The Child Catcher (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 4)

by M K Farrar

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE CHILD CATCHER

  First edition. October 8, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 M K Farrar.

  Written by M K Farrar.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  The Child Catcher (A DI Erica Swift Thriller, #4)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  The Child Catcher

  A DI Erica Swift Thriller

  Book Four

  M K Farrar

  Warwick House Press

  Chapter One

  The couple sat on a wooden park bench, a small brass plaque embedded in the backrest, marking it as a memorial for someone who’d also loved to sit in the East London park. Opposite the bench was the children’s playground, the little ones pumping their legs back and forth on the swings or whizzing down a shiny metal slide that hadn’t yet grown too hot in the sun that was surprisingly warm for this time of year.

  Jack Dempsey took his wife’s hand.

  “It’ll be okay,” he reassured her. “It always is.”

  Mae sighed, but there was a note of irritability in the sound. “You can’t simply trust things will work out in the end. Life doesn’t work like that.”

  “I’ve got two interviews coming up this week. I’m perfect for both roles. I’m bound to get one of them.”

  “I really hope so. I hate being negative, but we still haven’t got anywhere close to paying off the credit card bill from Christmas, and I’m borrowing from one place to pay off another.”

  He hated hearing the stress in her voice, knowing in part, he was the cause of it. She was still working, thank God, but he’d been made redundant from his job three months ago, and despite so many interviews he’d lost count, no one had offered him anything new. Desperation was creeping in, though he did his best to hide it from Mae. She deserved a husband who was able to spoil her and pay for a big house for them to live in, instead of the crappy two-bedroom flat they rented, and take her on fancy holidays with sunshine and beaches and pools. The last holiday they’d been on had been down to a caravan park in Devon, and while they’d had a lovely time, it wasn’t Marbella. But now, not only could he not treat her to any of those things, she was the one having to pay for him. The redundancy money had only been statutory, and was long gone.

  He’d signed on for the dole—something he hated doing—and it filled him with shame every time he had to go to the Job Centre to answer all their bloody questions. It made him feel like a chancer instead of a hardworking man, and that money was barely enough to put food on the table. Now Mae was paying for most things on his behalf, and even though she reassured him that he would do the same for her, and it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference that she was a woman and he was a man, he still hated himself a little more each day because of it.

  Mae had been nothing but supportive and reassuring, and this moment of doubt wasn’t like her. It was getting on top of her, too, and she was tired, having worked all the extra hours she could to make up their lost money. He’d hoped coming out to the park might help lift her mood, but it hadn’t.

  This Sunday had been the first properly warm one of spring, the rays of sunshine promising the long winter was finally over, coaxing the East London residents out of their homes to come and hang out in the park. Students lay on picnic blankets under trees that hadn’t yet gone from buds to leaf. Couples walked hand in hand, their jumpers and cardigans tied around their waists or slung over their shoulders. Families watched children play in the fenced-off area containing the playground equipment.

  The shriek and giggles of children playing in the park drowned out the birdsong. Like the people, the English songbirds also seemed to have been awakened by the warm weather, flitting between trees. A couple of sparrows landed near their feet, pecking around for crumbs that had been dropped while people had been having their lunch.

  Across the other side of the park, beyond the children’s playpark, two men—or they were most likely only teenagers—walked shoulder to shoulder, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled right up over their heads. The recesses of the material hid their faces in dark shadows.

  You’d think they’d be hot, Jack thought.

  He shouldn’t be so judgemental. He bet when he’d been a teenager, older people probably would have looked at him and thought he was up to no good as well, when all he’d ever really done was a bit of underaged drinking—hardly worthy of a home for delinquents. God, he was getting old. Maybe thirty-seven wasn’t really that old, but it turned out he was old enough to roll his eyes at teens and think of them as being ‘the youth of today’. His father’s voice sounded in his head. He seemed to conjure it at moments like this.

  They did look suspicious, though, even though hoodies were all the fashion these days. Even the girls seemed to dress in such a way.

  He tore his thoughts from the teenagers and refocused on his wife, reaching out to take her hand.

  “I have to get one of these jobs eventually. Maybe it’s just fate. Those other positions weren’t right for me, and whichever one I get offered next will have a ton of opportunity for promotion. We’ll have more money than we know what to do with and we’ll take a holiday abroad and pay off the credit cards, and eat steak for dinner every night of the week.”

  The fantasy at least raised a smile from Mae, and she sighed again and rested her head on his shoulder. He squeezed her hand, warmth blooming inside his chest. They might not have much materialistic stuff, but they had love, and that would have to be enough.

