The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  In fact the AC had a highly attuned grasp of politics allied

  with an almost feminine sensitivity to mood and thought and

  nuance. It suited him down to the ground to be thought thick. You usually only got one chance to underestimate Corrigan; he was adept at slipping the knife in. He’d ended several rivals’ careers, fellow officers who’d underestimated him, who now sat shuffling paper or reading their emails in disappointing dead-end jobs in Hendon or Basingstoke.

  Another of the AC’s survival skills was the ability to smell the way the wind was blowing. It had brought him promotion in the past and he was hoping it would do so again. Currently he was steering a delicate path between multi-ethnic policing and a rising backlash against it from critics citing police unwillingness to tackle difficult issues in case they were branded as racist. It was a difficult juggling act.

  Framed citations, decorations and awards were hung over the walls of the office. Most of these had been assiduously and discreetly lobbied for by the assistant commissioner. While on the surface he claimed that such things were meaningless to him, that what counted was getting the job done, he enjoyed the celebrity part of his job. He liked being recognized, enjoyed being feted. He was a great one for backing into the limelight. There were photos too. Corrigan sharing a joke with the home secretary, Corrigan waggling a pair of handcuffs at the prime minister. Corrigan with the mayor. There was a gap in the wall where Corrigan had taken down Ken Livingstone. As soon as the results were in and Ken was yesterday’s man, down he had come. Hanlon noted as she sat down opposite him that the home secretary’s photo too had gone now, to be replaced by a smiling Arab in white robes and a headdress. Corrigan obviously had little faith in her future. That boded ill for the politician. Corrigan had a finely tuned nose for that kind of thing.

  The Arab, Hanlon guessed, would turn out to be the interior

  minister of some oil-rich state where Corrigan would wind up

  doing very well-paid consultancy work should his bid to become Metropolitan Police commissioner fail. She could see Corrigan in somewhere like Doha, advising the Qataris. Corrigan would have several insurance policies on the go; he was that kind of man.

  Right now, Corrigan was in a bad mood and it showed. He had supported Hanlon when no other senior figure would dare. Politics and police work inevitably go together and Hanlon was politically troublesome. The Metropolitan Police is a huge organization, employing some fifty thousand people with a budget of over four billion pounds. In common with all large organizations it does not encourage maverick individuals. It can’t afford to and it doesn’t want to. When a precedent is set, others will follow. If more police followed Hanlon’s lead and disobeyed orders, recklessly endangering themselves and potentially inflaming an already explosive situation, it would be disastrous. But she had saved a fellow officer’s life and she had shown exceptional bravery. And Corrigan liked her a lot. So he had thrown his considerable weight behind Hanlon and was beginning to suspect he might regret it.

  ‘So this witchcraft killing?’ he began. As soon as he’d heard

  about it he had sent Hanlon down to check on it. It was the kind of story the press would get excited about.

  ‘Is probably not a witchcraft killing at all, sir,’ said Hanlon. ‘Really?’ said the AC sceptically. ‘I thought all these feathers

  and stuff, the crucifix… what about all of that then?’

  Hanlon shrugged. She was wearing a V-necked black cashmere sweater and the AC could see the delicate but powerful muscle that ran from her neck to her shoulder, her trapezius, move under the skin like an elegant cable as she did so. Having Hanlon in his office always had the effect of making him feel overweight and out of condition. Last week he’d had a

  mandatory work medical and had been warned about his BMI. He wondered what Hanlon’s BMI would be. Crazily low, he suspected. Maybe that was why she seemed to live in a state of constant irritation. Maybe that’s why she also looked so tired all the time.

  ‘Sources say that she had been extensively sexually assaulted and is probably of non-Christian origin, sir.’

  ‘So it’s assault and murder; it’s straightforward then,’ said Corrigan.

