Stranger Child (12 page)

David spoke. ‘Tasha, can you please answer Inspector Robinson?’ Becky wasn’t sure whether her title was being used to scare Natasha or not, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. They all stayed silent, and when David looked at Becky she shook her head slightly. He got the message and resisted his obvious temptation to try to persuade his daughter to talk.

Nobody spoke for over two minutes.

‘It was books.’

‘Yes? What sort of books – novels, schoolbooks?’

‘Just books.’

‘Okay – so why did you leave the backpack?’

‘Forgot it.’

‘Did you report it lost?’

A shake of the head.

‘Whose books were they?’

‘Mine.’

‘What kind of books did you have, Tasha?’

A shrug.

‘Who was the boy at the station you were talking to? Did you know him?’

‘No.’

‘Why did you talk to him, then?’

A shrug.

‘Tasha, we know you caught the next train back. You never left the station, in fact. You arrived on one train, spoke to the boy, dumped your backpack and caught a train back fifteen minutes later. So why did you go all that way?’

‘Supposed to meet a friend.’

‘What’s the friend called?’

There was a pause. Natasha looked as if she thought about shrugging again, but seemingly realised that she should have known the name of her friend. The pause went on for quite a few seconds.

‘She’s called Serena.’

‘Does Serena have a surname?’

‘Dunno – she’s just Serena to me.’

And so it went on. Round and round in circles. They got nothing else from her. She didn’t know where this Serena lived, had no means of contacting her and, when pushed, Natasha answered, ‘She’s moved.’

Becky had one more card left to play. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out another photo.

‘Who’s this, then?’ she asked.

Natasha gave it an indifferent glance, clearly expecting to see another photo of the boy at the station. But it wasn’t. It was somebody else entirely.

The girl didn’t look up, but Becky saw her mouth open slightly and every muscle in her body went rigid. She waited, perched on the edge of her seat for no more than ten seconds. When she looked up, her face was wiped of expression.

‘I don’t know him,’ she said.

Her ability to present an impassive face was remarkable for one so young, but as far as Becky knew, nobody had the ability to control when their pupils dilated.

20

‘Boh, boh, beep, beep,’ Ollie said in his singsong voice as Emma carried him upstairs for his bath and bed. He seemed wide awake at the moment, his head bobbing from side to side, as if there were a tune in his head somewhere but he hadn’t yet learned to make the right notes. Fortunately, Emma knew that as soon as she put Ollie in his cot, he would go to sleep.

And long may it continue, she thought, given that neither she nor David seemed to have had a decent night’s sleep in days.

As soon as the police had left after dropping their bombshell, David had called his daughter back downstairs to the dining room. They had tried to speak to her about the drug trafficking, but once again had failed to make any progress.

‘Tasha, nobody’s blaming you for any of this. We know that sometimes people live in environments where drugs are commonplace, and that children can be made to do things they wouldn’t do out of choice. You won’t tell us about your life over the last six years, but anything you were forced to do is absolutely not your fault. Do you understand?’

David had been calm and reasonable with Natasha, but it hadn’t helped. In the end he had decided to go back to the office to work on a report he said he had been struggling to finish. Emma didn’t believe him. He wanted to go somewhere quiet and lick his wounds. He would be back for dinner, but for a while Emma had just enjoyed spending some time playing with her baby and pretending that everything was normal. Tasha, of course, was in her room and couldn’t be tempted downstairs.

Emma laid Ollie tenderly in his cot and bent down to give him a kiss, breathing in the aroma of baby powder and nuzzling her nose against his soft skin. She sat down in her comfy chair, just looking at her son as he drifted off to sleep. This had always been her idea of bliss, watching his eyes flutter for a while until they were fully closed and he was fast asleep. But the disruption created by Natasha’s arrival had ripped that gentle peace apart. It
wasn’t the child’s fault, but in spite of that – and hating herself for the thought – she wished she had stayed hidden.

The room suddenly felt hot and airless, guilt at her selfishness causing her cheeks to flush. She stood up and opened the window slightly, pulling the curtain across so that there was no danger of Ollie being in a draught.

