The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  If Kathy was ethereal, then Clarissa was earthy. She was stocky in build, dark-haired, swarthy. Kathy guessed, correctly, that she had to work hard to keep her weight down and her hair under control. She could, and did, wear bold colours, vivid nail varnish, scarlet lipstick. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, her figure was indifferent, but she’d played the hand she’d been dealt extremely well. Kathy knew that when Clarissa walked into a room or down a street, male heads would turn. She was sexy and she knew it. It was the aura she obviously liked to project. At first sight she wasn’t the kind of person Kathy naturally warmed to. Clarissa looked like the sort of woman who didn’t like women, but now Kathy felt she had misjudged her. Clarissa’s competence and friendliness had thawed her.

  Albion, unlike the other agencies, had taken the time to draw

  up a detailed profile of her and her needs so they could find her the property she wanted, and Clarissa had even taken a keen interest in her twelve-year-old son, Peter, helpfully restricting the search to areas accessible from his school and to properties that fitted her price range. Kathy was immensely proud of Peter and, although she suspected that a healthy interest in your client’s children always made sense from a business point of view, Clarissa’s questions about Peter seemed inspired by genuine affection and concern. She’d even, with Kathy’s permission,

  put a picture of Kathy and Peter on her phone, in fact several pictures. ‘I like to show potential clients the kind of customers we have on our books,’ she explained. ‘Particularly women on their own. I’m a single woman myself and you can’t be too careful these days who you trust, especially when it comes down to really important things like where you live. Also who you meet. I’m very wary about male clients on their own until I’ve got to know them.’

  Clarissa now leant back in her chair and sipped her tea. She’d called round to tell Kathy they were thinking about putting cable into the property and wanted to check that was OK with her. Kathy had hired the flat on a one-year lease while she considered her options. After her husband’s death and the sale of her South London house, she didn’t feel up to the strains of buying a property. It would have taken an energy she didn’t have. She didn’t want to think about anything important for the time being. This particularly went for house-hunting. The endless visiting, the wasted time, the depressing traipsing around other people’s houses, the brief, unwanted snapshots of their lives. Above all, she didn’t want to make any decisions. She looked at Clarissa and thought, when I decide to get a place, I’ll get her to find it for me. She’s someone I can trust.

  Today Clarissa was looking Tatler-esque. She was wearing

  a well-cut jacket and skirt that looked expensive but not off-puttingly so. She had a silver ring with a large red rectangular-cut ruby on the ring finger of her right hand. It matched her lipstick. She asked, ‘So, how is Peter?’ She always asked after his welfare. She was very solicitous. She leant forward as she spoke. She had a husky, slightly emphatic, voice.

  Kathy, who frequently had to make presentations to large groups of people and speak at conferences, had once paid for a couple of sessions of professional training from a voice coach

  who worked in the theatre. He had shown her how to project her voice, using her breath and the muscles at the base of her diaphragm to reach the back of a room. Clarissa did this, she had noticed. Vaguely, she wondered if Clarissa had received theatrical training too. She did look slightly stagey and had those mannerisms that Kathy associated with Peter’s drama teacher at school, deliberately overemphasized movements, particularly hand and arm gestures. She put the thought from her head, it was hardly relevant.

  Kathy smiled and automatically looked at the school photo of Peter in his chorister’s robes. The school prided itself on its choir. She wondered, as she sometimes did, if he would keep his voice when it broke. His father had had a beautiful voice. ‘Getting over things,’ she said, in answer to Clarissa. ‘It’s like his dad said before he died, “I’m too old now for it to be a tragedy, just think of it as a bit of a shame”.’ She missed Dan, but above all she worried about how his death might affect her son. Would it make her too much of a clingy mother? Would it matter if her son didn’t have some sort of male role model?

  Luckily, she thought wryly to herself, I’m usually too busy to think about things like that, too busy to brood.

  ‘It must be difficult,’ said Clarissa in her caring voice, and looked at the family photos framed on the windowsill. Kathy’s son was very good-looking, she had decided. Very good-looking indeed. She gently touched the small, horseshoe-shaped scar between her eyes. It was a habit she had when she was thinking.

