#taken

by Tony Parsons

  DC Edie Wren.

  Age 26. Died of injuries.

  I stood there for a long moment, because I could never get enough of that smile, that face, but then I was suddenly aware that the students were waiting and they would not be allowed in until I had gone.

  ‘Thank you, John.’

  ‘Any time,’ he said, putting his arm around me. We walked towards his office, the voices in the corridor falling respectfully silent as we approached.

  ‘Give Harry Flowers a tug,’ John said. ‘He’ll tell you who hates him.’

  ‘Will do.’

  But I did not need to go looking for Harry Flowers.

  Because he came looking for me.

  3

  At the end of that first day I ate dinner in Smiths of Smithfield with Scout and Stan.

  The dog dozed at our feet, stretched out in the classic Cavalier King Charles Spaniel resting pose, his front legs pushed out before him like a high diver about to take the long plunge, as I watched the meat market coming alive through the great glass windows of SOS and Scout read aloud to herself from her book. She was a good reader.

  At eight, Scout’s milk teeth had almost gone. She had lost four top front teeth and four bottom front teeth, and her words occasionally came out with a sound that was somewhere between a whistle and a lisp.

  ‘Taormina,’ she read, ‘perched high on Monte Tauro, with Mount Etna ath a backdrop, lookth down on two grand, thweeping bays and is Thithily’th – Sicily’th! – Sicily’s! – Sicily’s best-known resort.’

  These last words punched out with considerable effort. Scout hated the speech impediment that came with the passing of her milk teeth and I tried not to let her catch me smiling. I glanced at the cover of her book. The Rough Guide to Italy. That’s a strange book to choose for library club, I thought.

  And then I saw the car.

  A black Bentley Bentayga V8.

  The meat porters stopped what they were doing to watch the luxury SUV make its stately progress down Charterhouse Street. The car stopped outside Smiths of Smithfield and a driver got out. A young man, probably of Indian or Pakistani descent, in a dark suit that was not quite a chauffeur’s uniform but close. His head was shaven but his expression was too timid for him to look threatening. He looked more like a Tibetan monk than a skinhead.

  He rang a buzzer on the door next to the restaurant. The building where we lived.

  ‘Sicily considers itself a separate entity to the rest of Italy,’ Scout said. She looked up from The Rough Guide to Italy. ‘Are we going to have any dessert?’

  ‘You order for us,’ I said. ‘I’m going to talk to the man.’

  The driver looked up at me as I came through the glass door of SOS. The Bentley’s big V8 engine rumbled with contentment.

  ‘Mr Wolfe?’ he said.

  ‘Detective Wolfe,’ I said. ‘What do you want, pal?’

  Although I had already guessed.

  ‘Mr Harold Flowers is in the back of this car,’ the driver said. ‘He would like to offer his assistance in your current investigation.’

  I looked at the blacked-out windows of the Bentley, feeling a spike of pure fury.

  ‘And your boss thinks it is appropriate to come to my home?’

  The driver looked apologetic.

  ‘It’s simply because Mr Flowers understands the urgency of the situation.’

  ‘Does your boss have any new information about the abduction of Jessica Lyle?’

  ‘Not new information as such, but Mr Flowers—’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Tell him to come into West End Central tomorrow morning and make a statement.’ I took a step closer to the driver. ‘And don’t ever come anywhere near my home again.’

  The Bentley’s back door began to open.

  The driver hurried to hold it.

  Harry Flowers got out and stood before me. He was a large man – a shade taller than my 6 feet, but twice as heavy – who looked like he had got that way not because of his genes but because of his appetites. His thinning hair was scraped back from his high forehead. Unapologetically balding.

  He looked like he had been trouble for a lifetime, but when he spoke his voice was soft and polite, so soft that I fought the urge to lean forward to listen more carefully, so polite that for a moment I didn’t feel like kicking him all the way back to Essex.

  ‘DC Wolfe? I’m sorry to disturb your evening and sorry for this intrusion.’

  Harry Flowers’ accent was unreconstructed London working class, but he had clearly been around people from more privileged backgrounds. Hadn’t John Caine told me Flowers had a posh wife? She had smoothed out his Cockney vowels and his table manners.

  ‘I want to help find Jessica,’ he said, and shrugged. A businessman’s shrug, the shrug of someone who understood the art of the deal. He was offering me something that I wanted too. He was making me an offer he didn’t think I could refuse. ‘That’s all,’ he said, the soft voice of reason. ‘In any way I can.’

  ‘Then come into West End Central tomorrow morning and make a statement.’

  ‘I didn’t want to wait.’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘After your dinner.’

  ‘After my dinner I’m busy walking my dog.’

  He spread his hands. They were big hands. ‘Then may I wait?’

  And he did. I went back into Smiths of Smithfield, where Scout was wiping a blueberry pancake stain from the cover of The Rough Guide to Italy and Stan was awake, sniffing the air, alert and very aware that there were hot pancakes knocking about.

  We finished our dessert. I got the bill, and when I came out Flowers and the driver were both back behind the tinted windows of the Bentley.

  The engine was switched off now. They were waiting.