Through the open window she could vaguely hear a voice, although she could hardly make out any words. Maybe she had left the radio on downstairs.

Then she heard one word. ‘When?’ She stayed completely still, her ears straining to hear more. There was silence for a few seconds. ‘
Please
– make it soon.’

Although the voice was using a pleading tone she had never heard before, there was no doubt in her mind that this wasn’t the radio. It was Natasha.

*

‘David, she was talking to somebody,’ Emma whispered into the kitchen phone, terrified that Natasha would come downstairs and hear her reporting back to David. ‘Yes, of course I’m sure. She sounded upset, but when I knocked on her door she refused to answer. I didn’t want her to know that I’d heard her, but when I tried the door she’d put something behind it again. I asked if she wanted to help me make a pizza, but I got no response.’

‘I was hoping this would happen,’ David said, and Emma could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Not that something would upset her, of course, but that she would use the phone I gave her to contact somebody from her other life.’

‘What, so we can trace them?’ Emma said, hope in her voice.

‘Yes I’m tracking all her calls. I put an app on the phone before I gave it to her. I can see who she’s called, read her texts and find out where she is at any given moment.’

‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’ Emma asked, uncertain whether she should applaud David’s cleverness or be appalled at his duplicity with his daughter.

‘Because I didn’t know if you would approve. If you thought it was wrong thing to do, I wouldn’t have put it past you to tell her.’

Emma was speechless.

‘Don’t give me the silent treatment, Emma. If she’d gone missing again, I wanted to know where she was. I’m not losing her again, and don’t forget that when she wandered off you were out of your mind with worry.’

‘I know,’ Emma said softly. If somebody had taken Ollie from her she would want to rip their throat out with her bare hands, so she could understand how David must feel.

Emma could hear David typing something into his keyboard.

‘I checked this morning, and up to now she hasn’t used her phone for anything. But it should show up now. Here we go.’

There was a pause.

‘Huh. That’s odd. Emma, are you sure you heard her talking? It couldn’t have been the radio?’

‘I’m positive. Why?’

‘Because I’m checking her records now, and she hasn’t made any calls. Her phone hasn’t been used at all since the day we gave it to her.’

*

It’s all going wrong. I’ve screwed up
.

Natasha was staring out of her bedroom window, seeing nothing. It had all seemed so easy to start with. Anything was better than the alternative. She would have been thrown in The Pit if she had refused – just for as long as it took to make her do as she was told – and then she would have gone the way of the others, ended up like Izzy.

She felt the back of her eyes sting but fought it. She might be wrong about Izzy. Maybe it wasn’t her body that the police had found. She should never have told Izzy about the job, though. It was dangerous and stupid. But she had needed somebody to tell her she was doing the right thing.

Now the police had that CCTV footage on the train. She’d been such an idiot, smiling at him like that. If it ever got out – got back to
them
– they would kill her. They would never trust her again.

Emma didn’t trust her either. For one awful moment when Natasha had come back into the house that morning, she had thought Emma was going to search her pockets. But she had refused to take the fleece off and had escaped up here, still wearing it. She had managed to hide everything, but it had been close.

Tonight she was going to have to sneak downstairs when they were asleep and do what she’d been told to do. The kitchen and the sitting room. Those were her instructions. She knew what to do. She’d already sorted David and Emma’s bedroom, and everything seemed to be working just fine.

Natasha knew she should be happy – this was payback time. But now the police had come nosing around, and she wasn’t supposed to let that happen. She would be punished. Surely she’d suffered enough?

And whose fault is that?
a little voice whispered in her ear.

She knew the answer. She knew who was to blame for all of it.

She was getting soft, living in this world where people played at being nice to each other. Nobody was nice really. She knew that – she’d seen it all her life. One minute nice as pie, next minute beating the shit out of each other.

Emma played at being nice, but Tasha knew what she really thought. She thought Tasha had disrupted her perfect life. Emma had replaced Tasha’s mum in this house and now she didn’t want to have to live with the daughter, even though she pretended otherwise.

