Perfect People (54 page)

Back in his den, and logged on, he saw that he had sixty-two new emails. Wearily, he slumped back in his chair and scrolled down through them.

Then he froze.

He leaned forward, hands poised over the keyboard, staring at the screen, barely able to believe what he was seeing.

It was an email from Luke and Phoebe.

On a computer monitor, in a room at Sussex Police Headquarters, Luke and Phoebe stood side by side, each with an arm around the other. They appeared to be in a small studio, with a plain grey background, which gave nothing away about their location. Luke wore a sweat shirt, jeans and trainers, Phoebe a purple tracksuit and trainers. Clearly visible beside them was a television screen, with the CNN morning headlines of today.

The children looked, Naomi had to admit to herself, happy and relaxed.

‘Hallo, Parents,’ Luke said. ‘See! We’re fine!’

‘Hallo, Parents!’ Phoebe said. ‘Actually, we’re great!’

At the end of the clip the image froze. Naomi stared at it through tears.
My children
, she was thinking.
Luke, Phoebe, my babies.
Then she closed her eyes, unable to look any more.

Please, God, let me wake up and find out that this has all been some horrible dream.

Pelham, Humbolt, Renate Harrison and the computer geek, Cliff, were in the room with John and Naomi, seated around a table.

‘What are your chances of tracing the email, Cliff?’ the detective inspector asked.

Cliff, in clothes as grimy and crumpled as before, looked no less tired at two thirty on a Monday afternoon than he had at ten o’clock on Saturday morning. Pushing his hair back with his hands, he said, ‘The thing is, if you want to make an email anonymous and you know what you’re doing, you can make it anonymous. It’s not a problem.’

‘Can you explain how to us?’ Tom Humbolt asked.

The computer analyst gave a nervous laugh, then, blinking furiously at the table, said, ‘There are several different ways. They mostly involve routing an anonymous email from server to server around the world, with software designed to delete its own footprints as it goes. If I’m right in the way I think this has been sent – and it’s the way I would have done it – you’d have to physically send me round the world, tracking it back, trying to find the footprints in every server it’s been through.’

‘How long would that take?’ Naomi asked.

‘Assuming we could even find every server, gosh, I don’t know.’ He gave another nervous giggle. ‘Months.’ Then, staring at the table again and blinking furiously, he said, ‘That’s not the answer you want to hear, is it?’

Dave Pelham leaned forward, placed his elbows on the table, then pressed his fingers together to form a bridge. Resting his chin on it, he said to Humbolt, ‘The lab have a copy of this?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The detective sergeant directed much of his reply at John and Naomi. ‘They’re enhancing the sound to see if they can pick up any background noise that might give us clues about where they are.’

John glanced at his watch, then caught Naomi’s eye. They were going to have to leave soon for the airport.

Pelham said to both of them, ‘I really think someone should accompany you, in the background.’

Naomi shook her head adamantly. ‘You read their instructions, Detective Inspector. We can’t take the gamble.’

John said, ‘They haven’t given us much time, have they?’

‘That’s deliberate,’ Pelham said. ‘We barely have time to get anything in place. OK, if we don’t send anyone with you, then we need to get the cooperation of the Italian police.’

‘NO!’ Naomi was emphatic. ‘You have to let us handle this the way they are telling us.’

‘Mrs Klaesson, let me make this clear. We never accede to demands of kidnappers.’

‘What demands? They’re not asking for anything. They’re saying
if we wish to meet them
. What kind of
demand
is that?’

‘These people, whoever they are who have abducted your children, are clearly highly professional and well organized. If you do what they are requesting without adequate police back-up, you and Dr Klaesson would be taking an unacceptable risk with your safety.’

‘My children come above everything,’ she replied. ‘I don’t care what risks I have to take to get them back. With respect, doing anything less than they ask in that email is what I would call an unacceptable risk.’

The plane was sinking steadily on its landing approach. Naomi, gripping an empty bottle of mineral water, her tray still down, sat squeezing her eyes shut against a headache that two paracetamol had done nothing to relieve.

John had a science magazine open in front of him but hadn’t turned the page in an hour. How could either of them concentrate on anything?

A stewardess, hurrying, took the empty bottle and slammed her tray shut. Minutes later, the plane touched down. The engines bellowed in reverse thrust. She felt the seat belt dig into her, then they were taxiing.

Rome. A short while ago they had been home; then they had been in a room at police headquarters; then in a speeding police car with a motorcycle escort. Now they were in Rome.

