Stranger Child (23 page)

‘
Finn
,’ she said. ‘I …’

They could hear the rasping notes of a voice from two metres away, although they couldn’t make out the words. The tone was one of cold fury.

‘Finn, I didn’t tell them anything. I never mentioned Rory.’

David started to move forwards, his hand out to take the phone from Tasha, but the girl shook her head furiously.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell Rory they’d seen me. I know I should have, then he could have changed the route. I’m
sorry
– I thought he’d be mad at me.’ Tasha’s voice had dropped to little more than a whisper, and her eyes were flooded with tears.

‘No, Finn,
no
. I promise – the police know nothing about the baby. Don’t hurt Ollie, Finn.’ The last words were whispered so quietly that the caller wouldn’t have heard them. But they were a plea from the heart.

Tasha listened for a few more minutes, ended the call and folded at the knees. David grabbed her, lowering her to sit on the bank on the side of the track.

‘What, Tasha? What’s the matter? Who’s Finn, and what did he want?’ It was all Emma could do to stop herself shaking the girl. She reached forwards to grasp Natasha’s shoulders, but when she saw the girl’s eyes, black with fear, her hands dropped gently and rubbed Natasha’s arms.

‘I don’t know what they’ll do to me now. You were right – what you said last night. I should have told Rory about the CCTV. Finn says Rory’s being questioned by the police.’

‘Good,’ Emma said. ‘He looked a nasty bastard. Surely that’s a good thing?’

‘What?’
David clearly had no idea what they were talking about, but Emma and Natasha both ignored him. Now wasn’t the time for lengthy explanations.

‘Of
course
it’s not a good thing. They don’t trust me now. That means I’m probably going to die. Everything could go wrong now, don’t you see? And all because of me.’

‘What about Ollie?’ Emma asked. ‘What does this mean for
Ollie
?’

Natasha shook her head again. ‘It changes everything. They don’t know if it’s safe to go ahead with the job. If it goes wrong, I’m dead. Finn’s got to see what the boss man says. I don’t know who he is – he’s like a shadow. I don’t think even Rory knows.’

‘What’s “the job”, Tasha?’ Emma asked. ‘Can’t we just give them some money and get Ollie back?’ But Tasha wasn’t listening.

‘It was meant to be over today. You could have had Ollie back and I could go home.’ Her head hung down and tears dripped unheeded onto the legs of her jeans.

Emma crouched down in the muddy lane. ‘Nobody wants you to go anywhere, Tasha. We just want Ollie back. But we want you too. We’re not going to abandon you.’

‘Oh, you will. You might not think so, but you will.’

Emma looked up at David, whose face in the weak sunlight had lines carved so deep that he looked twenty years older. She turned to Natasha and put her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

‘That’s not going to happen, Tasha. We’re
not
going to let you go.’

Natasha’s whole body was shaking with the force of her tears, and her hands were covering her eyes.

‘Course you will. You still don’t get it, do you? I know you want Ollie, and I know nobody ever wanted me. Even Rory doesn’t want
me
– only what I can do for him.’

David fell to his knees in the mud. ‘I don’t know what you and Emma are talking about, but I do know one thing. You were always very much loved and very much wanted, Tasha. You still are.’

Natasha pulled her hands away from her eyes and for a moment her expression hardened.

‘That’s not true, is it? I was a pawn in a game. That’s what Rory says. It’s all I’ve ever been – a pawn.’

Emma’s head was spinning with every word that had been spoken, but for now the only thing she wanted to think about was Ollie. She looked at David as he pulled his daughter towards him. For a moment, Natasha leaned into him – but with a sudden thrust, pushed him away.

‘Don’t.’

David looked as if he had been shot, a mixture of emotions that Emma couldn’t quite decipher distorting his features.

‘At least I’ve done one thing right,’ Tasha murmured. ‘At least the police don’t know about Ollie. Then I really
would
be dead.’

‘I think you’re being a bit melodramatic, darling,’ David said. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you when you’re with us.’

Natasha looked at him. ‘I would have thought you, of all people, would have known better than that.’

Emma walked away from them both. Whatever was going on between Natasha and her father, it was doing nothing to help Ollie, and she didn’t have the energy to argue about it right now.