If you think your life’s been messed up, Emma – you ain’t seen nothing yet
.

Tasha’s mum really
had
been nice, though, and Tasha had to hang on to that. She had to remember she wasn’t just doing this for herself. She was doing it for her dead mother.

You didn’t deserve to die, Mum
.

21

Tom was struggling to concentrate on his work and he really needed to get his focus back. He kept thinking about that SD card and the spreadsheet. He had finally told Leo about the password-protected file the night before; he had no idea why it worried him, but it kept niggling away like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he muttered, pulling his phone towards him and pressing the number for Becky’s extension.

‘Becky – update, please. My office.’ Quite why he was taking it out on Becky, he didn’t know. He took a deep breath.

Becky’s normally cheerful face was looking worried as she poked her head round the doorframe.

‘Is it safe to come in?’ she asked, flushing slightly as if she regretted her slightly facetious tone.

Tom gave her a lopsided smile of apology, and Becky pulled over a chair and sat down.

‘Okay, here’s where we’re at,’ she said, consulting the file she had brought with her. ‘The local guys have tracked down the boy Natasha spoke to briefly at the station and they found nothing on him at all. They asked why he’d taken the backpack she’d left on the bench, and he said he’d taken it to ask his mum what to do with it. The station was an unmanned one, so he had nobody to give it to. But he said he bumped into some mates on his way home, so he dumped it.’

‘Course he did. No doubt he can’t remember where exactly.’

‘The locals think he’s taking orders from somebody, but their guess is that he doesn’t know who. They think the kids have been shipping skunk grown somewhere in Manchester. Oh, and this isn’t random. It’s organised.’

Tom had suspected that would be the case, and he sighed inwardly. Serious and organised crime was a daily reality costing the country billions each year, causing immense
damage to communities and individuals through violence, drug use and child sexual exploitation. He hated it, and all those involved in it, with a passion.

Becky was watching him carefully, and he adopted a neutral expression, signalling that she should continue.

‘We showed Natasha a picture of the other boy on the train – do you remember him? The lad that looked like a young and slightly chubby-faced Tom Cruise before he got a chin. Not only did she recognise him, but the fact that we had his picture and we’d seen her smiling at him seemed to scare her. Anyway, Transport Police think they may have a lead on him. He’s been seen before. There was a definite sense of a message being passed between him and Natasha. If he’s part of the same gang, we’re hoping we can find a link and discover how Natasha fits into the picture. But all this new information has got me thinking.’

Becky leaned forwards and rested her arms on Tom’s desk.

‘The most logical interpretation of events six years ago is that Natasha was found in the aftermath of the accident – a cute little girl – and somebody decided to keep her. So why let her go now? Did she escape from whoever had her, or did they want to be rid of her? I keep going round in circles, but the drugs give the initial abduction a much more sinister slant, don’t they?’

Tom tilted his chair back to listen to Becky’s ideas, his gaze on a blank area of innocuous beige wall, his mind one hundred per cent on Natasha Joseph.

‘Being realistic, Tom, what are the chances that this little girl, on a dark winter’s night on a country lane, just happened to be picked up by members of some organised crime group? A crew smart enough to use kids as mules to get their skunk out to the sticks? What – were they out on a jolly that evening and happened upon her? There’s more chance of being hit by a flying tortoise, I’d have thought.’

Tom smiled. ‘You’re right, but it could have been some local scumbag who found her. Somebody at the bottom of the pecking order? Maybe thought he could use her – demand money from her father for her safe return. That would make sense, although with all the police activity at the time, they would have had to wait a while to have any chance of success.’

‘All I can say is that if she’s been living with somebody associated with organised crime at any level, it must have been a shit life. You’d have thought she’d be seriously relieved to be out of the place, wouldn’t you? As it is, she seems to be hanging in there by a thread at
the family home.’ Becky paused. ‘But I still keep going back to the night of the accident. What if we’re missing the obvious? What if she was a target?’