Stranger Child (22 page)

‘When I met your dad a year after you’d disappeared, he was a total wreck. He missed your mum so much, but more than anything he missed you. For two years it was the only thing he ever talked about. He didn’t know what had happened to his little girl, and he blamed himself because he didn’t go with you that night. Your mum skidded the car and died, and you disappeared. She wasn’t a great driver, according to your dad. Maybe she lost control – was it because you were talking to her? Did she turn round to look at you and drive off the road? Is that what happened, Tasha? Because she loved you so much that if you had needed her she’d have turned round, I’m sure. Is that why you’re like this – because you think you caused the crash?’

Natasha mumbled something.

‘What did you say?’ Emma asked.

The girl lifted a strained face.

‘It wasn’t me,’ she shouted. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ She spun round and stared at David. ‘Tell her it wasn’t my fault.’

Just for a second, all three of them stood immobile, Natasha and David staring at each other, Emma looking at David’s haggard face, a nerve twitching above his left eyebrow. She had to break this tension.

‘It was nobody’s fault, Tasha. I was simply trying to understand what happened – how your mum lost control of the car.’

Emma reached out a hand to Natasha, but the girl moved out of the way. Turning her back on her father and moving as far away from both of them as she could get, she carried on walking, head down.

Emma felt she was getting nowhere. Surely there had to be something that she could say or do that would get through to Natasha? She was so focused on searching for the right words that she almost missed it when the girl spoke.

‘It was the man’s fault. The man on the phone.’

Emma carried on walking, not wanting to do anything to stop Natasha from talking. After a second or two, she carried on.

‘There was a car right across the road, and Mummy was stopping. Then her phone rang. I didn’t think she was going to answer it, but she did. Suddenly she speeded up. I heard her shouting into the phone “Why can’t I stop? What’s going on?” Then the car went mad – all over the road. She shouted for help – she shouted to the man on the phone, but it was too late.’

‘What did she shout, Tasha? Can you remember?’

‘Of course I can. I remember everything. I wasn’t a baby, and it’s not the sort of night you forget in a hurry.’

‘So what did she shout?’

‘Just a name. I don’t know what he said to her, but she shouted his name.’

Emma waited.

‘She was going to stop. If she’d stopped, she wouldn’t have died, would she? But the man on the phone frightened her. She dropped the phone and went really fast, round the car in the road. Then she shouted to him – but it was too late. It was all
his
fault.’

‘Do you remember what she shouted?’

David had turned white.

‘Of course I do. It was a name – somebody I didn’t know, but I hate him. Jack. That’s what she screamed. Jack.’

36

The small team sat in Tom’s office, which was stuffy with the stale odour of too many warm bodies and too many half-drunk cups of coffee lying around on every vacant surface. Rory Slater hadn’t been at the bookie’s, but they had finally tracked him down and put a tail on him in the hope that he would contact his masters. His home phone was being tapped, but there was currently no mobile signal coming from the house. So for the moment all they could do was watch and wait.

They had looked into all Slater’s known associates, but that line of enquiry had revealed very little. As Becky said, those they had found were ‘run of the mill scumbags’, but none was capable of masterminding this – whatever ‘this’ was.

Becky’s nose was glued to her computer screen, and Tom had noticed her rub her tired eyes a couple of times. He knew from experience there was nothing worse than staring at a screen when you’d had precious little sleep.

‘Got her,’ she whispered, more to herself than anybody else. Despite her low voice, those left in the room turned towards her.

‘Donna Slater has a sister – Sylvia Briggs. Two daughters, one son. One of the daughters is thirteen, and she’s called Isabella. I think I need to pay Mrs Briggs a visit.’

‘Well done, Becky.’ Tom cast his gaze round the rest of the room. ‘We all know what’s at stake here, so let’s get on with it. And remember, even though I’d like to think nobody in this division would be in the pay of an organised crime group, with a baby’s life at stake we mustn’t assume anything.’