  The rapid tapping of footsteps signalled someone running up behind them, growing louder as the person approached.

  Mae stiffened slightly beside him, clearly hearing it, too.

  He turned a fraction in the direction Mae was sitting, just in time to see a flash of movement directly behind them. Something silver and shiny caught the bright spring sunlight, blinding him momentarily, and then the silver was gone again. The person the footsteps had belonged to had been right there, behind them, but only for a matter of seconds.

  It all happened so fast his brain barely had time to process the events. One moment, his attention was filled with this person standing behind them, and then next Mae fell from the bench to the path in front of them.

  His mind was a blur of confusion. Screaming filled his ears, and something was sticking out of Mae’s ba
ck.

  What was that? Had something hit her?

  The screaming continued, and he suddenly realised the noise came from Mae. Mae was the one screaming as though Hell had opened and was sucking her in. He’d never heard such terror and agony come from a person’s mouth, and that it was coming from the woman he loved stunned him into inertia.

  From all over the park, people ran towards them. Over his wife’s screams, came shouts of “call an ambulance”, and another of, “someone phone the police”.

  He blinked at the thing sticking out of Mae’s back. It was a handle. A knife handle. What the hell was that doing there?

  The shriek of someone else came from nearby. “She’s been stabbed! Oh my God, she’s been stabbed!”

  Understanding slammed into him. The person who’d run up behind them had stabbed Mae in the back.

  He dropped to his knees beside her. “Oh my God. Mae! Oh fuck.”

  He’d never felt so utterly helpless in his life. And still she was screaming, just lying on the warm concrete of the path. Her face was ashen, her eyes wide with terror, yet unfocused, as though she couldn’t believe what was happening either.

  He went to her head, wanting to lift her, not liking her being on the ground like that, but he didn’t want to move her, so his hands fluttered helplessly around her head like two giant, deformed moths.

  That was why the shiny metal had vanished. It had been plunged into his wife’s back, through cloth and then skin, and then flesh and blood.

  He suddenly remembered the reason they’d been sitting on the bench, looking out onto the playground.

  Ellie!

  He didn’t stand but knelt up, straining his neck, his gaze flicking across the equipment in the playground where they’d been watching their daughter play. What had Ellie seen? Did she understand her mother had been stabbed? But people were crowding around them now, blocking his view. He searched the faces of strangers, hoping to find their daughter at one of their sides, peering, probably terrified, between their legs.

  “Ellie?” he shouted, half getting to his feet. “Ellie?”

  Murmurs came from around him, and someone said, “Who’s Ellie?”

  He didn’t reply, his head buzzing with panic and confusion.

  Someone stepped forward and touched his shoulder. “It’s okay, an ambulance is coming, and the police, too. They were already in the park. Someone’s gone to get them.”

  Sure enough, two uniformed police officers came running up the path towards them. One was on his radio, requesting additional units as he ran.

  “Out of the way,” the other police officer instructed. “Come on, clear the area.”

  Mutters of discontent rose from the gathering crowd, but they shuffled back, creating pockets of space, allowing Jack to see between them. In desperation, he scoured the area, searching for her little dark head and her brown eyes widening in fear at what was happening. Though he spotted lots of children with that expression, none were the one he was searching for.

  He didn’t know what to do, feeling as though he was being torn in two. Should he get up and run to find her? But that would mean abandoning Mae.

  From the point where the knife entered her body, a bright dot of red, like ink, dropped into water, crept across the light blue of her t-shirt, growing larger with every passing second. He wanted to make it stop, to somehow push the red back in again. That blood was supposed to be inside his wife, not leaking out like that.

  God, if Ellie saw, she would be so scared.

  His attention snapped back to the park again. He couldn’t see her. Why couldn’t he see her? Mae would be so worried when she stopped screaming.

  She suddenly fell silent, and somehow that was even worse than the screams.

  “You need to give us some space, sir,” one of the police officers said. “Let us help her.”

  In shock, Jack allowed himself to be half-lifted by his arm, and moved out of the way, while strangers in uniform hunched over his wife.

  “Ellie!” he cried, clutching out at the male officer.

  “It’s okay, sir. An ambulance is minutes away.”

  “No, I can’t find Ellie!”

  “Ellie? Is that your wife’s name?”

  The officer didn’t understand.

  He shook his head. “No, Ellie’s our daughter. I can’t find our daughter!”

  Heads all turned in the direction of the playground where he’d last seen Ellie playing.

  Jack let out a sob. “She’s gone.”

