by Anita Waller
Twenty minutes later, all the packages had been taken downstairs, and Captor had re-locked the door, resuming surveillance, through the screen, of Philip Latimer.
Philanderer.
Father of the bastard child.
With anger threatening to overwhelm, Captor closed the screens and left the building by the back door. Time to move on to part two of this day, time to step up the terror for Liz Chambers.
Phil woke two hours later, aware of how full his bladder felt. He crawled off the camp bed, and rose unsteadily to his feet. He shook his head, and walked across to the toilet. He unzipped his trousers, placed one hand on the wall behind the toilet, and held his penis as the urine flowed rapidly out of him. A flask full of coffee was clearly having an effect on him, he thought with a wry smile.
And then he froze. One hand on the wall, one hand on his penis. No chain attached to his wrist. No struggling to be in the right position to stop his urine splattering on the floor. He looked down at his left wrist, and could clearly see the scar that the cuff had created over the months. Clearly see it, with a brighter light. He glanced up at the light bulb, and then quickly looked away. Much brighter light.
It was only then that he noticed the packages. He pulled up his zip and walked across to the foot of the stairs. Everything was in cardboard boxes.
He opened the first one and saw tins of baby food, nappies, baby wipes, and other assorted items necessary for a baby. Another one contained a travel cot, along with lots of baby bedding. A third one held a few toys, along with some items of clothing, mainly Babygros. Phil stared anxiously around. What the devil was going on? And when had this lot arrived?
He must have been deeply asleep not to have heard any noise from whoever had delivered it all. Which meant he had missed a chance of escape. A chance to find out who Captor was.
He slammed his hand against the wall in anger and frustration. ‘Bastard!’ he called aloud. ‘Fucking bastard!’
There was no response. Captor was long gone, preparing for the next part of the momentous day.
19
They had reached the talking after bit, the calm contentment following the frantic lovemaking. Gareth pulled Sadie a little closer to him, and kissed the top of her head.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘No thanks needed,’ she responded with a smile. ‘You’re welcome, sir. I’m surprised you’re here.’
‘Unexpected afternoon off. I was supposed to be going to Doncaster, but the customer had to change the appointment. It means I can collect Jake.’
‘Then we can stay here for a bit longer?’ She reached across and switched on the lamp. ‘It’s really dark. Hopefully no one saw you arrive.’
‘So, what if they did? I’m Jake’s daddy, here to collect my son. We’re good until Jake surfaces. I’ll text Liz in a few minutes and tell her I’ve finished early, so I’ll collect Jake.’
‘You know, Gareth, this is wrong on so many levels.’
‘You want to stop?’ Gareth lifted his head and looked at her. His hand moved, seemingly of its own volition, to her breast, and he rotated the palm of his hand on her nipple. She moaned in pleasure.
‘Did I say that? I said it was wrong,’ she whispered.
He leaned down to kiss her lips, a kiss that deepened until they were oblivious to anything else; oblivious to the sound of the back door opening, the sound of footsteps moving carefully through the house.
* * *
Captor searched for the child in the dark. The woman’s car was outside, indicating she was in the house somewhere; it would be good if she was having a nap at the same time as the child. A silent child and a silent woman meant she could live.
Gareth and Sadie broke apart, and Sadie smiled at him. ‘Just let me go and check on Jake. I’m not sure, but I think I can hear movement from his room.’
He nodded. ‘Okay, but let’s hope he’s not waking yet.’
She slipped out of bed and crossed to the door, shrugging on her dressing gown; she was still trying to sort out the right sleeve, which was hopelessly tangled, when she lifted her head and saw the figure at the top of the stairs.
Captor’s arm reached out and pulled her; a quick twist and she began to tumble downstairs, unable to save herself, with one arm still caught up in the sleeve. She screamed and landed at the bottom with an audible crack as her neck broke, then silence.
