Stranger Child (35 page)

The drilling took mere minutes in more expert hands, and finally the last pin snapped. A twist of the screwdriver, and the lock turned. It had worked.

‘Bingo,’ she muttered, playing the part. Her eyes still followed the man’s every move, her heart still hammered in her chest.

She inserted the other key, and the door swung open. It was one of the larger boxes with no separate container inside. Pulling her lamp back down over her eyes, she looked into the space and this time didn’t try to suppress her astonishment.

‘
Gold
,’ she said, as her eyes took in row upon row of stacked bars, their yellow light bright in the beam of the torch. Each bar was about eight centimetres long and four wide. She reached in to pick one up. For such a small thing it was really heavy and her lamp picked out the words imprinted in the metal.

1 KILO

She had no idea how many bars there were here, but she was sure there would be over a hundred.

The pale eyes watched Emma’s face as she stared in wonder into the depths of the box. Then she moved her head and returned his gaze, screwing her eyes up into a question.

His head came down to hers and she felt rather than heard the words. ‘Not now.’ He pointed to his watch. Only twenty minutes left to move all of this. How could they ever have believed it would be possible?

He bent down and picked up a bag, holding it open beneath the edge of the box and nodded at her. Emma put her hands in and started to pick up the gold bars one at a time. He nudged her and mimed a scooping action. It felt like sacrilege for something so beautiful,
but she had no choice. She leaned into the box with both arms and swept the bars forwards, letting them fall into the bag.

One bag went down and another was picked up. It took five minutes to empty the box, then he was on the floor, moving the bags around, lifting them up, testing them. He stood up and passed two of them to Emma. They were seriously heavy, but she could see that he’d put more in the other bags.

‘Get them to the door, outside the time lock,’ he mouthed against her ear, his lips touching her skin.

She leaned against him for a moment, her mouth next to his ear.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, pressing her head briefly against his. Then she turned and jogged as fast as she could towards the door. Running up the stairs was painful; there must have been at least twelve kilos in each bag, but she made it. She dumped heavy bags at the top and ran down for the next two, passing him coming in the opposite direction. And so it continued. The time was nearly up. She had four minutes. She raced down the stairs for the last two bags, once more passing him on the stairs as he heaved three bags, all heavier than hers, upwards. Their eyes met and she smiled – it felt like her first smile in days. There was no time to stop, though. She would thank him properly when it was over.

Emma grabbed the final two bags and staggered towards the stairs, the last of her strength almost gone.

‘Nearly there,’ she muttered to anybody who was listening, no longer caring whether Rory or his bosses could hear her.

She practically threw the bags out of the door, turned round and slammed it. One minute to spare.

She leaned against the door in the black corridor and looked around. Nothing.

She walked to the turn in the corridor and shone her torch into the blackness.

There was nobody there. He had gone, melted back into the night.

59

A huge sigh of relief went round the control room as they listened to Emma close the time-lock door. There seemed to be a brief moment of inactivity, and Tom imagined her leaning up against the wall to recover her breath. He guessed that she could perhaps carry ten kilos in each hand, and it sounded as if she had done three trips up the stairs. Given the market price of kilobars at the moment, that would be about one and a half million pounds worth of gold.

‘Come on, Emma,’ he said under his breath. She had less than ten minutes to get the bags into the back of the car, ready for the phone call.

He heard grunts as she lifted the bags, and thumps each time she threw one in the car. It seemed to be taking longer than he expected, and time was getting critical.

Tom heard the other phone ring and imagined her grabbing it out of her pocket.

He could only hear Emma’s part of the conversation.

‘No, I’m not in the bloody car, you’re quite right. I’ve just shifted about ten bags of stuff for you – and it wasn’t easy.’

Tom frowned. That seemed like something of an exaggeration.

A thought struck him. He had been so focused on listening to Emma as she brought the bags upstairs that he had stopped looking at the screen while she was obviously out of shot.

‘Can you play back the video from about three minutes before the time-lock please?’

The operator obliged.

Tom had been right. A dark figure had slipped out of the door and around the corner, back into the night.

