Stranger Child (33 page)

‘Is this the same brother that installed the security system at Joseph and Son? He died a few years ago, didn’t he?’

Tom nodded, unable to speak. Because this was adding up to something very nasty, and if his sums were correct, there was every chance that the person responsible for Jack’s death was the person whose face he was now staring at on the board.

54

‘I’m doing this for Ollie. I’m doing this for Ollie.’ Emma said the words over and over in her head as she drove, quickly taking a drink from a bottle of water she had brought with her. Her mouth was so dry, yet her skin was clammy and cold.

She was nearly there.

Much as she had hated every second of it, she had gone over and over the plan with David, making sure she understood everything she had to do. She had given him the police radio, showing him how to use it to call in help if he needed to, telling him to make sure that he and Natasha stayed safe. She wasn’t convinced he was listening, though.

She let go of the steering wheel first with one hand, and then the other, wiping her damp palms on an old pair of black cargo pants. Her phone was buried deep in one of the pockets, and switched to speaker. A head torch was on the seat beside her, fully charged with a new battery.

Emma took the Range Rover down a narrow alleyway that led to the back door of the building under which lay the Joseph & Son vault, and pulled it into the loading bay of the clothing manufacturer next door.

The streets in this part of Manchester were deathly quiet, although she knew that less than half a mile away there would be plenty of activity as the clubs emptied and people struggled home.

There were no lights down this backstreet.

‘I’m here,’ she said softly, reaching down to open the car door. She stepped out onto the wet tarmac, her feet in their dark trainers making no sound. She closed the door as gently as she could, but the small click seemed to echo against the dark brick walls, so close across the alley that she felt hemmed in – trapped. There was a smell of damp clothing from the piles of discarded fabric left in the loading bay, soaked by the weekend’s driving rain, overlaid with the stink of rancid fat from an all-night kebab shop on the main road.

If she spoke, Tom and his team would hear her through the phone. But once she was out of the car, he wouldn’t respond to her unless it was a real emergency. Anything she said out loud had to sound as if she was speaking to herself. Tom didn’t know if sound was being picked up in any way by the gang.

She had been instructed by the man on the phone to take Natasha’s phone with her too, and Emma knew they could switch it on remotely if they wanted to and pick up every word she uttered. And of course they could track where she was at any time through the GPS.

The building in front of her had been standing for over a hundred years and had once been at the heart of the textile industry. Now it housed a number of organisations, from insurance companies to solicitors’ offices, but only Joseph & Son was below ground.

As Emma slowly approached the communal doorway she glanced around, twisting from the waist to look first in one direction, then the other. She was sure Tom had said they would have eyes on her from the moment she left the house to the minute she was inside, but somehow it didn’t help. A deep, dark recess led to the door, and not a hint of light penetrated the cave-like entrance.

She pulled on her head torch over her hair and switched it on.

An opening to the right led to stairs going down into the boiler room. She forced herself not to glance in that direction, knowing that the light from her torch wouldn’t penetrate the furthest reaches, and she wouldn’t know if anything – or anybody – was there, watching her. She glanced down. In the corner was the duffle bag, as promised.

To get into the building’s foyer she had to type a password into the keypad to the right of the door. That was the easy bit. A few clicks and she was inside, standing by the main security door to Joseph & Son.

‘Okay,’ she muttered, as if to herself. ‘I’m in position and ready to go.’

She pulled Natasha’s phone from her pocket to check the time.

03.00 it said.

The final sixty seconds dragged, each second seeming longer than the last.
Would the time ever change? Did she want it to change?
She was about to pull out her other phone to check when the minute digit clicked over.

03.01.

She slowly punched in the seven digit number she had been given and heard a reassuring click. She pushed the door open and stepped into the black passageway.

‘No lights,’ David had told her. ‘They are on a time switch in case somebody leaves them on at the end of the day. With your torch, you’re probably okay in the dark.’

It was easy for him to say that. He wasn’t the one standing here with just a steel door separating him from a staircase leading down into the abyss. The beam from the head torch probed the blackness just a few metres ahead. Beyond that was an inky silence. She moved her head to one side and gasped.

What’s that?

Her narrow beam had picked up a reflection from a stainless steel inner door – flashing a bright light back at her. It had looked for all the world as if somebody was standing there – shining a torch into her face. She moved towards the door, and the mirror finish of the vertical bars blinded her momentarily. Never had anything looked more like a cage to Emma – a cage that contained a threat greater than any wild animal. It was the threat of the unknown. What else might be beyond this gate? What if somebody was here, waiting for her?

She pushed the steel door open and started her descent into the dark void below.

*

Despite the lack of any noticeable activity, the monitors for the three operations were being closely scrutinised in the dimly lit control room. The lights were low so as to give greater definition to the night-time images, but Tom couldn’t draw his gaze away from the monitor at the back of Joseph & Son. He didn’t believe he would look away until Emma reappeared in about 54 minutes’ time.

As he watched the screen, something moved. It was difficult to see, but he was sure he saw a shadow.

‘Paul, have you got a moment,’ he said, his tone clipped with an urgency that was driving him closer to the screen. He spoke to the operator as he moved. ‘Could you replay the last thirty seconds?’

Paul walked across the room and both men stared at the screen.

‘See – there.’ Tom leaned forwards and pointed at the screen.

‘And again, Luke,’ Paul said calmly to the operator. The section was replayed.

‘You’re right, Tom. What do you want to do about it?’

But both men knew there was nothing they
could
do, other than alert the team on standby.

They couldn’t talk to Emma without putting the whole operation in jeopardy, but Tom was in no doubt at all that somebody had just followed her down into the vault.