Gareth threw back the bedclothes, hurtling out of the bedroom. The scream had been unnerving. He saw the figure, covered in black, holding a silver knife; he momentarily hesitated before launching himself at the hooded Captor.
Gareth’s hands clutched the hood, and tugged violently.
He stared in shock at the revealed face, and gasped. ‘You! What the fuck…?’
The knife moved easily in between Gareth’s ribs, with no clothes to slow down its entry, and he slid to the floor.
Captor twisted the knife before removing it, and wiped the blood from the blade on Gareth’s naked leg, before side-stepping around his body and moving further along the corridor. Gareth’s dying breaths were loud; there were no sounds from the bottom of the stairs.
Sadie’s scream had awakened Jake, and Captor headed for the crying baby’s room. The expectation had been that Sadie would possibly have to die, but seeing Gareth had been a shock. Further punishment for Mrs high and mighty Liz Chambers.
Jake was soon strapped into the pushchair that was waiting in the hallway for his departure for home, and Captor wheeled it across Sadie’s head to get it over her. Nobody saw the pram’s journey as it left Sadie’s house, went down the hill and across the tram tracks, to where Captor’s car was waiting.
The pram was difficult to close, and Captor finally threw it into the spacious car boot, still unfolded. Within two minutes, the car and driver, along with the baby in a car seat, had disappeared.
It would soon transpire that nobody had seen anything; two people had died, a child was taken, and in the affluent area, nobody took any notice of what was happening in the surrounding neighbourhood.
Liz managed to get a seat as the tram carried her homewards. She felt tired; there had been several queries involving cases assigned to the two temporarily absent partners, and she had dealt with them. The worry of the missing Phil was never far from her thoughts, and staring out of the tram window didn’t help. All she could see was blackness and her own reflection.
Her headache was worsening, and she leaned her head against the coolness of the glass. Images of Phil flitted through her mind; she had spent eighteen months keeping her memories at bay, and they all came flooding back, bringing with them untold worries. Where was he? Was he even alive? And why the hell didn’t Rosie appear to care?
What was worse, Liz couldn’t even talk to Rosie about it. She was Phil’s wife, for God’s sake. Liz couldn’t go up to the woman and say where’s your husband, because I love him and I need to know if he is still alive.
* * *
Liz got off the tram and began the walk up the hill towards Sadie’s home. She checked her phone – still no reply to the text she had sent Rosie, telling her she was only ten minutes away, but she guessed she was maybe too busy with Jake to be able to respond.
The house was in darkness, and Liz rang the front door bell. When there was no activity, she rang again, and then knelt to speak through the letterbox.
‘Sadie, it’s me,’ she called, then placed her eye to the aperture.
Sadie was clearly visible, her head on the hall floor with the purple hair spread out like a halo. Her legs were splayed on the stairs, and she was naked except for a dressing gown, half on and half off her.
For a moment, Liz was immobile. She shook her head and looked around her for help. There was nobody. She tried pushing on the front door, but it was locked. Sprinting around the side of the house to try the back entrance, she saw it was wide open.
She was stepping through the entrance when her 999 call was answered. She was almost in tears as she was trying to explain
the circumstances in front of her – it was clear Sadie was dead. The operator asked her to go outside, just in case; Liz didn’t even think about the term “just in case”; she merely said she had to find her son, Sadie was her childminder, and her baby must still be upstairs having his nap. The frantic panic in her voice left the operator in no doubt as to Liz’s priorities.
‘Then please stay on the line, Liz. Do not put your phone down, and let me know as soon as you have your baby. Help is on the way, please stay at the property until the police arrive. Are you sure the lady is deceased? If there is any chance…’
‘She’s dead,’ Liz sobbed. ‘I’m going to find Jake. I can do nothing for Sadie.’ Liz was breathing heavily as she skirted Sadie’s body and carefully climbed the stairs. There was a small amount of light casting a glow on to the landing, coming from Sadie’s own bedroom at the back of the house.
