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

by Darren Young

‘Mum said something like she’ll find out one day.’

  Her father smiled. ‘I think it was about someone at the shop, if I recall correctly.’

  From his expression, Danni wasn’t sure, but he sounded confident enough and she felt silly again – as though she was dreaming up some big conspiracy that sounded less and less plausible the more she said it. She changed the subject and told him about the job interview.

  ‘It won’t do you any harm to broaden your horizons,’ he said.

  ‘And it makes you feel less guilty.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For taking my home from under me,’ she said, and instantly regretted it; at the moment, she couldn’t stop looking for ways to have a confrontation with him.

  ‘Please don’t find underlying meanings in everything,’ he said. ‘I just meant it would be good for you to explore something new.’

  Danni nodded. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And the new place I’ve looked at is big enough for both of us. But I suppose you’ll move to Southampton if you get this job.’

  ‘It’s just an interview, Dad. There are probably loads of candidates.’

  When he’d sent the email earlier, her father had attached a few photographs of an apartment he’d found. Although she hadn’t acknowledged them, she had taken a look and it was a nice place, a new-build, with two storeys, in a beautiful position on the beachfront with sea views from the living room and both bedrooms. Her father said in his email that he had secured first option on the top-floor apartment – a perfect place, as he put it, to get inspiration for his writing, and it would need virtually no maintenance, unlike the family home.

  ‘Where will you put all Mum’s stuff?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’ll have to put some in storage. It’s a decent-sized place but there are very few cupboards.’

  Danni pictured her mother’s things sitting in a cold, dark storage unit with a big yellow logo on the building. It was not an appealing thought and she told her father so.

  ‘Well, if you want to keep some of her things out, you’ll need to do it next week,’ he said. ‘And we can give some to charity. To the shop. She’d have wanted that.’

  She nodded and they carried on talking – the first time in a while that they hadn’t ended with a disagreement. He wished her luck with the interview when she left an hour later.

  The next morning, she stood at the train station in her best suit, listening to an announcement that told her that the train to Southampton was about to arrive. It was dark, and a swirling wind was blowing across the tracks. It was that hour before the sun came up and frosty underfoot, and she held a takeaway coffee cup in one hand and a newspaper in the other, feeling like a proper commuter when the train slowed to a stop and she stepped on board.

  A minute or so later, the 06.10 to Southampton was ready to depart and Danni sat with her feet next to the heaters, trying to warm them up. As she sipped her coffee she opened her newspaper, and began thumbing through the pages until an article on page ten caught her attention.

  It was about the mother of a child. A child who had gone missing more than twenty years ago.

  Does Life Really Go On?

  As the twenty-first anniversary of her disappearance approaches, the mother of Jessica Preston is no nearer to finding closure, writes Laura Grainger.

  Twenty-one years ago, two-year-old Jessica Preston went missing from a crowded beach in Devon and was never seen again. Anyone old enough to remember, and who lived in the area, won’t need reminding of the harrowing events on that sunny August morning, or the hours, days and weeks afterwards as the community tried to come to terms with what had happened.

  It is hard to imagine it today, with twenty-four-hour news cycles, social media campaigns and high-profile child abduction cases very fresh in the memory, but back then the story was only a national headline for one or two days, and even locally it quickly moved from headline story to the sidebar and eventually only warranted a mention on a significant anniversary.

  Life quickly moved on, as it does. Even those who helped police to search the beach, coastal paths and nearby woodland after Jessica went missing soon went back to their daily lives. The police search went on for longer, but they were so sure that the little girl, a few months from her third birthday, had drowned, that the search was eventually called off and the case closed in all but name. Of course, the official line is that anyone with information should contact the local police, but the reality is that no one has called that helpline for more than fifteen years.

  So what of the family Jessica left behind?

  Her father, Todd, died soon after the fifth anniversary of her disappearance, from alcohol poisoning, after becoming addicted to drink to numb the pain of losing his only daughter. Her brother was taken into care and eventually adopted by his foster parents.

  Which leaves Jessica’s mother, Sandra, for whom life hasn’t moved on at all. She sits, all these years later, still clinging to the hope that her daughter will one day return. Shortly after losing her son and husband in quick succession, she was admitted to a psychiatric unit, and she remains there now. Waiting and watching through a large glass window, her only ‘view’ of the world which has treated her so harshly.

  She has been told that she must find closure – move on and accept the fact that her little girl died that day in the rough and unpredictable sea – but she believes, vehemently, that the police and coroner’s theory is simply not the case. She remains convinced that her daughter was taken and has been raised by someone else, so there has never been a funeral or memorial service for Jessica in the twenty and a half years since her mother last saw her.

  ‘Unless anyone can show me her body, I’ll always maintain she is alive and was taken by someone. It was my view on the day and nothing has changed,’ she told me when I visited her earlier this week. ‘So I console myself with the fact that, even though she isn’t with me, and I’ve missed her growing into a young woman, she is hopefully still happy and loved.’

