by Jake Cross
‘Why isn’t that man handcuffed?’ Middleton said, staring over her shoulder in absolute shock.
‘Dad, don’t. I’m not in the mood.’
Middleton grunted his displeasure and turned away. ‘These detectives have been questioning me about my past now. Who I know who could have done this. What’s that all about, Anna?’
‘Father, please,’ Jane said from somewhere behind him. ‘Until we know, we don’t know anything, do we? They’ve asked me, too. Whoever it is and whatever their connection to us, that’s hardly our fault, is it?’
Middleton moved to a wall, probably to make sure there was space between him and Nick. Anna stepped inside and was immediately grabbed in a tight hug by Jane. Nick entered with Miller and Bennet close behind and Jane somehow knew it was him. He got the same squashing hug. Middleton glared at everyone but kept silent. Jane traced a shape on Nick’s cheek and over his chin with her finger.
‘It means everything will be okay.’
He couldn’t read Braille and he didn’t know this secret language of the sisters, either. So he gave her a thumbs up and pressed it against her arm so she could feel the shape. She understood because she gave her own thumbs up.
‘Except that the police still doubt it’s a kidnapping,’ Anna said. Everyone looked at her. ‘They want to bring in a dog to search the house for signs of Josie’s blood. In case the kidnapping story is a lie and really we killed her.’
Middleton and Jane voiced their shock, but were washed out by Nick as he spun on the detectives and roared, ‘What?’
Miller stepped forward. ‘Nick, no, that’s not right. We don’t—’
‘That dog van outside, is that it? You want to bring a damn dog in to search for blood? Okay, I’ll help you.’
Miller started to object, but Nick ran over to the living room doorway and stamped on the carpet. Everyone else watched, shocked. ‘Here, the carpet gripper. Let it sniff there. Josie cut her knees crawling around three years ago.’
‘Nick, calm down,’ Bennet said, ‘because you’ve got this—’
Nick approached the fireplace. ‘Or did we bash her head in right here? I guess you’ll soon know. And don’t forget the cellar. Actually, maybe we cut her up in the bath.’
‘Nick!’ Anna yelled. ‘Don’t you dare say such things.’
Nick jerked as if he’d been slapped. He took a step towards Anna, but stopped when she dropped on to the sofa, crying. Jane sat with her.
‘The superintendent sent the search dogs,’ Bennet said. He looked at both Carters, back and forth, as he spoke. ‘But DCI Miller objected. It’s protocol, but she said no. We trust you. Normally we’d have all of you out of here and down the station so a whole team could come in and search this place. But we didn’t, and we won’t. The dog handler isn’t being allowed inside. We know you didn’t hurt your daughter.’
Nick took another step towards his wife, but she didn’t look at him. ‘Anna?’
Still she refused to look up. He rubbed his forehead, looked at every shocked face watching him, and then quickly strode from the room.
Miller sat on Anna’s free side, but said nothing. That made it worse for Anna, who looked at her and mouthed: I’m sorry.
The DCI took her hand and shook her head. ‘Don’t you apologise. Okay? Not for anything, dear. Nothing you do while Josie is missing requires any kind of apology. I’m sorry, me, because the dog handler should have been gone. I don’t know why he’s still outside. You weren’t supposed to see him. And you’ll never see that face again.’
‘Like Josie’s, then,’ Anna moaned.
Nick needed a drink. In the kitchen, he opened a high cupboard full of cereals, but he wasn’t after cornflakes. From a bottle hidden behind the boxes, he poured a big dose of Jim Beam into a plastic beaker.
‘Drugs and alcohol?’
Nick turned to see DS Bennet in the doorway, watching.
‘The alcohol is my choice, at least.’
‘Don’t you need to be clear-headed for what’s coming?’
‘And what’s coming? Viewing my daughter’s body at the morgue? Watching your dog search for her body under the floorboards?’ He snatched up a large knife from the counter.
