Child Taken: A chilling page-turner you will be unable to put down

by Darren Young

  ‘Is Carol still here?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t spoken to her yet.’

  ‘She had to get back to work. She sends her love.’

  Danni had enjoyed a better relationship with Euan’s mother, Carol, right from the day they met. She was a very young mother, so she was in her mid-thirties now and by her own admission making up for lost time, so she’d always called Danni to meet for drinks or a coffee after work. They’d become friends, and, had it not been for Carol, she wondered if her relationship with Euan might have been considerably shorter.

  ‘I’ll call and thank her for coming.’

  The last of the guests were hovering in the hallway, readying themselves to go, so Danni went to see them out while Euan took her place in the kitchen and put the rest of the plates in the dishwasher. All of her mother’s colleagues from the charity shop had attended – they’d closed the shop for the day out of respect – and Dot, the first to arrive and last to leave, hugged Danni warmly and told her to let her know if she could do anything. She told her she would and closed the front door behind them.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ she said, walking back into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s no bother.’

  Danni moved towards the door and, although she tried to avoid making it obvious, she glanced at the clock. Euan either saw her or sensed what she’d done and smiled.

  ‘I’d better be making a move myself.’

  She felt guilty. She wanted him out of there, but, as soon as he acknowledged it, she felt she didn’t want him to go, if only because she didn’t want to be alone. ‘I’m sorry. I just—’

  He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. For the final weeks of their relationship she had dreaded being with him, but he had always had a gentle, caring side that just didn’t come out enough.

  ‘You don’t need to say anything,’ he said with a smile, ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  Danni nodded and smiled meekly. She found herself holding her tongue, wanting to say something but knowing she shouldn’t. She closed her eyes and, when she opened them, Euan was already in the hallway.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she called.

  He turned. Confused.

  ‘Go, I mean.’

  She was at her most vulnerable, but she had been alone for two weeks and it felt a lot longer.

  He walked back in the room. ‘I thought—’

  ‘Don’t think,’ she said, an overwhelming urge rising up in her body to feel something and be with someone. She realised she wasn’t really fussed at that moment who that someone was; anything was better than the numbness she’d experienced in the last fortnight.

  He stepped close to her and she gripped his shirt and pulled him to her, and kissed him as hard as she could, releasing more built-up anger than passion. His hands wrapped around her and she reached down and pulled his shirt out of the waistband of his suit trousers.

  Then she stopped, took his hand and led him through the house, up the stairs and past her father’s study. She put her finger to her lips as they passed the door, not really sure if she cared whether he heard them.

  They reached her bedroom, and she closed the door behind them and pushed Euan down so that he was sitting on the edge of her single bed. She was in control now and, although she was far from sexually experienced, she knew he wasn’t either.

  She stood in between his feet and turned so her back was to him. ‘Unzip.’

  He did as she asked. Danni slipped her knee-length black dress down over her shoulders so that it fell to the floor, and turned around to face him. His eyes widened and she opened the clasp on her bra and let that fall too, momentarily instinctively covering her breasts with one arm but then, feeling more confident, dropping it down by her side. Her heart was beating quickly but she felt no emotion; nothing except that, at that very moment, she wanted Euan for no better reason than that he happened to be in the right place at the right time.

  Danni stepped forward so that he could touch her and he pulled her forward, pushing his head against her body and kissing her belly and then her breast, his teeth gently gripping her nipple. She felt a rush of exhilaration and began to undo the top button of Euan’s shirt, and then pulled it roughly over his head and arms, but the cuffs were too tight and he had to help her. They both giggled like naughty children.

  At the other end of the hallway there was the sound of a toilet flushing that made them stop and look at each other. They heard the bathroom door close and then the study door slam shut.

  Danni wondered if it was her father’s clumsy attempt to remind her that he was in the house, but she dismissed it and pressed her body back against Euan’s, and he put his hands on her sides, running them down over her hips until they reached the material of her knickers. He paused, as if he was waiting for permission.

  Danni knew that if his hands moved another inch there was no turning back, and the last thing she’d expected to be doing on the night of her mother’s funeral was having sex. But now, in the moment, it felt right, or maybe not as wrong as she would have imagined it would, and she kissed the top of his head, silently acknowledging that he could continue, so he slid her knickers down over her thighs and past her knees and they fell to the ground at her feet. As Euan moved his head down and forward to kiss her between her legs, she gasped, and a pang of guilt ran the length of her body.

  Danni wasn’t sure if she felt bad about what she was doing because they had only just buried her mother, because her father was but a few yards down the hallway, or because she was shamelessly using Euan and had absolutely no intention of it going anywhere beyond the night.

  She put her hands on the back of his head, grabbing his hair and pushed his face into her body. She was going to look after her own needs for now.

  She’d worry about the rest in the morning.

  7 | Laura

  Laura Grainger hated Tuesdays.

  She hadn’t always, but the resentment had grown, and now it was the day of the week she dreaded, especially in the winter.

  Tuesday was dog-walking day and started early, well before it was light and more than an hour before she usually got up. On a bleak January morning like this one, there was very little she could imagine that was worse.

