‘Do you think they’d go that far?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes, the Yard would go that far to pin something on Ray Robertson. All that effort he made to make friends in high places through the boxing galas and the other charity stuff he’s done over the years doesn’t impress the Met one bit. Jackson’s not the only one who’s been panting to get Ray as well as Georgie for years. I’m just a side issue. A means to an end, maybe, but nothing more than that.’
‘An innocent bystander?’ Kate asked, almost offering a smile.
‘I wouldn’t go quite as far as that,’ Barnard said with a grin which fleetingly reminded Kate just why she was sitting here in his flat. He had, she thought, been fun once though not right now. He seemed as close as she had ever seen him to giving up.
‘I’m useful at the moment, but ultimately expendable,’ he said.
She took his hand tentatively. He responded by putting an arm round her shoulders and kissing her.
‘I’m sorry I’ve got you involved in all this nonsense,’ he said. She moved closer and returned the kiss more passionately than perhaps he’d anticipated. Reluctantly they pulled apart when the phone rang. Barnard half stood, hesitating.
‘Shall I answer it?’ he asked quietly.
‘You’ll have to make up your own mind about that,’ she said cautiously. ‘It depends if you think someone might be listening in.’ He nodded, spun on his heel and went to the phone. As he listened to the caller she was surprised to see the tension ebb away.
‘Yes, she’s here,’ he said handing the receiver to Kate. ‘It’s for you.’
The voice at the other end of the line was muffled and Kate did not recognize it at first. But when Connie Flanagan identified herself she realized that it was because the woman at the other end of the line was in tears. She instantly knew why.
‘Have they found Luke?’ she asked.
‘No, they haven’t. Everyone thinks his father’s taken him – my uncle, the police, everyone. They’re not taking it seriously. But I know Bert wouldn’t do that. I thought I was safe here with my family, but obviously I’m not. And I’m frightened they’ll try to take Sally and Liam as well. I found your number on the card you gave Jasper.’
‘But who would take the children?’
‘Someone who wanted to find Bert badly enough. I need to get away from here but I don’t know where to go.’
‘Isn’t it better to stay with people you know? Your uncle and his friends look as if they would be able to protect you.’
‘They didn’t protect Luke, did they? Someone got hold of him.’
‘So is there anywhere else you could go? Somewhere you’d be safe?’
There was a silence at the other end of the line and for a moment Kate thought Connie had rung off.
‘There’s my Auntie Vi in Clacton,’ she said eventually. ‘She married a man up there and runs some of the amusements on Clacton pier. She lives in a proper house, not a van. She might take us in, just until they find Luke.’
‘Can you ring her?’ Kate asked, but there was another silence.
‘She’s not on the phone and I don’t know how to get there by train. Not with the kids …’
‘Can you ring me back in ten minutes?’ Kate said glancing at Barnard who looked mystified, but she had had an idea and looked determined.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Barnard asked after she hung up.
‘It was Connie Flanagan, from the fairground in Southend. I left her this number in case she needed to get in touch. She wants to get herself and two children from Southend to Clacton as fast as she can. She’s scared out of her wits that whoever’s got the little boy will try to take the other children as well. If it’s the husband who’s taken Luke, I suppose he might well come back for the other two. She’s terrified.’
‘Can’t the Southend police help her get there?’ Barnard asked, reasonably enough.
‘I don’t think she trusts them,’ Kate said. ‘And she certainly doesn’t want anyone in Southend to know where she’s gone, not even the police. It doesn’t sound as if they’re trying very hard to find Luke.’
‘So what do you want to do? Drive out there and rescue her? Take her to Clacton?’
‘Would you?’ Kate said quickly. ‘If only I could drive … I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink unless I know she’s safe.’
Barnard sighed and looked at his watch. It was nine thirty.
‘It wasn’t quite the way I planned to spend the evening,’ he said ruefully.
‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘But can we do it? She’s going to ring back soon. If we say no and anything happens to her and the kids, I’d never forgive myself.’
‘Your problem is that you think you can solve the problems of the world single-handed.’ He glanced at his watch again. ‘Tell her to meet us at the end of the pier at eleven. We should be able to make it by then, the roads will be quiet.’
She kissed him again.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I wish we didn’t have to.’
They seemed to Kate to have been driving for half the night when a car with a blue flashing light passed them and cut in front, forcing Barnard to stop. A uniformed police officer waved to him to open the window and stuck his head inside curiously, taking in Kate in the front seat and Connie Flanagan and two sleeping children in the back.
‘Pushing it a bit hard, weren’t you sir?’ the traffic officer asked. Barnard nodded wearily.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s late and I was keen to get these kids to bed.’
‘Have you been drinking, sir?’ the officer persisted.
‘Not for hours,’ Barnard said. ‘I’m not drunk if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to get out of the car for me then, for a little chat?’ Barnard shrugged and got out.
‘Look,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m in the job myself, with the Met. You could give me a break. This was a family emergency. My girlfriend’s cousin had her bag stolen and couldn’t get home to Clacton, so I offered to take them. You don’t realize quite how fast you’re going when the road’s as empty as this.’