So intently was he watching the screen that he almost missed what Emma was saying, her tone of voice alerting him.

‘What do you mean?’ Emma wailed. ‘I don’t understand. I’ve done everything you asked.’

And then she started to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs, with one word choked out between each gulp of air. ‘No. No.’

He didn’t know what was happening, but they couldn’t wait any longer.

Tom turned to the silver commander.

‘Get that baby out of there
now
. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re out of time.’

Tom’s attention was focused on the images being relayed back to the control room from the covert team at Julie McGuinness’s house. They were in.

He heard sounds of running feet. Becky’s radio was live, and he could hear her breath as she jogged into the house. He heard her shout a question, and then she sounded as if she was running upstairs.

‘Come on, Becky,’ Tom said quietly.

‘What?’ he heard her say. ‘Are you sure? Shit! Tom – he’s not here,’ she said. ‘Ollie’s not here. And Julie’s out cold.’

‘Fuck!’ Tom shouted, slamming the palms of his hands down on the table.

*

‘Tom – are you there?’ Emma was shouting through her tears, using Tom’s name. She wasn’t even attempting to hide who she was speaking to, and that said it all.

He took his phone off mute. ‘What’s happened, Emma?’

‘Have you got Ollie, Tom?’

Tom closed his eyes.

‘
Tom
,’ she screamed. ‘Have you
got
him?’

‘Emma, I’m so sorry. He wasn’t where we thought he was. We’re trying to find out where he’s been moved to.’

‘
No!’
Tom felt the agony in that single syllable and he had nothing to give her.

Suddenly he heard a car door slam, and seconds later the roar of an engine.

‘Emma!’ he shouted. There was no answer.

Through his radio he heard the voice of Nic Havers.

‘Sir, she’s driven off – she’s going fast. Really fast. We’re following – what do you want us to do?’

‘Stick with her for now. I’ll get back to you Nic.’

Tom picked up the phone again. ‘Emma!’ he shouted. There was no answer.

*

How did they know? Tom said it would be safe. How did they know?

The noise of her own thoughts battered Emma’s exhausted brain.

‘You’ve got our gold, but we’ve got your son,’ the voice had said. ‘We told you no police – you lied to us, Emma. We don’t like that.’

She had screamed at them down the phone, but it had made no difference.

Oh, Ollie, I’m so sorry
.

‘You need to lose the police – and do it now. What have they given you – a wire, a radio? A phone? Drive away and throw it out of the window. We’ll be watching. Get away from them, then we’ll tell you what to do next. Fuck this up, and your son’s as good as dead.’

Emma didn’t care about the police – whether they caught these men or not. She wanted her baby back, and this time she was going to do exactly as they said. She flattened her foot to the floor.

Calm down, Emma
. She knew that if she drove too quickly she would be stopped by traffic police – and with a boot full of gold that would be the end of everything. But she had to lose her followers.

The phone, the phone
. She wound down the car window and threw her Australian phone out of the window. She glanced in her rear-view mirror. There was a motorbike behind her, driving in the middle of the road so nobody could get past. She speeded up and the motorbike slowed slightly to block any pursuit. She knew who this was – and he was keeping the detectives from following her.

She waited, hoping and praying for a call on Tasha’s mobile from the man with the rasping voice.

*

‘Sir, we’re losing her.’ It was Nic Havers again. ‘There’s a motorbike in the middle of the road, going slowly but we can’t get past unless we switch the siren on. He must be one of theirs.’

Rory Slater
, thought Tom.

‘And sir – she’s thrown something out of the window. Looks like a phone.’

Bugger
. Somehow they had known that the police were involved. How was that possible?

‘I’m going to call David Joseph,’ Tom said to Paul Green. ‘Maybe Natasha felt she’d made a mistake in helping us and decided to contact them. I can’t see how else they could have known. I’ll speak to David and see what he can get out of her.’

He asked an operator to get through on the Josephs’ home number. There was no reply.

‘Try the radio,’ he said. He really needed to speak to David.

There was no response.

