallen in on top of her. There must be some mistake.

  The fat man on his own carried on eating his spatzeli. The two young lovers were still holding hands and looking at each other over the tablecloth. A tired-looking, quite drunk, English businessman in a crumpled suit was reading a book propped up on the salt and pepper in front of him. All was as before, except in her head, where everything had exploded into Edvard Munch-like despair. I must get home, she thought.

  Images of Peter flashed through her head in bewildering succession. Terrible thoughts of what might be happening to him, mixed with random memories of his face. The police would meet her flight, Annette had said. She had felt Annette’s guilt and pain through the iPhone in her hand, but she had no desire to say anything comforting. She felt like throwing up. She was stunned. I must go, she thought, and stood up, then immediately sat down. She was too unsteady on her feet. Her legs were like jelly. I must tell Max I’m going, she thought. But I can’t say why, I can’t face talking.

  When Max rejoined her at the table, he thought to himself as he saw her across the restaurant that she looked ethereally beautiful. Before, she’d been funny, sexy, warm. Now, she was like a woman transformed. She was staring expressionlessly into space. Momentarily he wondered if he had done something, or said something, terrible to offend her. They had been speaking German, Kathy’s was so good Max had to keep reminding himself how unusual this was from a British person. Now she

  switched to English. Her beautiful eyes held his and she spoke as if she were reading a script, her voice flat and uninflected. ‘Max. I need to leave now. Something’s happened. No, I’m not going to talk about it now, I’m sorry. There’s a taxi rank on the corner.’ He opened his mouth to speak and she touched him gently as a feather on the lips. ‘Please don’t say anything.

  I can’t talk right now.’

  She stood up and left. He watched her back retreat through the restaurant. Kathy always had excellent posture, she didn’t stoop like some tall people, but now she was walking drawn up to her full height in an almost exaggerated way. She didn’t look back or left or right. ‘Entschuldigung. Zahlen, bitte,’ he said to a waiter, asking for the bill.

  He realized she had left without taking her small suitcase. He would look after it for her until he saw her again. He guessed it had to be serious. Most of us can recognize when someone has just had bad news, but Max couldn’t even begin to guess how bad it could be.

  24

  Enver watched from his position outside the flat as the SOCO officers came and started their work, while various other uniforms sealed off the premises and started searching the roof and alley. These were the parameters that he had defined as the primary and secondary search sites. He had already started a crime-scene log, which he’d handed over to the SIO. He had also taken a witness statement from Mr Colin Hargreaves, the formerly abusive, but now extremely cooperative, pensioner. Hargreaves seemed pathetically eager to help. He kept smiling nervously at Enver, his false teeth slipping around wetly in his slack mouth. He reminded Enver of a chastised dog, keen to make amends.

  What he told Enver was this: two men in council workclothes

  had arrived, had been admitted to the Yilmaz flat, there’d been some shouting, a general commotion which the old man had put down to objections to doing what they were told, then silence. The men had emerged carrying the large refuse sacks of the kind that were reinforced and strong enough to contain builders’ waste and rubble. Hargreaves said he assumed the bags contained rubbish. No description of the men beyond the fact that they were white and burly, both with hats, one a baseball cap, one a blue beanie. Hargreaves had no idea of the vehicle the men had arrived in. He said he’d heard doors

  slam after they disappeared down the staircase, so he assumed it was a van.

  The officer who had been put in charge, the SIO, was DCI Murray, someone Enver knew fairly well. Murray was regarded as reliable and thorough, but Enver thought he was actually a lazy sod who liked to spin things out for overtime purposes. He was known as ‘Never Hurry’ Murray. As if to confirm this nickname, as soon as he’d cordoned off the service road and checked the initial plan of action with Enver, Murray had put Enver in charge of the crime scene and disappeared to ‘sort things out, logistics wise. We need an incident room.’ In Murray speak, that meant finding an office and drinking a lot of tea. Enver resigned himself mentally
to a very late finish. He sent officers to check the shops below for CCTV footage and to get witness statements. He arranged to have door-to-door enquiries down the street and he also sent an officer to try to track down the gang of youths who’d been hanging around when he and Hanlon had first arrived. If anyone had seen anything, they would have, although the chances of them helping the police with their enquiries would be

  practically nil.

  He had been so preoccupied with the various tasks in hand, determined not to let Hanlon down, that strangely, the first he heard of the Whiteside shooting was when the outsize bulk of Corrigan, all six foot five of the assistant commissioner, loomed up the metal steps that led to the roof where the flat was. Like Enver, he was finding the metal stairs hard going and he appeared in Enver’s sight inch by impressive inch as he grimly hauled his way up, knees protesting. The top of his head came first, followed by the rest of him in slow motion. It was like the visitation of a deity. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared. He climbed on to the flat roof, followed by

  two of his own men, hard-faced police that Enver had never seen before, one in uniform, one not. They fell in behind Corrigan, one on either side, like attendant priests.

  In the absence of Murray, Enver had been busy contacting the council for traffic and other CCTV sources to see if anything could be made of the van. If they had the number plate they could use the ANPR system. He wasn’t optimistic. They’d probably have fake plates, but it was worth a try. He told the council employee he’d be back in touch later and, like everyone else, he stopped what he was doing and stared at the assistant commissioner. Although Corrigan was wearing civilian clothes, chinos, a baggy shirt and deck shoes, Enver recognized him immediately and saluted. Like everyone else, he wondered, what had brought the assistant commissioner up here. To his horror, Corrigan bore down on him.