by Steve Mosby
‘Jane Taylor,’ he says. ‘She disappeared on the fifteenth of March last year from Brookland. She was last seen playing outside her house.’
He leans forward.
‘Now, there are conflicting witness reports, but two people saw a similar rusty red van to the one described in the file. And she was twelve years old, which is about the same age as the “Jane” our child describes playing with underneath her house.’
Our child.
Even as he says the words, he regrets them but it doesn’t matter. Gray is not really listening; he is simply following formal procedure and waiting for his chance to speak. At which point he intends to add a full stop to the conversation, whether Sullivan likes it or not.
‘What I’d like to do, sir,’ he says, ‘is present her with a photograph of Jane Taylor for verification. I have it in the file.’
Gray makes no move to check; of course, he has already seen it. Instead, he takes a drag on the cigarette. A second later, the air between them fills with derisory smoke.
‘Do you believe her story, Sullivan?’
Yes, he thinks. I do.
‘It’s possible, sir. I think it would be—’
Gray holds a hand up.
‘Possible.’
He says it as though musing, but Sullivan knows exactly what he is thinking. Everybody in the department believes that what they are dealing with here is a runaway child, scared to tell the truth and face the repercussions.
Everybody, that is, apart from Sullivan. But again, he knows what people think of him. After the death of Anna Hanson, he is too biased, too haunted, too primed to believe whatever comes his way. Of course, they all sympathise. A child’s death is supposed to affect you; there would be something wrong if it did not. At the same time, the unspoken rule is that you’re not supposed to dwell. A balance must be struck between empathy and strength; it must only affect you so much. A year on, Sullivan is now in breach of that unspoken rule. He has been since Clark Poole lodged his first complaint.
‘Lots of things are possible, aren’t they?’ Gray says. ‘To me, this has the feeling of a child’s invention. Something she’s made up after watching an unfortunate movie.’
Sullivan does not reply. Gray certainly has a point: the child’s story is the most horrific thing he has ever heard. But that does not, to his mind, mean she must have invented it.
Gray taps away some ash.
‘Have you found this farm?’
‘No, sir. There was no obvious way forward there.’
During the interview, the little girl told them that she had grown up at an isolated farmhouse. To her, of course, it was not isolated, because it was all she had ever known. She had a younger brother, a mother – and the father. The only time she ever encountered the outside world was on days like yesterday, when her father drove the family in his rusted old van to different places. Sometimes the journeys would take hours. And on many of those occasions, they returned with a new friend. Sometimes a child; sometimes an adult. Sometimes more than one.
But that, as awful as it sounded, was not as terrible as what happened to the victims once they arrived back.
‘It must be easy to find a farm,’ Gray insists.
‘Sir?’
‘If you look hard enough, I mean.’
Sullivan shakes his head, confused.
Gray spreads his hands. ‘If you look for a farm, you’ll find one. The same way that if you look for missing children called Jane, you will likely find several.’
‘I’m not following you, sir.’
‘What I’m saying, DS Sullivan, is that our child could have invented any name at all, and away you would have gone and found a missing child to match. They all have names, you know. Unfortunately, there are enough of them to cover all the names under the sun.’
‘You think she invented it? Why would she?’
‘I don’t know. Why would I? The workings of young girls’ minds are a mystery to me – probably as much as they are to you. What about the handbag?’
‘We’ve identified the manufacturer. It’s a common brand.’
‘And it’s not a little girl’s handbag, DS. So she must have stolen or found it somewhere, yes? It certainly didn’t belong to this Jane Taylor, did it?’
‘No, sir.’
But again, this is all in the file, which rests between them on the desk. The little girl never claimed the handbag belonged to her or to ‘Jane’. She said it belonged to one of the other women her father had brought to the farm, whose name she never learned. One of the many.
Gray taps the end of his cigarette over the chunky glass ashtray but then thinks better of it, and stubs it out altogether. Sullivan realises he has been allowed precisely the amount of time it took his superior to smoke it.
Gray says, ‘If you want to continue this foolishness in your spare time, that’s your own business, Sullivan. At least it will keep you away from certain people’s houses. But from what I hear, you would be better off spending your time at home.’
‘Pardon, sir?’
Sullivan leans forward. He’s not sure whether to be alarmed or angry. What had his wife been saying? And to whom, in what circumstances? It is no secret between them that things have become complicated and difficult, but this is the first time he’s heard his personal problems referred to at work, even as obliquely as this.
‘But that isn’t my concern,’ Gray says, ignoring the question. ‘And in the meantime, what we have, effectively, is a missing child, only in circumstances far more fortuitous than normal. Parents tend to want their children back. They are not usually difficult to find.’
Sullivan remembers the look of panic on the little girl’s face.
‘Sir—’
Gray holds up a hand.
‘Be quiet. We need an appeal, DS Sullivan, don’t we? Rather than further attempts at authenticating a fairy tale, we need a photograph for the newspapers. Rather than believing in horror stories, we need a press conference. We need information for the television. We need to get this girl’s image out there.’