Liz’s eye-level moved past the top tread and she saw the blood and a second body. She stepped upwards and a black mist surrounded her. ‘Gareth,’ she whispered, and slid down the wall.
20
Captor switched on the garage light, then pressed the remote control to lower the door. The baby was waking, and Captor lifted him out of the car, still in his baby seat.
Jake’s eyes moved around, as if searching for a familiar face, but he made no sound as the car seat was placed in the dumb waiter.
* * *
Phil heard the rattle of the dumb waiter chains as it was lowered.
He felt perplexed. His food had arrived some hours earlier, so what was being lowered now? He hoped it was a hot drink, then smiled to himself as his brain added the words, ‘preferably with a tot of whisky in it’.
He stood slowly, and rubbed his legs to get some feeling into them, before crossing to the little cupboard.
Jake cried, stopping Phil abruptly. A radio? Could Captor be sending a radio down?
He reached the cupboard in two easy strides; if it was a radio, he didn’t want it disappearing before he could remove it. The cupboard hit the base with a thud, and Phil smiled. Something heavy was in it. He grasped the handle, and opened the door.
Two things happened simultaneously. Jake lifted his arms to his daddy for the first time, and Phil heard spoken words.
‘His name is Jake.’
It was Darth Vader echoing down the chimney-like structure of the dumb waiter housing. Phil remembered the helmet that Melissa had loved, until she had grown tired of it, the one where she could speak in her soft, silvery voice and it would come out as Darth Vader. Did Rosie really think he wouldn’t remember the toy?
He lifted out the car seat and risked putting his head in the cupboard.
‘Rosie? What the fuck are you doing? Get me out of here!’
The chains clanked, and he swiftly moved his head away from danger. He stepped back and stumbled against the car seat. Jake resumed crying, and Phil bent down to soothe him.
‘Hey, little man – that’s enough of that. Let’s get you out and warmed up.’
The baby was dressed in a long sleeved top and dungarees, so Phil wrapped him in one of the baby blankets that had arrived earlier. He couldn’t believe his naiveté. He had assumed Captor had needed to use the cellar for storage, and instead of going through all the boxes he had merely stacked them out of the way – a task that brought something different into his blighted life. Now he saw the truth behind the acquisition of the supplies.
He had no doubt that this baby was his son. He held him close and gradually Jake’s sobs subsided. He placed him back in the car seat and went to look further into the boxes. The travelling cot took no time to set up, once he had worked out the complex instructions, and he put as much warmth under the thin mattress as he could; he knew from experience how the cold permeated upwards from the stone cellar floor.
Despite holding the precious child in his arms once again, he felt an anger so intense it was scary. It had to be Rosie holding him there; he knew she had been upset when he had confessed the darkness surrounding him was because he had lost Liz, and that Liz was pregnant with his child, but this was taking Rosie’s grief at the news to the extreme. Both he and his son could die in here.
He checked out the box that revealed pouches of baby food. He unscrewed a somewhat dubious-sounding cauliflower, rice and broccoli, and handed it to Jake. He hoped this was the right thing to do. Melissa had enjoyed food out of jars, not pouches.
Jake grabbed at it, and the pouch full of food was soon empty. He tended to eat his own meagre rations when he felt quite hungry, but would that be the way it worked with a baby? He had no way of knowing what time it was, even if day or night. He guessed he and Jake had a learning curve to come.
It was a new experience to him; the first time he changed the little boy’s nappy. It was only wet, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He put him in a Babygro, and added a jumper. Keeping him warm was imperative.
They played for a while, with Phil desperately trying to stop his brain from wandering to unanswered questions. This little boy had been taken from his normal environment and dumped with someone he didn’t know. It was Phil’s priority to rectify that. He could let his mind wander when Jake was asleep.