‘OK, hon?’ John said.

She eked out a tearful smile. In a hotel room in this city they would get instructions. They would be reunited with Luke and Phoebe. In her hopes, they would all go back home together, and this nightmare would fade away into the past.

The entrance was a busy modern lobby in an old building. They sidestepped a horde of Japanese tourists being marshalled towards a coach, and reached the front desk. John filled in the forms, handed over their passports and a credit card, and declined the offer of help with their luggage, which consisted of her handbag, a small holdall and John’s laptop bag.

The clerk’s lapel badge said,
VITTORIO
. ‘Travel light, good thing, eh, very good!’ Vittorio flashed a smile that was wasted on them, and handed them their door card and minibar key.

‘Do you have any messages or mail for us?’ Naomi asked, looking around, scanning faces in the lobby, wondering if the person Luke and Phoebe’s email had said was going to make contact with them was already here.

‘One moment, huh? I check.’ He turned round and peered at the rows of pigeon holes, then pecked at the computer keyboard. ‘Doctor Meeses Klayassion, no mail and – eh – no, no message. Anything come, no worry, straight to you room. Have a good stay in Roma!’

The room was narrow and gloomy, and even with all the lights on felt dark. Naomi sat down on the bed and looked at her watch. It was ten thirty local time, nine thirty in England. ‘Do you really think they will contact us, John?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why haven’t they yet? Why isn’t there any message?’

‘Hon, they –
whoever
– they’ll know we’ve only just arrived. Give it time.’

‘DI Pelham has contacted the Italian police, hasn’t he? I bet he has.’

‘He agreed he wouldn’t, provided we sent him an email by midnight telling him we were OK.’

‘I don’t believe him. I think he’s contacted them, and that’s why we’re not going to hear from Luke and Phoebe, or whoever’s taken them. Pelham has blown it.’

‘Give them time.’ He walked over to the window. It was a huge, heavy old sash, double-glazed, with a view down on to a busy street. He unclipped the catch and slid the outer unit upwards. Immediately, he felt a cold draught from the chill night air, and heard the rasp of mopeds and motorcycles, the roar of car engines, the cacophony of horns, the endless crazed symphony of a Rome evening.

He let the window drop shut again, set his laptop up on the small writing table and took out his adaptor kit. After a couple of aborted attempts he was logged on.

There were twenty-seven new emails. Running his eyes down them, he felt a sudden beat of excitement, and instantly double-clicked the ninth. ‘Hon,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

‘What’s in Dubai?’ Naomi asked.

‘I have absolutely no more idea than you do, hon. Anyhow, it’s maybe not the final destination.’

‘It sounds it, if we’re being collected by car.’

John wrote the details down on a slip of hotel notepaper, then logged off, opened the earlier email from Luke and Phoebe and again played the video clip of them.

Staring at the screen, Naomi put an arm around his shoulder. ‘I know they haven’t been all we dreamed of, that they’re not perfect, but I don’t know how I could cope if anything happens to them. You do think they’re still alive, don’t you?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, trying to sound confident, trying to mask his doubts from her.

They must be alive, still
, he thought.
In this clip, with this morning’s CNN news they are alive. Whoever has taken them, and whatever their agenda, they must still be alive at this moment, and all we can do is keep obeying the instructions. And hope.

Then, to try to keep Detective Inspector Pelham off their backs and to prevent him from involving the Italian police, he sent an email to him.

Twenty minutes later, when he logged on again, there was a reply from Pelham.

John logged off again, then phoned down to the front desk and booked a taxi to the airport for seven in the morning.

A million placards, some from hotels, some from car rental companies, some in English, some in Arabic, were thrust at John and Naomi by a clamouring horde of people as they walked out through customs, into the air-conditioned cool of the cavernous arrivals hall. They looked around, increasingly anxiously:
AVIS
,
HILTON
,
HERTZ
,
NOUJAIM
,
THOMAS COOK
,
DR HAUPTMAN
. Then they saw it.

KLAESSON
.

A short Middle-Eastern man in a grey suit with damp patches under the arms, a cheap white shirt and plain black tie, greeted them eagerly in bad English.

‘I Elias,’ he said. ‘Come driving you.’ Then, despite John’s attempts to resist, he took both the holdall and the laptop bag, and led the way through the melee and out into the cloyingly warm evening air.

It was seven o’clock and already almost completely dark. Just a few bloody, red streaks stained the sky as they followed him across an open parking lot to a white Mercedes in a meter bay. ‘Where are you taking us?’ John asked.