  5

  Patrick Cunningham was starting to go crazy. He knew this, but it was so much part of the craziness that had taken over his life that he had come to accept it as normal.

  He impatiently parked his red Porsche in a residents-only parking bay. He wasn’t a Notting Hill resident himself, but he’d represented a fair few of them in court and felt more than entitled. He hurriedly walked across the road into the upmarket pub. All the bars in Notting Hill seemed to have been gentrified since the film with Hugh Grant. He ran his eye along the bottles in the refrigerated cabinet behind the barman and ordered a Kirin. He stood by the bar, pretending to read a Metro, the free London newspaper, one eye firmly, and, if he were honest, slightly desperately, fixed on the clock above the optic rack.

  The doors had just opened and there were only another two customers, their rosy faces witnesses to their owners’ early starts and late finishes in the pub. It was 12.15 p.m. Cunningham had a hell of a coke habit. That was his problem, the root source of the craziness. The motherlode.

  Today he’d rescheduled face-time with a client to see Toby Manning, his dealer. It was extremely unprofessional. This was far from the first time he’d done this. He was beginning to run out of plausible excuses for cancelled meetings and, maybe more worryingly, he was beginning not to care. Work was becoming

  almost an irrelevance.

  Cunningham’s own chambers were becoming both perplexed and alarmed at his behaviour. Eyebrows were beginning to be raised by his erratic work habits. He didn’t care. Real life was cocaine-centred; it was dominating his life. He was either doing coke, getting coke or thinking about coke. Then Toby had texted him to say he couldn’t come and he was sending an associate, but not to worry, the guy was reliable.

  Come on, come on, come on, thought Cunningham to himself impatiently. He didn’t drum his fingers on the polished wooden bar counter but he felt like doing so.

  He drank some lager. He didn’t want lager, what good was that to him. He wanted Charlie.

  Then, at twelve thirty, as promised, the dealer appeared. Cunningham knew it was him as soon as he walked through the door. The lawyer breathed a huge sigh of relief. It wasn’t as if the man was dressed in a hip-hop, pimped-up style, like some of Cunningham’s wealthier, cash-rich, clients. He was dressed inconspicuously, if expensively, but he stood out from the other customers in the pub. The other people in the bar looked normal. They had educated, relaxed, comfortable faces. This man didn’t belong in their cosy Notting Hill world. It was the aura of matter-of-fact menace, the look in the eyes and the face that bore the traces of past violence – a broken nose, a hairline scar, a misaligned jaw disguised by the current trend for beards that was sweeping the media and hipster world. The man reminded him of Anderson. Cunningham had met a lot of criminals. It was his job after all. The innocent didn’t hire him. He knew what he was looking at now. It was the unmistakable face of crime.

  Toby’s stand-in too immediately recognized the tall, thin,

  angular frame of Patrick Cunningham, leaning against the bar, as soon as he walked into the pub. He had seen him in action in

  court a couple of times. There, he had been effortlessly in charge of the situation. Most people are used to seeing lawyers in TV dramas where they’re well rehearsed, eloquent and effective. The reality is often the reverse. Cunning
ham, however, looked like a famous actor being a lawyer. He gave a polished performance. He gave good court. The dealer thought the lawyer was one of those people who believed so strongly in themselves that others were drawn into it, judges included. He had made the other legal team appear amateurish, stupid.

  Patrick Cunningham, his languid frame physically dominating the court, had looked slightly bored as he effortlessly demolished arguments and evidence given by the prosecution and the police, or introduced reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. They’d been almost cheering him on. It was like watching a Grand Slam tennis player turning up at a club-level tournament.

  He went up to Cunningham. ‘I’m George,’ he said quietly. ‘Toby can’t make it. He said he’d called you.’ Cunningham looked at him closely and nodded. He asked George what he wanted to drink, bought the dealer a beer, and they both sat down at a quiet corner table. The pub was popular and was beginning to fill up. George looked around him. He recognized it from a decade ago when it had been a defiantly drinkers’ pub that no one but the desperate would have used, with a sticky carpet, a jukebox and a fruit machine. The fibre of the carpet had been so soaked in spilt beer over the years it was like walking on Velcro. Now its walls were Farrow & Ball grey, not nicotine yellow, the ageing alcoholics who’d been its loyal patrons either dead of alcohol-related disease or dispersed. Miles Davis was playing in the background. Tonight it was full of professional people like Cunningham. I’m getting old, thought George.

