by Conrad Jones
Book 1
The Child Taker
CONRAD JONES
Detective Alec Ramsay Series
The Child Taker
Criminally Insane
Slow Burn
Frozen Betrayal
Desolate Sands
Concrete Evidence
Soft Target Series
Soft Target
Soft Target II ‘Tank’
Soft Target III ‘Jerusalem’
The Rage Within
Blister
The Child Taker
Unleashed
Hunting Angels Diaries
A child for the Devil
Black Angel
Blood Bath
The Book of Abominations
Copyright © 2010 CONRAD JONES
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
1 CHAPTER ONE
Coniston Water
He watched from the cover of the trees as the children ran between the tents. He was tempted to creep nearer and snatch one of them as they passed by the edge of the trees but he needed both of them. As a pair, they were far more valuable than they were as individuals. Patience was the key. He had carefully prepared his plan to catch them both and all he had to do now was to wait for the right time. The mother, Hayley, whose name he knew from his research, was clucking about like a mother hen, but she would turn her focus away from her chicks when the time came. They always did. It would take a few seconds, no more, to make them vanish. At first glance, they seemed like the perfect family – but they were far from it and he would use the cracks in their relationship to steal their children from under their noses.
Hayley watched her twins chasing each other around in a circle. They had been playing outside on the grass all afternoon and their olive skin glowed, kissed by the sunshine. Every now and again the chaser would about turn and become the chased. They giggled so much as they ran that they could hardly get their breath. Life could not get much better than watching her children laughing and playing in such a beautiful place. The evening sun was setting over the lake and the still water looked like a huge mirror set between two mountains. In the distance, she could see the peak of Coniston Old Man, where patches of snow still clung to the mountain, despite the glorious sunshine. The still waters of the Lake District never manage to be blue. Slate grey, mossy green and all the shades between can sabotage the images of the romantic who stands on their shores. In the summertime, near the piers, they achieve an oily radiance around the hulls of the motor boats, like the iridescent hues of a pigeon’s throat. When the sun goes down and clouds obscure the moon and the stars, the waters appear as black as ink. As Hayley looked at the lake, two white sailing yachts, anchored close to the shore, drifted as the clear water rippled gently around the hulls, but apart from them, the Coniston Water was as still as could be.
“Ten more minutes you two, and then it will be sleepy time for little boys and girls.” Hayley reached out and ran her fingers through their blond hair as they raced past her. They were nearly six years old and she could not believe how fast they were growing up. Hayley treasured every minute that she had to spend with her children.
Seven years earlier, doctors had told her that she could not have children and the news had devastated her. Her husband had been a rock at the time but Hayley thought that she could sense a yearning within him and it tore her apart that she couldn’t give him the children that he wanted so badly. Two months later, she had conceived. Her husband wept when they had received the news that she was pregnant, and they both wept when the doctors told them that they were expecting twins. Things between Hayley and her husband had changed since then, but she soldiered on because of her beautiful twins. They were the most precious things in her world, and she had to try hard not to smother them by wrapping them in cotton wool to protect them from the world.
“I don’t want to go to bed yet, Mummy!” Sarah chuckled as her twin brother caught up with her.
“I don’t want to go to bed neither, Mummy!” Zak agreed with his sister before tearing off in the opposite direction as the chase began again.
“Either, Zak, I don’t want to go to bed either; we don’t use the word neither,” Hayley laughed.
“Either, Mummy, either, either, either!” Zak shouted the word as he zigzagged across the grass before heading towards their tent. Her husband had nagged at her for years to try camping in the Lake District. He had been a frequent visitor to the area as a young man, fishing and climbing the challenging peaks that the Lake District had to offer. Hayley had finally caved in to the idea and she was surprised how much she enjoyed the peace and tranquillity. The stresses and strains of everyday life seemed to melt away as they drove through the breathtaking scenery on the way to their camp. The campsite was situated on the lakeshore. It was early in the season: there were only a handful of tents and campervans scattered about the site.
Hayley watched the twins carefully as they careered towards the side of the tent, and the potentially dangerous configuration of guy ropes which held their impressive eight-berth tent in place. Zak ducked beneath the first nylon line and expertly sidestepped the tent peg, which protruded from the grass. Sarah was not so fleet of foot and she stumbled over the peg before crashing head-first into the wall of the tent.
“I’ve told you not to run around the tent, Zak; you should stay at the front where I can see you. Now your sister has hurt herself because you ignored me.” Hayley ran to her daughter and gathered her up into her comforting arms. Sarah had that look on her face that only children can have. She was teetering on the edge of tears but not quite crying. Her bottom lip quivered slightly and her eyes looked watery, but she was not going to let it go just yet. As soon as she felt her mother’s embrace the emotion became too much and the tears flooded down her rosy cheeks. She wrapped her little arms tightly around her mother’s neck. Hayley could feel her sticky fingers grasping for some material to hold on to, and then the sobbing began as if it was the end of the world.