  Let the bastard wait, I thought.

  Scout and I took Stan down to West Smithfield Rotunda Garden. It was a peaceful little space, not big enough to be called a park, and you would never guess that this was once a place of public execution. William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered here more than seven hundred years ago. Queen Mary burned 200 Protestants here five hundred years ago. You would never guess at that long history of violence, I thought, looking back at the meat market, just as you would never guess what the man in the back of that Bentley had once done to a business rival with a 20-litre can of petrol.

  I didn’t want this scum-sack anywhere near me, my daughter and our home.

  I didn’t want him near my dog.

  But the Bentley was still parked outside Smiths of Smithfield when we got back, a couple of parking tickets fluttering under its windscreen wipers.

  ‘You got your key?’ I asked Scout. ‘Put some water down for Stan and brush your teeth. Don’t answer the door. I’ll be up in five minutes.’

  I let them into our building and watched Scout lead Stan into the lift. When the doors had closed I went back to the Bentley. The driver was standing on the pavement.

  ‘He’s got five minutes,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Flowers is waiting for you in there,’ the driver said.

  He was indicating Fred’s gym.

  I went inside.

  At this time of night Fred’s was almost empty.

  James Brown was playing on the sound system, the volume turned up to ten, the lone treadmill runner seeming to move to that funky beat, while on a yoga mat a woman in her sixties with the body of someone forty years younger performed an immaculate surya namaskar, the sun salutation, her arms reaching up to the heavens and then down to her toes, bending and unfolding as she made the series of asanas look like some graceful pagan dance. Up on the giant TV screen, the first fight between Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales was playing with the sound turned off, the two Mexicans refusing to retreat an inch. The yoga woman stared straight at them and did not seem to see them. You got all types in Fred’s.

  Harry Flowers was watching Fred sparring with a heavyweight who was perhaps twice his size. And Flowers was not alone.

 
The polite little driver had stayed on the street but there was a tall, good-looking black man standing by Flowers’ side while an enormously fat white man in glasses lifted free weights with hands blurred by ancient tattoos.

  The hired help, I thought. What kind of legitimate businessman brings his bodyguards to a gym?

  The fat man lifting weights spoke as I passed him.

  ‘How old is your kid?’ he said.

  I stopped and I stared at him. And I kept staring until he looked away. And when I saw that he was not going to open his mouth to me again, I walked to where Flowers was watching the boxing.

  ‘The smaller man is faster,’ he said thoughtfully, talking about Fred. ‘But there’s something else. He has no fear.’

  Could I imagine Harry Flowers emptying a can of petrol on a terrified family? It was thirty years ago. It felt like somebody else, in some other lifetime. Maybe he had not done it after all. Maybe it was one of those myths that villains love. A tale that grew in the telling, John Caine had said, as if it was a story from Tolkien.

  ‘What do you want, Flowers?’

  He turned to look at me.

  ‘What’s happened to Jessica Lyle is a tragedy,’ he said.

  ‘Feeling guilty, are you? You should. Because it doesn’t seem very likely that they were after Jessica Lyle, does it?’

  The black man by his side stirred at the tone in my voice and I realised that I had seen him before. Long ago, in a professional boxing ring. He was good back then – big but fast, brought up on dreams of moving like Muhammad Ali.

  ‘Where do I know you from?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m Ruben Shavers,’ he said, holding out a massive hand.

  I ignored it. ‘And who is the meathead on the free weights?’

  Flowers chuckled. ‘Meathead!’ He liked that one.

  ‘That’s Derek Bumpus,’ the black guy told me. ‘Big Del.’

  I turned my full attention to his master.

  ‘We both know they didn’t want Jessica Lyle,’ I said to Flowers. ‘They wanted your special friend. They wanted Snezia Jones. An innocent woman has been taken because someone wants to get back at you.’

  ‘Is that your theory?’ he said, calm and quiet.

  ‘Or maybe you tried to get shot of Snezia Jones yourself.’

  A cloud passed across his fleshy features.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ he said.

  ‘All the usual reasons a man like you would press the eject button on his mistress. Because you’re bored with her. Because you want her off the payroll. Because you found out she had her own bit on the side. Or any combination of the above.’

  ‘I prefer your first theory. Someone wants to do me harm. If I was behind the abduction, I would not be very likely to seek out a detective in Homicide and Serious Crime, would I?’

  He had me there. Or maybe not. Maybe coming to see me was a double bluff.

  ‘Who do you think took Jessica Lyle?’ I said. ‘I can’t believe you don’t have a list of suspects.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Whatever you have heard about me is ancient history,’ he said. He gave me what looked like a business card but turned out to be one of those old-fashioned matchbox folders that advertised a business.

  Auto Waste Solutions, it said on the cover.

  ‘I don’t know who took her, but I know what happens next,’ he said. ‘Whoever took Jessica, they are violent men, and they are stupid men, and by now they almost certainly understand they have made the biggest mistake of their lives. And that makes me fear for this young woman.’

  It was exactly my take on the situation.