  She didn’t need an alarm on a Tuesday. Her dog – on any other day he was the family dog, but he was very much her dog on a Tuesday – was already whining and pawing expectantly at the back door of the house, waking her in the bedroom directly above. Laura groaned, checked the clock and switched off the alarm she had set on her phone. She slowly climbed out of her warm bed and pulled the bedroom curtain to one side. The only light was the faint orange glow from a lamp-post, only just visible through the sea mist that was hanging over the road. A crisp frost had settled over everything, but at least it was dry, she thought, as she pulled on three layers of clothing and trudged downstairs.

  Ten minutes later she stood at the bottom of the coastal path, at the point where the path turned back on itself and the steps down the beach began. She wasn’t going that far, it was too dark beyond that point, so she stood waiting for her dog to do what he had to.

  ‘Come on,’ she muttered.

  Her dog was a King Charles spaniel that had been a present for her eleventh birthday, a reward for persistence after many years of asking for a puppy. It had been a dream come true, and she’d promptly christened him Mimark, a word she’d heard once on TV and liked even though she had no idea what it meant, and had resolved to give as a name to her first pet. When her father brought him home, he had sat there, all big drooping ears and oversized paws that it would take him the best part of a year to grow into, and she’d put a pretty red bow on him and promised her parents she would always take care of him.

  Her dog was now an old boy with a greying chin, who dragged one of his hind legs behind him and had the weakest bladder imaginable. He did everything at his own pace and exactly when he wanted to; so if Laura needed him to be quick – for example, on a freezing winter morning when she was
probably going to be late for work – then he would almost certainly do the opposite.

  ‘Please, Mimark.’ She even thought the name sounded idiotic now. The dog looked up and carried on sniffing around the foot of the tree stump. Laura rubbed her hands together and then pressed them against each other tightly, as though she was praying, which she could easily have been.

  Every other day, her father did this routine, but on Tuesdays the job was hers because there was an early-morning staff meeting at the hospital where her father worked and he liked to stop at the petrol station for a bacon sandwich he thought no one knew about. Her mother had long ago refused to take Mimark anywhere after he had excitedly tried to chase a rabbit down the coastal path and pulled her so hard she had twisted her knee.

  That dog, so full of energy and strength, was hard to imagine now. Laura watched as he plodded around, sniffing bushes and knocking frost off with his nose, while she stamped up and down to warm her toes and stop them going numb.

  ‘Just get it over with, will you?’

  Finally the dog did what she asked, and Laura clipped on his lead and desperately tried to hurry proceedings by pulling him along behind her until they reached the house. It was only just after half-past seven, and her father had left barely forty minutes ago, but the house was dark and cold when she got back and she quickly made herself a drink and some porridge while Mimark drank his water and ate the biscuits she’d poured into his bowl. Then she rushed upstairs into the shower, dried her hair, put her make-up on in double-quick time and dressed as quickly as she could, constantly checking the clock; if she was lucky she’d only be five minutes late for work.

  As she manoeuvred her old but reliable red VW Polo off the drive and drove down the hill into the town centre, she cursed several times as not one but three dustbin lorries held her up in quick succession – another reason why Tuesdays were not her favourite day, especially if you were in a hurry to get anywhere before eight forty-five. That was the unusual start time for work at the town’s weekly newspaper, the Gazette, where she worked as a junior trainee – and her boss was a stickler for punctuality. As it was closer, she swerved through the entrance to the small staff car park, one she hardly ever used, and found a space in the corner that few cars would attempt to fit into, but she had neither the luxury of choice nor any concern for her car’s bodywork; it already had more scratches than she could keep track of. She anxiously checked her watch as she ran up the stairs and hoped that David Weatherall, editor, owner and basically the only person with any power, wasn’t in his office.

  But, as she walked briskly into the modest second-floor offices to join the rest of the newspaper’s overworked staff, it was already past ten to nine, so she put her head down and made a beeline for her desk.

  ‘Morning, Laura.’

  David was sitting at his desk, and he looked at the office clock on the far wall rather than at her when he spoke.

  ‘Morning. Sorry I’m late,’ she called, already unbuttoning her coat and throwing her leather satchel so that it landed heavily among the clutter on her desk. Tuesday was never a good day at the paper if you were the most junior member of staff, because the stories that had built up over the weekend had already been allocated, and that meant you got the leftovers or, even worse than that, the dull administrative tasks no one wanted.

  David Weatherall was the driving force behind the publication, having the absolute final say on everything and anything. He was revered by the rest of the staff, so much that when they talked about him it was always using his full name, never just David. When Laura had been taken on, she had quickly realised that everyone who worked at the paper was either scared of him or in awe of him, usually both. After just one week, Laura had certainly known she was.

