‘Eva, have you any message for your daughter?’ someone called out.
Trix’s mother slowed, then turned. ‘I just want her home,’ she said. ‘She’s the best daughter in the world. She never gets into trouble. I don’t understand any of this.’
Someone tried to ask another question, but the men in tight suits escorted her away.
‘Poor Mum,’ Trix said.
There was a brief conversation between the newsreader and the reporter who was standing where the policeman had been interviewed.
Trixie was just a normal young girl, the reporter said. Because her parents were wealthy, there was a theory that she was being held to ransom. ‘Obviously, the more time goes by without any contact from possible kidnappers, the more concerned the police are becoming for her safety.’
‘Here’s that number again,’ said the newsreader. ‘Witnesses who can provide any information regarding the whereabouts of Trixie Bell are asked to contact the police.’
EVA JOHANSSON
We were grateful that the detective in charge of the case was Detective Inspector Barry Cartwright, who has handled high-profile cases before. He understands how important the media can be in cases like this. It was Barry who said that we should call her ‘Trixie’ rather than ‘Trix’ when talking to the press. Getting the public on your side, making them care, was very important, he said.
‘Trix’ sounded a bit tough, maybe even a bit boyish. ‘Trixie’ was more vulnerable. I trusted him. The police know about these things.
WIKI
We switched the TV off when the news moved on to the next item, a big train crash in Spain. For a few moments we sat in silence, each of us with the same thought in our mind.
What have we done?
It was Mark who recovered first.
‘All right there, Trixie?’ he said
‘Trixie – what is that? I hate that name,’ said Trix. ‘And they chose the worst photograph of me. It made me look like a spoilt little rich girl.’
‘Your mum was a bit upset,’ I said quietly. It was meant to be a helpful remark but, as soon as the words left my mouth, Trix’s eyes were filled with tears. She wiped them away angrily.
‘Well done, Wik,’ said Mark.
‘I was only saying. I just thought that—’
‘This is about Africa.’ Trix spoke quietly. ‘Let’s just remember all the mothers in Ethiopia and Mali, and how they feel when their children actually die.’
‘Except –’ I tried to put it as sensitively as I could – ‘she is your mum.’
‘Maybe we could get word to her that you’re not dead,’ said Mark.
Trix laughed angrily. ‘What, give her a call on the mobile and say everything is fine? We’re just hanging out in Wales with a madman plucking chickens?’
‘Email?’ I suggested. ‘Find an Internet cafe somewhere?’
‘No.’ It was Trix who was first to pull herself together and think straight.
‘I once saw a film where the gang sent a message with bits of newspaper,’ she said. ‘They cut up words from different newspapers to make a message. That way there was no handwriting or anything.’
‘They’d be able to tell where it came from,’ I said. ‘From the postmark.’
We sat there in the gloom, each of us trying to think of an answer to this impossible question: how do you kidnap someone without upsetting her mum?
Downstairs we could hear Gideon making clattering sounds in the kitchen, which meant he was making supper.
Without a word, we stood up. It should have been a good moment – the kidnap was on the news, we were in business – but suddenly there was this giant weight on our shoulders.
There was no going back now.
MARK
If The Godfather Gideon Cookbook existed, its basic ingredients would be this:
1. Kill something.
2. Do disgusting things to remove its fur/feathers/innards.
3. Throw it in a big saucepan.
4. Look in the fridge for any vegetables you’ve collected from the kitchen garden.
5. Chop them up into the saucepan.
6. Boil it until it smells really good.
Meals produced by Gideon all look the same – i.e. revolting – but they taste good in different ways. After the first day, we just closed our eyes and got on with it. I’ve never eaten anything better.
But the evening when Trix made the TV news we were right off our food. Gideon is not usually the greatest at mealtime chatter – normally he’d just sit at the end of the table, shovelling in food and thinking about rocking chairs, but that night he surprised us.
GODFATHER GIDEON
Something was up. I smelt it as surely as a hare smells a fox.
I knew Mark liked his adventures. The first time he came here, he climbed the big walnut tree next to the house and nearly brained himself when he fell off a branch. Children need freedom, country air in their lungs, mud on their hands. A bit of wildness in their early years will harden them for the evil world they are growing up in.
But at dinner that night, I began to worry. They were too quiet, too pale, too generally guilty in the way they looked and moved about. There was something odd too about all those trips to the attic.
I was almost tempted to break my golden rule and ask them questions.
Instead, I gave them some work to do.
WIKI
There was this low rumble from the end of the table. Godfather Gideon was preparing to do something unusual. He was going to talk to us.
‘Time for you sprogs to earn your keep,’ he said, his eyes darting around at us under his grey thatch of hair.
‘Gideon, it’s holiday-time,’ said Mark, rather too cheerfully. ‘Can’t we just chillax for a few days?’
‘Chillax.’ Gideon seemed to be chewing this over in his mind like a bit of rabbit from the stew we were eating.
‘It means chill and relax,’ said Trix. ‘Like, take it easy.’