  ‘So it would seem, sir,’ she agreed. Straightforward was Essex police’s view. The SIO on the case had been unmoved by the ‘eighteen’ on the wall of the bunker. ‘If that’s what it is, so what? Have we got seventeen other missing black girls? No, we haven’t. Have we got seventeen other burnt bodies? I haven’t seen any. Life’s complicated enough without looking for problems,’ he’d said in a dismissive tone. Hanlon wasn’t so sure. Corrigan looked at Hanlon with his shrewd eyes. ‘So it would seem’ was very much an evasive answer. Hanlon was careful with words. She weighed them carefully before she used them, like a miser with money. She was returning his gaze coldly. He thought to himself, you’re not telling me everything. There was little he could do about it. You couldn’t push Hanlon or intimidate her. He decided to bring this conversation to an end.

  ‘Well, Detective Inspector, if I’m asked I’ll say that police experts have cast doubts on the witchcraft theory and if anyone

  perseveres, I’ll refer them to you.’

  Hanlon nodded. ‘Fine by me, sir. The SIO is copying me in on their findings and I’ll summarize it for you. It’ll be on your desk the day after tomorrow.’ She stood up. ‘If that’s everything, sir? I’ve got an appointment, if you don’t mind.’

  Corrigan waved her away absent-mindedly. He had a briefing to give to the London Assembly and was behind his

  own self-imposed schedule. More issues with trigger-happy policemen. Sometimes his own force seemed more trouble than the criminals. Hanlon left his office.

  * * *

  She signed herself out of the building and crossed the road to the art-deco St James’s Park Underground where she walked down to the Circle and District line. Victoria Street was a mass of snarled traffic. As she waited for a westbound train, she checked the time again on her BlackBerry: 8.30 a.m. She had emailed DS Whiteside, her former colleague from the Serious and Organized Crime Group, just before she entered the station.

  After the riot incident, SCD 7 had washed their hands of Hanlon, but although they were finished with her she still had unfinished business with a case she’d been involved with at the time. Hanlon didn’t like unresolved business. Whiteside’s reply confirmed they were still on. Their target was alone, and at home.

  Hanlon rode the tube train two stops down to Sloane Square and exited there. She walked up into the wide-open plaza that reminded her of a European city in its spaciousness, not London with its typically narrow streets like a turned-up collar against the rain, and looked at the Peter Jones store opposite. Hanlon was no great fan of shopping, nor of Sloane Rangers, the ostentatiously wealthy women who frequented the area, but she did like buildings and the sinuous late-1920s art-deco lines of the large shop gave her a great deal of pleasure.

  She walked through the expensive streets, moving quickly out of the borders of the exclusive areas of Chelsea and into the marginally less price-tag-heavy Fulham. A one-bedroom flat here would still be about a dozen times her annual salary,

  if not more. You didn’t have to deal drugs to live in Fulham, but it helped.

  Although her legs still ached from the hour she’d put in at the gym between six and seven, before her 8 a.m. meeting with Corrigan, she was enjoying the walk. She loved the streets of London with a visceral passion. Today she’d been working on her thighs, calves and shoulders, high-weight, low-repetition work, and she could still feel the muscles protesting. She ignored them. She was old school: no pain, no gain. Hanlon’s gym was defiantly old-fashioned, full of free weights, barbells and dumbbells, its soundtrack being grunts of effort and clanking metal.

  Her eyes softened slightly as she saw the well-dressed figure of DS Whiteside sitting on a low wall at a corner of the street where their target lived. Today the sergeant looked like an Indie rocker in tight skinny jeans
and a fashionably distressed leather jacket. The clothes emphasized the powerful body beneath rather than concealing it. As she waited to cross the road to join him, a couple of Sloaney girls walked past her, frankly ogling him as they did so. She heard one say to the other, ‘He’s a bit of all right.’ The other replied, lasciviously, flicking back her glossy long hair with an expensively manicured hand, ‘Yah! I most certainly wouldn’t say no!’ Hanlon shook her head sadly. You really are barking up the wrong tree, she said mentally to the young girls as they disappeared along the pavement.

  She crossed over to where Whiteside was sitting. He smiled

  up at her, supremely confident as ever. He had, she reflected, an insanely optimistic attitude on life.

  ‘Did you know you’re a babe magnet, Sergeant?’ she asked. ‘Morning, ma’am. Some of us have got it, and some of us

  haven’t,’ he said, with a grin.