  As she had got to know him better, or as well as anyone could get to know such a man, she’d realised he had only two moods. He was always either miserable or annoyed; and sometimes he managed to combine the two. He was in his early sixties, with a healthy head full of whitish-grey hair and neatly trimmed moustache of the same shade. He was proudly old-fashioned but he harked back to the ‘good ole days’ a bit too much for Laura’s liking, talking about the halcyon days of newspaper publishing as if they were better than sliced bread, while treating the digital age like a blight on society. When she had first joined the paper and suggested they send out a tweet about that day’s main headline, she’d thought he was going to have a stroke.

  As Laura hurriedly opened up her laptop, his head appeared from his office door and looked over in her direction.

  ‘Laura, I have some filing for you.’

  ‘Can I just check my emails first?’

  ‘When you arrive on time you can check emails first. The filing, please.’

  Laura went to his office and collected the files he’d been working on, three cardboard boxes’ worth, and pushed them in a trolley to the Records Room, a dusty, stale-smelling room in the building’s basement. It was the kind of place you would send someone you didn’t like, which was about right, Laura thought, as she began putting the files back in their rightful place.

  She had no expectation of David’s ever becoming her biggest fan – he hadn’t wanted to recruit her in the first place – and unless he suddenly decided to retire and hand over the reins to someone else she knew she was unlikely to further her career at the paper, and she would be stuck doing jobs like this for a while yet. But, she reminded herself, it was a job, and not everyone was finding one of those after graduating.

  She spent the rest of the morning putting paper into cardboard folders; only in her daydreams could she picture being asked to follow proper leads, and being the reporter behind a real story, and then reality always kicked back in.

  Her thoughts turned from journalism to the weekend because, unusually for her, she was going out. She had arranged to meet some friends for a drink, two girls she’d met during her university years, and she was really looking forward to it.

  It was another reason for hating Tuesdays. They were far enough away from the previous weekend that you had all but forgotten it ever happened, but so far from the next one, it felt as if you would never get there.

  8 | Laura

  Laura’s red VW Polo climbed the hill and turned into the small side road that didn’t look as though it led anywhere but the sea.

  She drove to the bottom, past the field and the stile that led to the path to the coast, and turned into a tiny cul-de-sac with just four houses nestled in the hill that sat above the beach. She got out wearily and opened the iron gates at the furthest house, then drove up the driveway and parked next to her mother’s car, checking she’d left enough room for her father to squeeze past and put his car in the garage. Tuesdays were a long day for him, with the staff meeting, another meeting with the department heads and then his actual shift, and Laura knew he would be lucky to be home before seven.

  Helen Grainger was standing in the kitchen making the evening meal when Laura trudged in through the back door. Mimark briefly raised his head out of curiosity as he lay in his basket, and she bent down and ran her fingers through his fur.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, and gave her mother a kiss on the cheek, smelling the red wine on her breath, and in return received a hug that was usually reserved for people she hadn’t seen in years; Laura had to extricate herself out of her grip to sit down.

  ‘Good day?’

  It had been one of the least good days she’d had at the Gazette, and there had been quite a few to compare it with. But Laura preferred not to spend any more time talking about it on top of actually being there, and she hoped her mother would take the hint.

  ‘Fine,’ she shrugged as Helen put a glass of wine in front of her. ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you don’t want it … ’

  There was a glint in Helen’s eye as she said it and Laura smiled, picked up the glass and took a sip, and realised it was exactly what she needed. She sat and watched as her mother multi-tasked around the kitche
n, firmly pressing the edges down on a meat pie she had made that afternoon. If she did nothing else in a day, she would diligently prepare a family meal for them, timed to perfection to coincide with her husband walking through the door at the end of his shift; he would call ahead from the car with an estimated time that was rarely out by more than a minute. If you wanted to miss the meal – and Laura rarely did – then you needed a very good excuse and to give plenty of prior notice.

  Robert Grainger was one of the most prominent surgeons at the nearest hospital, a relatively large one with a big and densely populated catchment area. As well as some of the key specialist units, it also had the largest A&E ward outside of one of the county’s main towns. He was an industrious worker, and it wasn’t a surprise to see him clock up as many as fourteen working hours in a day.

  ‘So, not such a good day?’ Laura’s mother pushed the pie to one side and took an egg from the fridge.

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘I thought you liked your job.’

  ‘I do.’

  Her mother put the offcuts of pastry into the bin and Laura knew exactly where the conversation was going.

  ‘You know your father had to pull a few strings to get you in there,’ she reminded her for what seemed like the thousandth time, as she broke the egg and beat it in a bowl.

  ‘I know, Mum. It’s fine, really. I just spent all day filing, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah – instead of writing front-page stories?’

  ‘Don’t take the piss.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Helen protested with a smile, ‘and mind your language.’

  Laura smiled.

  ‘But I’m just saying. Filing comes with the territory, doesn’t it? For a trainee?’

  Laura shrugged. ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you have to get on with it. You’ve—’

  ‘Got time on my side, I know.’

  Her mother began brushing the beaten egg over the pie, and looked over her glasses at the recipe book perched up on the worktop. Laura thought she resembled a wise old owl when she cooked. Hair tied back, putting ten years on her, and the glasses adding at least another five, she worked meticulously while still finding time to dole out advice and sip from a large glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.