She put her hand in her pocket and felt the solid lump that was her mobile phone – the object she had considered her lifeline. Now its cold touch burned her fingers, and she couldn’t help wondering if all it offered was a death sentence – for Natasha, and maybe even for Ollie.

38

Tom could have done without this. Whatever Titan wanted, he was sure it wasn’t as vital as finding young Ollie Joseph, and Philippa should know that. Irritated as he was, though, he had little choice but to bow to her command. Much as he had never wanted to rise above the rank of Chief Inspector because he didn’t want to be confined to an office even more than he already was, sometimes he wished that he had the power to say ‘no’ when he was told to do something.

He knocked briefly on Philippa’s closed door and pushed it open without hearing her usual call of ‘Come’ – another source of irritation. She sounded like the Queen sometimes, and, efficient as she was, when she received her next inevitable promotion Tom was certain that she would become so far up herself that nobody would be able to find the real Philippa any more.

Her office reflected her personality – or at least the personality she liked to display. The room was featureless with some random prints on the wall that conveyed nothing about the person who had chosen them. In fact, they had probably been chosen by the decorators. The desk was totally uncluttered, with a stack of three wire trays that, unlike Tom’s, weren’t overflowing all over the desk. In other words, bland but fit for purpose.

Philippa was dressed in her customary dark suit with a dazzling white blouse, and every strand of her straight auburn hair was in place, the bob just below her ears that never seemed to get any longer or be cut any shorter. Facing Philippa, his back to the door, was a man in a pinstriped jacket who turned to stand as Tom came in.

Beating Philippa to the introductions, Tom held out his hand. ‘Tom Douglas,’ he said, noting the warm, dry grip of the distinguished-looking man facing him.

‘Paul Green’, he responded, indicating the chair next to him and sitting down.

Tom sat, and turned to face Philippa.

‘What can I do for you both?’ he asked.

‘Tom, Mr Green would like to talk to you about your possible surveillance of one of Titan’s targets, a man by the name of …’ Philippa glanced down at her notepad, ‘… Rory Slater.’

Before Tom had a chance to speak, Green turned to face him.

‘If I could explain, Tom – it’s okay if I call you Tom?’ Without waiting for confirmation, he continued. ‘We’ve had our eye on Slater for some time. I know you’re interested in him as the person who may have been harbouring Natasha Joseph, but he’s part of something much bigger and we’ve been running an operation to catch the head of this organised crime group for a few years. We’re sure we know who the main man is, but catching him is proving difficult. He doesn’t get his hands dirty. He leaves all that to his minions. Slater is bottom of the pile, but through him we’re getting closer.’

Green withdrew some photos from his briefcase and laid them on the desk.

‘These were taken this morning. You sent somebody into the Slater household, and you’ve got a surveillance van just down the road. I need you to back off, Tom. This operation is too big to be blown apart by the investigation into a girl who has now reappeared.’

Philippa interrupted. ‘You and I haven’t had a chance to discuss your interest in Slater, Tom. I gather he’s only just come onto your radar.’

‘That’s right – in the early hours of this morning.’ Tom turned towards Green. ‘But it’s no longer only about a missing girl. Slater is implicated in the kidnap of a baby, Mr Green.’ As Tom knew only too well, a child’s life trumped just about everything else, including organised crime.

‘Shit,’ Green mumbled.

The room was quiet for a moment.

‘We’ve had our eyes on this particular group for a long time,’ Green said. ‘We’ve known Slater was part of it, and there’s a guy higher up the chain that’s implicated too – Finbar – or Finn – McGuinness. He’s an enforcer and a sociopathic bastard.’ Paul Green leaned towards the desk and took a drink from a glass of water before continuing.

‘McGuinness has been out of prison for about eight years – he was the driver in an armed robbery – but to all intents and purposes he seems to be keeping out of trouble. His wife runs a burger van in Salford – very popular it is too. We know that Slater picks up the drugs that he sells from the McGuinness burger van, and we want to trace the supply chain back from there. Finn McGuinness keeps a very low profile, but everybody’s terrified of him.
We’ve held off doing anything about the burger van until we can get the top man – the man who’s running the show – and we think we’re getting there.’

