Stranger Child (21 page)

‘Never seen him before,’ came the reply. Even from the van, Tom could see that the boy hadn’t even glanced at the picture. These kids were trained from an early age, it seemed.

A girl of about nine strode up to them and stopped dead, hands on hips.

‘Whoever you are, piss off.’

Andy spoke calmly to her.

‘Be a good girl and go and tell your mum that I want to see her, will you?’

‘No. She don’t like bad news. Who are you, any road?’

‘I’m DC Hughes.’ They’d agreed that he would play down his rank. It was unlikely they would check his warrant card.

‘DC short for Dick, is it,’ she muttered with a laugh at what she thought was an original joke. She turned and went back into the house, and Andy followed. They could no longer see him, but they could hear every word.

‘Nice banner, kids. Welcome home, Shell.’

There was a clatter in the background.

‘Steady on, son – we don’t want you falling off that ladder.’

There was a grunt in the background and what sounded like ‘fuck off’ but Tom couldn’t be sure.

‘That’s a nice welcome message for somebody,’ Andy said. ‘Who’s Shell?’

‘She’s our sister.’ It sounded like a little girl speaking.

‘Shut up, idiot,’ an older voice growled. ‘And you – piss off. You shouldn’t be in here without a warrant.’

Andy refrained from responding, but Tom could picture his expression of mild disdain. In his experience it was always best when kids tried to rile you to treat them with contempt. Most didn’t have the confidence to continue with their abuse if they thought they were being mocked.

‘Who’s the candle for?’ Andy asked

‘What’s all the bloody noise about?’ The voice came from somewhere further away and was quite faint, growing in volume as the speaker got closer to Andy. Nobody answered.

‘Mrs Slater?’ Andy said. There was the sound of a baby crying and the listeners in the van stiffened for a moment. ‘Cute baby,’ Andy said. ‘What is she, about eight months?’

Clever guy, Tom thought.

‘She’s nine months, not that it’s any of your bleeding business,’ the woman muttered, an aggressive note cutting through the wheezing tones of too many cigarettes.

‘If you’ve come about the kids and school, you can sod off. I do me best, but there are twelve of ’em, and I ain’t got a car. Sometimes we walk, but I’m not too good on me legs – so tell me what I’m supposed to do, will you?’

‘Twelve kids – that’s quite a handful,’ Andy said conversationally. ‘All yours, are they?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing – I wondered if you fostered, that’s all.’

‘A few are me sister’s kids. She doesn’t like ’em much, so they’ve come to live with me.’

Tom made a note to check up on Donna Slater’s sister as soon as Andy was out of the house.

‘So what do you want, then? My Rory’ll be back soon, and he don’t like you lot, so best make it snappy.’

‘We’ve only got one question, Mrs Slater,’ Andy said. ‘Do you know this lad?’ There was a brief pause.

‘Look at the picture, Mrs Slater,’ he said. ‘I mean it – look at it properly.’

‘Don’t recognise him,’ was her only response after all of two seconds, followed by a brief bout of coughing.

There wasn’t a sound from the Slater’s living room. It was as if the children had left, or maybe each child was holding his or her breath to see what Donna Slater would say. Suddenly it was filled with sound again as if a button had been pressed, and Tom guessed that there had been some silent communication between the woman and the kids.

‘Thanks for your time, Mrs Slater. Hope you have a happy reunion with your daughter when she gets back.’

‘How the fuck do you know about that?’ came the angry response.

‘Call it intuition, Mrs Slater. Or perhaps it could be something to do with that bloody great banner on your wall.’

*

A few minutes later, Tom watched as Andy wrestled with the broken gate and start walking towards them. As he walked he started to talk.

‘They know the lad. No doubt about it. If you’re right and the girl Natasha is known to them as Shelley, they’re definitely expecting her home tonight or tomorrow. At a guess, the lad you’re interested in from the train was in his bedroom. I saw a little kid get a nod from one of the older ones and sneak off upstairs – I would imagine to tell him to hide. Not that I had any right to search anyway. I don’t think the baby was there, though. I think they would have been more frightened by my visit. The kids look scruffy, but not malnourished. Not the healthiest of specimens – you know, a bit grey-looking rather than pink and rosy – but not skinny and I didn’t see any bruises. Mind you, they all had jumpers on because the house is bloody freezing.’

