Shadows to Ashes

by Tori de Clare

  ‘Naomi?’ Solomon cut in. ‘Missing? Since when?’

  ‘Since she didn’t arrive at court this morning. I swear I’ll call the police if you don’t tell me what’s happened to her. I don’t care what you might do to me next.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with me.’

  Henry couldn’t digest Solomon’s words. ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Why would I lie? If Naomi were with me, I’d relish rubbing your nose right in it.’ Solomon’s voice had lowered, but the tone was cutting. ‘I don’t know anything about Naomi disappearing, but I can promise you this, I will find her.’

  ‘How can you possibly give me assurances if you don’t know where she is?’ Henry hissed.

  ‘I’ll get people on the job immediately. We’ll find her.’

  Henry was feeling lightheaded and mildly nauseous. It had been a mistake to call. He’d been too rash. ‘Why does that give me no comfort at all?’

  ‘You’re wasting my time, Henry. We’re on the same side for once. We want the same thing. I need to make some calls. And now.’

  ‘I know I can’t trust you.’

  ‘Good. You’re learning. No police, Henry, understand? The police are useless. Nothing good can come from contacting them, you hear me? You do not want her name plastered all over the news again.’

  ‘No, I do not,’ Henry said, ‘But I’ll do whatever it takes to get my daughter back.’ His voice was shaking.

  ‘Leave it to me then. You’re sure there’s no mistake?’

  ‘She should have shown up at court as a witness in Dan’s trial this morning. I’m sure you already know that, somehow. She was hell-bent on testifying. It seems too much of a coincidence that’s she’s vanished en route. But there’s no mistake. Something’s happened.’

  ‘Who did she last speak to? Where was she last seen?’

  ‘She texted the woman who’s been preparing her for trial to say she was almost there. She must have been in central Manchester. I don’t know any more than that.’

  Solomon said, ‘No publicity. No police.’

  Henry’s chest felt tight. A familiar sensation. ‘What do I tell my wife?’ His voice cracked.

  ‘Lie to her, Henry. Keep her sweet. Whoever has Naomi will get jittery if the news spreads. Neither of us want that.’

  ‘I’m giving you twelve hours to come up with something and then I’ll have no choice but to involve the police and the media.’

  ‘Don’t dictate terms to me.’

  ‘Twelve hours,’ Henry insisted. ‘This is my daughter’s life we’re talking about.’

  ‘You’re still wasting time, Henry. Minutes matter at this stage.’

  ‘Find my daughter and bring her home to me.’

  ‘The first part, I definitely intend to do.’

  Solomon cut the call and Henry was left to breath warm air into the chilled wooden hut. Tears were very close.

  ***

  Solomon’s first thought was that Joel was responsible. He dismissed the idea as quickly as it had come. Joel was a joke; a lazy, irresponsible fool who couldn’t organise a drinking party in a brewery, let alone pull off a successful abduction. Besides which, he’d be with Annabel right now. In court, probably. And he’d be eager to hide the truth of who he was from her. He was in no position to be taking risks.

  Next thought: it could be a rival gang leader in Manchester who’d heard through the grapevine that Solomon wanted Naomi. The owner of Suede nightclub was an enemy too. Had one of Solomon’s own players betrayed him by selling that little gem of information? Information like that was platinum. It meant that someone like Solomon, with money, would be willing to part with a chunk of it as a ransom. People were valuable. People meant big money.

  Fury rose inside him. If any of his boys were involved, they wouldn’t live to regret it. He knew what he’d do next. Everyone wearing a gang badge would meet. Immediately. Solomon wanted to look every last one of them in the eye. If he saw the least flicker of betrayal, he’d know. He made a series of phone calls. The Muscles first.

  ‘Yo, Vincent?’

  Yo? Vincent shuddered, but time was short, so he let yo go. The lecture on his tongue about the use of stupid words would have to wait. ‘Pawn to King four. Twelve hundred hours, sharp.’

  He ended the call and gave the same message to seven other pawns, then started on the bigger players.

  Charlie was the first.