‘You’d realize if you had to scrape people off the road after a smash,’ the officer said, his eyes cold, making a note of the Capri’s registration number. ‘Name and address?’ he asked. For a wild moment Barnard thought of lying although his name could be easily traced through his car’s number plate. He shrugged and gave his details, cursing the persistence of the Essex police.
‘Can’t we leave it at that?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps if I bought you and your mates a drink?’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ the officer said. ‘But maybe we’ll forget you made that suggestion. This isn’t the Met, this is Essex. We tend to be straight up and down in Essex, and we don’t much like foreigners tearing up and down the A12 at seventy-odd miles an hour. Would you like to walk in a straight line towards my car? Let’s see how much I think you’ve been drinking, shall we?’
Barnard did as he was told, conscious of being carefully watched by the officer behind him and his mate behind the wheel of the patrol car. To his relief, all he got in the end was a pat on the shoulder rather than the heavy hand of an arresting officer.
‘Mind how you go the rest of the way, sir,’ the officer said. ‘And keep your speed down. Remember you’ve got kids in the car.’
Barnard got back into the driving seat, leaned back and shut his eyes for a second.
‘What was that all about?’ Kate asked.
‘Speeding, drinking. I think they were just looking for something to break the monotony of a quiet night. But if they’d decided to arrest me, it could have been nasty. It would have gone straight back to the Met and questions would have been asked.’ He watched the police car set off towards the turn-off for Clacton at a sober pace, which he knew he would have to follow.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, glancing at the sleeping passengers in the back seat. ‘I’m more than ready for bed myself.’
Terry and Kevin
sat on the shingle eating jam sandwiches. The boys were wearing wellington boots but their grey school shorts were already spattered in mud, and the coats that concealed the rest of their school uniform were also liberally smeared. Terry, the smaller boy, finished his sandwich and groaned, rubbing his stomach dramatically.
‘I’m still starving,’ he said. ‘We should have brought something else.’
‘If I’d taken anything else, my mam would have noticed. She’d guess we were bunking off and not having school dinner,’ Kevin said.
‘I didn’t realize it was so far,’ Terry said, rubbing his calf above the boots and turning his leg black with mud.
‘If you want good worms you have to come right out here, my dad says. This is where he comes. He’ll give me sixpence if we take a bucketful back. Anyway, it’s worth it for a day out of school. I’m fed up with being called a pikey or a gyppo and getting thumped all the time by Ricky Raymond. I hate him and I hate the place. The sooner I can leave school and help my da on the big dipper the better. You don’t need to read and write to do that.’
‘Adding up is useful, though,’ Terry said with a thoughtful expression. ‘For doing the change.’
‘Most of them don’t even count their change,’ Kevin said scornfully. He threw away the paper bag his sandwiches had been wrapped in and picked up a long metal fork. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You bring the bucket. Let’s see what we can find.’
They plodded out on to the sands again, with the wet mud sucking at their wellingtons.
‘What’s that?’ Terry asked, pointing slightly to one side. They both stared at something sticking out of the mud.
‘It’s just an old log,’ Kevin said.
‘Looks like a boot,’ Terry said uncertainly.
‘Nah,’ Kevin said. ‘Just a log. Come on. Let’s get digging.’
The two boys worked hard and silently for half an hour before Terry gave a wail. Kevin looked across the wet sands, which lay not far below the grassy edge of what passed here for dry land and laughed. The younger boy was standing on one leg with his other wellington boot wedged firmly in the mud. He wobbled precariously for a moment, then put his bare foot down with a squelch.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘My da will murder me if I go home like this.’
‘Here, I’ll help you pull it out,’ Kevin offered, plodding through the increasingly liquid surface towards Terry, using his fork to help keep his balance. But with each step he could feel less of a firm base beneath his feet and by the time he reached the younger boy he was becoming seriously worried.
‘Hold on to me,’ he said, and felt his own feet sinking deeper. Terry grabbed his arm and Kevin could see the watery mud rising up his own boots. He reached for Terry’s wellington and gave it a tug. At first it refused to move, but when he stuck the fork into the mud close to it he was able to lever it back to the surface. He rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, leaving another dark smear.
‘Come on,’ he said urgently. ‘I don’t know about the tide out here. We’d better get back to dry land. It feels as if the water’s getting deeper.’ He turned and began wading through the mud but soon realized that Terry had moved no more than a couple of steps and had stopped again.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m stuck,’ the younger boy said. ‘I can’t get my feet out.’ Kevin turned and plodded back towards Terry. He could feel the pull of the mud getting stronger and grabbed Terry under the arms. As he tried to pull him upwards, he realized that the more he tugged the more the sucking black stuff was pulling him down as well. He let go and extricated his own feet. Panic was beginning to seize him and he felt sick.
‘I can’t lift you out, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get someone to help.’ He glanced at the shoreline and, some distance back, could see a white van that had stopped close to the water’s edge.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s someone up there. I’ll go and get them.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ Terry screamed, tipping over into panic. ‘Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’
‘I have to,’ Kevin said. ‘It’ll only take five minutes if I run like the clappers. Promise.’ Gritting his teeth, he turned away from Terry and began the long, tortuous struggle back to the grassy bank, the fork in one hand and the bucket with a puny catch in the other. As he scrambled up on to dry land, dropped the fork and bucket with a clatter and began to run, he could hear Terry’s wails. There were two men sitting in the front of the van drinking mugs of tea. Kevin banged on the window and shouted incoherently for help.