  Whichever version you choose to believe, it is a tragic story.

  On one hand, a mother’s life has been torn apart and no one has been able to provide that tiny crumb of comfort by telling her what happened that day.

  But if Sandra Preston is right about her daughter’s disappearance, and she was taken that August day, then her daughter would have been too young to have any recollection of it and will have grown up never knowing, or even having any idea of, her real identity. Unless the people who took her decide to give themselves up, or ever tell her what they had done, she will be completely oblivious to the truth.

  And even if she is right, where does that leave Sandra now? Two decades later she remains hopeful but also realistic. We do not know what Jessica might look like today, or if she is alive, if she is still in the country or was smuggled abroad. Even the most sophisticated facial recognition techniques are based on probability and assumptions. The description of Jessica as a two-year-old might apply to ten to fifteen per cent of the UK female population, and then she might have significantly changed her appearance anyway.

  So, with that in mind, her mother has accepted that, although she won’t ever give up hope, the chances of her ever seeing her daughter are incredibly small.

  But, with that tiniest glimmer of hope, she sits alone in the unit looking out on a beach just like the one her daughter vanished from. Whether it was a terrible accident or a callous crime, whether you blame her for not looking after her daughter better, or think of her as a victim in every sense, she won’t mind. No one will ever blame her more than she blames herself. More than twenty years later, she has little to fill her days except the waiting. Her family are gone; she has no friends and no visitors. Her only ‘relationships’ are the ones she has forged with the staff or fellow patients.

  And that is probably the life that awaits her for the rest of her days.

  But, ‘If I give up on her,’ she told me as she watched the empty beach below from the huge windows, ‘then wh
at happens if she finds out who she is and comes looking for me? At least, with me here, she’ll have someone waiting for her.’

  People use the expression ‘life goes on’, don’t they? But, when they say it, I’m sure they haven’t just spent an hour in the company of Sandra Preston.

  Part Four

  Two years after she was taken…

  It had taken time – a whole two years – for us to stop looking over our shoulders.

  Two years before we finally knew that that knock on the door wasn’t going to come at any minute – and we had lived over a million of those minutes – the knock that would destroy it all in an instant. And we began to relax. Not completely relax, you understand, but when you’ve spent two years wound as tightly as a spring, waiting for something to happen, it was so good to at least not have that feeling any longer.

  Two years was the point when we stopped thinking of ourselves as fugitives, and started thinking of ourselves as parents. Parents to a beautiful little girl.

  It’s actually your perspective that changes in that time. She was always a beautiful little girl, of course we knew that, but one whom we saw differently from anyone else. For those first twenty-four months we talked about her as if she were something we had picked off a supermarket shelf or ordered from a website. So it was good to be able to think of her as a child; one we were now fully responsible for and who loved us unconditionally.

  My biggest worry, to begin with in those first two years, was whether she knew what we had done. I studied books in the library and they all said that a child wouldn’t be able to remember their life before the age of three, but obviously we could never ask anyone to confirm it so we had to trust what the books told us. But I always wondered, when I looked in her eyes or caught her watching me; she had this look – not fear or anger but disappointment, as if some part of her instinctively knew but she just didn’t understand it.

  But, after two years, that look had gone.

  The news that had been so helpful in keeping us fully updated on the story now began to also tell us that the story had almost bled completely from the public’s consciousness. It had become a footnote every now and again in the media, only mentioned on the anniversary and when there was a very rare case of mistaken identity.

  Time allowed us to become parents, and my wife thrived in the role. It was like watching a new person form in the space where the old one once stood. Heartache had gone without a trace and had been replaced with confidence and pride. After two years, she began to take her out in public and no one in the village batted an eyelid, for there was nothing at all unusual about a mother out with her child.

  ‘Isn’t she big for her age?’ people would say when they saw her, and my wife would agree – and this was crucial in the way we integrated into our new lives. We had false records and documents that showed we had a daughter who was a few months younger than the one that went missing.

  So time, and the changing of it, helped us cover our tracks too. We were the proud parents of a young girl in a place where no one knew us, in a world that had all but forgotten what had happened on that beach.

  Two years ago, when they’d walked through that door, it had been impossible to imagine a time when we would be able to show our daughter off in public without the constant threat of being found out. But we, like the world, had moved on.

  How our daughter’s real parents were moving on was something I tried not to think about too much.

  Two years? Is that really how long it’s been?

  I hadn’t even realised until a local reporter knocked at the door early in the evening and asked if I would answer a few questions. Todd was asleep on the sofa, and if I were being kind I’d tell you he’d had a hard day at work, but I’d stopped being kind after two years. He had passed out; he’d started drinking earlier than usual that day, and, when I let this reporter in, it was for some company as much as anything else.

