The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  The old imam, immaculate in an antique three-piece suit, winced gently from the pain of the arthritis in his left hand and then smiled at himself. ‘Why me?’ he had been on the point of thinking. Why did God see fit to inflict arthritis on me. Then he thought, Majid got the heart, I got arthritis. I shouldn’t complain. I mustn’t be impatient. It is not my will, Osman thought, that is important. What I will does not matter.

  Enver sipped his Fanta and glared at the hunched, bearded figure of Mehmet. The Sergeant was normally a very patient man but Mehmet’s slowness in coming forward had made any investigation hugely difficult. Mehmet sat on his chair, shoulders rounded, twisting his fingers uncomfortably. He was hollow-faced, dark rings around his eyes. He hadn’t slept properly since Thursday. Life, for Mehmet, had taken on an unreal, nightmarish quality, as if he was living in some kind of cave and events were flickering away on the wall, like a terrible hallucination. It’s Monday today, Enver was thinking, and this abduction had happened on Thursday. Four days, gone. His frustration at this time lag was clearly visible on his face. Osman gently recapitulated for Enver’s benefit the problems that Mehmet faced and why he had done, or more to the point, hadn’t done, what he did.

  The biggest problem was of course that he was here illegally

  and there was currently a crackdown on Turkish illegal workers. If Mehmet had been Kurdish, he could maybe have claimed some form of asylum, citing Turkish persecution, but coming from a country that had wanted to join the EU, and indeed had been backed in that by the British government, it was hard to see an asylum request being granted.

  The next problem was one of debt. Mehmet owed a great deal of money to his family in Turkey for getting him over here. It was money that had to be repaid. It was a debt of honour as well as of hard cash. Currently half of everything he earned went straight back to Cappadocia, remitted to pay back what he owed. Mehmet paid no tax or National Insurance and both he and Mehmet’s employers were keen to keep it that way. They did not want the local Inland Revenue on their backs. Tax avoidance and the employment of illegal immigrants were very hot topics at the moment; trouble was to be avoided at all costs. Osman explained to Enver that Mehmet was working off a debt of about twenty thousand pounds for the fraudulent paperwork and the various bribes that had got him and Nur, his wife, over here. If he were deported, he could never pay it back.

  And now Reyhan, his daughter, was at school and Nur

  pregnant again. Mehmet had been hoping – though maybe hope was the wrong word – that Ali had been kidnapped for money. In Cappadocia such things were not too unusual. If that had been the case, somehow he’d have found the cash. But as the days had gone past and no demands had come, it had become obvious to him this wasn’t so.

  Enver looked again at Mehmet, at the short, stocky muscular peasant who in turn looked at the police sergeant with anguish, as if it lay within Enver’s grasp to somehow make everything OK again. It was infuriating to be made the repository of such blind, unrealistic hopes. They wanted him to launch an unofficial

  investigation into a child’s disappearance, somehow using as much of the Metropolitan Police’s official time and resources as possible. He made up his mind to say ‘no’. If we do this at all, he thought to himself, you can go through official channels. I’m not an unofficial cheerleader for London’s Turkish community. If he said yes, he suspected – no, he knew, he didn’t suspect –

  it would be the thin end of the wedge. He could easily visualize endless petitions from London Turks. ‘Go to Enver, he’ll sort you out. He did it for Mehmet Yilmaz, he can’t refuse you.’

  He cleared his throat to say, I can’t help you. It was an official-sounding noise, the prelude to a statement. He put his official face on, straightening his posture to add authority. As he did so, Mehmet produced a small, grey, woollen rabbit from his jacket pocket. Mehmet cradled it gently in his hands. He looked at it and Enver heard his breathing change to a deep, agonized rasp, as if putting as much air as possible inside his lungs would somehow compensate for the pain.

  The stitching along the knitted toy’s spine had long ago come adrift and the toy rabbit had been neatly, lovingly, sewn back together with black thread. Enver could guess what it was and who it had belonged to.