Sullivan feels deflated. There is nothing he can say, and he knew this would happen as he walked in, but even so.
He also feels afraid.
Parents tend to want their children back.
That is the impression he got from the interview, and it is exactly what the little girl is afraid of. That her monstrous father is going to want her back very much. That he will not stop looking until he finds her and takes her home again.
‘Is there a problem, DS?’
‘No, sir.’ Sullivan stands up. ‘For the record, I think this is a mistake.’
‘That is possible, Sullivan. We shall see, won’t we?’
Finally, now that the meeting is over, Gray picks up the file. He still doesn’t open it, but he stares down at the cover with a slight frown on his face, as though – beneath the bluster – he isn’t quite sure what to make of the details inside after all.
‘We shall see,’ he says again.
Sullivan walks back through the typing pool towards his desk, half imagining a slight pause in activity at each station he passes. But he does not care.
He is remembering Anna Hanson, and the one time they met. Last year, he and Pearson visited the primary school to talk to an audience of enraptured, cross–legged children; she pulled him aside timidly afterwards, and told him she was scared someone was watching her house. But Sullivan had not listened carefully enough and not believed sufficiently. Preoccupied with his marriage, he had heard only a child’s inventions. He had not even known her name. Weeks later, he had recognised her face in the missing persons report, and the next time he saw her had been on the beach, where she was tangled in strands of black seaweed, her small grey hand resting on the rocks.
He thinks of the little girl on the promenade. How brave she has been; how much courage it must have taken for her first to run away, and then to trust them with her story. About her father, who will do anything to have her home again. Who will never sto
p.
Whatever anyone says, he does believe her and he is going to protect her. Because in a world that only takes, in a world filled with lost little girls who were not believed in time, someone has to.
Chapter Eight
I drove home too quickly.
There’s nothing to worry about.
I kept telling myself that. It didn’t help; I’d told myself the exact same thing after Marsha’s phone call, after all, and been wrong then. There was no rational basis for how on edge I felt, how nervous, but that didn’t help either.
Robert Wiseman’s wife had died in an accident. A year afterwards, he checked into The Southerton, where he was rumoured to be working on a sequel to his most popular book, but instead of doing that he disappeared, and was presumed to have committed suicide. Twenty years later, my father had done the same: gone to the same place, possibly writing a book of his own, and now he was dead too. Something was happening. Something still only half visible between the lines.
As I drove, pushing as hard as I could through the traffic, connections and implications kept flickering in my head like ghosts, forming and dissolving, but it was one set in particular that was strongest. Wiseman had written: Two people saw a similar rusty red van to the one described in the file …
And the journalist interviewing Wiseman had referred to the book being based on real crimes that took place in the 1970s.
That was a hell of a long time ago, so there was nothing to worry about. Certainly no reason to make any kind of connection with what I’d seen last night out of the kitchen window.
As irrational as it was, I couldn’t shake it.
I parked up in front of my building. It was after six now, and it was the weekend, so the pub across the street was busy. Groups of men were planted outside on the tarmac, leaning back over their heels. Some of them, drinking from their pint glasses, looked as though they were trying to get the whole rim between their teeth. As my car door slammed, laughter echoed across, more aggressive than it usually sounded. None of them were paying me any attention. From down the street, I could hear the rhythmic thump thump of music from a parked car.
I opened my front door.
The uneasy feeling didn’t go away as I stepped inside. The downstairs hallway was dark and empty – although at least I could hear the thuds and explosions echoing down from my neighbour’s flat. For once, that was weirdly reassuring. But there was something else that wasn’t. Something different. Standing there, it took me a moment to work out what.
A smell.
It was unpleasant. I breathed in, trying to identify it. Rubbish, maybe, or rotting vegetables. Only slight, but definitely there. Cool air too. A draft was delivering the smell here from …
I stared along the downstairs hallway.
At the far end, it doubled back and stairs led down to the cellar. I’d only been in there once, to check the meter when I first moved in; the rooms under the house were filled with broken furniture, mostly impassable. But I remembered an outline of daylight where a fractured door faced out up rubbish-strewn stone steps into the alley behind.
That was where the smell was coming from. A breeze was working its way from the alley, through the cellar, then coiling up the stairs and reaching me here, bringing that stench with it. Because …
Because someone had broken in.
Above me, the artificial bangs and booms continued.
Ally. I took the stairs two at a time. When I reached the first floor landing, my neighbour’s television was louder than ever. There were shrieks coming from inside. I turned the corner, up the stairs to my flat, and—
At the top, my front door was hanging open against the white, woodchip wall. Not broken, just open.
My heart was beating too fast. There’s nothing to worry about, I told myself, walking inside. Maybe she’d gone out. Not closed the door properly on her way.
‘Ally?’
I half stepped into the front room – but then held still in the doorway. It seemed even smaller and more crammed than ever, because my few items of furniture had been scattered around. The coffee table was over by the wall on its side, one leg buckled outwards. The TV was on its face. The wires, and the weight of it, had pulled the stand over too. The bed was angled to one side, the mattress half hanging off. Sheets of paper littered the carpet.