Tom’s office emptied and he rested his elbows on the desk and his chin on his cupped hands. More than anything he wanted to drag Rory Slater into an interview room and grill him until he admitted where Ollie was being held. But he didn’t think Rory would know. The baby would have been handed over to a middleman. Rory would be part of one small cell in a bigger organisation.

Tom turned to his computer to check his email. There would be nothing about Ollie Joseph on here of course, but he had other cases to think about. And he still had the Swiss bank to call back. For the moment, there wasn’t a single thing he could be doing to help Ollie, and Becky had the sad case of the dead girl well in hand.

He paused for a moment. It was Saturday, but then he remembered the message – call me any time – and he strongly suspected that for private clients with enough funds there would be access to the bank seven days a week.

He checked his mobile for the number he had used the last time and pressed call.

‘Good morning. My name is Tom Douglas. Could I speak to Mr Charteris, please?’ Tom hung on for a few moments as his call was put through.

‘Mr Douglas, good day to you. Can I go through some security checks with you, please?’ Tom hoped he could remember the ‘memorable word’ he had submitted so that he could pick out the third and eighth letter.

‘Okay, Mr Douglas. Thank you for calling us back. As I mentioned in my message, when the account was opened details of a beneficiary in the event of your brother’s death were provided, and it is indeed your name that’s on the documentation. Of course, if nobody knew there was an account with us it’s understandable that we weren’t informed its owner was deceased. I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you. You said there were some irregularities with the account that you wanted to discuss?’

‘Yes. Do you think your brother may have provided details of this account to anybody else other than you?’

Tom thought for a moment. Emma would be the most likely, but she would have mentioned it when he was trying to give her money all those years ago. Melissa was another option. She’d been living with Jack for about six months before he died, and she had moved heaven and earth to claim ownership of some of Jack’s estate because she said she was ‘owed’ it. If she’d had access to the four million, though, Tom wasn’t sure she would have continued to try to get the rest of Jack’s money. He had no idea where she was now. He had never been provided with her contact details and hadn’t seen her in person since Jack died. All dealings were through her solicitor – a man with too smart a suit for the job he was doing whom Tom didn’t trust as far as he could throw him.

‘I can’t think of anybody. Why are you asking?’

‘Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the account is closed. The balance was withdrawn a few months ago – September, to be precise – transferred to an account in the Cayman Islands. I can, of course, provide the transfer details under the circumstances, but I doubt that will help you.’

Damn it. Another banking system with secrecy laws
.

It seemed Tom had been right. Whoever had broken into his house in the summer must have stolen the login details of the account in Switzerland and cleared it out.

He was about to question Mr Charteris further when his internal line rang. Making his excuses and asking if it would be okay to call again, he hung up and answered his phone.

‘Tom Douglas,’ he answered vacantly, his mind running through the options for discovering who had taken Jack’s money.

‘Tom, we need to talk. My office, one hour.’

‘Philippa, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can it wait, please?’ he asked. Sometimes, Philippa’s high-handed attitude grated on him, although most of the time he accepted that she was the boss. But today he had other things to worry about than offending Philippa.

‘No. It can’t wait. I’ve had a call from the head of operations for Titan. One hour, please.’

The phone went dead. What the hell did the North West’s Regional Organised Crime Unit want with him?

‘Bugger,’ Tom muttered.

37

The only sounds were birdsong, a distant tractor and the squelching of three pairs of wellington boots on a track that had suddenly become a quagmire. Nobody had spoken since Natasha’s shocking revelation that her mother had shouted the name Jack, and each of them was lost in thought.

Emma didn’t know what David was thinking, but she could guess. Why would Caroline have called out another man’s name just as she crashed? Who was this Jack? Even as she wondered about it, Emma felt a chill creep up her back. Jack wasn’t such a common name. But if it was
her
Jack, why had he phoned Caroline? What had he said?