  Chapter Two

  DI Erica Swift and DS Shawn Turner walked briskly across the wide expanse of the park. They’d driven as close as they could to the crime scene, and then had left the pool car, together with several marked police cars, to take the path.

  It was approaching mid-afternoon in early March, and the weather was beautiful. It didn’t seem right that something so utterly despicable could have happened on a day that felt so full of promise. If it wasn’t for the familiar thwack-thwack-thwack of the police helicopter overhead, Erica could almost kid herself that they were here for pleasure rather than business.

  She shook her head.

  What the fuck was wrong with people? A young mother had been stabbed in a seemingly unprovoked attack in the middle of the day in front of multiple other people, and her husband. The victim had been taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and was in surgery, and clinging to life. If she didn’t die, it was purely due to the skill of the paramedics who’d initially been on the scene, and the doctors and surgeons who worked on her now.

  Ahead lay the scene of the crime, easily distinguished from the rest of the park by not only the level of activity, but also the blue tape of the cordon.

  Pedestrians had gathered near the outer cordon, craning their necks, trying to get an idea of what was going on. The entrances to the park had been closed, but the park covered over two hundred acres and had eight different entrances, and it had been impossible to clear it completely. Uniformed officers did their best to move on the rubberneckers and request that people not take photographs or video. That was the trouble these days, everyone decided they were a reporter and had a camera in their pockets.

  Not that there was much to see. Other than the clear police presence, the only thing that pointed towards a crime having been committed was the dark smear of blood on the concrete path in front of one of the benches. Two SOCO officers in protective clothing moved around the inner cordon, one of them holding a camera and taking photographs of the scene, and the other numbering items and bagging anything of interest they’d found. With the bench where the attack had happened being so close to the playground, there were multiple items that needed to be bagged—discarded cigarette butts, a half-crushed Coke can, a screwed-up receipt. There was even an old pink dummy, the rubber teat squashed and folded in on itself. Anything, no matter how small, might provide a vital clue as to who was responsible for this terrible act.

  She spotted the short, girthy form of Sergeant Mark Coggins, also kitted out in protective gear, directing the officers from SOCO. She assumed he was the sergeant coordinating the crime scene.

  She and Shawn paused at the outer cordon and donned protective gloves and footwear.

  “DI Swift,” Coggins greeted as they ducked under the cordon. “DS Turner. Thanks for coming.”

  Erica nodded. “Of course. Where are we up to?”

  “Thirty-two-year-old Mae Dempsey was sitting with her husband, watching their daughter playing in the park, when a person wearing a dark-coloured hoody ran up behind her and stabbed her in the back with a large kitchen knife. The victim fell forward, right here”—he gestured to the mark on the ground where a plastic double-sided evidence marker with the number ‘1’ on it had been positioned—“and lay facedown, with the knife still embedded in her back. She remained conscious for approximately three minutes, before losing consciousness just as police nearby made it onto the scene. Paramedics arrived several minutes later, and she was then taken to th
e nearest hospital.”

  “And the attacker?” Erica asked.

  “Eyewitnesses say there were two males, one about six feet, the other shorter at around five feet ten. It would seem they were circling the park before the attack.”

  Shawn cocked an eyebrow. “Picking out their victim?”

  “Possibly. The shorter one did the stabbing. They stopped right over there.” He pointed to a spot fifteen to twenty feet from behind the bench. “And the shorter one ran forward with the knife and stabbed Mrs Dempsey in the back. Then they both ran off in different directions. One went east, the other west.”

  Erica glanced in one direction and then the next, trying to get a picture in her mind of a replay of events. She wanted to know what the attackers were thinking, not only on the build-up, but straight afterwards, too. If she could get into their heads, it would be easier to track their steps.

  “So, they split up?”

  Coggins nodded. “That’s right. We’re assuming they did it to make them harder to track. We also have a missing child involved. The victim’s five-year-old daughter, Ellie, was playing in the park right there”—he gestured towards the fenced-off playground—“when the attack happened. Of course, everyone was distracted by the stabbing, including the husband, and when he looked up again, his daughter was gone. I really felt for him, not knowing if he should stay in the park to search for the girl or to go in the ambulance with his wife. The attending officers promised him they’d keep searching for the daughter, and we have a bird in the sky trying to spot both the missing girl and the attackers.”

  “And has there been any sign of her?” Shawn asked, concern lining his brow.

  Coggins shook his head. “Not yet. I’m in the process of coordinating a grid search and I’ve requested some tracking K-9s as well.”

  Erica pressed her lips together, the news worrying her. “Did the girl run away because she was frightened that her mother had been stabbed, or did the stabbing take place in order to abduct the girl?”