#taken

by Tony Parsons

  ‘You have to buy me a drink,’ she said.

  A waitress materialised. She wore a tailored dinner jacket with a ruffled white shirt and bow-tie but nothing below the waist apart from high-denier black tights and precarious shoes. It was as though Hugh Hefner had never died. I let Snezia do the ordering and then I nodded at Bumpus and Shavers.

  ‘What are the goon squad doing here?’ I said.

  ‘In case they come again,’ she said, rubbing the palms of her hands on her thighs. ‘The men who took Jessica.’

  Her hands were shaking.

  Behind the polished smile, I saw she was terrified.

  It could have been her in that car. It should have been her.

  ‘What does Harry tell you about what happened?’ I said. ‘What does he say about that night?’

  ‘We haven’t spoken for a while,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult for him. Someone tried to hurt him last night. Some people who pretended they had Jess.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about that,’ I said. ‘But Harry’s got a lot of enemies. And what about you? You got any enemies, Snezia? Anyone hassling you? A jealous ex-boyfriend?’

  I indicated the Western World. The near-naked women wrapping their young flesh around those fireman poles and the men who were not as young or as firm and who sipped their drinks without taking their eyes from the women.

  ‘You ever get any customers in here who can’t take no for an answer, Snezia?’

  ‘Drunks who think money can buy anything. The bouncers can take care of them.’

  ‘Never tempted? You must have got a bit lonely when Flowers was out in the suburbs playing happy families.’

  ‘I’ve been true to Harry,’ she said.

  Flowers had made their relationship sound like a cold commercial transaction.

  But Snezia made it sound more like a love story.

  ‘What was the long-term plan?’ I said. ‘If none of this had happened with Jessica. What was going to happen next with Harry? Did he tell you he was going to leave his wife? What were you hoping for, Snezia? And what were you expecting?’

  She was silent while the waitress brought a bottle of something sparkly and two glasses.

  ‘There was no long-term plan,’ she said, brushing away an invisible tear, as if to be polite. ‘I knew it was coming to an end. I knew it could never be. Not forever. Not with a married man. I was already thinking about moving out of the apartment.’

  Beyond what seemed like a genuine sadness, there was a clear-eyed pragmatism about her as she took a sip of her Prosecco.

  ‘Harry is not a young man,’ she said. ‘And an older man – he needs stimulation. The kind of stimulation that calls for variety. Someone once said – why would a man go out for hamburger when he has steak at home? And that’s easy – because a man gets tired of the same diet. Harry was seeing me less and less. When he came to the flat, he never stayed the night. Not for months. And when he was there, he seemed keen to get away. We were heading towards a conscious uncoupling – you know, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin.’ She paused. ‘I am glad you are looking for Jess,’ she said. ‘Because I know that not everyone is so lucky. There was a girl here – Minky – and she just stopped coming to work.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Gone. Is that the same as missing?’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Minky?’

  ‘Not so long ago. I don’t know. Maybe around the time that Jess was taken? It must have been around then.’

  ‘And was Minky’s disappearance ever reported?’

  ‘I think it was reported. It must have been. I know some policemen came to ask questions. But just once. They were more interested in the girls. And I am sure she is fine. Gone home to Prague, or maybe it was Budapest. Or Belgrade. No – Riga.’

  ‘Minky was Latvian?’

  ‘Or maybe she found a rich man,’ Snezia said, brightening at the prospect. ‘She was a very popular girl. Big Del liked her. They went out.’

  I glanced down the bar at Derek Bumpus. He was staring up at a dancer with a faint smirk on his fleshy face.

  ‘Lots of men liked Minky. I am sure she found someone who would take care of her. A sponsor. But Minky disappeared too. And my point is – nobody is looking very hard for her, are they? It doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s not fair. Sometimes we turn the world upside down to find the missing. And sometimes we don’t try as hard as we should.’

