“I don’t want to know how you’re going to do it, or when,” said the man, handing over the folder. “That’s up to you. Just make sure you call the number when you’ve got her.”
“No problem,” I said. “We won’t let you down.”
The man turned to get back into his car, when my mum spoke out for the first time.
“Why are you doing this?”
The man slowly turned back to face us. “The ad said ‘no questions’,” he growled.
“I know,” said my mum. “But – your own daughter…”
Another pause, longer this time. When he spoke again, his voice sounded harder.
“You remember that boy who was kidnapped while he was on holiday with his family in Greece last year? It was all over the news.”
Mum nodded. “I remember.”
“The public was horrified by the crime,” said the man. “Horrified to the point of rushing to donate money into a fund to help his devastated parents find their little angel. They got over five million pounds in the first week alone.”
“And you want to do the same with Tiffany?” asked my mum. “You’re going to sit there on TV, crying and asking people to help find her so that you can line your own pockets?”
“You’re starting to sound very virtuous for someone who’s just taken ten grand to kidnap an innocent little girl,” the man rumbled.
I stepped in. “We’ve only got five grand.”
The man snarled. “I told you – you’ll get the rest when you’ve got Tiffany.”
He got into his car without another word. He nodded to his driver and they drove away, leaving us standing in the shadows. I felt the bulge of the money stuffed into my pocket and realised that we were now deeply involved in a crime far more serious than nicking a few DVDs from the local supermarket.
Now, we just had to figure out how to do it.
CHAPTER 4
THE HARD WAY
We studied Tiffany’s file for the next two days. The school she went to was a private facility where the well-off sent their kids to be educated away from, well… away from the likes of me, I suppose.
A couple of nights a week, she stayed behind after classes to either play hockey or to practise her show-jumping. She even had a horse of her own, a pale-brown thing called Chestnut that was kept in an exclusive stables on the outskirts of town.
That’s where we decided to make our move.
My mum rented a van with the money we now had, and we parked it part-way down the track leading to Chestnut’s stables. We were both dressed in farmer-type clothes, and my mum was writing something on a clipboard. Then, at exactly the time we’d been promised in her file, Tiffany came walking along the lane, carrying her riding helmet.
My mum jumped out of the van. “Sorry,” she called out, waving her clipboard, “you can’t go any further, I’m afraid. There’s been an accident at the stable yard.”
I was hiding at the back of the van, so I couldn’t see Tiffany, but I could hear the panic in her voice.
“Accident?” she cried. “What kind of accident?”
“Some idiot fell asleep at the wheel of his Landrover and ploughed into the stables. One of the horses was badly injured. The vet is there now, putting it to sleep.”
Tiffany gasped. “Which horse?”
My mum looked down the list she pretended to have on her clipboard. “Let me see… ah, here it is. A light brown eight-year-old called Chestnut.”
I almost felt sorry for Tiffany. She gave out a strangled sob and ran past my mum in the direction of the stables. As she stumbled past me, tears already flowing down her cheeks, I pulled a sack down over her head and pushed her into the back of the van.
“Go! Go!” I shouted over Tiffany’s muffled screams.
My mum jumped into the driver’s seat, as I jumped in beside Tiffany and closed the van doors. Within a few minutes, we were driving back towards our part of town.
I cautiously pulled the sack from Tiffany’s head. “Don’t make a noise, and we promise not to hurt you,” I said.
Tiffany nodded, but then obviously changed her mind. “Help!” she bellowed as we pulled up at a set of traffic lights. “Help me!”
I grabbed a roll of tape and tore off a strip. “Now we’ve got to do things the hard way,” I said, pressing the tape over her mouth and ripping off another strip for her wrists.
Back at the hostel, we waited until it was dark, then bundled Tiffany into our room. Once inside, I sat her on my bed and grabbed the mobile phone and dialled.
“It’s done,” I said as the same, brooding voice answered the call.
“Prove it,” came the response.
I went over to Tiffany and carefully pulled the tape from her mouth, but left her wrists taped together behind her back. “Say your name and where you are,” I commanded, holding the phone up to her ear.
“M… my name is Tiffany King,” she sobbed, “and I don’t know where I am. Two people grabbed me near the stables and they’ve brought me to some cheap hotel.”
“That’s enough!” I snapped, pulling the phone away. My mum moved in to place a fresh strip of tape over Tiffany’s mouth.
“When do we get the rest of the money?” I demanded into the mobile.
“Patience,” said the man with a low chuckle. “Let’s get the donations coming in from well-wishers first.”
“That wasn’t the agreement…” I began, but all I could hear was the dial tone.
Tiffany’s father had hung up.
I dropped the mobile beside the laptop on my bedside table and stood with my mum as she studied our prisoner.