  ‘Hey, Vincent. Just off to the gym.’

  Hey? Another one! Maybe he’d just write the lecture and send it out as a blanket email. ‘Not now. Rook to King four. Twelve hundred hours, sharp.’ He severed that call before Charlie could object.

  The next person he called was his contact inside the police force.

  ‘Bishop to King four. Twelve hundred hours, sharp,’ he said.

  ‘I’m at work,’ a hushed voice seeped down Solomon’s phone, spiralling into his ear. ‘I can't just –’

  ‘Be there,’ Solomon cut in, impatiently. ‘You’ll find a way.’

  Call after call he made with the same economical words, squashing any objection, until he’d finished making his calls and summoning his flock. And now it was time to turn the heat up. And also time to change into his finest suit and shoes.

  13

  ‘Steps,’ he barked.

  Naomi had a thick pillowcase covering her head and couldn’t see anything except varying degrees of light. He had a firm grip on her arm and had taken her from the van up a roughly paved path to a house. She’d heard a key being inserted inside a lock and then she was tugged through an echoing hallway and into a room that she assumed was the kitchen. She detected a definite smell of cooking oil. A chip pan, perhaps, whose oil hadn’t been changed in a dozen years.

  The air temperature was chilled. The place felt damp and dirty on her skin. She imagined the particles of oil and spores of damp air forcing entry into her pores and settling on her from within as well as from without. She felt soiled even before he opened a door and said, abruptly,

  ‘Steps.’

  The open door only carried a fresher wave of air, if that was possible. She was glad of her long wool coat as she stood, hesitating on unwilling legs, longing for the security of Dan’s arms.

  What would happen in court now? She was the key witness and had failed to deliver a vital testimony. What of the trial now? On the flipside, what had happened to her felt almost justified. In a perverse way, the present seemed to equalize events. The torture she’d endured of lying in a warm bed, eating fresh food while Dan had been rotting in a cell, had lifted. Only to be replaced with sickening apprehension.

  The agony of undeserved comfort or this sickening fear? Neither were bearable. She wanted to tell Dan that she’d never left him really. That it was as lonely for her on the outside of prison as it was for him on the inside. That they were still together, just like always, like their binary stars, magnetic and secure. That right now, she was suffering right alongside him.

  She wanted to yell that she’d never surrender until Dan was free. That she’d fight with everything she had for justice.

  If she survived the day.

  Dan had never seemed so far away.

  ‘Steps. Down. Move it,’ he raised his voice and she was slammed right back in the present and to the icy air on her front. Down? She didn’t like the sound of that. She shuffled forward until her feet met an edge. He was still holding her arm near the top. He pulled her now and she lurched forward and found herself stepping down, down, down in her heels. Concrete steps. She counted eleven loud clips in all as she tried to keep up with him. The counting was instinctive. His shoes were silent but his breathing was laboured on her right side.

  She felt the darkness at the bottom, enveloping her. A cellar, cold and claustrophobic. Her windpipe tightened and she was forced to open her mouth wider to breathe.

  ‘Don’t panic. I need money, is all.’

  ‘Money? I-I have money.’ She was breathless, suddenly. ‘I’ll get you
money. I need to get to Manchester. I’m due in court,’ she rambled.

  ‘Ransom’s two million.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m guessing that puts you out of the bidding.’

  He let go of her and started to walk up the steps behind her. She ripped the covering off her head and felt disoriented for a moment. Determined to catch a glimpse of him, she turned and saw his legs in dark trousers, black trainers which said Adidas in red letters on his heels. His head was covered by a hood. He was at the top of the steps walking into the light-source. It was a wide opening that slashed across the ceiling. A trap door.

  ‘No, wait.’

  The door crashed shut and sunk her into darkness. A bolt thundered into place and footsteps passed overhead until everything was silent but for Naomi’s desperate, hampered breaths and the drumming of her heart.