“I’m sorry, Mummy.” Zak tugged at his mother’s blouse with one dirty hand and patted his twin sister’s foot, which was just about in reach, with the other hand.
“How many times have I told you not to go behind the tents?” Her voice was calming yet there was a message in the comforting tone. Only a mother can master combining the two.
“Ten times, Mummy,” Zak guessed, but he was way off the mark.
“I think it’s more like a hundred and ten times, young man!”
Zak looked confused by the use of such a big number. He could barely comprehend sums at the best of times and a hundred had too many zeros to begin working it out.
“I’m sorry, Mummy,” he sang. He was at a bit of a loss for anything else to say, and his little sister was blubbering for England. He patted her foot again but she kicked his hand away grumpily and cried even louder. “Hey, she kicked me!” He mumbled sulkily.
“Get him away!”
“What’s all the noise about?”
“We could hear you all the way across the lake!”
Hayley smiled as she turned towards the voices. Her husband Karl had been fishing on the lake with his younger brother, Steve. They were both wearing vest tops and shorts, and the sun had reddened their skin, especially on their shoulders. Their rods and equipment clattered as they walked. Zak ran to his dad and grabb
ed his leg with both arms.
“What have you done to your little sister, Zachariah?” His father asked in a mock-stern tone of voice. He only ever used his son’s full name when he was in trouble.
“She tripped over the high ropes, Daddy, and then she crashed into the tent.” Zak looked up into his father’s eyes and searched them for approval. His sister was a girl after all, and she was always crashing into things and crying. Zak didn’t think that this was a bad crash by any stretch of the imagination. Sarah had crashed into a glass coffee table at Granddad’s house last month and it had shattered into pieces. Now that was a bad crash in comparison to this one.
“No Zak, she tripped over the guy rope, and I wonder who was chasing her?” His father ruffled his blond hair and gently clipped his ear.
“She was chasing me, Daddy, and your hands smell horrible.” Zak got a whiff of fish from his father’s hand. His father teased him by rubbing his hand under his nose. Zak giggled and recoiled. “Poo! Stop it, Daddy.”
“How was the fishing?” Hayley asked. Karl put his rod down and embraced his wife and daughter with his strong suntanned arms. Hayley felt herself flinch slightly as he touched her skin; she didn’t like the feeling any more as it turned her insides out. She once craved his touch, ached for his arms around her but not any longer. Karl glanced into her eyes and she looked away. She felt guilty because her feelings had changed although it wasn’t her fault. It was his.
“We caught a couple of tiddlers, but they weren’t big enough to eat so we’ll all have to eat bread and water tonight. How’s my favourite girls?” He said, as he kissed his wife and daughter in turn. Sarah stopped crying and flung her arms around her father. She snuggled her sticky face into his neck. “Come here and stop crying, Munchkin.”
“I don’t want bread and water, Daddy,” Sarah said forlornly. She forced another little sob to reinforce her concern about dinner.
“Okay sweetheart, what would you like to eat then?”
“Alphabet spaghetti and toast,” she groaned.
“Okay princess we’ll see what we can do.” He kissed her forehead and gently moved her fringe from her face.
“Daddy…,” she whispered.
“What darling?” He whispered back.
“Zak is right, your hands are smelly,” she said. She giggled and pinched her nose to block out the smell. Karl kissed his daughter again and they all laughed.
Fifty yards behind the tent, in the trees, a figure moved silently with the stealth of a cat. He was tall and thin with a gaunt face. The skin on his face was pale and pockmarked, the back of his neck riddled with blackheads and his arms were pale and crisscrossed with blue veins. The man stared through the leaves and branches at the family gathering. Earlier that week, he had received a tipoff from a reliable source that the family were heading for the lakes and so he had waited, and then followed them from a motorway service station. The twins were eating ice cream when he first spotted them. They were priceless and too good an opportunity to miss, so he tracked them all the way to their campsite. There was a conflict of interest in his mind. They were valuable without a doubt but he felt that he could fetch a higher price elsewhere.
He had rubbed his hands together with glee when he realised that they were heading to a remote spot for their holiday; it would have been so much more difficult if they were heading to a busy hotel in one of the many tourist towns in the Lake District. His internet connections had gone ballistic when he first floated a picture of the blond-haired children. When he put them up for sale, a bidding war started between men from four continents. Now he had a buyer in place and everything was set. He looked at the little blonde girl giggling in her father’s arms and he smiled. The smile became a twisted grin and his pink tongue flicked over crooked blackened teeth. He could feel his heart starting to beat faster, and he ran his skeletal fingers through his greasy black hair. The black dye which he used emphasised how lank and greasy his hair was and the grey re-growth at the roots belied its true colour.