‘Put that down right now,’ the DS ordered. His stance changed slightly, as if readying for an attack. Nick tossed the knife into the sink and the DS added: ‘Protocol, remember? Imagine if a week from now you admitted Josie was under the floorboards and that we didn’t even search the house. Remember also that I said we’re not using the dog. And what’s coming are things you need to be clear-headed for. Step away from that sink, please.’
Nick spat the alcohol into the sink. ‘Gotcha. A in that police ABC mantra, eh? A: accept nothing. Your wife must find life one long party.’
He almost upended the bottle’s contents down the plughole, too, but stopped himself. He put the top back on. And backed out of arm’s reach of the whiskey-soaked weapon.
‘It’s for celebrating good news, anyway,’ he said, meaning the whiskey. Meaning he still might have the chance to celebrate.
‘Why was the bottle hidden? Do you have a drink problem you’re hiding from your wife?’
‘What are you, a detective or something?’
Bennet’s phone beeped the arrival of a text message. He quickly read it and lost the device. ‘Then hopefully we can all have a good news nip very soon,’ he said. ‘Now, can we go into your daughter’s room, and you can run me through your story again.’
‘Looking for holes in it?’ Nick said as he slapped the bottle down on the worktop and slid it away.
‘I’ll understand the story better if you tell it here at the scene. Maybe it’ll help your memory, too.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? You think I gave you a line? Ah, wait. C: challenge everything.’
‘Maybe you missed some things. Your head is clearer now.’
‘Like what?’
‘Only you could know that. Maybe something that happened in the long black zone in your head between when you were knocked out and woke up in a garage.’
The DS’s glare confirmed it: the police knew that Nick had fudged his tale a little. He did remember something from that black zone. Unable to meet the police officer’s gaze, he looked at a framed picture above the microwave oven: a quote, from author Josh Jameson, about those moments in life when one needed to turn the page rather than close the book. Nick felt this book trying to close itself.
In Josie’s room, he sat against the wall facing the bed and Bennet sat on the mattress. Nick glanced down, under the bed, then away.
‘Just before we do the story, Nick, let’s see if your long-term memory is better. Enemies.’
‘You asked me that in the car. No enemies.’
‘The people who took your daughter away from you said you had to pay your dues. You. Sounds personal. Doesn’t have to be someone you know. Someone you annoyed. Cut anyone up on the road recently?’
‘You told me already. Look, anyone I pissed off recently, I didn’t give them my name and address, okay?’
‘How about your job? You do gardens. Easy to trace you through a business. Anyone unhappy with the finished product?’
‘Now and then. Bit extreme, don’t you think?’
‘I could tell you my snowball story, which I use at times like this. Tell me about the latest unhappy garden fanatic.’
‘She was about eighty years old.’
‘Prison is full of vicious young thugs with eighty-year-old grandmothers they love dearly.’
‘Look, Detective Bennet, I keep to myself and I’m nice and sweet on days when my daughter hasn’t been kidnapped. No enemies. No one pissed off enough to do this. This is about money and they know Anna’s dad has enough to spare.’
‘Anyone at all you’ve had recent contact with, even if it didn’t seem as if you got on their wrong side?’
Nick sighed. ‘Couple of weeks back, a guy a street over had to brake coming out his garden because he didn’t see
my van. A corner shop owner in Mexborough accused me of buying alcohol for teenagers hanging around outside. Some girl the other day knocked on the door and tried to get me to buy organic pizzas. You want to chase these people? Like I said before, someone has done this because they want money and know Anna’s dad has enough to spare.’
Bennet nodded. ‘Okay, Nick. Seems your memory is back nice and fine. So let’s run through the story again, if you don’t mind.’
‘Fine. But is there a point to me retelling this? After all, you guys swear by your B: believe no one.’
After the story was told, again, Nick found Anna in the playroom. She was at the painting table with her back to him and didn’t turn when he entered. But she knew he was there.
‘I hoped this time of day might be easiest. Because Josie’s usually at school. So she’s not normally here anyway. But for some reason it’s worse.’