“What now?” my mum asked, guessing the call hadn’t gone well.
I shrugged. “We wait.”
CHAPTER 5
CHILD’S PLAY
The next few days were a nightmare. Mum and I took it in turns to sleep in her bed, while Tiffany slept in mine. We fed our prisoner and gave her drinks, each time making her promise not to scream before taking the tape from her mouth.
Using the toilet was the worst. We didn’t have our own bathroom at the hostel; we had to use the shared facilities at the end of the hall. Whenever Tiffany needed to pee, we had to check that the coast was clear while my mum hurried down to the bathroom with her. I stood outside the door, keeping watch, then giving three knocks to signal that no one was around and we could take her back to the room.
I tried calling the number of our employer several times, but no one answered.
As we didn’t have a TV in our room, we watched news updates online on the laptop. The kidnapping of Tiffany King was the big story on every channel, with reporters stationed outside her school, her home and on the track leading down to Chestnut’s stables.
On the third day, Tiffany’s parents gave a press conference, begging for whoever had taken their little girl to please let her go. Her dad hardly looked like the man we’d met in the dark car park to take on the job. Instead of the strong, slightly scary man we’d faced, here he was in jumper and jeans, crying for the release of his daughter. He was a much better actor than my dad.
And then, just as had been predicted, the news reported that a fund was being set up to help in the search for Tiffany. A number appeared on the screen and, from all over the country, people started to donate. They hit £125,000 in the first twenty-four hours.
Tiffany sat and watched all the news reports with us, barely showing any emotion – until she saw the distress her mum was in during the press conference. Mum grabbed a tissue from her handbag and gently wiped away our hostage’s tears.
That night, as I finished feeding Tiffany a chicken korma from the takeaway on the corner, she looked straight into my eyes. “Please don’t put the tape back over my mouth,” she said. “I promise I won’t make any noise.”
I glanced over at my mum, who nodded.
“OK,” I said, “but if you try anything…”
“I won’t,” Tiffany promised.
I stuffed the takeaway cartons into
a plastic bag and left it near the door to throw out in the morning.
“Why are you doing this?” Tiffany asked quietly.
Neither my mum nor I, spoke. We didn’t know what to say.
“If you need money, contact my dad,” said Tiffany. “He’s rich. He’ll give you whatever you want. Just let me go.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” I said.
“Of course it is,” countered Tiffany. “It’s a straight exchange. You’ve got me, and he’s got money.”
“Not enough, according to him,” said my mum. “At least, not yet.”
I froze, praying that Tiffany hadn’t heard what she had said – but, of course, she had.
“What do you mean?” our prisoner asked, her brow furrowing.
“Nothing,” said my mum. “I made a mistake.”
“No,” said Tiffany. “You said my dad didn’t have enough money yet, according to him. What do you mean?”
I sighed, and sat down beside her.
I don’t know whether it was the pressure of being cooped up in this horrible room for the past few days, or the growing worry that, instead of giving us our outstanding £5,000, Tiffany’s dad was going to blame us for the kidnapping – but I told her everything. How her dad had placed the ad online, how he’d paid us to grab her, and how he wanted the public to pay millions into a fund to find her and make him richer than ever.
When I had finished, Tiffany sat in silence, staring down at the threadbare cover on my duvet. Eventually, she spoke in a low whisper.
“I hate him!”
I struggled to hold back a laugh, but obviously not well enough. Tiffany’s head snapped up and she glared at me.
“You think this is funny?” she spat.
“Not at all,” I admitted. “In fact, I’m terrified. I just never thought that you and me would ever have something in common.”
It was Tiffany’s turn to laugh. She glanced around the dump my mum and I called home. “I very much doubt that,” she said.
So I told her about my dad. About how he’d left us for a girl at work, and how we’d had to turn to shoplifting to make ends meet.
“Shoplifting?” she said when I’d finished. “Child’s play! I was shoplifting by the time I was six years old!” She leaned across the bed to me, eyes sparkling. “Have you ever tried hacking?”
“Well, I cracked the wi-fi password of the taxi company next door,” I said.
“Noob!” cried Tiffany with a grin. “Untie my wrists and I’ll show you some real hacking…”
I hesitated, and glanced at my mum.
“Oh, come on!” said Tiffany. “I’ve just found out that my dad arranged for me to be kidnapped – and you know he’s going to let you take the fall for this, don’t you?”
“I’d more or less figured out as much,” I said.
“Then what say we get back at both our dads?”
That, I couldn’t resist. I grabbed a pair of scissors from the drawer and cut through the tape holding Tiffany’s wrists behind her back. Mum stood near the door in case our hostage took the opportunity for a break for freedom but, instead, she grabbed the laptop and entered the address of an élite London bank into the browser.
