The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  oh so superior girls at school who had looked down on her, who had sneered at her, who had belittled her, the girls who had ruined her childhood. She represented all the girls who had never liked her, never let her join their gangs. Well, suck on this, Kathy!

  Then there was her career. Clarissa was a failed actress; Kathy an in-your-face successful businesswoman. Who did Kathy think she was with her high-power job, swanking around all over the world (in Clarissa’s mind Kathy didn’t travel, she swanked, every step of her elegant, high-heeled shoes leaving footprints of smugness), attending meetings, speaking her foreign languages. Oooh, look at me, I’m speaking German. Oooh, look at me, I’m speaking Italian. Oooh, look at me, now I’m talking French. Are you tri-lingual? I bet you’re not.

  Then there was her beauty. Clarissa knew she herself was reasonably good-looking, and quite sexy, but she had to work on that, and there was no way on earth, no matter how many diets, how much aerobics, how much Zumba, that she would ever have Kathy’s long legs, Kathy’s neck, Kathy’s classic, fine-chiselled features. Women like Kathy were in the Style section of the Sunday Times. They modelled clothes for Boden. Clarissa despised them. She was everything that Clarissa wasn’t, but had longed to be, in one package. Slim, sophisticated, successful, almost certainly popular. She’d have been one of those girls who had taunted Clarissa (then called Clare) at primary school. The girls who used to sing:

  * * *

  ‘Clare Yate, Clare Yate

  Don’t kiss her at the garden gate! Don’t touch her, isn’t she big!

  Look at her, she’s a big fat pig.’

  Well, she wasn’t at school any more, she wasn’t called Clare Yate any more, and thanks to remorseless self-discipline, she wasn’t fat any more, and people didn’t chant hurtful things about her in playgrounds. Today she was Clarissa Yeats. And today she wasn’t going to eat any more shit in her life. She’d had a bellyful of it growing up. She didn’t take pain any more; she dished it out.

  It’s not as if the woman needed her looks anyway, not with her ‘career’. To make matters even more galling, Kathy always seemed to be doing something worthy, baking, yoga, exercise, ironing, reading foreign journals. In the toilet there were The Economist, Der Spiegel, Paris Match and the FT.

  Clarissa felt she was a living reproach. Kathy even had tragic glamour as a result of being a widow. Her husband would never grow bald, fat and old, never have hair sprout from his ears, never break her heart by having sex with a girl in his office or her best friend. He would remain an iconic, shining memory.

  And then, of course, there was her beautiful son.

  When the judge has finished with him, when Robbo has finished with him, he won’t look so beautiful then, Kathy.

  I can never have what you’ve got, Kathy, but I can, and I will, take it away from you, she thought. And it starts today. The Somali girl she had lured into a car where Robbo had dealt with her. The Turkish toddler she’d taken while following Mehmet. She knew the family routine and the gods had smiled on her when the man had left the boy of his own volition in

  her care.

  She shook her head with irritation when she thought of Robbo, huge, packed with weightlifter’s muscle, his shaved head decorated with those three inverted V’s like sergeant’s stripes. He’d really started to go off the rails of late. Clarissa blamed the drugs he took for his bodybuilding. Human growth

  hormone, extracted from some dead guy’s pituitary gland, as if that would do you good.

  The Somali girl he’d left in that bunker where the police had found her. They’d accepted his explanation that he’d thought it would be blamed on kindoku (Just don’t think, OK, said Conquest). Then the boy dumped, highly visibly, in the canal. I panicked, Robbo had said, I thought the Old Bill were going to pull my car. Well, Robbo didn’t know, but his future was under review and it would be a severance package, quite literally. They couldn’t put up with his erratic behaviour any more.

  Neither of them even began to suspect that Robbo, in his own way, had been paying tribute to the historic figure he truly venerated.

  Today was her third, then, and she knew it would go well. Peter was more of a challenge. Much more. He was tall and strong and, above all, she guessed he would be a fighter by nature. Not like the others. Destiny had already dealt Mariam, the Somali, a series of dreadful blows so it was almost as if she accepted her fate, she hadn’t fought back. Baby Ali couldn’t.

  The boy wouldn’t either. Not through choice. The boy wouldn’t know what had hit him.