Nick took the seat opposite. He didn’t know what to say, and it wasn’t just because of the nightmare they shared. This was the first time in a long time that they’d been alone together in a place with no distractions like a TV or a road to watch or a five-year-old backing vocalist. He was still thinking about taking a bellyful of whiskey and it influenced what popped into his head:
‘I hope they’re feeding her.’
His line teased a sensitive nerve because the left side of Anna’s face twitched. She tried to rub the feeling away. Done, her fingers crawled to her raw neck, but didn’t scratch the scaly rash. ‘We need a holiday when she gets back. All of us.’
‘They won’t know she’s got a milk allergy, though.’ He felt anger rising. ‘They could have at least taken her damn soy milk with them.’
He reached out to trace his finger across the sun on Josie’s latest drawing. Anna’s hand laid atop his.
‘It’s July, but she misses the snow already. We could go to Iceland. Josie would love the rocket ship church, and the Blue Lagoon.’
The picture was the usual suspect: dodgy-looking line house with a spiky sun and stick family far too big for the thin garden path. Nick’s form was bigger than the others, because he was Josie’s giant dad, the superhero, but the perspective made it appear as if his stick representation was ahead of Anna and Josie, closer than the house. Further from it. Parted from them. As if walking away. Going to work, Josie had said, and she’d called it BUSY DAY, but that wasn’t how Nick saw it now. He chose to believe Josie had painted him apart from the others because she had sensed the breakdown between her parents.
There was a beep from his pocket. He registered the single beep by his expression, but made no move to take the item out of his pocket because Anna was watching him.
She didn’t miss a thing, though: ‘Is that a phone?’
‘Back in a minute.’ He went out and slipped into the bathroom, unseen, and locked the door and pulled out the phone.
It was time to do this.
Six
She managed three minutes, but by then there was more worry than curiosity. Anna stepped out into the hallway but didn’t see Nick. She could hear voices from the bedroom and the living room. But not Nick’s.
Nabi said, ‘I think HOLMES is a bit silly. I mean the name. HOLMES, with L for large and M for major. Large major enquiry?’
‘It’s a major enquiry, and it’s a large one,’ someone replied. It sounded like the young pregnant detective, Hicks.
She noticed the bathroom door was shut.
‘Murder cases are all large, and major means big. So it’s like saying a large big enquiry.’
‘What I mean, fool, is that it’s a major enquiry, but it’s the system that’s large. Large system for major enquiries.’
‘You just thought of that. That’s not what you said.’
Anna realised they were discussing the name of the police computer database. They would have used that, of course. Fed in information, or however it worked, with a hope of finding who took Josie. She went to the bathroom door and tried it. Locked.
DC Hicks said, ‘HOLMES, though, is from Sherlock Holmes. They had to cover the L and the M in the acronym. With no L it sounds like an estate agent’s system.’
Nabi’s reply was: ‘But it’s a police system, so we’re hardly going to get confused. Anyway, they should have done SHERLOCK, which sounds better.’
Anna knocked on the door. ‘Nick? You okay?’
No answer. Nick would have responded, so there was probably a police officer in there. She was about to make sure with a louder knock when there was a burst of laughter from the living room. A moment of mirth highlighted her utter distress and it dug right under her skin. She banged the living room door open.
Nobody in the living room, but through the room divider she saw them in their little NASA control room. As guessed: Hicks and Nabi and three others, one of whom was a new face, all sitting around her dining table like Sunday afternoon dinner guests. She stepped up to the gap at the end. Hicks had a pained face and was rubbing one side of her bloated belly. Anna opened her mouth to shout at them – if Miller had ordered her people to stay in their little sanctuary to give Anna peace, it surely included not filling the house with their mundane chatter – but the anger quickly subsided. She was tired of anger on top of pain. The moment the detectives spotted her, she spoke.
‘I find it hard to picture Josie smiling in my head. Does that sound normal?’
The new face was caught halfway standing, as if to introduce himself. Everyone just stared at her.
‘The last thing I said to her before she went to bed… it was something bad. I told her off because she was being naughty. I last saw my little lady with a grumpy face, and now it’s the only face I can picture when I think of her. She said to me, you don’t love me. But I just left the room without speaking. What if I never get another chance to tell her I love her?’