“My dad changes his online banking password at least once a week,” Tiffany explained as she worked. “He’s paranoid that someone will break in and steal from him. Shame he doesn’t know that’s how his little princess here has been funding her horse-loving lifestyle for years…”
I couldn’t help but smile as I watched Tiffany’s fingers fly across the keys. She quickly opened a second browser window and downloaded a small piece of software, into which she typed her dad’s bank account number. She hit ‘enter’, and the program began to cycle through possible passwords, based on those he had used in the past and mentions of the family in the press. Then…
PING!
“Got it!” exclaimed Tiffany. “This week’s password is… KIDNAP. Oh, Dad – you’re so predictable.”
A few seconds later, Tiffany was inside her dad’s bank account. “No alarms, as we logged in with the correct password,” she said, “and as I’m surfing from behind a proxy server, this laptop cannot be traced.”
My mum and I exchanged an impressed smile.
“Now,” said Tiffany, cracking her knuckles. “How much did my dad offer you?”
“Ten thousand,” said my mum. “But he only gave us five.”
“Then I reckon you deserve at least thirty,” said Tiffany.
“Thirty thousand pounds!” cried my mum.
“Let’s make it forty,” said Tiffany. “You did have to feed me, after all. I’ll transfer it into one of my secret, off-shore bank accounts first, then I’ll set up a similar account for you to access it. That way, we won’t raise any suspicions.”
“Won’t your dad be angry?” I asked.
Tiffany beamed. “He’ll be furious. But knowing the way he makes his money – through dodgy stuff like this – he hasn’t got anything to complain about.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” said Tiffany. “Little posh girl is kidnapped on the orders of her uncaring father? I’ll be on TV chat shows for weeks! I might even get a book deal out of it!”
PING!
“There!” she said. “You’re now forty thousand pounds richer!”
I ran across the room and hugged my mum. Our worries were over!
“Now,” said Tiffany. “Let’s see about your dad…”
CHAPTER 6
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT…
Mum and I crouched behind a stack of boxes containing printed kebab menus, and watched. In the office above the factory floor, the light was on in my dad’s office – but he wasn’t working late. We could hear Liz giggling up there with him. They were having a great time.
Down below, taped to a wooden chair beside one of the now-silent printing machines, sat Tiffany. I hadn’t wanted to tape her mouth closed again, but she had insisted.
“We have to make this look authentic,” she said.
So I pressed a strip of tape across her mouth and pulled the sack down over her head.
Then I made the call.
The police smashed in through the front doors of the factory less than fifteen minutes later.
“Police!”
“Show yourselves!”
“Come out with your hands in the air!”
The office door swung open and my dad stepped out, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. I felt my mum tense up beside me, so I squeezed her hand.
“What’s going on?” my dad demanded.
“Hands where I can see them!” ordered an armed officer, his gun trained up the staircase. “Come down, slowly.”
Liz appeared in the doorway. “Jerry?” she squeaked.
“You too!” roared the police officer. “Downstairs, now!”
Then, one of the policemen spotted Tiffany.
He ran over and pulled the sack from her head. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was just as good an actor as me!
“Are you Tiffany King?”
Tiffany nodded, dumbly.
“We’ve got her!” the officer yelled.
As my dad and Liz reached the bottom of the staircase, Tiffany screamed. “That’s them!” she sobbed, pointing to the bemused couple. “Those are the two people who kidnapped me!”
“What!” exclaimed my dad. “No, that’s not true!”
“I’d know them anywhere!” Tiffany continued.
“They work for my dad. He’s the one that paid them to grab me. Look into his bank account – he’s bound to have made some sort of secret payment to them!”
Oh, Tiffany was good!
A sergeant spoke into his radio. “Can we arrange an arrest warrant for Mr Desmond King, and let’s have a search warrant for his personal accounts while we’re at it. I think he has a couple of questions to answer.”
More police officers appeared. They turned my dad and Liz to face the wall and began to search
them. “You are under arrest for the abduction of Miss Tiffany King,” one of them said as he worked. “You have the right to remain silent, but anything you do say may be taken down and given in evidence against you.”
“But, we haven’t done anything!” my dad insisted as he was handcuffed.
“That’s it,” whispered my mum in my ear. “I’ve seen enough.”
As Tiffany had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, me and my mum crept towards the fire exit we’d left open when we first arrived. Tiffany spotted us leaving our hiding place and, when she was sure none of the police were watching her, she winked at me.
The cold night air washed over us as we stepped out into the moonlight. “Forty grand in the bank, and this…” I said, pulling what was left of our initial fee from my pocket. “There’s just under four thousand there, I reckon. So, what first? Our own flat, or a new car?”
“Neither!” grinned my mum, linking her arm through mine. “I fancy a holiday – anywhere but Cornwall!”
THE END
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