  Then the waitress was back, lifting her head towards the empty podium.

  Snezia nodded.

  ‘I must dance,’ she said, bolting down the rest of her glass.

  The goon squad were still watching me. I remembered that an unidentified male had accompanied Harry Flowers to that Sunday lunch at the Mahones all those years ago. And I wondered if it was one of them. They would have had to have been very young.

  And as I was thinking about how old Ruben Shavers and Derek Bumpus would have been on the day of that petrol-soaked Sunday lunch, the hen party arrived. There were around a dozen women, all dressed in a parody of school uniform, white shorts and stripy ties and skirts hitched up. One of them, drunker than the rest, carried an inflatable pink phallus, a giant penis balloon, that she waved above her head as if it was their battle flag.

  And I saw it was Meadow Flowers.

  The hen party took their places at the bar, half of them seated and the other half ordering drinks and dancing to the music. It was no coincidence that they had walked into this bar. They were here for Snezia.

  Meadow Flowers began slapping at the dancer with her inflatable penis. Light and jokey at first, almost an invitation to play.

  And then harder, nastier, with real spite. Snezia backed away, twirled to the far side of her fireman’s pole.

  And kept dancing.

  The hen party roared with laughter. Then bouncers were suddenly there, ushering the women dressed as schoolgirls away from the stage and back to one of the stand-alone tables.

  I watched as they began throwing peanuts at Snezia, cheering when one of them bounced off her butt. I saw Bumpus and Shavers in heated discussion, unsure where their loyalties lay between their master’s mistress and their master’s daughter. And then the chanting began, low at first but growing louder.

  ‘Whore … whore … whore …’

  Snezia snatched up a wine glass from the bar and hurled it at them. It shattered at their feet and Meadow Flowers flew at her, tears of rage streaming down her face. She did not seem drunk now.

  ‘You lousy rotten hooker!’ she screamed.

  ‘I’m an erotic dancer, you spoilt little rich bitch!’ Snezia screamed back.

  There were men between them, the Western World bouncers, Shavers and Bumpus, and they all wore the look of men who knew that they were the only thing that stood between the two women and real emergency-ward violence.

  ‘You think they just dance at this club?’ Meadow Flowers shouted at nobody in particular. ‘He cheats on my mother with some whore who will bang anyone for a few quid and a bucket of chicken nuggets! They all do in here!’

  And I saw that she meant it. She was not accusing Snezia of having an affair with her father.

  It was more than that.

  The bouncers were leading Snezia away, Bumpus and Shavers trailing behind them, unsure how to play it as Meadow Flowers kept shouting.

  ‘This slag is all about the money! A hooker. A whore. A prostitute. That’s what she was – that’s what she is – that’s what my dad brought into our home! Into his marriage! Into our lives!’

  I looked at Snezia. She looked like she was done for the night. She looked as though she might be done forever. She picked up her pink silk shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  ‘I know all about her!’ Meadow was explaining to one of the bouncers, tears of rage and grief streaming down her face. ‘She has caused so much suffering. To me. To my mother.’

  The hen party were chanting louder now.

  ‘Whore! W
hore! Whore!’

  They turned off the music and I heard the hiss of escaped air. In the ruckus with the bouncers, the giant inflatable phallus had sprung a leak and it began to crumple, the big pink plastic prick folding in on itself.

  Snezia was leaving the stage with as much dignity as she could muster. In the strange silence of a club with no music, someone threw a bottle at her. It missed, shattering against the fireman’s pole, leaving a splash of beer on one of her long legs that looked somehow obscene.

  Snezia held her head high and took her time, but she avoided all eye contact and under the lights her pale face was burning with something that might have been shame, as if she had suddenly realised that she was almost naked, and the entire world was looking at her.

  Joy Adams was curled up and sleeping on the back seat of the BMW but Pat Whitestone was wide awake and clear-eyed, watching me as I crossed from the Western World to the car.

  ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘Harry Flowers did have a motive to want his mistress gone. The sex had worn off.’

  12

  One hour before dawn we went in hard.

  Four vehicles. The lead was a white transit van with Avant Gardens – let us be your green fingers emblazoned on the side in fading green letters, in reality a Tactical Support Unit beefed up with reinforced steel beams and shatterproof glass.

  The thing was a tank and it went through the big electric gates of Harry Flowers’ mansion as if they were made of wet cardboard.

  I followed in the BMW X5, Whitestone beside me and Adams in the back, all of us operating on a few hours of snatched sleep, all of us wide-eyed with adrenaline, bumping over the smashed gates as the Specialist Firearms Officers in their grey body armour began emerging from the back of the Avant Gardens van and heading towards the front door, their Sig Sauer MCX assault rifles swinging to their shoulders. Behind me came two big marked vans loaded with uniformed officers in riot gear.

  The little gentle skinhead driver – Mo – was already up and on the driveway and cleaning the Bentley. He paused in mid-polish, staring at us in wonder. There was another car parked in front of the house. A Range Rover with Ruben Shavers at the wheel and Derek Bumpus in the passenger seat. They were both sleeping. It must have been a late night at the Western World, I thought.

  The shots lined up either side of the front door, like a guard of honour, their assault rifles swinging back to the 45-degree angle they liked to adopt when they were waiting for something to happen, which was most of the time. One of the uniforms walked purposefully forward carrying a heavily scarred bright red battering ram that weighs 16 kilos and is variously known as the bosher, the big red key and the Nigel.

  The Flowers’ front door was reinforced with a London Bar, a solid steel bar designed to fit over the door frame and lock, which would have prevented an army of intruders from kicking it down, but the big red key popped it on the first try.

  A burglar alarm began to ring.

  The uniformed officer stepped aside with a flourish and the shots poured inside, their assault rifles coming back to their shoulders, screaming a warning to embolden themselves and subdue whatever was waiting.

  Harry Flowers came down the stairs in his pyjamas.

  In each hand he carried a thin dark stick.

  I recognised them as the fighting sticks of Eskrima, the Filipino martial art, 28 inches long, made of hardwood that could crack a skull open without the user breaking sweat. And if the user could claim a legitimate interest in the noble fighting art of Eskrima, then no judge in the land would consider them offensive weapons. It was a clever thing to have by your bedside to confront a trespasser and Harry Flowers was reluctant to put them down.

  ‘Drop the weapon!’

  ‘Do it now!’

  ‘Show us your hands!’

  There were ten assault rifles aimed at his chest. He smiled at Whitestone as if he had been expecting her and let the Eskrima sticks drop when he reached the bottom of the stairs. She stepped forward and turned him around, marching him to the nearest wall. She was clear-eyed in the early morning and I saw the pattern emerging. The drinking took over as the day wore on. At dawn my boss was her old self, supremely confident, vastly experienced and, despite her modest frame and weak eyesight, quite capable of taking physical control of any man alive.

  ‘Harry Flowers, I am arresting you on suspicion of the Kidnap and False Imprisonment of Jessica Lyle.’ Whitestone banged his head against the wall, as if for punctuation. ‘You do not have to say anything.’ She banged his head again, a bit harder this time, and Flowers gasped with shock and pain. ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.’

  Bang.

  ‘Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’ She spun him around. A thin dribble of blood ran down his large forehead. ‘Let’s go.’

  The goon squad were awake and rubbing the sleep from their eyes when we went outside.

  Ruben Shavers took one look at our mob and wisely wanted none of it. But that old-school machismo learned bouncing on the doors obliged Big Del Bumpus to show some dissent. He did not have it in him to let us just walk away. He made a move towards Whitestone and I was on him, kicking his legs from beneath him and getting him face down in all that expensive gravel.

  He half-turned his head to talk to me.