‘Send the team into the Josephs’ house,’ he instructed. ‘The gang knows we’re onto them, so there’s nothing to lose. I don’t like this silence.’

‘Tom,’ Paul Green had walked over to stand beside him. ‘According to my CHIS, everything’s going ahead as planned. They may be aware that we know about Ollie and the robbery, but Emma was never told where the handover point was, so as long as she’s not followed they’ve got no reason to change it. As far as the CHIS is aware, the handover point is the same. If it changes, he’ll let us know.’

Tom nodded his thanks and picked up his radio again. ‘Nic – you need to look as if you’re trying to get past the bike – but don’t try too hard. Make it look as if you’re trying to tail her, but lose her. We believe we know where she’s going. If they know you’re still following her, they’ll change to a different handover location, and she’ll be very vulnerable.’

Tom’s attention was back on the cameras – to the place where he hoped and prayed the exchange was still going to take place. The cemetery was dark, deserted. There was nothing to see.

A call came through on his radio.

‘Mr Douglas, we’re at the Josephs’ place now. The back door’s been kicked in. We found David Joseph on the kitchen floor. He’s in a bad way, sir. We’ve called an ambulance, but he’s been given a real going over.’

Shit
. This was going from bad to worse.

‘What about Natasha? Is she okay?’

‘Just a moment, sir.’ Tom heard the policeman speak to somebody else. ‘We’ve searched the house and the gardens thoroughly, sir. There’s no sign of the girl. They’ve got her.’

60

The McGuinness’ house was stiflingly hot. Becky wiped her face with a scrunched-up tissue. How could they have got it so wrong? The entrance to the property had gone entirely to plan. They’d waited as long as the command team had believed sensible before going in. And now they had nothing. Bugger all.

Julie McGuinness was lying on her back in the centre of the bed, fully dressed. She was out cold. On the bedside table were a plastic bottle of Temazepam and a blue litre bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

‘Bollocks,’ Becky spat the word in frustration into her radio. ‘She’s taken sleeping pills. I’ve no idea how many – there’s a prescription bottle half empty, but she’s been drinking gin with them. Doesn’t look like a suicide attempt – there’s still plenty left in the bottle. At a guess, she hadn’t coped well with a baby screaming for his mum. We need to get a medic – see if we can bring her round.’

From the control room, she heard agreement and knew it would be in hand.

She looked at the body lying on the bed. What must it be like to be married to a thug like Finn McGuinness? Julie herself was no angel, of course, and was running her own part of the business from a separate property – seemingly involving girls as young as thirteen. Had Julie been like this when she met McGuinness, Becky wondered. Or is that what happened when you got involved with a man like him?

The woman on the bed had shoulder-length hair, too dark to be natural, and her skin had the orange tinge of a fake tan. In repose, her mouth turned down sourly at the edges, and her heavy dark eye makeup was smudged, running into the creases at the corners of her eyes. Becky imagined that when Julie McGuinness was looking her best she would be quite stunning with her slim body and large chest. But it was all artifice. There was something depressing about her – as if this body on the bed was the real, sad person behind the glamour and riches that her chosen life had brought her.

‘You got a minute, ma’am? You might want to look at this.’

Becky turned at the voice from the doorway. A young policeman, chunky in his ballistic vest, a semi-automatic disarmed and held safely across his body, was indicating a room across the landing and Becky followed him into a large bathroom with a Jacuzzi corner bath and huge walk-in shower. In the middle of the floor there was a plastic changing mat, and a pack of nappies with a picture of a toddler on the front. The policeman picked up one of the nappies and handed it to Becky.

‘Don’t know how much you know about nappies, ma’am, but we’ve got a new baby at home and these would go round her twice.’

Becky nodded and walked over to the bathroom bin. Inside were several nappy bags. Ollie had been here.

So where the hell was he now?

61

Stupid, stupid woman
. Why did she always have to think that she knew best? Why hadn’t she just gone along with everything like David had wanted?

The thought of David brought it all back to her. How could he have done that to Caroline and Tasha? And now – all because of his reckless actions six years ago, she had lost her baby. She lifted both hands and banged them on the steering wheel.