Andy walked straight past the van without slowing down or looking at it.

‘The kids know what they’re about. Not one of them looked at the picture, probably trained that way because they’re too young to be able to disguise emotion. I got the feeling that the kids stick together, but when they heard Donna coming they all busied themselves. A couple made themselves scarce. But no sign of Rory. I’ll call at the bookie’s – see if he’s there. I’ll let you know if he is. One other thing. They had a candle burning and a picture of a girl propped up behind it. Blonde girl, looked about twelve. See you later.’

Tom gave it five minutes and then exited the van, leaving the surveillance team to do their job. He needed to check how many children should be in that house, whether Donna Slater had a sister and, if she did, whether one of her kids was missing.

*

Across the road from the Slaters’ house, two men sat in a dingy flat above a shabby hairdresser’s. The persistent high-pitched cries of women shrieking to be heard above a background of hairdryers from the salon below was only marginally masked by music blaring out from speakers situated just below the floorboards of the first-floor room.

‘God, this music is doing my head in,’ said one of the men. ‘If I have to listen to another track from bloody Adele, I’ll go down there and personally pull the plug on whatever’s playing that frigging music and crush it underfoot.’

The other guy laughed. ‘Well, it says something that you recognise her music, Jim. Not sure I would admit to that if I were you.’

‘The wife’s favourite – I don’t have much choice at home, but I didn’t think I’d have to suffer that noise all day as well. Mind you, maybe it’s better than the racket those women make. Wah, wah, wah – it’s relentless. What the hell do they find to yabber about?’

The question hung unanswered in the dank air of the drab room in which they were sitting. The dirty, yellowed woodchip wallpaper was peeling away from the plaster, its discolouration enhanced by the number of cigarettes the two men had smoked in the week or so that they had been sitting there. An old brown sofa was pushed against one wall, stuffing escaping from the arms. There was a folding card table and a couple of bent-back chairs that looked as if they had been made in about the same year as the row of shops had been built. As rooms went, it had to be one of the most depressing that either of them had seen for a while.

The lack of home comforts didn’t matter to the two men, though. They had brought their own chairs. Right now, they were both on high alert, a state that Jim put down to the acrid fumes of cheap hair lacquer that seemed to permeate the room. He was sure it was making him high, but at that moment he had other things on his mind.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ he asked, peering through the binoculars set into a stand. With one hand he pressed the trigger release for the camera on a separate tripod. He didn’t need to check the viewfinder – the telephoto lens was permanently focused on the house opposite.

‘I don’t know, but I’m more interested in that van parked outside the halal butchers. It’s been there for forty-five minutes and nobody’s got in or out, and nothing’s been delivered. Given its position, I’d say it’s surveillance. And I’d say it was on the Slaters.’

‘Bloody marvellous. If that’s the case, what’s that other idiot doing walking right in there? Stupid bastard – he’s going to bugger everything up if he’s not careful.’

Jim pushed himself back from the window and the wheels on his chair propelled him to the table behind. He grabbed a packet of cigarettes and wheeled himself back to the window.

They watched for a few more minutes until the man came out of the house and walked up the road.

‘He’s not even glanced at the van, and he’s talking. He’s wired. Give it a minute or two.’

They waited. Finally the side door of the van slid open, and a tall man in dark-blue jeans and a black jacket emerged on the side away from the Slaters’ home.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Jesus. It’s Tom Douglas. He’s a DCI in the Major Incidents Team. What in God’s name is he doing here?’

Jim muttered a string of expletives.

‘We’ve got to stop them before everything goes tits up.
Bollocks
. This is
all
we need.’

The man picked up his phone and dialled a number.

35

The table was covered with the remains of three uneaten breakfasts, and the room smelled temptingly of the bacon that remained untouched on plates. Cooking was something that Emma felt she could do to keep her body occupied while her mind spun in circles. Just sitting had never been something she had managed easily, and any problems in her past had always resulted in bursts of energy. It wasn’t only that, though. Unlike David, she was aware that the conversation in the kitchen was being listened to, and much as she was determined to work on Natasha, the girl wasn’t going to weaken when she knew she would be heard. And she could hardly drag her off into the bathroom.