He breathed in sharply through his nose, another of his little habits. ‘If you want to . . . chillax, I’ll drive you to the station tomorrow and you can take the train home. At Hill Farm, we work. Don’t we, Mark?’
‘If you say so, Gideon.’ Mark’s answer was just this side of rudeness, but only just.
‘So. The tasks. Shopping. The village is two miles away. I have two old bicycles in the shed, which I shall make good before breakfast tomorrow. I shall give you directions and expect full supplies for the house. You pay, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Mark.
Daringly, I mentioned that there was a bit of a steep hill to the farm. Wouldn’t coming back carrying provisions –?
Gideon gave me a cold look with his piecing blue eyes. The words froze in my throat.
‘Then there’s firewood. You collect. You saw. You stack.’
‘That’s one for you, Wik,’ said Mark. ‘You need building up.’
‘Cooking.’ He looked at Trix.
‘Just because I’m a girl,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t mean that—’
‘I don’t care who does what. If you prefer, you can be in charge of hunting.’
‘Hunting? That is so . . .’ Almost for the first time since I had known her, Trix seemed lost for words. ‘. . . so twentieth century.’
Gideon stabbed a piece of meat on his plate. ‘You eat, you hunt,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a four-ten shotgun one of you can take.’
We looked at one another.
‘It’s fun,’ he said. ‘Where have you children been all your lives? Rabbit, pigeon, pheasant, woodcock. If it moves and it looks tasty, you can shoot it.’
‘I’ve never used a gun before,’ I said in a quiet voice.
‘Wimp,’ said Mark. ‘I’m a good shot, I’ll be the hunter.’
‘Then we’ll need someone to pluck, skin and gut. There are the snares to check for rabbits.’
‘Snares? That is so cruel, Gideon,’ said Trix with a bit of her old spirit.
‘Your choi
ce,’ he said. ‘Finally, rats.’
‘Please tell me you’re not saying we eat rats here,’ said Trix.
Gideon raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s a thought. I believe stewed rat is rather a delicacy around the world. But we’ll only have to eat them if the hunter fails to hunt. No, all one of you needs to do is shoot them in the evenings and early mornings around the chicken shed. They’re taking too many eggs and chicks.’
‘Couldn’t you just poison them?’ asked Trix.
He looked at her. ‘Now that’s twentieth century,’ he said. ‘Poison is a slow, painful death. When owls pick them up, they get poisoned too. It’s a positively barbarian way to keep numbers down.’
‘We’ll probably have shot all the owls anyway,’ Trix muttered.
Gideon glowered for a moment. ‘I shall devote tomorrow to training,’ he said. ‘After that, it’s up to you. That’s the way it is at Hill Farm. No free rides.’ He returned to his meal. It was a big speech by his standards. ‘Let me know who’s doing what tomorrow at breakfast,’ he muttered as he chewed.
MARK
So that night, the first night after the news of the Trixter’s disappearance hit the media big time, we ended up in the bedroom which I shared with Wiki, not discussing the kidnap at all but deciding who was going to shop or shoot or cook or snare or kill rats.
It began to occur to me that staying with Gideon had not been such a great idea after all.
WIKI
The scary thing about Godfather Gideon was that he never ever joked. For him, we weren’t children at all. We were mini-adults. If we had said that maybe allowing children to wander around with guns was not the safest idea, or asking them to put their hands into the bodies of dead animals to take out innards was a bit on the disgusting side, he would simply have looked at us as if we were mad.
He was a sort of caveman. He lived in a different world from the rest of us. Like it or not, we were in that world for the next few days. There was no escape.
Some decisions were easy. Because Trix’s face was all over the papers, there was no question of her being seen in the village.
Mark fancied himself as a killer. Grumpily, with many mutterings about sexist men, Trix agreed to do the cooking.
Which, uh-oh, left me with the preparation – the skinning and gutting.
We couldn’t get our heads around the whole rat thing.
HOLLY
It was lucky that my parents and their friends were nowhere near the villa’s television room when Trix’s face first loomed up on the big screen. They might have been ever so slightly surprised to hear Jade reacting to news that one of her friends had been kidnapped as if she were watching a football game and her team had just scored a goal.
‘Whoa, result. Yessss.’ She punched the air. ‘They did it.’
We had been worried that the news had not broken sooner. Now that it had, there was almost nothing else. We got several out-of-date pictures of Trix, who now seemed to be called ‘Trixie’. There was an interview with Miss Fothergill, who said what a marvellous person she was. Trix’s mother and stepfather were filmed outside their house after flying back from America. At one point, the good-looking detective in charge of the case gazed into the camera and asked anyone with information about Trixie to get in touch with the police.
‘I don’t think so, buddy,’ said Jade.
I pressed the remote and the screen turned black. Although the sun was still outside, the blinds were down and the air conditioning made the room cool.
‘I can’t believe that they actually did it,’ I said.
Jade did an imitation of Wiki blinking behind his glasses. ‘Hello, my name is William Church and I’m a kidnapper,’ she said in a geeky voice.
We fell about.
‘But you know what this means,’ I said, sitting up and trying to think straight about the new situation. ‘Our holiday is over.’