Nabi didn’t seem to care, but Hicks got up and approached.
‘Don’t think like that,’ she said, standing close. ‘She’s coming back to you, and very soon.’
When the detective took her into a hug, Anna couldn’t stop a deluge of tears. She had sought a reaction, that was all, but hearing the words aloud drove their potency home. What if she never again got the chance to speak to her little lady? What if there was a dead spot in her mind, like a scratch on a vinyl record, and she was never again able to imagine Josie smiling?
What if… ‘She thinks she’s been taken from her mum and dad as punishment for being naughty?’
Before the detective could answer, they heard the front door close, and then a shout from another room, by Miller: ‘Did someone just leave the house?’
No one from the living room. As if an alarm had sounded, and with more haste than anyone had moved when her five-year-old vanished, they jumped into action. By the time Anna got to the front door, five detectives were already in the garden, staring off to the right. Miller ordered them out of sight, quickly. As they retreated into the house, Anna saw her own car bolting down the road. Nick.
She remembered thinking he’d had a phone. Had he got a message, or a call, while in the bathroom? But Nick had claimed his phone was taken by the kidnappers.
She ran into Josie’s room and Bennet appeared just as she knelt by her daughter’s bed and lifted the end of a cable that ran under the frame and into a wall socket.
‘Was there a phone plugged in there? Has Nick got a phone?’
‘Yes. Josie’s. An old one we let her have. For Tetris when she can’t sleep.’ And it had been there earlier, when she’d retrieved Nick’s birthday present to her.
‘Does it have credit, is it active? Was it here this morning?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Why? Yes, it had a couple of pounds left over from a top-up ages ago.’
He cursed and rushed from the room. She heard him bellow that Nick might have made a phone call. Then he was back, wanting Josie’s number so they could trace the call. Then she heard her father’s voice.
‘I knew it. He’s gone to meet his accomp
lices. How did you let him out? Didn’t you hear the car start? Ten police officers in this tiny house and he got out.’
Someone urged him to calm down. She heard more footsteps, and then various voices, all urgent. So much noise, adding to the pain. She ran to the door and shoved it shut with a bang.
Accomplices… couldn’t be… could it? But… the Sunderland connection… No, no, Nick must be out searching for Josie. Maybe he had a clue. Maybe he had remembered something, something about the kidnappers who attacked him. Perhaps one had worn an item of clothing with a badge or a logo identifying a place of work. Yes, that was it: over the effects of the drug, Nick now had a clue and was pursuing it alone because the police didn’t like vigilantes. He was doing something proactive to get back his daughter. She cursed herself for doubting him – again.
She pulled out her mobile and dialled Josie’s number from memory. The call went to voicemail and she heard a fumbled message from her daughter, reading from a script that Nick had written. Hearing her little lady’s voice cut her deep. But she didn’t hear Nick’s voice, because he didn’t answer. As she hung up, Jane crashed through the door.
‘Annie, you here?’ Her head twitched in Anna’s direction as she heard the beep of dialled numbers. ‘Where’s Nick going, Annie?’
This time Anna wasn’t trying to reach Nick. She just wanted to hear Josie’s recorded voice again.
Nabi was sent in pursuit, but Nick had gone east, and within ten seconds of the house by car was an X-junction. It took him ten more to pull his phone and dial a number, so within a minute, all told, Miller knew that Nick had vanished. Then she got a radio call from base: Lowth and Adams, the officers who’d responded to the 999 call that started everything, had just called in to say they’d seen the Carters’ car leaving the area and were wondering if it had been authorised. No got bounced from base to patrol car and soon Nick had a tail. But only a tail, Miller ordered. ‘Don’t stop him. No arrest. Keep me updated on your location.’ Her father questioned this, and it was Jane who had the answer: they wanted to see if Nick led the police to Josie. Anna leaned against a wall in the living room, far from the mass crowding Miller and her radio, and dared to hope this nightmare could be winding down.