She pushed her chair back and started to grab plates.

‘I’ll do that, Em,’ David said. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t done justice to your breakfast. I think if I try to swallow anything solid it will choke me.’

‘I wonder what they’ve given Ollie for breakfast,’ was all she said. ‘I hope they understand what babies of his age like to eat. Do you think they do, Natasha? Or will they be feeding him salted peanuts, or whole grapes with pips in?’ She looked pointedly at her stepdaughter, who looked pale this morning. The girl had spirit, though, she had to admit, as Natasha gave Emma a defiant stare.

Emma slammed the plates down on the worktop with such force that she was surprised they didn’t shatter. She spun round and leaned back against the counter, folding her arms.

‘Right,’ she said with as much bravado as she could manage. ‘We’re going for a walk. All of us. Get your coats.’

‘What?’ A response from Natasha at last. ‘I’m not going nowhere. You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.’
Bravely said, Natasha
, Emma thought.

‘Wrong, Natasha. I’m the grown-up, you’re the child. You may be capable of doing some terrible things that even in my wildest dreams I wouldn’t stoop to …’ Emma ignored David’s look of horror, ‘… but you are
not
going to stop me from going for a walk, and your
father is coming with me. If you want to spy on us you’d better come too, or we might escape into town and call the police.’

‘Em, what happens if somebody calls?’ David asked, clearly wondering what she was playing at.

‘Nobody’s going to call, are they? They’ll phone Natasha on that mobile that never leaves her right hand. The one I presume she smuggled into the house in the pocket of my fleece.’

Without waiting for a reply, Emma stomped off into the hall, returning with three jackets of various sizes. She saw Natasha look askance at the red one that was thrown at her.

‘Put it on. It’s cold out there, and it was good enough when you needed deep pockets, wasn’t it? We need to move – to get some energy back. Come on, both of you.’

Emma opened the door to the back porch, stuffed her feet in a pair of green wellingtons and set off down the path, knowing that David would follow her.

She waited where the path met the lane, and sure enough a couple of minutes later David and his daughter came plodding round the corner, looking like a pair of reluctant hikers on a Sunday ramble.

She turned on her heel and marched off. She wanted them to be well away from the house before she started on Natasha. She waited at the start of a track that led across the fields to an old bridleway she had walked down a few times. Natasha and David caught up with her, and she ushered them onto the track.

‘I used to bring Ollie here when he was tiny,’ she said conversationally. ‘I used to strap him into a papoose type thing, but with him facing outwards so he could see what was going on. He loved it. I bet your mum brought you here when you were a baby. Isn’t that what you told me, David? That Caroline used to love walking with Tasha when she was little?’

After a brief pause, David seemed to realise what she was trying to do.

‘We all used to go together at the weekend. Do you remember, Tasha? And when you got your first bike you insisted you could ride it all the way. We said the track was too rough for a bike – particularly with stabilisers on, but you weren’t having any of it, and I had to push you. Had a bad back for weeks.’ David looked at Natasha and smiled, to show there was no resentment in his words.

‘How well do you remember your mum?’ Emma asked, as if this were the most normal family out for a walk. ‘I told you the other day that I met her – I could see how much your dad loved her.’

Emma had no knowledge of child psychology at all but felt that the more she played on the whole mum and dad thing, the more Natasha might feel a sense of belonging and a commitment to Ollie.

‘I lost touch with them, though, when I went to Australia,’ she continued. ‘Then my ex-fiancé died – I didn’t tell you that, did I? I was a mess. It’s horrible when someone you love dies, isn’t it? You must have felt terrible when your mum died. Do you remember the accident?’

Natasha’s face had tightened. She was, after all, only a kid. A kid who had lost her mum in a horrible accident and then had been brought up by that awful Rory man. In spite of everything Emma wanted to hug her. So she did.

It only lasted a second, but she felt Tasha lean in towards her and then push her away and march off in front of them. Emma gave her a minute and then she speeded up too, so she was walking abreast of Natasha, with David slightly behind on the narrowing track.