  We sat down in the kitchen and I made us a cup of tea. ‘So, it’s two years today,’ he said by way of an opening to his questions, and I looked at him, confused, angry that he’d not even got his facts right; annoyed that he was so sloppy. In my head it seemed much less than that, and I could hardly remember there being a first-year anniversary. But then, I’d spent most of that time in a self-imposed daze; just getting through each day was an achievement, never mind remembering them.

  The poor man must have wondered what on earth was wrong with my face – he hadn’t even reached the first question in his notebook – and then I started to tell him he was wrong, but, as the bitter words started to slip from my mouth, I stopped. It was me that was wrong, not him. The seasons all merged into one long bleak winter for me, but spring had duly arrived, and now it was summer again; I just hadn’t noticed the date.

  She had been gone for two years.

  What I could remember was the way people changed towards you. At first, people I thought I knew, but who did not have the first clue how I was feeling, told me how I should act and the things I should feel. Stay positive, they said to begin with, but that message became mixed over time and then changed; stay strong, they began to tell me, which was just another way of saying prepare for the worst.

  Only they had no idea what the worst was. Was, for example, the worst finding her dead, or never finding her at all and not knowing if she lived or had died? I realised that, however well-meaning they were, their words were meaningless; after all, none of them really knew what had happened to Jessica.

  Then, over time, they stopped saying anything at all. I was supposed to have grieved, come to terms with my loss and moved on. The police said it, the counsellor said it, and the people I thought of as friends probably said it too.

  Only I wasn’t ready to move on.

  But it became easier to nod in the right places and pretend I thought they were making some sense, rather than keep fighting them. And my friends? They stopped coming around and calling me anyway when I couldn’t move on. That was when I needed my husband most, to handle things like this, support me and help me through anniversaries and answer difficult questions in interviews, but the man snoring off his stupor in the next room had nothing to offer me. If he’d thought she was still alive, he’d have been out there looking for her.

  And now the reporter began asking his questions and using the past tense in a way that told me he was sure she was dead too. I thought about telling him what had really happened to my daughter but they’d all heard it before, and by the look on his face it wasn’t what he’d come to hear today. He only wanted a grieving mother so I gave him exactly that: the tears and incoherent mumblings of someone who was slowly coming to terms with her loss.

  It was just easier than fighting all the time.

  32 | Laura

  The editor of the Herald had posted Laura a compliments slip with a handwritten thank-you and cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds, plus five copies of the paper containing her article.

  In an email he had told her how pleased he’d been with it, and of the positive response since it had been published. When she’d sent it to him, a few days earlier, it had been with no real expectations, and he had given no guarantees of using it and certainly not of paying her for it, so it was a real bonus that he had covered her costs, with some change, afterwards. She thought about framing the cheque, as a motivating reminder that her talent had been recognised beyond David Weatherall’s office, but after checking her bank balance she’d cashed it instead.

  Her mother had been so proud when she’d shown her the article in print, although also worried about David’s reaction.

  ‘Won’t he be upset?’ she asked over breakfast.

  Laura had been concerned too, but the Herald was a very local paper, just like the Gazette, and wouldn’t have a readership far outside its circulation, so she had put her worries to the back of her mind and she told her mother to do the same.

  ‘I just don’t want you getting in trouble.’

  ‘I won’t. I doubt they shi
ft more than a few hundred copies.’

  ‘So what next?’

  ‘Back to the day job, I suppose.’

  Laura was quite relieved to say it. Sandra might not have any closure, but she was looking forward to it; the travelling she’d done had already eaten into a lot of her spare time and when she’d looked in the mirror that morning she had been shocked by the fatigued appearance of the twenty-something girl who looked back at her. The missing child had provided her with fifteen minutes of fame; it was time to start building on it.

  ‘Got to happen some time,’ her mother said with a smile.

  ‘Just imagine if Sandra was right, though.’

  ‘It’s a helluva big if.’

  ‘But imagine it. Finding her, after all these years. Now that’s a story … ’

  Helen stood up and looked at the clock on the microwave. ‘C’mon. If you’re not quick, you won’t have a day job to be late for.’

  Laura was pulled abruptly from her imagination; she took a last bite of her toast and then rushed out to the car, making it into the office with a few minutes to spare. But all morning she found her mind wandering, asking questions, and her fingers typing words into Google searches that were all about Jessica Preston and nothing to do with her day job.

  What if there was even a one per cent chance of finding her?

  It was her way of justifying her actions, but by lunchtime she had to admit that there didn’t seem to be anything even close to a one per cent chance. The trail had gone cold long before the police had called off the search; and that itself was more than fifteen years ago. After that, other than the odd reference or comment in the local press, there was nothing new that had been added to the story in all that time.

  She glanced over at David’s office. He was sitting in his chair and it looked as though he was dictating a letter to Sue even though all three of them knew he could type perfectly well. It was his way, Laura thought, of just holding on to the past for a little longer. He paused and turned her way and she looked back at her screen, embarrassed, and trying to work out how he seemed to sense it every time she watched him. But the jolt made her concentrate on her Gazette duties for the next few hours, and she was grateful it did.