  ‘All this fuss for some dumb slut who’s probably already dead,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ I said.

  ‘Stupid slag,’ he said. ‘Little whore.’

  I jerked the wrist of his right hand towards me as I pushed the elbow away from me as hard as I could. There was one sharp crack, and then another, so close together that the double crack almost sounded like one sound. But there are two long bones in the lower arm, the radius and the ulna, and I had broken both of them.

  He screamed. And he kept on screaming.

  I got to my feet and left him down there.

  ‘If you’re going to call a woman names,’ I said, ‘best not do it when I’ve got you in an arm lock.’

  And now the house was wide awake.

  In the smashed front doorway, Junior appeared, still in his clothes from the night before, and then his sister Meadow, in her pyjamas, pushing past her brother and running out of the house, the tears rolling down her face as Joy Adams gently guided Flowers into the back seat of the BMW.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ Meadow Flowers cried, tears streaming, but Harry Flowers had already slipped into the zone, the stone-faced, blank-eyed passivity of a man who knew the form. He was conserving his energy and, whatever his thoughts, he was keeping them to himself.

  And then his wife was at exactly the same window where I had seen her throw away his things.

  Charlotte Flowers leaned from the window, wearing some floaty, gossamer-thin nightdress, like a princess in a fairy story who had never been rescued as promised.

  She shook her head.

  And then, almost delicately, she spat.

  That old cop hatred, I thought. Some of these people carry it around for a lifetime.

  It was only when we were on the road back to the city that I realised she had been spitting at her husband.

  One hour later, Harry Flowers sat in an interview room of West End Central with the Zen-like calm of the career criminal.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Whitestone said. ‘It had gone smooth with Snezia in the past. The bit on the side you had set up in the apartment. The basic pleasure model on the payroll. It worked out well for both of you. You got exclusive access to a beautiful young woman. Snezia got free accommodation in a great postcode – and the benefit of your charming personality, Harry. And you’d got away with it before. How many times, Harry? How many women on the side over the years? But this time it went wrong. Snezia was going to tell your wife. Or she wanted to get married. One or the other. Maybe both. Or you got bored but she wanted an extension of the lease. And then she became quite strident about it.’ Whitesto
ne snapped her fingers. ‘Oh. Or was she pregnant? Is that what happened? She wanted to keep the baby and you were not so keen?’ She exhaled. ‘It all comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Does it?’

  Whitestone nodded.

  ‘She wanted more than you were willing to give. And you decided to remove the problem. It’s not such a big step. Not for the man who poured petrol over the Mahone family. How many children were at that table, Harry?’

  His lawyer leaned forward. ‘No charges were ever—’

  Harry Flowers silenced him with a look.

  ‘One flaw in your theory?’ Flowers said. ‘The bored-sponsor theory?’

  ‘I’m all ears,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Snezia was not kidnapped, was she?’ he said.

  ‘Because villains are stupid,’ Whitestone said. ‘Because professional criminals all have an IQ lower than their shoe size. If they weren’t stupid, they would get a real job. They saw the car, checked the reg, and they thought they had the right woman. They took Jessica Lyle when they were meant to take Snezia Jones. And you, Harry, were the man who sent them.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you what I think,’ Flowers said. ‘You’re drowning, DCI Whitestone. You’re floundering around, coming up with nothing, and you need an arrest. Because all of this is very big news thanks to that old cop with the very big mouth.’ He meant Jessica Lyle’s father. He meant Frank Lyle.

  Then Flowers turned to look at me and for the first time he let some anger tighten his mouth.

  ‘And you are wasting time when you could be looking for that missing girl,’ he said.

  ‘Sex wear off, did it, Harry?’ Whitestone said. ‘Need a bit of extra stimulation at your age?’

  The lawyer leaned forward again. ‘Really, you don’t have to—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Harry said, not even looking at him. ‘The truth is that Snezia is a sweet girl. But she was acting like she owned the place.’