by Jacob Rayne
She texted the number that been messaging her and explained how much she had.
‘Maybe the old codger nxt door has sum stashed away,’ came the reply.
She knew that the people involved would have no qualms about hurting Becki if she didn’t comply with their wishes. They were scum, pure and simple.
Frank and Maggie were reasonably well off, they were always jetting off to sunnier climes and had the latest cars and expensive clothes.
Am I seriously going to consider ripping these people off? After everything they’ve done for us over the years?
A second later her answer came; fucking right I am if it means getting Becki back safe and sound.
She sat and tried to figure out a way of doing it. Just go round and ask to lend the money, she thought, they’re so kind-hearted they’d probably give you it.
But she knew that if the scum were watching her then they’d know that she had asked for the money and thus told someone of her plight.
She couldn’t risk it.
Her heart thudding in her chest, she knocked on Frank and Maggie’s back door.
Maggie opened the door, smiling.
‘What can I do for you, dear?’
‘Just need some company,’ Debbie said, feeling awful for lying but knowing that it was necessary.
‘Well, come in, kettle’s just boiled.’
Debbie thanked her and moved inside.
They sat for a while and Debbie came to regret her decision about the robbery much more as she unburdened herself of the distress of the last few weeks.
It was made worse still by the fact that Maggie was a great listener and had some genuinely helpful advice.
Debbie asked to use the toilet. It was strange being in the house, which was basically a mirror image of hers, but without the blood and death hanging in the air.
She locked herself in the bathroom, hunched over on the toilet, trying to figure out what to do.
In the end, she tapped out a message on the phone she’d been given, then called Maggie upstairs, saying that she’d ran out of toilet roll.
Maggie was understandably confused – there were close to a dozen rolls on the ornate toilet roll holder – but Debbie opened the door, put a finger to her lips to shush her neighbour, and pushed the phone in front of her.
‘The scumbags who’ve got Becki are watching me,’ the message said. ‘They want three grand from me by tonight, or else they’re going to hurt Becki.’ Maggie gasped. ‘I have just under two grand from my savings. Are you able to lend me the difference? I’ll pay you back with interest.’
‘Of course we will, dear,’ Maggie said.
She continued reading. ‘They want me to steal the money from you and they said that I can’t tell anyone about the situation, so it needs to look like I’ve robbed you. I’m so sorry to put you in this position.’
Maggie nodded. ‘The money is in Frank’s top drawer, in a yellow envelope,’ she typed into the phone.
Debbie nodded.
Maggie turned and left her to it, not wanting to make it look as though she had been talking to her.
Debbie waited till Maggie was downstairs, then crept into their room.
Despite the fact that Maggie knew what she was doing and had given her permission, Debbie felt guilty. She was glad she’d taken the risk, but hoped that the youths didn’t know she’d told someone about her predicament.
She crept to Maggie’s side of the room, wanting to make it look as though she didn’t instantly know where the money was and thus draw suspicion to her actions.
She reckoned she deserved an Oscar for her performance, occasionally glancing around as if checking Maggie wasn’t coming, as she hauled things out of the drawers and rifled through them.
When she didn’t find anything, she moved over to Frank’s bedside cabinet and started raking around in there.
She threw things out of the drawer, to maintain the façade that she didn’t know exactly where to look, then found the envelope. It bulged at the seams with notes.
She gave another cautious look over her shoulder as she pulled the money out and started counting out the amount she needed.
Halfway through the count, she glanced out to the hall before resuming counting. Then she pulled the wedge of notes loose and tucked them into the pocket of her jeans.
She carefully replaced the envelope and shut the drawer, miming care at the noise she was creating.
As she left the room and went back to flush the toilet as if to cover her tracks, she felt the phone vibrate in her pocket.
‘Nice 1, maybe u aren’t as fucking sackless as u look,’ the message said.
Fighting to keep the smile from her face at the thought of getting one over on them, she went back downstairs.
She resisted the urge to wink at Maggie, knowing they would see her if she did.
She had another cuppa, reclining on the settee as she talked to Maggie, trying to act as normal as possible, then went home and counted the money. There was just enough.
She spent the rest of the day trying to think of a way out of the nightmare.
Six
When midnight rolled round, she checked her phone compulsively like a teenager waiting for a text from a crush. She got the impression that the bastards were letting her stew on purpose.
At twelve eighteen, a message came through.
‘We’re @ the park. Where the fuck ru?’
She groaned as she remembered they’d told her to meet them in the park.
She shrugged on a coat, unsure whether the chill she felt was through the inclement weather or the terror that consumed her, and left the house.
It had been an automatic reaction to hide the knife under her coat, so often had she picked it up of late.
The park was dark, only a hint of light coming from the lampposts spread around the path.
The skeletal tree branches poked through the shadows, looking like hands clawing their way towards her.
She feared what lurked in the shadows, but figured it couldn’t be worse than the people she was going to meet.
She drew comfort from that, though it may be hard to believe.