  ‘Please,’ said Mehmet, holding out Ali’s toy rabbit like a talisman to Enver. His eyes filled with tears. It was the only English word he’d spoken so far. Maybe the only one he knew. It was enough. Enver knew then he was going to help.

  Enver cursed himself mentally for a fool and took his notebook out. He knew too he was going to regret this. Well, he could always put in for a transfer to Norfolk. He’d heard it had the lowest number of immigrants in the UK. King’s Lynn, he guessed, would be Turkish free. He would be safe from his family out there. He turned to his uncle. ‘Tell him to go through the events of last Thursday.’ Mehmet started speaking; Enver started writing.

  8

  There are some two thousand miles of canals in Britain, about two hundred miles or so of which – such as the Grand Union Canal, the Hertford Union Canal and the River Lea Navigation

  – loop and meander, or strike purposefully, through London. One of the oldest of the capital’s waterways is the Regent’s Canal, which runs through the heart of London like a secret artery from Islington to Little Venice, built about two centuries ago. The uses of the canals have changed from transport to leisure but they’ve survived more or less intact.

  It was a man called Ron James who found the body. There was an inset day for teacher training at his grandson’s school, and his daughter and her husband were both at work. He had taken the seven-year-old to fish on the Regent’s Canal down near Maida Vale. The towpath gets quite busy and Ron and the boy had arrived early to stake out a place. There were some nice roach and perch in the water down there, maybe a carp if they were really lucky. His grandson enjoyed fishing and Ron was pleased to have this bond with him. He particularly liked showing him how to tie the knots and bait the hooks. The boy was good at knots and was always fascinated by the maggots writhing in their small, polythene tub.

  Most of the people on the canal bank at that hour of the

  day were runners and joggers, with the occasional dog walker,

  paying no attention to the canal’s waters. There were few fishermen around.

  ‘Can I put the maggot on, Granddad?’ asked the boy.

  ‘’Course you can, son. I’ll just get this on for you.’ Ron slid

  the fine nylon line through the eye of the float and let Jared, his grandson, carefully bait the small hook with one of the maggots. He cast the line into the water for the boy and then he noticed the small bundle floating down by some rushes that grew near the lock gates and had escaped the last canal clean-up in the previous year.

  ‘Jared,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, Granddad?’

  ‘Do you see that man sitting back there, the one with the really long rod?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you go and ask him if he’s had any luck so far today?

  See if the fish are biting.’

  ‘Sure, Granddad.’ The small, self-confident boy walked happily back the way they’d come.

  Ron had never seen a dead body before outside of a hospital, but he realized immediately what he was looking at. It was far too realistic to be a toy. He had hoped it might be a large doll but he knew, almost instinctively, it wasn’t the case. This year there had been a lot of algal bloom on the canal, but here by the lock it was comparatively clear. The child’s hair floated gently around the back of his head in the dark, still waters. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been scanning the surface of the water for possible obstructions to his line.

  He waited for Jared to move a little distance down the towpath to ask the fisherman how he was doing so the child wouldn’t overhear his conversation, then he took his phone out. Ten minutes later the first couple of police arrived.

  Baby Ali had been found.

  The lock gate, a f
ew metres away from where the body was snagged on the reeds, had been recently repainted black. White numerals denoting its number on the canal were stencilled on to the top lintel of one of the two powerfully thick mitre gates that controlled the flow of water in the lock. Ron noticed – the numbers didn’t signify anything to him – that it was Gate 18.

  9

  Enver watched the two police divers from the marine policing unit as they gently and carefully moved the body of the child into the webbing of the cradle, so it could be pulled free of the water and up on to the bank of the canal. The water of the Regent’s Canal was mournful, dark and still. It was now 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning and the towpath and canal banks had been cordoned off on both sides. On the other divide of the police tape, a group of TV reporters had assembled. They eyed each other disdainfully. By contrast, most of the technical crew with them – cameramen, sound engineers and other outside broadcast personnel – knew each other from similar, past occasions and there was a sense of, if not quite a party atmosphere, then a definite feeling of good cheer, of camaraderie, as they caught up with news and gossip. This was not shared on the other side of the police line. Grim efficiency was the pervasive atmosphere. There was very little talking beyond what was necessary.

