The Mother

by Jaime Raven

  Brennan tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. It was, after all, a development that moved them no closer to finding Molly.

  ‘So do you think Tony Kemp did it?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘He’s our number-one suspect, but not just because of what Knight’s mother said. You see, Kemp owns a house that backs onto the wood. Knight was actually buried about three hundred yards from the property.’

  ‘So this means that someone else has got Molly.’

  ‘I realise that, Sarah. I think we’re now looking for an accomplice. We’ve suspected all along that he probably had one. So whoever it is could still be holding Molly in or near Hayes.’

  ‘But what if you’re wrong?’ Sarah said, her voice breaking. ‘What if Bobby Knight had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘We know he was plotting to punish you, Sarah. He told Victor Rosetti and then there were the photos on the phone we found under his bed. He was stalking you.’

  ‘I know that, but none of us knows for sure if he actually went through with the abduction.’

  Brennan could tell she was struggling to take it in and he understood why. Her hopes had been cruelly dashed. The discovery of the body was a serious blow to the investigation and he was reminded of what the kidnapper wrote in the message he sent the previous night.

  BTW I’m not who you think I am. You’re looking for the wrong man in the wrong place.

  Well they now knew that to be true. Bobby Knight did not send that text or any of the others. And he wasn’t the man in the balaclava who abducted Molly from her grandparents’ home. But there was no doubt he was involved and must have had an accomplice.

  ‘We need to tell Adam about this,’ Brennan said. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  But Sarah didn’t respond and Brennan immediately realised that it was because she was no longer on the line. She had either hung up on him or the signal had cut out.

  56

  Sarah

  My phone just died on me while Brennan was talking. A flat battery. I hadn’t noticed that it needed charging. I didn’t have a charger with me so I’d have to wait until I got home. But right now it was the least of my worries. The discovery of Bobby Knight’s body was a shattering piece of news. I knew now that it wasn’t him who had taken my daughter. It was someone else. Another man who wanted to punish me.

  But who? And why?

  It was a further twist of the knife and it left me feeling sick and confused.

  It was going to change the whole dynamic of the investigation and make finding Molly even more difficult, if not impossible.

  It was also going to have a negative impact on Brennan and his team. They had made such a big thing of how they believed Knight was the kidnapper. Brennan had been at pains to suggest that Knight’s mother didn’t know what she was talking about when she claimed her son must be dead. Yet she had been proved right. But was she also right about Tony Kemp? Had Knight’s former underworld boss killed him – or had him killed – because he was harassing his daughter, Lauren? Or was it conceivable that Kemp himself had been involved somehow with Molly’s abduction?

  I didn’t know what to think and the questions were swamping my brain.

  For a long time I just sat there staring out of the café window without really seeing anything. And as the minutes ticked by my apprehension grew.

  I knew I ought to find a public phone and call Adam and also my mother. They needed to know as soon as possible about the body. But I couldn’t bring myself to move, at least not until I’d decided how I was going to respond to this latest setback.

  I eventually managed to motivate myself to leave the café. I came to a sudden decision, which was to stick around in Hayes, at least for a while. Bobby Knight might well be dead, but that didn’t mean that Molly wasn’t in the area being looked after by an accomplice. And if she was I had to do what I could to find her. The alternative was to go home and just sit there waiting for further bad news, while the fear and anxiety clawed at my insides. At least here I could keep myself distracted while I came to terms with the latest disturbing development.

  I planned to visit more shops and businesses with the newspaper photos. And as soon as I came across a public phone I’d call Adam and my mother. Luckily I knew both their numbers by heart.

  It worried me that I didn’t have the use of my own phone because it meant that nobody could contact me, and that included the kidnapper. But at least it granted me a brief respite from the agony of knowing that at any second I might receive a message, photo or video clip that would break my heart all over again.

  There were a lot of premises I hadn’t yet been to, including the post office and a big pub on the corner. I knew I was clutching at straws but surely that was better than losing all hope.

  And there was still a chance, albeit a slim one, that Adam would get something out of Eddie Lomax at the hospital. If the so-called Keyholder gave him the address of a property in the Hayes area then I was well placed to make my way there straight away. I told myself I could not stop believing that Molly might still be in the area. It was still the only lead I had.

  So I got started. I dropped in on a shoe shop, a hairdressers, another estate agent, a bakers, an Iceland supermarket, a couple of clothes shops. But each time I got the same response. A police officer had already been there and none of the owners or assistants could remember seeing Bobby Knight. But of course it was a lot to expect since he hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks.

  I counted another four shops on this side of the road leading down to the big corner pub. I decided that after those I’d cross the road and work my way back up towards the station.

  I noticed that one of the shops sold baby stuff. It was called Kiddies Corner and displayed in the window were children’s clothes, plus a range of accessories, including toys, pushchairs, shoes and car seat covers. There was a store just like it back in Dulwich and Molly and I were frequent visitors.

  The interior was bigger than I expected and stretched way back into the building, with racks of clothes and shelves full of toys.

  The woman behind the counter looked to be in her fifties. Her eyes were soft and coffee-brown, and her hair was smooth and flat, like a steel-grey helmet.