  ‘Do you know Jessica Lyle?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘She is the flatmate of …’ pausing to find the correct terminology, ‘… someone I am close to. We have been introduced and we say hello. I am not often at the apartment. Snezia and I usually meet at a hotel in town.’

  I looked at the clock on the wall of Fred’s. I thought of Scout alone in the big loft. This was taking too long. She had put down water for Stan and she had brushed her teeth, but what was she doing now? I looked at the fat man in glasses with the blurred tattoos on his hands.

  ‘I need to get home to my daughter,’ I said.

  ‘I understand.’

  But I had one more question.

  ‘Who hates your guts, Flowers?’

  For the first time, he bridled with impatience. It was no more than that. I sensed he was a man who kept his anger under lock and key.

  ‘I’m into recycling solutions,’ he said. ‘It’s not the Eighties any more. The people who made everything start with an E are either dead, doing time or – if they were smart – they moved on to other fields. And legitimate business.’ He indicated the matchbox I was holding.

  ‘Then who hates you enough to kidnap the woman they thought was your mistress?’

  He lifted his chin and Ruben Shavers left us.

  ‘Do you ever watch those David Attenborough documentaries? I love them. Sometimes a young lion tries to take the place of an older lion. And sometimes they succeed and the old lion has to crawl away to die. But not always. Sometimes the old lion still has more than the young lion can handle – too much strength, too much experience, and far too much to lose. And that’s when the young lion gets his face ripped off.’

  ‘And sometimes both of them get stuck in a zoo.’

  Behind us, I could hear the sound of leather gloves hitting flesh and bone. The big man fighting Fred grunted with pain. I wanted to be home.

  ‘I know you despise me, DC Wolfe,’ Flowers said. ‘But please don’t let your personal feelings stop me from helping you find Jessica Lyle. Whatever you think of me, whatever you may have heard about me, it all dates, I am sure, from a very long time ago. But I still have resources. And I can help.’

  Fred darted beyond the heavyweight’s lowered guard and threw more punches than I could count, battering the far bigger man to his knees. The bell went and they embraced. It was time for me to go home. I could feel that sick anxious feeling rising in me – parental panic – but still I lingered for a few seconds more. Because for the first time I thought perhaps I could use Harry Flowers.

  ‘It’s possible they still believe they have the right woman,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if that is good or bad news for Jessica Lyle.’

  ‘Then why don’t they ask for a ransom?’

  ‘I would be guessing.’

  ‘Please have a guess, DC Wolfe.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t want your money, Harry,’ I said. ‘Maybe they just want to see you suffer.’

  I ran home.

  The lift took too long coming, no matter how many times I hit the call button, so I took the stairs, two at a time, all the way to the top floor. I burst into our loft sweaty with dread.

  Scout was in her pyjamas, kneeling by the coffee table and holding her book in one hand while the fingers of her other hand stroked the sleeping head of our dog, who was snoring with contentment on the sofa.

  Scout looked up from The Rough Guide to Italy and stared at me with her solemn brown eyes as I stood there with the panic receding, the last of the day’s sunshine pouring through the big windows, knowing that I had never seen anything in this world more beautiful than my daughter.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  4

  Jessica Lyle’s bedroom was large and full of light, a spacious room with views on two sides across Hampstead Heath. A good address in an expensive area. There was a cot at the end of the bed, and wardrobes stuffed full of clothes for a woman and a fast-growing baby boy. The bookcase was jammed with bestselling paperbacks for her and first books for baby Michael. Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, Lisa Jewell and Audrey Niffenegger shared space with The Noisy Farm Sound Book, The Wipe Clean Work Book, Cars! Cars! Cars!, I like Bugs and All the Things I Wish for You.

  And as I read the titles of the books, I felt her life surround me.

  This is who we are, the room seemed to whisper.


  The baby boy and his dancing mother.

  Jessica Lyle was not a crime statistic in this room.

  On the bedside table there was a single silver-framed photograph of a good-looking, rugby-fit young man with his arms wrapped tight around Jessica, grinning for the camera as if he was the happiest man who ever lived.

  Lawrence, the dead fiancé, who got knocked off his bike and left for dead by someone who was never stopped and never caught. But this did not feel like the room of a woman who was still in mourning for the man she had planned to spend her life with.

  Apart from the one bedside photograph, which looked as though it had been taken by the boating lake in Hyde Park, there was no other evidence of Jessica Lyle’s dead fiancé in this room.

  No clothes, no books, no reminders of that other life.

  This room belonged exclusively to Jessica Lyle and her son.

  There were dance trophies, books and electronic devices. Stuffed toys that looked faded with age, passed on from mother to child. I peered at a plastic pink-and-purple My First Laptop and recalled it from when Scout was a few years younger.

  This felt like someone’s home.

  And it felt like the room of a woman who had been desperately, horrifically unlucky.

  I went to the windows and stared down at Eden Hill Park. The security guard who had called the abduction in was making his rounds in his van.

  DCI Pat Whitestone entered the room and came and stood beside me.

  She stared down at the security guard. ‘That useless piece of trash,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘A woman is dragged from her car and this guy – this plastic policeman – he doesn’t lift a finger. He didn’t even get a registration plate or ID.’