  Enver had worked on two previous child deaths, liaising

  with CEOP, the child protection people. He knew the statistics, themselves a subject of controversy. NSPCC figures put the number of deaths of under-sixteens at one child killed on average every week and one baby killed every twenty days in England and Wales. However, alternative sources put the

  figures much higher, at one to two hundred per year. The figures weren’t huge but they all knew that the investigation would be depressing enough. Whichever way you looked at it, it would be depressing. It could hardly be anything but. The chances were statistically high that the parents were involved and there would be a tearful litany of denial and attempt to shift the blame elsewhere if they were the killers. The alternative, that there was a child killer on the loose, an Ian Huntley or an Ian Brady or maybe even children involved in killing children, like the Bulger case, was perhaps even worse. Social services would be involved, newspapers, external agencies; it would be a messy and unpleasant investigation. And to make the investigation even more problematic, it would be conducted under an intense media scrutiny and an atmosphere of public semi-hysteria.

  He watched as the small corpse, now on the bank, was

  carefully and gently zipped into a child’s body bag. Enver found the sight of the small container with its pathetic contents deeply distressing. He thought of Mehmet, his anguished, tear-stained face. He thought of Ali’s toy, Grey Rabbit. He couldn’t tell if he felt angry or depressed. Above all, he felt numb and slightly sick. The MPU men climbed out of the water, this part of their job done. Soon they would be joined by the Underwater and Confined Spaces Search Team to check that there were no more bodies down there. Enver guessed visibility would be dreadful in the canal. He’d often wondered why anyone would want to work for UCSST. He could understand people liking diving, not a passion he himself shared, but moving around, groping about in zero visibility in polluted canals, rivers and flooded buildings in search of bodies or evidence was hideous. Even when the search area wasn’t aquatic, UCSST would be crawling around unpleasant places. He’d seen them once having to extract a body from a ventilation flue in a pub in White City.

  A burglar over Christmas had tried to break into the premises like a criminally minded Santa, by crawling into the hood of the extractor fans from the kitchen, which rose funnel-like from the roof behind the building. He’d become trapped inside and because the pub kitchens were closed for three days, no one had heard his cries for help. He’d been in there for ten days while the kitchen staff had tried to work out where the terrible smell was coming from.

  Enver knew the body they’d found had to be Mehmet’s son, Ali. Today was the day after he had spoken to Mehmet and his uncle. So far, all he had been able to do was confirm that the supermarket had no CCTV record of the incident. The shop system was an old XDH one, connected to twenty-eight cameras internally and half a dozen externally. It was a good system: colour and high-resolution. There were so few external cameras because the shop car park was relatively small. The security manager, an ex-soldier, had been very helpful, but they only stored images for three days, seventy-two hours.

  And, of course, they had no member of staff either called Aisha or answering to Mehmet’s sketchy description. And that was as far as he’d got in his unofficial capacity. At least now they’d be able to do things properly, although Enver suspected it would all be too late. If only Mehmet had come forward earlier. He knew too that he would be in for an uncomfortable time explaining to his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Ludgate, why he was able to identify the body. It wasn’t that he had done anything particularly wrong, he hadn’t had time, but he knew Ludgate would be in a bad mood and he’d be in the firing line.

  He could see Jim Ludgate now, stocky and balding, wearing a suit that looked slept in, talking to a slim, dark-haired woman he didn’t recognize. Ludgate looked irritated; the woman,

  expressionless. Enver was a believer in doing unpalatable things quickly. Oh well, he thought, may as well get things over with. Hopefully, Ludgate won’t be too interested to know how one of his officers had managed to become personally involved with the illegal immigrant parents of a murdered child.