  She gave me a warm smile and asked me how she could help. I showed her my ID, then held up the newspaper, pointing to Knight’s picture.

  ‘You’ve probably been asked this question already,’ I said. ‘But I wondered if you might have seen this man before.’

  She looked from me to the paper and shook her head.

  ‘I’m certain that I haven’t,’ she said. ‘Another police officer came in here earlier today and I told him the same thing.’ She tilted her head to one side and frowned. ‘You’re that little girl’s mother, aren’t you? I recognise you from the television.’ When I nodded, she continued: ‘I saw you on the news speaking outside your flat to all those reporters. What you said made me cry. I hate to think how hard this is for you. I have children of my own.’

  ‘That’s why I came to Hayes,’ I said. ‘I just needed to get involved with the search.’

  ‘Well I really hope they find your daughter soon. She looks such a sweet little mite. It’s terrible what that man is doing to her and to you. And I’m truly sorry that I can’t be of any help.’

  I lifted my shoulders. ‘I thought perhaps that man might have come in here to buy things for Molly.’

  ‘It’s quite possible that he did at some point. There are three of us working here and one of them may well have served him.’

  ‘So what about your colleagues. Where are they?’

  ‘Mable’s at home and Brenda’s on holiday. We work a shift pattern.’

  I felt my heart sink for the umpteenth time and the air wheezed out of my chest.

  ‘Well thank you for your time,’ I said.

  As I turned to go, my gaze snagged on a collection of larger toys on the floor towards the back of the shop. Among them was a small plastic slide that looked just
like the one that appeared behind Molly in the latest photo the kidnapper had sent to me.

  I turned back to the grey-haired woman and gestured towards the slide.

  ‘Would you be able to tell me if you’ve sold any of those recently, say in the past couple of months?’

  Another frown. ‘I don’t know offhand. But I could check for you. We keep a record of every sale on the computer.’

  ‘Would you please check for me? I’d really appreciate it.’

  ‘Of course. That’s no trouble.’

  The tension built inside me as I waited for her to trawl through the sales log. After two minutes she lifted her eyes from the computer screen and looked at me.

  ‘We’ve only had two of those slides in stock since April,’ she said. ‘The other one was sold by Brenda just over a month ago.’

  I shivered with excitement. ‘Have you got the details?’

  ‘Well it was part of an order that also included a cot, a high chair, three packs of nappies, some other toys and various clothes for a girl aged between one and two.’

  Now it was a struggle for me even to speak.

  ‘What about bank or credit card details? Can you give me those?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. The man who bought them gave his name as John Smith and paid in cash – a total of four hundred pounds. But he wanted us to arrange for the order to be delivered to his home. And the address happens to be quite near here.’

  I bolted out of the shop and headed back towards the car behind the station. In my hand was a piece of paper with John Smith’s address scrawled on it. I didn’t for a second believe it to be his real name. But I was convinced that the man who’d purchased the goods from Kiddies Corner was the same man who had abducted Molly.

  There was very little room in my mind for doubt. I had never been a great believer in coincidences, and this had to be more than a coincidence.

  The guy had bought clothes for a girl aged between one and two. Molly was 15 months old. Then there was the slide. The one in the shop was identical to the one in the photo. And all my senses were telling me that the one in the photo was the one bought by John Smith.

  The blood was burning in my veins as I ran along the street, and my pulse was beating high up in my throat. I was praying that I wasn’t wrong and that this was the breakthrough we’d been waiting for. If so then Molly was possibly only a couple of miles away from where I was, and it wasn’t going to take me long to get there.

  When I reached my car, I wrenched open the door and got in. Then I tapped the address I’d been given into the satnav with trembling fingers.

  Before I got going I took out my mobile to alert Brennan to what I’d found. It was only then that I remembered the battery was flat.

  Fuck.

  I had a choice to make. Go and find a phone to call Brennan or 999, and then be forced to wait for them to send a team to the house to check it out. Or I could go there by myself and be there in minutes.

  It was a no-brainer. I was far too hyped-up to hold back, too driven by the prospect of finding my daughter.

  So I dropped the dead phone onto the passenger seat, slipped the gearstick into first and stamped on the accelerator.

  57

  DCI Brennan

  The patrol car raced through South London, the shrill wail of its siren piercing the air.

  Brennan sat in the back, feeling flat, disconnected, miserable.

  He’d left DC Foster in charge at Oaklands Copse. She would oversee the painstaking forensic examination of the grave and make sure that the integrity of the crime scene was preserved. His job now was to inform Bobby Knight’s mother that her son’s body had been found and that she and her other son would have to make a formal identification.

  He had already broken the news to Sarah and Adam. The call with Sarah had ended abruptly and when he’d tried to ring her back her phone had been dead.

  Adam had been totally shocked, but Brennan had been just as surprised to learn that he’d been stabbed, and that he was waiting at St Thomas’s Hospital to speak to a man known as The Keyholder.