  ***

  11:45. Solomon pulled up alone in a black Mercedes which was as shiny as a polished mirror. His car was the first to arrive which was how he preferred it. He looked about him. He’d driven down a concrete path which ran into a dead-end. Beyond it was a stretch of grass and, in the distance, an old derelict mill. One slim chimney poked the sky. The dark bricks, once proud to be there, looked tired now. Half the windows in the place were absent. The other half were fragmented and filthy. It told a sorry story of a thriving industry long past.

  Patchy grass and odd trees circled Solomon on three sides. It could have been a pretty scene except that there were piles of broken concrete and tipped-up metal tubes and pockets of abandoned furniture. There was no snow on the ground here at all.

  Solomon sat in silence until cars began to roll up all around him. He kept his eyes trained on the old Satanic mill in the distance and made eye contact with no one. At 11:59 he straightened his cufflinks, fastened one button on his jacket and brushed a small bit of fluff from his knee to the floor. Then he checked that his shoes were without blemish and took hold of the door handle and paused. At twelve exactly, he stepped out of his car and signalled for everyone else to exit theirs.

  He stood facing his small band and counted them silently, pausing to examine their eyes as he scanned them briefly. Everyone met his gaze with ease. Interesting. The small congregation before him wasn’t a full house. Nathan was gone, and since he’d released Lorie from her duties, there was a space to fill there too. He’d worry about that later.

  It was Charlie who broke the silence.

  ‘What’s this about, Vincent? People to see, etcetera.’

  Solomon held up a hand and she said no more.

  After a heavy silence, he spoke.

  ‘I find myself in a situation,’ he began. ‘I hear from a reliable source that Naomi Hamilton has vanished suddenly, without reason or explanation.’ It was at this point that he began to stride round the bodies and examine eyes carefully. He saw no ember of shame or guilt. No evidence of betrayal. ‘Anybody think of a logical explanation for her disappearance?’

  Charlie, again, ‘Maybe she wants you to think she’s vanished when in fact –’

  ‘No. She should have been in court at Stone’s trial this morning. If she hasn’t had an accident – and I’m sure her family would have been informed if she’d been hurt – this points to something more sinister and I don’t have time for smart comments.’ His eyes were everywhere again. ‘Anybody heard anything at all?’

  Heads were shaking. A drone of quiet muttering broke out. By now, Solomon was convinced that his crew were clean.

  ‘OK then. It’s simple. We’ve got to find her. Ears to the ground. If someone’s after my money, you can bet there’ll be some loose tongues. Somebody somewhere will want to talk. So get out and about, talk to whoever you have to talk to. Make calls. Find out what you can and we meet here again six hours from now.’

  ‘Six hours?’ Noel Beresford’s rough voice barked out from the middle of the group. ‘It’s not enough.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got. I don’t want police involvement and Henry will flag the pigs if we don’t find a trail today. There’ll be a nice bonus for whoever brings me something solid. Got it? Needless to say, failure isn’t acceptable.’

  Heads were nodding now. ‘Eighteen hundred hours back here to report. Don’t come to my house. No texts. If you have information, call me on my mobile. Clear?’

  Two minutes later, the last car was hurrying away and Solomon found himself alone again. He dragged Henry’s number up on his mobile phone and faced the old mill. Henry answered after one ring. His tone was frantic.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘Wheels are in motion, Henry. I’m hoping to bring you something later today. Be free to talk after six this evening. In order to keep things under wraps, you’ll need to convince Annabel about the need for silence at home. Understand?’

  Henry let out a desperate whimper at the other end of the phone.

  Solomon continued. ‘Hold it together. Nothing productive can come from your wife getting wind about another disappearance and possible abduction, so zip it. Clear?’

  ‘Just find her. Please.’ Henry’s voice was a whisper.

  Solomon switched off his phone.

  ***

  When her eyes adjusted, Naomi realised that there were tiny cracks of light in two places. This confused her. She put one hand flat against the nearest brick wall and felt her way around the perimeter of the room, turning ninety degrees whenever a wall finished. Her shoes clopped loudly against the stone floor.