Tom filled them in on what he knew of Slater, and how he was implicated in Ollie Joseph’s kidnap.

‘None of what you said has surprised me, Tom. This gang is highly organised, but also opportunistic,’ Green continued. ‘They’re entrepreneurial. They deal in drugs, firearms, women – anything they can sell on the street. But if an opportunity comes up – something out of the ordinary – they’ll go for it.’

‘And you think they’re going for something now, do you?’ Philippa asked.

‘We know they are, although we don’t know what exactly. We have a CHIS. He’s working for them, but at the moment he only has a small part of the picture. It’s going to happen soon. He’s been on standby for a couple of days now.’

Tom had always thought that CHIS, or Covert Human Intelligence Source, was an absurd term. He was much more comfortable with informant, or even snout, but within Philippa’s four walls, political correctness was everything.

‘Do you think the kidnap and the job are related?’ Philippa asked.

‘Could be,’ Tom answered. He filled Paul Green in on more of the details of young Ollie’s abduction and his belief that money was unlikely to be the motive.

‘Tiger kidnap,’ Green said. ‘That sounds about right for this lot.’

‘Our information is that whatever David Joseph is going to be asked to do, it’s today. Then the baby will be brought back safe and well, we hope. Given the timetable your CHIS is giving you, it sounds as if they might be linked. What else do we know?’

There was a knock on the door and Philippa barked ‘Wait’. But the door opened and Becky poked her head round the door.

‘So sorry, ma’am,’ she said, giving a slightly nervous grimace, ‘but we need Tom. A bit of a problem. Ten minutes ago, British Transport Police arrested the lad Natasha was seen smiling at on the train and they’ve taken Rory Slater in for questioning too, because he was at the station waiting to pick the lad up.’

Tom heard a groan from Paul Green and he had to sympathise with the man. Years of work could be about to go down the pan. Of course, Transport Police had been excluded from the information about the kidnap and so they believed the focus was still on finding out who had taken Natasha.

‘They let me know straight away,’ Becky said, ‘so I told them under no circumstances to mention Natasha Joseph. Let’s hope they were listening, or we’re in trouble.’

39

Fear was nothing new to Natasha. For more than six years it had been a daily reality – fear of pissing Rory off; fear of being caught nicking stuff; fear that her life would never get any better. But this was a whole new level of fear. She felt sick. She knew what happened to people who let Finn down. She’d seen it with her own eyes once, when she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been. But Emma and David wouldn’t believe her. They really had no idea.

Nobody was speaking to Natasha anyway. Nobody knew what to say to her, and she got that. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, though. She wasn’t supposed to care about any of them – not Emma, not Ollie and certainly not David. She had jumped at the chance to do this job because more than anything she wanted her father to have some idea of the life she’d been forced to live. Then they told her the reward – another year before she would have to go to Julie’s – and she would have done anything for that.

Nearly all the girls who went to Julie’s had to have some time in The Pit first – Rory said it was to make them obedient – to show them what would happen if they tried to run away. Natasha had been terrified of that hole in the ground at the back of the cellar since the first time she had been thrown in there. She had been six years old, and the darkness had swallowed her whole.

Am I dead?
It had been the only thought that her young mind was able to grasp. This wasn’t what being alive was like, so it had to be what being dead felt like. Never before had she been left alone with nobody to speak to for days at a time. For hours she had wandered round, bewildered, stumbling about in the dark, touching the damp earthen walls and asking, begging, for somebody to speak to her. But nobody was listening.

The floor and walls of The Pit were icy, and freezing air blew through gaps around the trapdoor. She had cried and cried, but nobody had come.

I didn’t know what I’d done wrong – why I’d been put in there
.

Then there was the man with a voice that sounded like footsteps on a gravel path – the man who she now knew to be Finn McGuinness. She had heard him talking, but she couldn’t remember now what he had said. Apart from one thing.

‘Her mam’s dead. She’s no use to us. Get rid of her.’

She had repeated those words over and over in her head. ‘Her mam’s dead.’ She understood that, but it wasn’t for some time that she understood the rest of what he had said.