  Brennan knew he should have warned the guy off and told him that once again he had broken all the rules in the book. And if he hadn’t been so close to retirement he almost certainly would have. But now he just wanted Molly Mason to be found by whatever means. So instead he’d simply said to call him if Eddie Lomax opened up about what Knight had been after.

  He found it hard not to sympathise with Adam Boyd. His actions, after all, were those of a desperate father who was prepared to do whatever he deemed necessary to get his daughter back. Brennan could see himself behaving in much the same way if his own grandson Michael had been abducted.

  As they arrived in Peckham, Brennan readied himself mentally for the meeting with Mrs Knight. He’d phoned ahead to tell her that he was dropping by but hadn’t said why. He was sure the news would come as a shock even though she’d been convinced all along that her son was dead.

  Brennan, on the other hand, had believed with a cold, hard certainty that Bobby Knight was alive. Now he felt like a fool for being so dismissive of the alternative, particularly during the press conference. And he wasn’t looking forward to facing the media again because he was going to have to answer some frigging difficult questions. Like where would the investigation go from here? Did the police have any clue as to the true identity of Molly Mason’s kidnapper? Was Tony Kemp now firmly in the frame as a murder suspect?

  Brennan had yet to hear back from DI Driscoll who had been tasked with bringing Kemp in for questioning. It was assumed that the old gangster was still at his flat in Bermondsey because when officers called at his house in Sevenoaks his wife said he wasn’t in but he was due to arrive later that evening.

  Brennan still couldn’t work out why, if Kemp was indeed responsible for Knight’s death, he would have dumped the body so close to his country home. Perhaps it had been down to sheer convenience and plans were in place to move the body eventually.

  Another question mark hung over the anonymous caller. Was he someone who worked for Kemp? A disgruntled employee maybe? Or even an arch-rival who got tipped off about the location of the grave and thought he’d use the information to his advantage.

  Brennan didn’t know what to think right now, and his internal dialogue was filling his head with doubts and chilling images of dead bodies and men in black balaclavas.

  Mrs Knight was alone in the house and she made it obvious that she wasn’t pleased to see him.

  She threw open the front door and without so much as a hello, she stormed off into the kitchen, where she struck up a fag and sat at the table, her face as hard as granite.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ she moaned as Brennan entered the room along with one of the uniforms. ‘I was up half the night because that bloody woman upset me. And now it’s your turn to have a go. Why the fuck can’t you just leave me alone?’

  ‘What woman are you talking about, Mrs Knight?’ Brennan asked.

  ‘That lying bitch, Sarah Mason. She came here last night and threatened me. She accused me of lying about Bobby and even hit me. But she won’t get away with it. I’m gonna put in a complaint.’

  ‘I had no idea that Detective Mason came here, Mrs Knight. I’ll make it my business to have a word with her. But you have to appreciate that she’s extremely stressed out as I’m sure any mother would be in her situation.’

  Brennan was pretty sure that if his own wife had been in Sarah’s shoes then she would have come here too.

  ‘That’s it, jump to her defence,’ she snarled. ‘It’s exactly how I knew you’d react. She’s one of your own so she can do no fucking wrong.’

  Brennan sat down opposite her and tried to soften his expression. He didn’t want this conversation to go off on a tangent, but that seemed inevitable considering the mood she was in.

  ‘I came here to give you some news,’ he said. ‘But I was hoping your other son would be here with you.’

  �
�He will be shortly,’ she said. ‘He’s coming over to take me to the shops. But why does he have to be here anyway? I don’t need him to look after me.’

  Brennan put his fist over his mouth and cleared his throat. Then he took a deep breath through his nose and said, ‘We found Bobby’s body this morning, Mrs Knight.’

  She stiffened and her eyes became slits.

  ‘I told you,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘I told you that Tony Kemp had killed him and you wouldn’t believe me.’

  She twisted her cigarette into the ashtray on the table. Then a shuddering sob erupted from her body.

  Brennan reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. But she whipped it away.

  ‘He was a good boy,’ she snapped. ‘He didn’t deserve to die.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry for your loss, Mrs Knight. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry I doubted you.’

  Her eyes flashed at him. ‘Where did you find my Bobby? I want to know.’

  ‘In a wood in Kent,’ Brennan said, and after a pause added, ‘He was buried in a shallow grave and we believe he was killed soon after he disappeared. There’s a lot we still don’t know about the circumstances surrounding his death. As soon as we do you will be informed.’

  She clenched her eyes shut and swallowed.

  ‘How did they kill him? Tell me.’

  ‘We’re not sure yet, but he did have a serious head wound which is the likely cause of death.’

  ‘So he wasn’t shot or stabbed?’

  Brennan shook his head. ‘Almost certainly not.’

  ‘Had he been tortured?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She opened her eyes then and shot him an angry look.

  ‘Tell that bitch Sarah Mason that she has my boy’s blood on her hands. So I hope she never sees her daughter again. I hope whoever has the little sprog rapes her until she bleeds to death.’

  Brennan lowered his eyes, not trusting himself to speak. But the officer who was standing behind him said, ‘I’m sure you don’t really mean that, Mrs Knight.’