  Notting Hill had changed too. George could remember when

  it was rundown, the Portobello Road a haven for ageing hippies,

  when bands used to play under the Westway, the motorway bridge vaulting upwards high above the roof of the open-air concert area. It had smelt of exhaust fumes, cement dust and hash. He’d known it when it was a dump of a place and every other person seemed to be a dealer. Now it was the haunt of millionaires and models. George preferred the old days.

  Still, he thought, some things never change. Drugs then, drugs now, and there would be drugs tomorrow. He said, ‘I’ve got something for you from Toby,’ and discreetly took an envelope from his jacket and slid it to the lawyer under the table. It contained ten one-gram wraps of cocaine, and Cunningham in turn pressed a wad of folded twenties silently into George’s hand. George put it in the pocket of his jacket. He knew it would be correct.

  A hint of a smile now played around Cunningham’s tight, bloodless lips. George noted, slightly to his surprise, that Cunningham was almost shaking with suppressed eagerness. George knew a lot of people with big drug problems; he hadn’t expected Cunningham to be one of them. You’ve got it bad, mate, he thought to himself.

  ‘Thank you very much, George,’ said Cunningham. Like Toby, his accent was privately educated, expensively vowelled. George noted with amusement that he was trying to look nonchalant while trembling, practically shaking, with coke desire. ‘Toby did say it was going to be exceptional. I hope he’s right.’ His voice tailed off. He was salivating. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

  Cunningham disappeared, practically ran, into the toilets with his coke. George raised his eyebrows; drugs were a great social leveller. It really doesn’t matter where you’re from, an addiction is an addiction, an addict, an addict. George recognized that semi-insane look of overexcited eagerness in Cunningham’s eyes, and it wasn’t the look of a casual user. The lawyer was a man

  with a monkey on his back. He took a slow mouthful of beer and thoughtfully picked up Cunningham’s paper.

  A while later Cunningham came back into the bar. George was still at the table, reading the lawyer’s paper.

  ‘Everything OK?’ asked the dealer without looking up from the paper.

  ‘Fine. Exceptional even,’ said Cunningham, his eyes glittering. George raised his eyes, then his eyebrows. Cunningham was wired, coked out of his mind. How much did he just do? wondered George. The lawyer’s jaw was rotating like he was chewing invisible gum. His eyes were starting out of his head as if they’d grown and the sockets had shrunk. Sweat beaded his forehead. Coke sweat. George knew that if he put his head close to Cunningham he’d be able to smell the metallic tang in his perspiration from the drug.

  Cunningham stood smiling down at him, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He was so out of it he really didn’t know what to do. God alone knew what was happening to his brain; synapses were exploding like fireworks. ‘Tell Toby, next week, same time, same place,’ said Cunningham, self-importantly. He grinned wildly again. His nose ran and he sniffed loudly.

  Jesus Christ, thought George. And this is supposedly one of Britain’s finest legal minds. ‘OK,’ he said mildly. ‘Take care.’ As he watched Cunningham’s back disappear through the frosted glass of the pub’s Victorian doors – a suitable image, thought George, for the man’s brain – he wondered if the lawyer were due in court that day. He guessed the judge might not notice, but Cunningham’s low-life clients certainly would. Oh well, he thought. That’s his problem, not mine. He went back to the paper. The headline read:

  Burnt girl not ‘witchcraft’ killing, say police.

  6

  Cunningham left the pub, stepped off the pavement and was very nearly hit by a four-by-four he hadn’t seen, as he euphorically strode into the road without looking. He was finding it very hard to focus. The driver angrily sounded the horn. Cunningham gave him the finger. He crossed over to his Carrera and climbed inside. He closed his eyes momentarily and told himself to concentrate. As he sat on the leather-upholstered seat, sweating in his expensive suit, the temptation to do another quick line before driving back to his office was overwhelming. No one will notice, he thought, and even if they do, fuck ’em. His hand made contact with the envelope in his pocket.