  He walked over to the DCS. Movement made him aware of the weight he was carrying. He was suddenly and ridiculously conscious of the tightness of his shirt against his growing belly. Enver was an ex-athlete. He’d been a boxer before becoming a policeman and now, freed from the constraints of having to train and diet to make a weight, his stomach had relished its freedom with predictable results. A section of unwearable shirts in his wardrobe was steadily growing. They were simply too small. Some he could no longer even button around his stomach. It wasn’t just his belly. He felt he could live with that. Even worse were the rolls of surplus flesh on his sides, above his hips. I’ve got love handles, he’d think to himself gloomily. Quite often he would grasp the fatty flesh in each hand and jiggle it up and down angrily in a fit of self-loathing. It really wasn’t the time to be thinking about dieting, he thought, as he approached Ludgate.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ he said.

  Ludgate looked up, away from the woman. Enver saw her face properly for the first time. He noticed that her long dark hair could do with cutting and she had a pale, intense face, bare of make-up. He had no idea who she was. He guessed she was one of the scene of crimes people. There were dark circles around her eyes as if she habitually slept badly. She looked like the kind of person you might see in a line-up as a fanatic for some militant cause.

  ‘Morning, Sergeant,’ said Ludgate. There was an unmistakably sour note to Ludgate’s voice. He knew Enver by sight and, although Enver had a good, some would say very good,

  record, the DCS had never really acknowledged him. It was a slight that had not gone unnoticed at the Wood Green station, particularly by Enver. Enver put it down to racism. Most people liked him. He was an easy-going man by nature and not used to hostility, except as a result of his job.

  It was unusual to see the DCS at a crime scene. Ludgate had very nearly put in his thirty years and was well known for studiously avoiding anything that might be regarded as hard work. He was a popular enough figure, though, loyal to his men and trustworthy. Or that was the myth anyway. Ludgate waved a vague, dismissive hand at the canal scene behind them. ‘Bad business, Sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Enver was aware that the woman was studying him with cold, intelligent eyes, as if trying to work out something about him, maybe to place him. He was still vain enough to wonder what she made of him, a powerfully built thirty-year-old with thick, black hair, a drooping black moustache and sad, sleepy brown eyes. And, of course, a fat stomach. Despite himself not finding her remotely attractive, he tried to suck it in. All that happe
ned was the band of iron-hard muscle he still had around his middle contracted, but the flab stayed where it was. And the love handles. You couldn’t suck those in. He must do something about it. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what. He didn’t even have the excuse of ignorance. I need more will power, he thought. More exercise, less carbs. He wished she’d go away. He didn’t want SOCO there witnessing what could well be an unpleasant conversation. One that could lead to a very public bollocking.

  ‘Was there anything in particular, Sergeant?’ Ludgate was

  beginning to look impatient, evidently willing him to get to the point. Enver didn’t want to speak in front of her but he was left with no choice.

  ‘I think I might have information about the child’s identity, sir,’ he said.

  Ludgate raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quick work, Sergeant. Oh, this is DI Hanlon, by the way, I’m sure you’ve heard of her. Our Tottenham Riots Pin-up Girl.’

  Enver kept his face expressionless. Ludgate’s old-school policing habits, he knew from rumour and anecdotes, extended into casual racism according to some, hardcore racism according to others, or harmless ‘banter’ if you believed his supporters. That made Enver dislike him on a secondary level. Personal rudeness to himself; racial rudeness to others. Maybe the two were interlinked. Now it seemed Ludgate didn’t like women either. There was no mistaking the venom in Ludgate’s voice behind the Pin-up Girl jibe. It was also hard to imagine anyone less like a vapid lingerie model than Hanlon.

  Hanlon remained silent, impassive. Enver was impressed. It wasn’t that she was blanking Ludgate out; it was if he didn’t even exist. Her face was like a mask. There was no narrowing of eyes, raising of eyebrows. No reaction at all. So, he thought, this is the famous Hanlon. Everyone knew the riot story. There were other rumours too about Hanlon and violence. Rumour had it she’d hospitalized a fellow officer for calling her a ‘fag hag’, some rumour about her and her sergeant. He had also been told by someone that she was a triathlete and competed in several Iron Man competitions. Reputedly, she was one of the top amateurs in the country. Enver knew that an Iron Man event meant a 2.4 mile swim, a 100 plus mile cycle race and then running a full marathon. He doubted he could waddle