  He’s ridiculously attractive, thought Hanlon. ‘Shall we go and wake young Toby up?’

  She nodded. ‘Let’s go then.’

  They crossed the road together. Whiteside’s eyes were gleaming with pleasure at working with Hanlon again. Life had been so boring without her.

  Toby Manning had a basement flat and the two of them walked down the steep stairs that led off the pavement, in single file. They stood in the stairwell next to some dead potted plants while Whiteside rang the bell. He looked at the plants. Toby’s gardening skills were not the best. He had to ring three times before they heard a muffled ‘All right, OK, I’m coming’ from within. There was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and then the door opened a crack and a bleary, unshaven face appeared.

  With one practised, synchronized movement, Whiteside shouldered both Toby and the door back, Hanlon stepped regally inside and Whiteside wheeled round, closed the door and leant against it, while Toby stood with his back to a wall, wearing nothing but a dressing gown and a puzzled, frightened look.

  ‘Who—’ he began to say. The sergeant had no intention of letting Toby speak. He wanted to establish in Toby’s slow mind who was in control. Whiteside grabbed Toby by the lapels of the ragged dressing gown and roughly pushed him into the centre of his own living room where Hanlon was now standing, looking around her with an air of distaste.

  ‘Sit down, Toby,’ she ordered, pointing to a scruffy-looking armchair. The flat was probably worth between half to three-quarters of a million in its SW6 location, but inside it was a dump. Toby did as he was told. The living room hadn’t been cleaned in a while and smelt of stale cigarette smoke, grass and old booze. There was still a half-smoked joint in an ashtray on a coffee table. Next to it a folded wrap of paper and a mirror.

  There was an underlying sweet/sour smell of rotting food from the kitchen.

  Hanlon produced a warrant card and held it in front of Toby’s face. She leant forward, invading his personal space, literally in his face.

  ‘We’re police.’

  Toby had shoulder-length permed hair and lined, unhealthily pale features. He looked as if he’d wandered in from another era. Hanlon guessed he didn’t really keep up with current trends except narcotics. His lifestyle was catching up with him quickly. His arms and legs beneath the short, silk dressing gown were pallid and thin. Hanlon knew he was only twenty-nine, but he could have passed for forty in the struggling sunlight from the uncleaned windows that dimly transformed the native gloom of the basement into a murky greyness.

  ‘You look like shit, Toby,’ said Hanlon conversationally. ‘Like you’ve crawled out from under a rock.’

  There was a sideboard in the living room and Whiteside had pulled a drawer open. He slipped a pair of latex gloves over his fingers.

  Toby looked alarmed. ‘What are you doing?’ he said in a dry, frightened tone. ‘Have you got a search warrant?’ His voice was expensively educated. It went with the flat in a way that the rest of Toby didn’t. Hanlon knew that Toby was a Trustafarian whose private income and accommodation provided by his tax-exile parents did not cover his drug expenditure, so he had turned to coke dealing to his friends and acquaintances to make ends meet. He was an amateur dealer, now hopelessly out of his depth, and beginning to realize it.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said Whiteside. He was looking into the open drawer. You beauty, he was thinking to himself. There, in the drawer, were electronic scales, a zip-loc bag of white powder, a

  plastic screw-top container of dextrose that he assumed was for cutting the coke and another transparent plastic bag containing small, wrapped packages, like miniature origami envelopes, that Whiteside guessed would contain one gram deals of coke. He lifted this out of the drawer and held it up. Toby looked at it with fear.

  ‘Well, well, well, Toby Manning. What’s this then?’ said Whiteside. ‘Hardly for personal consumption, eh, Tobes?’

  Toby had risen to his feet. ‘That’s not mine. I’m looking after it for a friend,’ he said. ‘I want a lawyer. I don’t think you’re allowed—’

  Hanlon guessed the rest of the sentence would have been ‘to do this’ but she’d had enough of Toby. With a scythe-like move of her foot, she kicked his legs from underneath him at ankle level so he fell back into his chair. She leant over as he collapsed, startled, into the welcoming fabric of the armchair, seized a handful of his hair and yanked it hard. His head snapped back on its neck and he was staring upwards at the ceiling. Hanlon’s face, her grey eyes boring into his, appeared menacingly in his line of vision.