  A tap on the driver’s window made him jump. For a second

  he wondered what the noise was. He also wondered how long he’d been sitting there staring into space. He’d lost track of time. Momentarily he was disorientated, wondered where he was. He looked up and around, half expecting to see George, and instead saw the dark blue uniform of a policeman. His heart started pounding and he felt an unpleasant lurch in his bowels. He didn’t want to be dealing with the police. Whenever he usually saw them, they were safely in a witness box or deferentially escorting him to a witness room in a police station. Not like this. He opened the window.

  ‘Would you mind getting out of the car, sir,’ said the officer politely.

  He did so, now extremely conscious of the curious glances of passers-by on the pavement. Man in a Porsche being pulled over. Good, they probably thought. He was also extremely conscious of the presence of enough quantities of a Class A drug on his person to be facing jail time. Oh shit, thought Cunningham.

  Half an hour before, Hanlon had looked approvingly at Detective Sergeant Whiteside as he shrugged himself into the brown suede jacket that felt as soft as warm butter and slipped a pair of Armani glasses on where they rested comfortably on the slight ridge in his nose from one of the three occasions it had been broken, twice in the line of duty and once in his own time. Hanlon had borrowed the clothes from the property store of goods confiscated from convicted criminals that were awaiting auction. The sergeant was dressed in the seized goods of a busted drug dealer the same build as Whiteside. It seemed appropriate to Hanlon that if Whiteside were impersonating a drug dealer he might as well dress the part. She felt it was a kind of poetic justice. The dealer’s wardrobe collection seized by the police, not including shoes, was probably worth a conservative fifty thousand, or would have been, when new. Whiteside loved clothes. Having the opportunity to wear an entire new outfit

  without worrying about the cost was a welcome novelty.

  ‘Do I get to keep these?’ asked Whiteside.

  ‘Why not?’ said Hanlon. The evidence storage manager shrugged. ‘Fine by me. Just submit a report later saying they’ve been damaged in police use and are no longer suitable for resale, so it’s all kosher. If DI Hanlon signs it, that’ll be good enoug
h.’

  ‘There’s your answer then,’ said Hanlon.

  Whiteside grinned happily. The civilian in charge of the confiscated goods in the property room, Dan Brudenell, was the brother of the PCSO whose life Hanlon had saved. It was Dan who had come to her after the event to say if ever she needed a favour, no matter what, just to ask. He’d been delighted to help when asked to kit Whiteside out. Whiteside’s own wardrobe was carefully selected and good quality, but Hanlon wanted him in the trappings of the genuine dealer. Whiteside wouldn’t spend three grand on a jacket even if he could afford to. ‘George’, his new alter ego, would.

  Hanlon now watched with amusement as Whiteside rubbed his short, clipped beard while he studied his appearance in the mirror of the sun visor of the unmarked police car. ‘I should have requested a Rolex,’ he said. Sergeant Thompson and Constable Childs, sitting in the back, studied the rear of his head.

  ‘You look so gay, sir!’ said Childs. Thompson put his hand over his mouth to mask a smile. Whiteside was actually gay, a fact known to just about everyone he worked with, but obviously not Constable Childs.

  Hanlon’s expressionless eyes met Whiteside’s. The sergeant decided to spare Childs’ blushes. His hard brown eyes rested on the reflection of the two policemen in the rear of the car. Childs was kind of cute, thought Whiteside speculatively. The prospect of action always made him horny. ‘Well,’ said Hanlon, as if divining his thoughts, which wouldn’t have surprised Whiteside. It was as if the woman was psychic sometimes. ‘Off you go, George. Time to make your dope deal.’

  Whiteside got out of the Ford and closed the door gently behind him. Hanlon watched his muscular back stretching the fabric of the jacket as he walked to the upmarket Notting Hill pub where he was about to sell ten grams of coke to one of London’s top criminal defendants. It was coming up to half past