She could sympathise with David’s obvious confusion; she felt bewildered herself. Caroline’s accident had occurred less than a week before Jack’s death and only days before she had received his suicide note. Not that she had recognised it as such when it had arrived. The wording suggested that he was wallowing in some kind of self-pity, and she was so appalled at the way he had dumped her all those months previously that she had dismissed it as a cry for sympathy for all the mistakes he had made in his life. She’d decided he wasn’t getting any sympathy from her. He could whistle for it.

And then he was dead, and she knew she should have done something when she received the note – called Tom, phoned Jack to talk it through – anything. Her disgust at his treatment of her didn’t mean she wished him any harm.

She had never understood about Melissa, though, who had appeared to come from nowhere, and had been with Jack for the last six months of his life. To this day, Melissa had been one piece of the puzzle in their relationship that had eluded her. His suicide was the other.

Emma was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she had momentarily lost sight of what mattered here and now. She glanced at Natasha, whose eyes betrayed a hint of uncertainty, and Emma felt a glimmer of hope. She still felt as if somebody had put a hand into her chest
and ripped her heart out through her ribs, but there was a faint pulse of optimism hovering at the edge of her consciousness.

‘Are you okay, Em?’ David asked. She glanced across at him, above Natasha’s head, and nodded.

‘Do you think it was
my
Jack?’ she said, knowing the answer before he spoke.

‘I can’t think who else it could have been, but I have no idea why he was calling Caroline.’

‘What was their relationship?’

David’s head spun round. ‘What?’

Emma closed her eyes for a second. She had phrased that badly and should have known that David would only hear the word ‘relationship’.

‘I mean, how did she know him, and how come she knew him so well that he had her phone number?’

Looking slightly mollified, David walked on a few yards before answering. If it turned out Caroline had been having an affair with Jack he would be devastated – and so would she.

‘You know he sorted out my computer security at work, don’t you?’ he said after a few moments, turning back towards Emma.

‘Of course – that’s how I was introduced to you and Caroline at those charity events. But I never thought she and Jack were close – on swapping mobile numbers terms.’

‘No, me neither,’ David muttered.

‘Did Caroline meet him first, or did you?’

‘It was me. I went to a seminar about internet security. He was the keynote speaker, and I was impressed. So when I needed to upgrade the system at work a few months later, I called him.’

Natasha had walked on, her head down, lost in her own thoughts. They could leave her to her worries for a while.

‘And Caroline?’ Emma asked tentatively.

‘She used to stop by the office a couple of times a week – more sometimes. After Tasha went to school, Caroline found herself at a bit of a loose end. She wasn’t a joiner, if you know what I mean. She didn’t like going to the gym or anything like that, and she said being at home all day freaked her out. So she would come into town, have a look around the shops
and then come to the office for an hour or so. Jack used to call in every few days to check on the work his team were doing, but that was way before Caroline’s accident. By the time she died, Jack had sold his company, and we hadn’t seen him for months at social events. I guess after you and he split up he didn’t enjoy them any more. I can’t think why he would have had Caroline’s mobile number, though.’

Emma thought for a while.

‘If I had to guess, I’d say that while he was working for you he used the opportunity to get
all
your phone numbers. He was a hoarder of information. “Data is king” he used to say. So I’m not surprised he had her number. I’m more surprised that the police didn’t track the call back to him.’

‘They knew she’d taken a call just before the accident but they told me it was from an unregistered mobile.’

Emma shook her head. Jack’s love of secrecy sometimes went to ridiculous lengths. For a while, as she talked to David about Jack, Emma felt temporarily glad of the distraction, but it didn’t take long for the aching void in her chest to return. Caroline and Jack were dead. They had been missed, but the pain of losing them was nothing in comparison to her fear for Ollie.

Up ahead, Natasha suddenly thrust her hand into the pocket of her fleece and pulled out her mobile, pushing it to her ear. David and Emma both broke into a run at the same time.

She spun round towards them, holding up one hand as a clear ‘stop’ signal, and brought her finger to her lips.

‘Hello, Rory,’ she said, looking down at her feet.

Slowly she lifted her head and stared at Emma and David. Her eyes widened, and her pupils dilated.