‘Two days,’ said Jade. ‘We agreed to give it two days after the news broke.’
‘At that point we’ll be too upset by the news to enjoy ourselves in Italy and will just have to go home.’
That cracked us up too.
WIKI
The next day, Mark and I rode two heavy black bikes with big wicker baskets on the handlebars down to the village shop – or ‘Mrs Phillips’s’, as Godfather Gideon preferred to call it.
In fact, we almost missed it. The village turned out to be a few little houses with neat gardens in the front of them at the bottom of the hill. As we raced past them, I noticed that one of the buildings had a Post Office sign outside it.
‘Mrs Phillips!’ Mark screamed, and we screeched to a halt, laughing. It was definitely a shop, we now saw, although the only thing in the window was a cat, fast asleep.
There were other things, odd things, about Mrs Phillips’s:
1. You didn’t have to lock your bikes up when you went inside. It took Mark and me several days to believe this.
2. The door opened with a little ting-a-ling noise from a bell attached to it.
3. It was so dark in there that you could hardly see what you were buying. (This was quite often a good thing.)
4. Sometimes you picked up an item and it looked as if it has been there since the end of World War Two.
5. No one just walked into the village shop, bought something and left. They would potter about the dusty shelves. When they eventually reached Mrs Phillips behind the till they would discuss the weather for about half an hour, then tell each other some really interesting piece of gossip (‘Did you hear that Mrs White’s cat has passed away?’ ‘What, Mrs White that was Miss Pink?’ ‘That’s the one. It was only twelve and all.’ ‘What do they think it was then?’ ‘Oh, Mr Brown says it’s the weather.’ ‘Terrible weather we’ve been having lately,’ etc., etc., etc.). Then they would realize they had forgotten something, so Mrs Phillips had to go and look for it ‘out the back’. Then they needed a lottery ticket. Then they counted out the money in change very, very slowly. Mark said it was no wonder everyone in the country looks so old. Most of them have turned grey waiting to be served in their village shop.
6. Mrs Phillips is about 150 years old and has a beard.
But none of this was what we noticed that day. On the front page of all the newspapers, laid out on a low shelf at the front of the shop, was the same photograph of Trix.
As casually as we could, we crouched down to look more closely. One headline read ‘TAXI KIDNAP OF ACTRESS’S DAUGHTER’, another ‘FIND LITTLE TRIXIE’. One even had ‘OUR LITTLE ANGEL’.
‘Little angel?’ Mark murmured under his breath. ‘I’ve heard it all now.’
We bought three newspapers – one serious, two trashy – then bought the rest of the shopping.
At some point a woman in her sixties (a youngster in this village) walked in and began to chat with Mrs Phillips at the till.
As we approached, she smiled and said, ‘You go ahead, you boys. We’re just passing the time of day.’
Moving with the speed of an alpine glacier, Mrs Phillips took out each item, examined it, then tapped the price into the till. When she reached the newspapers at the bottom of the basket, she gazed sadly down at Trix for a moment.
‘Terrible business, that young girl,’ she said.
Before we could think of the right answer, the other woman standing nearby made a tutting noise.
‘Taxi-driver, they say,’ she said. ‘You get some rough types driving them taxis.’
‘You know what I’d do to people like that?’ The shopkeeper’s beard seemed to be trembling with anger. ‘I’d lock them in a house and then I’d torch it. Burn them to a crisp, I would. That would teach them.’
‘It would,’ said the other woman. ‘You know what? Hanging’s too good for them.’
‘Unless you hanged them really, really slowly,’ said Mrs Phillips.
‘Now that’s a job I’d like to do.’
‘Me too.’
I cleared my throat. Annoyed at having her torture daydream
s interrupted, Mrs Phillips tapped in the price of the newspapers. ‘You don’t want to be reading any of that stuff. Not on your holidays.’ She smiled, revealing her three remaining teeth. ‘Where are you staying then?’
‘With Gideon Burrowes,’ said Mark.
‘Ah, Gideon, there’s a character.’ Mrs Phillips smiled, revealing her front teeth. ‘A man of few words, as we say in these parts.’
‘Yeah.’ We took the bags of shopping and made for the door.
‘Gideon won’t be reading those papers,’ the woman shopper said, a look of glittering suspicion in her eye. ‘Gideon hasn’t read a paper for years. He doesn’t believe in them, does he, Mrs Phillips?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Phillips. ‘No, he doesn’t, come to think of it.’
The four of us stood for a moment like actors on a stage when one of them has forgotten their lines.
‘Football!’ I blurted out. ‘The papers are for us. We’re really big fans of football, aren’t we, Mark?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Mark.
‘And we like to read about our team. In all the papers.’
Before the two women could say anything else, we blundered out of the door, scrambled on to our bikes and began the cruel uphill journey back to Hill Farm.
MARK
At first, when we brought the newspapers home and took them up to the attic, Trix seemed cheerful – excited even. She complained about the photograph that had been used, laughed at all the mistakes in the stories about her.
Missing, Believed Crazy Page 7