His name was Ian once, but that was when he was a young boy. They changed his name years before, when they sent him to prison. When he came out of the penal system, they gave him a new identity and called him Jack. Quite an apt choice, he often thought. The gruesome stories of the ‘Ripper,’ or ‘Jack’ as the police had nicknamed him, fascinated him for all the wrong reasons. Nowadays he used whatever name sprang to mind. Few of the people that he met ever spoke to him anyway, especially the children he encountered. They never spoke. He wasn’t sure what he should be called any more but his latest employers used his internet pseudonym. Jack liked the internet very much. It was a world where he could meet deviants with the same interests as himself, some not quite as sick, but some much, much worse. It was also how he made his living. He had stumbled into this profession and business was booming. It was very rare that his customers ever knew his real name. They only knew him as Jack Howarth, the child taker.
Chapter Two
Mogadishu
Thousands of miles away, on the African continent, Grace Farrington felt sweat running down her spine in rivulets. It was nearly one hundred degrees in the full glare of the Somali sun. Her black skin glistened with moisture as the heat of the sun intensified. Midday was approaching and the temperature continued to climb steadily as she walked through the bullet-ridden streets of Mogadishu. The buildings around her were built from stone, rendered with plaster made from crushed seashells and coral rock and whitewashed. She couldn’t help but wonder what the city would have been like before civil war brought it to its knees. Grace had seen many war-torn cities during her service but Mogadishu was in a league of its own. Mogadishu, now the capital city of Somalia, was one of the first Muslim settlements on the East African coast and its first secure harbour. Though it had been settled long before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, the expansion of Islam made it an important commercial centre for the trade of cloth, ivory, hides, slaves, spices, cattle and porcelain with merchants from Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Indonesia and China. In the sixteenth century it fell under the control of the Portuguese and then fell under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1871. Twenty years later the Sultan leased it to the Italians who then bought the city in 1905 and made it the capital of their colonial Somaliland until World War Two. The indigenous tribes had been warring ever since.
Grace was accustomed to the sight and sounds of a war zone. The daughter of the first black man to achieve the rank of Sergeant Major in the British army, she had chosen to follow her illustrious father into the forces. She was a natural soldier, a sharpshooter and unarmed combat aficionado. Grace had risen through the junior ranks of the military quickly, impressing her superiors so much that they put her name forward for the Special Forces selection programme. She was successful and spent the next three years flitting from one elite unit to the next, wherever a female black operative was required at the time. Different missions required different personnel, especially in countries abroad where dark skin was indigenous. Soon Grace was chosen to take the selection programme for the combined Terrorist Task Force Unit, which she passed with flying colours and now she was the unit’s number one female agent. She had led operations all over the world, but this time Somalia was the theatre in which their unit would perform. The collapse of the Somali government seventeen years earlier had led to a brutal civil war which was still raging and the outskirts of the city had been reduced to nothing but derelict ruins. The square built buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes of every size and shape imaginable. The deserted houses were riddled with shell holes, and black smoke stains crept out of every window and smeared the bricks above them. Grace could hear a petrol engine approaching and the hairs on the back of her neck bristled.
“It’s them,” her Somali guide whispered nervously as he looked over his shoulder towards the speeding vehicle. He was a nineteen-year-old militiaman; as thin as a rake and dressed in a mishmash uniform which hung from his skeletal frame. Sweat was pouri
ng from every pore on his skinny body and the smell that emanated from him was not a pleasant one. “Give me the money now before they get here.”
“You’ll get paid when I’ve met Said Adid,” Grace hissed. She stubbed her little toe on a stone and cursed under her breath. Rocks and stones protruded from the compacted sand that formed the narrow streets of the war-torn city. Her flimsy sandals offered her very little protection against them, and she stumbled frequently.
“I don’t trust you, English bitch!” Her guide snarled. He grabbed her elbow and helped her to her feet again. “Pay me my money.”
“There are half a dozen marksmen with their sights trained on the back of your head right now. If you don’t calm down and stick to your part of the bargain, I’ll signal them to blow your fucking brains all over this godforsaken road.” Grace held him with an icy glare, which left him with no doubt in his mind that she wasn’t lying. He tried to match her glare, but she was not a woman to mess with.
“Are you okay?” Tara asked concerned. Tara was a twenty-three-year-old white-skinned European. She was the newest member of the unit. She was also beautiful and today they were the bait in a honey trap operation.
“I’m fine. Get on with the job,” Grace replied curtly. Although Tara and Grace had worked in the elite counter-terrorist unit together for three months now, they didn’t get on at all. She turned back to their guide and hissed, “If you make one move out of line, you’re a dead man.”
The guide nodded his head slowly and swallowed hard. His oversized Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He was sweating profusely and he wiped his eyes with the front of his khaki shirt. A dark wet smear appeared on the material.
The vehicle’s engine roared as it screeched to a halt ten yards away from them. The driver fishtailed the back of the truck and a wave of grit and sand showered Grace and her guide. The guide rubbed sand from his face as he turned to the vehicle and smiled widely. Grace kept her face lowered as she analysed the situation in a microsecond. The vehicle was a battered red Toyota pick-up. There were three men in the crew cab, and three more standing on the flatbed at the rear. They were operating a Chinese-made heavy machinegun that was welded to a makeshift tripod. Mogadishu was swamped with improvised military vehicles like this one. They were known to Westerners as ‘technicals.’