55

A sharp gust of wind blew drops of rain from the overhanging tree on to Natasha’s bedroom window. Their soft splatter was the only sound in an otherwise silent house. She could no longer bear to be in the same room as David. How could he believe that no harm would have been done to her and her mum, kidnapped and locked up, even if only for a few hours? For years she had hoped that Rory had been lying about the accident, but tonight she had been forced to listen to David making excuses and she’d had to accept that everything she had been told was the truth.

Natasha could remember her mother. She remembered the smell of her perfume – something soft and flowery – and she was so gentle, so timid compared to the people that Natasha had lived with since. She remembered her first day at school, when her mum had tried so hard not to cry. And then at the end of each day, she would be waiting by the school gates – not standing chatting to the others mums and dads, but anxiously watching the door until Natasha came out, at which point her she would jump up and down on the spot, madly waving at Natasha as if they hadn’t seen each other in months. She said she missed her every single moment of the day and counted the hours until Natasha came home.

Somehow, she knew that if her mother hadn’t died but had been abducted that night instead, she would never have recovered. Her mum would probably have ended up like a woman up the road from Rory and Donna’s. She hadn’t been out of the house for twenty years, all because of something that had happened to her – although nobody knew what. Some of the kids played tricks on her to get her to open the door, but she just looked out of the window with a round, sad face.

How could David not have known how much damage he would do?

Natasha glanced at herself in the mirror, the shiny tears on her face matching the droplets of rain running down the window. For a while she had hoped that Rory had told her a bunch of lies – or at least that David would give her an explanation that she could live with.
She had even allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to stay here, with David, Emma and Ollie when they got him back.

But that was just a childish dream. She wasn’t sure what would happen to her dad and Emma now, and it was all because of her. She had ruined their lives, as David had ruined hers.

She knew she wouldn’t be allowed to stay – even if she was wanted here, which she wasn’t. She couldn’t think why they would want to fight for her – a girl who was the best shoplifter in the west of Manchester, expert mobile phone thief, drug mule and baby snatcher.
Really?

She thought of what was going to happen next. The police would rescue Ollie, and then they would all know – Rory, Finn, the Boss – that she had betrayed them. They would know that either Emma or David had called the police, and she hadn’t stopped them. She would get the blame. Even if she said she hadn’t known, they wouldn’t believe her. And anyway, they would beat the truth out of her. Then there would only be one outcome.

Natasha stood up from the bed and went to the drawers. She grabbed a carrier bag that she had liked the look of when Emma bought her some clothes and started to push things inside. She stopped. That would be thieving, and they would hate her even more.

She slowly took off all her clothes, folded them, and put them away in the drawers. At the bottom of the wardrobe was the bag of clothes she had arrived in, and she put them on, piece by piece, feeling for the first time the rough texture of cheap fabric, smelling the odour of age and seeing the dark stains where other children who had worn the clothes before her had spilled their food.

She was ready. Now she just had to wait.

56

Emma wiped her damp hands on her jeans again and reached out the forefinger of her right hand for the second time. Her print had been rejected. If it didn’t work this time, she was fairly sure that she would only have one chance left before her print became invalid and she wouldn’t be able to get into the key room.

She placed her finger on the screen, waiting for the beep and the green light. It took a moment, but the red light flashed again.

Shit
. If she couldn’t get in, she was going to fail, and she was losing too much time. But she was so hot.

As she wiped her sticky forehead with the back of her hand, she felt what seemed like a cold draught of air on her back, but it was over in a second. She spun round, the light from her headlamp illuminating the small reception room behind her. Nothing. She must have imagined it. It must have been a cold trickle of fear.

She turned back to the door, knowing she had one chance left. Wiping her finger hadn’t worked. She remembered that there was a thermal indicator as well, and her hands were so hot and sweaty that they were probably unreadable. She placed her finger in her mouth to get it wet, and then waved it above her head, hoping the body heat would dissipate from her finger as the saliva dried.

Without giving the beads of sweat time to reform, she placed her finger on the screen. As she waited, she could feel dampness oozing through her skin.

Beep
. The green light, a dull, thick click and the door sprang open.

‘Thank God for that,’ she said under her breath – loud enough for the listeners to hear.

She moved her head around to shine the light at line after line of hooks, each holding a key with its own numbered tag attached. It took her just seconds to find the right one.

‘Two, nine, oh, nine,’ Emma mumbled, pulling the key from the hook. She turned to leave the room.

The key room had given her a false sense of security. Standing in the centre of that confined space, spinning around, she could see all four corners of the room. But now she was at the entrance to the vault, and the thought of what lay beyond – the expanse, the myriad side rooms, the dark depths that her torch wouldn’t penetrate, the corners around which she couldn’t see – filled her with icy terror. Her body started to shake, although she had still gone no further than the doorway.

Once more she used her fingerprint to gain access. The door clicked open on her first attempt. She stood still, dreading the moment when she had to enter the main chamber, a vast open space.

Come on, Emma. This is for Ollie
. She couldn’t afford to waste time. She pushed the door gently, and it slid open on well-oiled hinges. She knew this door was left open during the day, and she pushed it as far back as she could, dreading the thought that the door would close and she would be trapped inside.

She took a step into the black space, turning her head in an attempt to light the shady reaches of the room. To the right were several individual doorless rooms with wide, thin boxes around the sides and back; two hundred down each side, a hundred along the back wall, ten deep from top to bottom.

To her left were further rooms leading from the central vault, and in one corner was the viewing room – the only room with a closed door. Emma twisted her body to shine the head torch towards it, feeling strangely drawn to the room – the compulsion to check that it was empty almost overpowering her need to get the job done.

She was wasting time. She hitched the heavy duffle bag higher on her shoulder, scared to move in case the soft sound of her footsteps masked other sounds in the yawning space. The corners of each side room seemed remote, concealing their secrets in the shadows.