  ‘You listen to me, you cretin,’ she said. ‘You have two options. Cooperate and we won’t prosecute. Don’t cooperate and you go down for dealing coke. Do you understand?’

  Toby wanted to say ‘You can’t do this’. But the policewoman was doing this, his hair felt like it might be ripped out at any second, it was very painful and he was very frightened. He badly needed the toilet, he felt his bladder might burst. The coke had been bringing on panic attacks for a while and he was in the middle of one now. Her eyes looked totally insane. He thought his heart might explode, it was galloping so.

  He heard the other policeman say, ‘We don’t need a warrant, Toby, because you invited us in and the drugs were in plain

  sight. I think you’ve got about a hundred grams here, Toby, old chum. Plus your paraphernalia, the scales, the bagged-up gear.’

  ‘That’s called dealing, Toby,’ said Hanlon. She gave his hair

  an extra hard tug for emphasis.

  ‘Help us and you walk, we’ll be out of here,’ said the other one. ‘We’ll even let you keep all your gear. Don’t help and you’re going down. Seven years, Toby. That’s what you’ll probably get.’ ‘That would be the going rate,’ agreed Hanlon. The dealer digested this unhappily. Then the policeman went on. ‘Oh,

  and Toby…’

  The policewoman let go of his hair and he sat up straight in the chair and looked nervously at the bearded policeman. ‘All those stories, Toby, you may have heard about prison showers and what happens to innocent young men in them.’ Toby nodded. He swallowed painfully, wary of the mad bitch policewoman who was staring at him with those unnerving eyes. The policeman went on. ‘Well, the thing is, Tobes, they’re all true.’ He smiled as Toby’s mind flooded with horror stories he’d heard about prison or seen in films.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be an ex-public schoolboy inside, Tobes.

  They’ll eat you alive. As the actress said to the bishop.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked in a small voice. ‘Go and get your phone, Toby,’ said the policewoman calmly.

  ‘I want you to text one of your clients. That will be more or less it.’ She picked up a DVD case from his coffee table and looked at it with distaste. ‘Then you can return to watching Bangkok Thai Anal Babe Whores Three at your leisure.’

  Toby stood up and fetched his phone. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

  * * *

  Bingo, thought Whiteside triumphantly.

  4

  In Finchley, in North London, Kathy Reynolds poured anot
her cup of tea for the woman from the property-letting company. Clarissa Morgan, she thought, was exceptionally helpful. Albion Services had been a real find. Other estate agents, other letting agencies, had proved utterly useless, in some cases worse than useless, when it came to finding a property. The level of incompetence she had encountered was shocking. Kathy was extremely efficient herself at her job and it caused her bewilderment when she came across people manifestly not up to doing theirs. She really didn’t see how hard it could be. They were estate agents, for heaven’s sake, not astrophysicists or surgeons. It was surprising really when they had all the relevant information, knew her price range and her requirements – single mother, one twelve-year-old child – the number of unsuitable properties she’d been offered, everything from penthouses suitable for single, wealthy bachelors to eight-bedroom houses or downright slums. Not so with Clarissa Morgan. Clarissa Morgan was a beacon of ability. Kathy had known Clarissa would be good, ever since she first saw her bright, intelligent face under her short square-cut fringe of dark hair, and they’d become friends. An observer might have thought that Clarissa and Kathy could be used in some advertising campaign that required two Caucasian women

  who were physically virtual polar opposites.

  Kathy was tall, blonde and slim. She looked, and was, reserved by nature. Time had etched fine lines on her face but she still had an exceptionally good figure, and she was aware that she was still extremely attractive. Peter, her son, had inherited her good looks. He was too young to think about girls but Kathy knew that before he was much older, he’d be in great demand. That wasn’t just a mother’s biased judgement; there was independent verification. Her friends frequently remarked upon it. He was exceptionally handsome.