The floor below me was vibrating.
And at first, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It looked like a burglary, but none of the drawers were open, nothing obvious had been taken.
No. The thought came with a chill. Not a burglary.
My gaze caught the corner of the coffee table, where the leg was bent. There was blood there. A smudge of it across the wood.
For a second it was all I could see. I stared at it, and it suddenly felt like I was metres closer, like I was seeing it magnified right before my eyes.
It looks like a fight.
‘Ally?’
I moved quickly down the hallway, checking the bathroom and the kitchen. She wasn’t here. Obviously she wasn’t here. And there were no other signs of disturbance. In the kitchen, I peered down into the alley. Empty.
This was madness. My heart was thumping in my chest.
There were a couple of seconds where I didn’t actually know what to do and just stood there uselessly, my fists clenched. Was I in shock? And then my phone began vibrating in my pocket. I scrabbled for it.
Ally Mobile
I answered it. ‘Ally?’
For a moment, there was no reply. All I could hear was a crackle on the line. It sounded like traffic. Maybe she was—
‘No.’
A man’s voice.
‘Who is this?’ I said.
‘You know who I am.’
I shook my head, said the first name that came to mind:
‘Wiseman …?’
‘No, not Wiseman.’ The man was old, I thought. His voice was rich and textured, full of throat. ‘But Wiseman knew me. He wrote about me. Wrote bits of me into being.’
Even though I didn’t understand, even though it was all too strange to make sense of, everything inside me still went cold. Wiseman had written about this man? Wiseman had written about a serial killer, who lived on a farm. His book was nearly twenty years old now. This couldn’t …
‘Who is this?’ I asked again.
‘I’m your Goblin King.’ The old man stopped, then let loose a great, hacking cough. ‘I gave you what you wanted, didn’t I.’
‘What?’
‘I liked your story.’
My story? I started to say that out loud but then realised: my father’s laptop was still missing. Dad had never been much of a techie. When he logged into his Yahoo account, he probably checked the ‘keep me logged in’ button on the screen. So there was only one obvious way this man could have read my story.
‘You’ve got his computer,’ I said.
‘My boy took it from the car after he made him fly.’
I hesitated. ‘Why did that … why did you kill him?’
‘Because he was in the way.’
The world was suddenly unsteady. I sat down at the kitchen table, my legs shaking.
‘Where is she?’ I said.
‘Here with us. And that’s where she’s staying.’ He said it decisively. ‘She’s part of my family now. We’ll take good care of her. You’ll forget her in time. Both of them.’
‘You can’t—’
‘You asked for it to happen!’ He snapped, suddenly angry. ‘You wanted it.’
All the man has to do is wish for it to happen, I thought.
Eventually, selfishly, he does.
But that was …
‘No, that was just a story.’
‘There’s no taking it back. She belongs to me now.’
I shook my head. What was happening was too surreal. I couldn’t fit this into the everyday world and make sense of it.
‘You can’t get away with this,’ I said. ‘Whoever you are. I’ll call the police, an
d they’ll find you. Whatever it is, what you’re really doing here, you need to stop it now.’
‘Do it. Call them. They haven’t found me yet, have they? Never have, never will. But let them try, if that’s what you want – see if they believe anything you have to say, or have the first idea where to look. And then you’ll never see this one again. Never get her back.’
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘There is one way though.’
For a moment, I didn’t reply.
‘One way,’ I said. ‘One way to get her back?’
‘That’s right. She’s mine now because you gave her to me. That means you need to give me something in exchange. You have to trade me. There has to be a change so we come out equal.’
‘Trade you?’
‘Fair’s fair, isn’t it? That’s the way it works.’
‘For what?’ I said. ‘Trade her for what?’
‘For my little girl.’
I started to reply again – to say something, anything – but stopped. In Wiseman’s book, the killer was determined to find his escaped daughter, whatever the cost. Barbara Phillips had implied the book was based on real crimes. My little girl. Was that what this old man was implying? That he wanted me to find a fictional character? Or rather, the real person a character might have been based on?
I repeated, ‘For your little girl?’
‘You know who I’m talking about?’
‘The girl from Wiseman’s book.’
‘That’s her.’
‘But she’s not real.’
The old man laughed to himself.
‘She’s as real as I am.’
‘How am I supposed to find her?’
‘I don’t know, do I? If I did, the trade wouldn’t be worth anything. Same way your father did. If you want to see this one again, you’ll figure out how he did it. And you won’t go to the police either. You won’t tell anyone about me. You’ll just find my little girl, and then maybe we’ll trade.’
Same way your father did. I made the connection with what he’d said earlier: that my father had ‘got in the way’ at the viaduct. What had happened? Had he gone there with someone – with someone this man thought was his grown daughter – and then, when they were attacked, fought back long enough for her to get away? I remembered the pale, malformed face I’d seen peering up through the van windscreen: the bulk of the driver’s body. My father was a small man, not a fighter. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against most people, never mind someone as big as that.