Her stomach lurched as she walked through the gap in the hedgerow, jolting a little as a thorn scraped a fiery trail across her arm.
She cursed under her breath, but worse than the pain was the resurgence of the memories of the last time she had been here.
She blotted that out as best she could – knowing that dead woman in the park could so easily be her tomorrow morning – and wished she had asked for help instead of wandering off into the unknown.
From the top of the hill she saw no one. The bottom of the hill was utter blackness. She felt apprehensive, knowing that nothing good lurked in that shadowy patch.
The phone vibrated in her pocket.
‘Leave the £ on top of the bin and fuck off home,’ the text said.
‘Where’s Becki?’ she shouted.
Mocking laughter echoed around the darkness at the bottom of the hill.
‘We’re just getting started, bitch,’ the next text said.
A second text came through shortly after the other. ‘Now fuck off b4 ur kid lives the rest of her life with 1 eye.’
Debbie gasped at this, drawing more sinister chuckles from the shadows.
From below her and to the left, she suddenly heard, ‘Give the lass her baby back,’ in a booming voice that could only have belonged to Frank from next door.
The laughter cut off abruptly, seemingly shocked by Frank’s silent approach.
‘I mean it, or you’ll get a headful of buckshot,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve got no problem with killing scum like you.’
A lad laughed, and Debbie knew it was the tall youth with the smashed in cheek, who’d held her car keys out to mock her.
Someone moved towards Frank, but Debbie’s eyes still struggled to penetrate the gloom.
Frank shouted a warning, then the shotgun roared.
Muzzle flashes li
t the darkness, briefly showing the younger of the two lads running towards Frank, a knife held above his head.
The second muzzle flash showed a brief glance of the kid falling backwards, missing a chunk out of the top of his head. She saw a brief spurt of blood from his riven skull, then heard a wet thud as he hit the floor.
The other lad let out a cry of distress, then Debbie heard his running footsteps heading off in the opposite direction.
‘Get after him,’ Frank shouted while he fumbled more shells into the shotgun.
Debbie was disoriented by the dark and the panic she felt at having just witnessed another death.
She tried to run, but her legs had that strange nightmare quality where they wouldn’t move as fast as she wanted them to, even though she knew how urgent the situation was.
The lad’s silhouette appeared by the railing to her right and she knew already that she would not catch him.
He was too far away, too young, too fit.
Her chance of seeing her daughter disappeared into the night.
‘Are you ok?’ Frank asked, shining a torch out towards her.
‘Holy shit,’ she said, clawing in breaths.
‘Maggie told me what had happened. I couldn’t let you come here by yourself. They could have done anything to you.’
‘Thank you, Frank.’ She went in to give him a hug, but he recoiled.
‘Best check this un’s dead first,’ he said, casting the beam over the fallen youth’s head.
It was a safe bet, as the top right side of his head was just a vast bleeding crater and his eyes were staring glassily up at the sky.
‘Shit, Frank, you just killed someone.’
‘I’d kill this whole town if it got you your daughter back.’ Now he allowed her to embrace him.
‘We’d best get moving,’ he said. ‘This place’ll be crawling with coppers soon.’
Back home, Frank wiped his shotgun down and hid it in the kitchen cupboard.
‘One thing worries me,’ Debbie said over a calming glass of brandy with her neighbours.
‘What’s that?’ Maggie asked, her own hands trembling at the scare she’d had vicariously.
‘They specifically told me not to tell anyone, or they’d hurt Becki.’
Maggie and Frank’s lack of a reply spoke volumes.
‘It’s catch 22, my dear,’ Maggie said eventually.
‘They could have attacked you or anything,’ Frank said.
‘I know, but if they’ve hurt Becki…’
‘Just tell ’em I followed you,’ Frank said. ‘I was concerned so I decided to keep an eye on you.’
‘They’ll not believe that,’ Debbie said.
The phone in her pocket vibrated against her leg. She opened the message.
‘U scheming cunt. We told u not to tell any1.’
The words hit her like punches, but the picture sent next was like having a car run over her head.
It showed a tiny baby’s tooth, covered in thick strands of blood-flecked drool.
Seven
Debbie stared at the photo for a numb second then screamed with rage.
‘I’ll put this under my pillow, c if the tooth fairy cums,’ the message underneath the photo said.
Without stopping to consider her actions, Debbie dialled the number they’d been texting her from and screamed, ‘You fucking bastards,’ down the earpiece before hanging up and sinking into the settee, in floods of tears.
‘Shh, shh, she’s going to be ok,’ Frank said, hugging her.
‘We’ll get the police here and tell them what’s going on,’ Maggie said.
A string of ‘ha’s came through on Debbie’s phone.
‘Don’t even think about calling the cops,’ began the next message. ‘Or there’ll b more teeth pulled.’
‘We can’t,’ Debbie said, showing them the next message.
‘Well, we’ll have to sort these bastards out ourselves,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll happily blow the other two to hell if I have to.’ His face was set in a determined grimace that made it clear he meant his words.