‘Calm down, calm down,’ one of them said. ‘What’s the panic?’ But when Kevin told them, they quickly opened the back door, shoved the boy inside, and drove along the shore to the point where the boys had embarked on their adventure. Kevin could see that Terry had now sunk up to his waist and could hear him screaming hysterically.
‘Ladders,’ one of the men said sharply to the other, waving at the roof of the van, where ladders were stored. ‘Quick, mate.’ Silently they lifted the ladders down and began to wade towards the trapped boy until the mud came almost over the top of their boots. Then they placed the ladders flat on the surface, one man holding the end steady while the younger, lighter man began to crawl purposefully towards Terry. The boy clung to his rescuer as soon as he succeeded in reaching him, and for a moment it looked as if he would pull him into the mud instead of being pulled out. But the man quickly got a grip and began to ease backwards very slowly, bringing Terry with him.
As soon as they got to the shingle edge, Kevin sank to the ground and began to cry. The men helped the boys up the shallow bank and the four of them sat on the grass panting, gazing over the flat expanse of the sands where a muddy black tide was now gurgling towards them.
‘Dangerous, that,’ the van driver said, watching as Kevin emptied the water out of his wellington and pulled it on again and Terry tried to scrape the mud out of his.
‘So where do you little beggars come from?’ he asked. Kevin told him reluctantly.
‘So how the hell did you get out here?’ the man asked, surprised.
‘We walked,’ Kevin said. ‘My da comes out here to dig for worms.’ The other man was gazing out at the mud flats with a curious look on his face.
‘Is that a log?’ he asked his mate. The other man shook his head.
‘I noticed that,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a log. Maybe.’ He shook his head slightly and glanced at the boys.
‘I thought it was a boot,’ Kevin said. ‘Maybe someone got stuck and couldn’t get out. Ugh.’ The two men exchanged a quick glance.
‘Come on, we’ll take you home,’ the driver said.
But Terry, covered in thick mud and now shivering, just glanced into the bucket.
‘D’you think we got enough worms to get sixpence?’ he asked.
‘I should think you’re more likely to get a bloody good hiding,’ the driver said.
DS Harry Barnard took his time going into work the next morning. He’d driven sedately back to Highgate after delivering Connie Flanagan and her children, together with a couple of battered suitcases, to a sleepily bemused Auntie Vi in Clacton, and it was almost three o’clock when he and Kate had fallen into bed exhausted, any lingering thought of doing anything but sleep driven from their minds. By the time Barnard surfaced, Kate had already gone to work and he decided to take a leisurely stroll around Soho to see if he could pick up anything there that the DCI might be remotely interested in. He called into a couple of booksellers, legitimate as far as their window displays were concerned, but much less so if you chose to have a look in their locked back rooms. There had been a rumour that a new source of supply had been located by some of them in the Netherlands and he wondered if his best contact – a man called George, whose tweedy bulk and permanently smoky briar pipe suggested nothing but intense respectability – would be prepared to help. George would either be buying some of the allegedly extreme pornography himself, in which case Barnard might get a sniff of di
scomfort amongst the tobacco fumes. Or he would not, in which case he might be prepared to grass up some of his rivals and hint to the Met which storerooms would be worth raiding. But he was not giving much away this morning and Barnard left the fug of the overstuffed shop convinced that George was probably already buying from the new source and would tell him nothing unless and until the deal went sour.
On his way back towards Oxford Street he called in at the queer pub, another of DCI Jackson’s monotonously frequent targets, but found only cleaners and a solitary barman inside. Like the street girls, who generally slept until noon, seekers after illegal sex went to bed late and rose even later. He needed, he thought, to have another prowl around later in the day. He knew he was being watched from high windows in the narrow streets, but at this time of the morning no one of any interest was talking.
Even so, Barnard felt reassured by the familiarity of the Soho streets and the myriad doorways offering services from the exotic to the everyday. If you wanted illicit pleasures or jazz, foreign cuisine or late night boozing, this was the place to come and it was where he felt most at home.
Cutting through close to the Delilah Club, doors firmly closed, his pace quickened as he saw someone he did recognize. Ray Robertson’s ex-wife Loretta was sweeping up the road towards him, the same hat with a tiny veil perched on top of her red hair and a fox fur round her neck with lifelike eyes that seemed to Barnard almost as searching as Loretta’s own.
‘Ha!’ she said with some belligerence as he approached. ‘Have you found him yet?’ Barnard reluctantly stopped as she was effectively barring his way.
‘No, I haven’t,’ he said. ‘He’s gone to ground for some reason that I don’t understand. The only way he’s going to sort this out is to talk to us.’
‘Well, you know what a slippery bastard he is,’ Loretta said, smoothing the tawny fur more tightly around her neck to keep out the wintry wind. ‘Are you going to let me know when you find him? Or are you holding out on me? Do you really not know where he is?’
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