The little boy’s body finally decided enough was enough, and Phil lifted him gently into the travel cot, covering him with layers of blankets. He had placed the cot by the side of his own camp bed; he wanted to be nearby if Jake woke during the night. If indeed it was night…
He watched him sleeping for a few minutes, and inevitably his mind questioned why this had happened. With the arrival of Jake, it pointed to Liz being the person targeted, rather than him.
She must be frantic, his brain was saying, out of her mind. If she had realised he was missing – and he knew there was no guarantee of that – she would be devastated. Their love had been strong, strong enough for him to believe it was still as strong in her, as it was in him.
But losing Jake was another level altogether. This would destroy her.
But… why? Why would anyone hate Liz enough to do this to her? Could it really be Rosie? Despite what he had seen as proof with the Darth Vader voice, it didn’t really mean anything. There were probably thousands of the helmets out there, and still freely available. And really… Rosie? Knowing his wife as well as he did, deep down he knew it couldn’t be her.
For a start, there was Melissa. Committing a criminal act of this magnitude would always end up with a prison sentence, and he was a hundred per cent sure that Rosie wouldn’t risk being locked away from Melissa.
Phil settled himself down for the night and for a few moments allowed a little bit of normality into his life. He watched as Jake slept; his son, sleeping by his side. Under any other circumstances…
21
‘Mrs Chambers? Liz? Can you hear me?’ Somewhere deep in the back of her brain, Liz could hear the voice. Slowly, so slowly, she emerged from the faint, and groaned.
‘Okay, Liz. Don’t try and sit up yet. Do you hurt anywhere?’
Liz shook her head, and lifted her hand. It was covered in blood. She groaned once again, wondering what had happened; and her mind cleared.
She spun her head around and gasped. ‘Gareth…’
‘You know this man?’
She nodded, unable to comprehend what was happening. ‘Yes, he’s my husband. But…’
‘Mrs Chambers, we need to move you. Can you stand?’
Again, she nodded, not sure what to say. The two paramedics helped her upright, and her eyes rested on Gareth.
‘Is he…?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ the tall, male paramedic said. ‘Let’s get you over here.’
They helped her into the bedroom kept ready should Christian, Sadie’s son, need to stay for a couple of nights. She sat on the chair in front of the desk, and her head dropped.
‘What’s going on,’ she whispered, her head reeling with the pain of finding Gareth. ‘Where’s Jake? Where’s my son? Is he okay?’ The panic was clear in her voice.
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‘Your son?’
‘Yes, Sadie’s my son’s childminder.’ Liz stood to move out of the door, terror written across her features. The female paramedic stopped her.
‘Please wait here, Liz.’
Liz looked up as a policeman came through the door. ‘Mrs Chambers? I’m DI Brent. Are you okay to talk?’
Liz nodded. ‘Please, get Jake for me first.’
‘Jake?’
‘My baby. He’ll be in the room across from this. In the cot.’
DI Brent looked at the two paramedics, and they shook their heads. ‘Mrs Chambers, there’s no baby in the house. Bear with me a moment.’ He left the room and she heard him speak to someone on the landing.
She tried to stand, to go and look for Jake herself, but was restrained by the paramedics, who pushed her none too gently back on to the seat.
He re-entered, and knelt in front of her. She was shaking uncontrollably, unable to believe what she was seeing on their faces. ‘I’ve asked one of the men to go outside and check the shed and greenhouse, but there’s definitely no baby in this house.’
She clutched at his hand. ‘Please… he’s only eleven months. Please find him. You’ve got to–’ She was frantic, her eyes darting around the people in front of her.
‘We will, Liz. I need a description of what he was wearing.’ He took out his notebook and wrote down everything Liz told him. ‘And did you bring him in a pushchair?’
‘I did. It’s a Mothercare one. My phone… there’s a photograph of him in his pushchair. I don’t know where my phone is…’ and she wept, unable to conceive fully the horror that had overtaken her.
‘Wait.’ Sandra, the female paramedic, went out of the door and came back in carrying the phone. ‘You talked on it till you reached the top of the stairs, and then you fainted.’