‘That means a lot to me,’ Debbie said. ‘And thank you for coming to the park, but I get the feeling they don’t want anyone else involved.’
‘If you want us to butt out, then just say so,’ Maggie said.
‘I want your help, but I don’t want Becki to get hurt because of it.’
‘I understand,’ Frank said. ‘We’ll leave you to it unless you ask for our help.’
‘Thank you. I’m going to get some sleep now. Good night.’
‘Good night.’
That night, Debbie’s bed felt like it was made of concrete wrapped in barbed wire.
She was lucky if she slept an hour. The thought of those bastards with their filthy hands on Becki made her physically sick.
The image of the bloody tooth spun around in her head all night.
She even had a dream where the ugly girl who had taken Becki was a tooth fairy, creeping in her room with a pair of pliers ready to pull out Debbie’s own teeth.
When the pliers clamped around one of her front teeth and twisted and tore it out of her head, it wasn’t the scarily realistic ripping sensation that made her wake, it was the sound of her daughter’s scream in reply that made her start screaming until her eyes opened and she found herself panicked and sweating and panting for breath.
As far as sleeping went, that was curtains.
She laid for another hour, in absolute mental and physical discomfort, then got up and made a coffee.
She sat at the table in the front room, a notepad and pen by her side, trying to think of a plan to defeat the scumbags who had taken Becki.
A thought hit her with the customary eureka light bulb. The boy’s body in the park. Maybe he had ID on him.
Grinning like a Cheshire cat, she practically ran to the park.
Her sprained ankle did not thank her for this, but her desire to check the lad for ID far outweighed any pain she felt.
The sun was still thinking about showing his face as she set foot in the park.
Gotta get there quick, before a late night dog walker notices the body, she thought.
In her haste she almost went arse over tit and fell all of the way to the bottom of the hill.
To her relief the body still lay there, untouched by anything other than rigor mortis and the rain that had fallen since she and Frank had left the park.
The body was horrendous to look at, but she found she could tolerate it much better when she remembered who it belonged to.
The gaping hole in the head held the same morbid fascination as a car crash.
Her eyes were drawn to it for a few seconds.
Despite the blood and gore and the clumps of brain and skull, she smiled.
‘Got what you deserved, fucker,’ she said and hawked up a loogie ready to spit on the body, but stopped herself at the last minute, realising that she’d be putting her DNA on him. This hastily made her realise she was about to touch him without gloves on.
She pulled the sleeves of her coat down over her hand and started searching his pocket.
In spite of the covering, her hand sunk into something cold and wet and slimy. She almost pulled her hand out, but the thought of her plan being scuppered if someone found her like this made her continue.
Pressing her hand further into the slime, she felt bile rise up her throat as the blood swamped her sleeve and went all the way up to her wrist. Something hard lay just behind the wet squidgy part which she knew was a bullet hole, and she dug in harder, suppressing another bout of nausea as she did so.
She pulled out a battered leather wallet that looked as old as the kid who lay on the grass.
Grinning at her hard won prize, she took a quick look around then stuffed the wallet into her pocket and set off home.
The dead kid was called Nathan Riley, according to the provisional driver’s license in his wallet. It gave his address, which Debbie committed to memory, and his age as being tw
enty.
‘Old enough to know better,’ she muttered.
She got into the car and set off for the address on the driver’s licence. The house was seemingly derelict, with the gutters not having been repaired since a furious spate of rain. The front window was boarded up with a spattering of graffiti sprayed on it.
‘Boxy woz ’ere,’ one of the tags declared.
It was a start.
She looked around the street, seeing no one who was obviously watching her.
Being careful to avoid a sharp splinter of wood that poked out near the edge of the hole, she put her eye to the small gap in the board and saw a man asleep on the floor in the front room.
She watched him for a second, wondering if he was the owner or a squatter, then stepped back from the window and tried the front door. It was locked and the handle squealed as she let go of it.
At the rear of the house was a broken window that had yet to be boarded up. The gap in the glass was large enough to admit her, but she needed to be careful as jagged edges of glass still clung to the frame.
The dawn light was filtering into the house, giving some illumination but not enough to reveal everything.
She decided to make it a quick visit, as the derelict house was making her skin crawl.
She made her way to the front room, pulling her knife out as she approached the sleeping man on the floor.
Before he woke, she put the blade to his throat and roughly shook him awake.
He stared up at her with eyes like white marbles and started to jabber in a high-pitched voice until she clapped her free hand over his mouth.
‘Where does Boxy live?’ she hissed.
She was unable to believe she was going to these lengths, but there was no way she was accepting her daughter’s disappearance without a fight.
She took her hand off his mouth so he could reply.
‘I-I dunno, really, dunno where he lives.’
‘He has my daughter.’
‘Really, lady, I have no idea. I would tell you if I knew. Maybe try the estate. I know he drives a clapped out Fiat Punto. Black paint, red doors.’
Debbie nodded her thanks and left quickly.
She drove round the estate a few times, searching for the black car with the red doors, but the search proved to be in vain.