  After the second turn, she walked into a narrow bed with a blanket and a pillow. She felt her way along the bed. The short end of it met with a low brick wall that jutted out from the main wall a little further than the bed itself and was a couple of feet tall. Bent over, she ran her hands along the short wall, and four paces later, found the last main wall which was beside the flight of concrete steps. She’d gone full circle.

  The little wall seemed to create an enclosure of some sort. Inside it, her fingers fumbled over a million dusty stones. What the hell? When she lifted a stone, she found it to be too light, and not the right feel or texture. So if it wasn’t stone, what was it? The surface was smooth, but with rough, irregular angles and edges. She picked up another and another. They were all different shapes and sizes and had a strange scent which aroused a faint childhood memory that at first, she couldn’t place.

  After a patient probe around her mind, she knew that the scent was linked to her grandparent’s house and from visits there when she was very young. They’d had a real fire. In the back garden was an outbuilding which held a heap of fuel for the fire. Coal. This was coal. She pictured her hands, black with soot and threw down the fragment.

  Above the enclosure on one wall, was a hint of light. She studied it patiently and couldn’t work out what the light was. She ran her hands along the wall above the coal pile and discovered a cavity in the wall. She had to clamber over the wall and on top of the mound of coal and feel around intently to discover that the hole was a passageway to a faint light source, which could only be the outside. She was feeling her way around a steep and filthy coal shoot. The walls were dense with powdery grime. A pallid light rained down from whatever covering was at the top.

  Naomi wiped her hands on her coat and stepped out of the coal mountain and looked around her. The darkness was thick and damp and cold. The room was maybe about five metres by three or four. The other fracture of light was above the bed in the far corner of the ceiling. When she listened hard, she could hear the rhythmic dripping of water coming from the same place. On a metronome it would have tapped out an adagio tempo, around fifty drops a minute. Enough to drive anyone to the edge of sanity.

  She groped her way to the bed and sat down. She felt sick enough to vomit. She didn’t know the identity of the man in the hooded top, but she felt certain that he’d have The Mark – the mark of Vincent Solomon’s gang. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t panicking, because she’d known that at some point, Solomon would make his move. She hadn’t expected this, but it was ty
pical that he’d sent a big guy to do filthy work. She didn’t believe the guy wanted money. Two million? It was unrealistic.

  Maybe now Solomon would reveal himself. He’d been invisible and unreachable for months, and now this. Naomi found herself lodged in a black prison, sucking in damp air which she wanted to scream out of her lungs. She sat, breathing hard, chest tight, dark thoughts of Solomon swilling round her mind.

  14

  Henry’s underarms were wet and uncomfortable. His palms were cool and moist. Camilla had left the house shortly after Solomon’s call that morning with no notion that there was a state of emergency, that Naomi had vanished from the planet. Camilla had been in defence mode for days. The tension at home was tightening and she’d been as distant as a star. Which is why she’d missed the warning signs that day: Henry sneaking off to take a phone call; Henry unresponsive when she told him she was going out, lines etched on his forehead.

  If she’d told him where she was going, he hadn’t processed it. He only knew she’d left in a green coat and a mist of perfume. He recalled the relief that she was leaving before Annabel came back. And he could bring to mind her parting words: “So, Naomi’s defied me and gone. I’ve told her that if she testifies for Stone, she’s on her own. I’m through with her, Henry. Permanently. I mean it.”

  The words were nonsensical while Henry was struggling to breathe. While he was battling the persistent thought that they might not see Naomi again. His imagination had been blazing like a fire when Camilla had departed in her cool green coat leaving Henry to stare at the door and then to prowl the house alone, unable to quench the flames.

  And then Annabel had hurried in and Henry had found her in his arms, sobbing and babbling into his shoulder, her belly shoved into his middle while Vincent Solomon’s brother stood back and watched. Henry had glared at him, unable to absorb a single word that Annabel was saying, until the word, police. Then Henry had distanced himself a pace from Annabel and nodded and the deception tore at him. Without uttering a thing, he’d confirmed to Annabel he’d done everything possible. That all they could do now was wait. When he’d actually done nothing. Nothing!