  Earlier that day she had watched from the van as Kathy had left for the airport. Kathy had told her about the trip and her movements. London was such a perfect environment to work in. No one noticed vehicles. She left the van where she’d parked it so she wouldn’t lose its place. She had a council parking permit displayed on the dashboard. The plates on the van were fake. She knew from talking to Kathy – ‘It must be so hard for you when you travel to make arrangements for Peter! How do you manage?’ – the boy would be home about four thirty and was due to shower, change and then go to a friend’s party from seven until ten, then go to a sleepover and stay at

  another friend’s until Sunday evening when Kathy would pick him up. It would all work perfectly.

  She rehearsed it again in her mind. It was foolproof.

  Clarissa came back to the vehicle at four in the afternoon, accompanied by the dog. She had thought about leaving it in the van but was worried in case it started barking. You could commit virtually any crime in Britain and no one would do a thing, but leave a dog unattended in a vehicle and they’d lynch you.

  She had thought about taking the boy in the flat where there would be privacy, but he was tall and strong, and in the inevitable struggle she was worried about leaving DNA evidence. Of course, she had been in the flat for professional reasons, as an employee of Albion, so there was no reason why there shouldn’t be traces of her around, but she was thinking about blood or hair, things that shouldn’t be there, things that might look suspicious. There was going to be one hell of an investigation over Peter’s disappearance, that was for sure. A Somali and a Turk both with questionable pasts, both here illegally, were not so newsworthy. There was a public feeling it was almost their fault for being here in the first place. Nobody had asked them to come to Britain. Mariam hadn’t made any of the national papers. Baby Ali had warranted a paragraph. Even the TV footage from the canal hadn’t been used. A photogenic white boy with a beautiful, tragic mother, that would be a gift from the gods to journalists. That would go national.

  No, she thought, the street would be best, if all went accord

  ing to plan, and she could see no reason why it shouldn’t, the whole thing would be over in seconds. She had rehearsed over and over; she had used props. She knew her lines, the direction was thorough and clear, now she was impatient to get on stage.

  She looked at the clock in the car. Four fifteen. It was time to get ready.

  Showtime.

  Peter walked slowly home from school and turned into his road. The street was always quiet at this time. He had a lot to carry on a Friday. There was his PE kit, his heavy schoolbag with his textbooks and exercise books, and today he was further burdened with a papier mâché model of a cat that he’d made in art and had decided to give to his mum as a birthday present. He hadn’t painted it yet; he would do that at home. He was still undecided as to the colour scheme. Black and white would be easiest but tabby more of a challenge. His mum liked cats. She liked dogs too but when he asked, as he often did, about getting one, she’d always say that it would be too much of a responsibility. One day, thought Peter. One day, I’ll have a dog. It was, he decided, an achievable dream. He was a very practical boy.

  Not like Kemal in his class. Kemal wanted a horse. Like

  that was going to happen in Finchley.

  As he rounded the corner he saw the woman and the spaniel. It was a cocker spaniel, or similar, with a brown and white coat and one of its front l
egs was heavily bandaged. He guessed it had to be a stray. The woman, one leg kneeling on the pavement, was wearing a blue uniform and the van had the Haringey Council logo, a kind of asymmetric star, that to Peter’s eyes was strangely similar to the NATO emblem he’d seen on the military channel that he liked watching on TV.

  The dog-warden lady had managed to get the animal into a small, portable cage but she had some kind of cast on her hand, maybe it was broken, and would obviously struggle to lift the steel container, now heavy with dog, into the back of the van.

  Peter stopped and said politely, ‘Hello. Do you need some help?’ He was a very helpful boy. His school reports usually mentioned this. ‘Peter is very popular with the other boys and always ready to help out.’

  The woman looked up at him from where she was crouching beside the dog on the pavement. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, and smiled at him warmly.

  Peter noticed she was very pretty. He was just beginning to notice girls. There was a U-shaped scar between her eyebrows, which strangely made her look even more attractive. It was a paradox. He thought, maybe when I’m older I’ll understand things like that.

  ‘He’s got a collar but no tag,’ she said, pointing at the spaniel. The dog looked at them mournfully through the wire mesh of the cage as if it knew it was being talked about. ‘I need to take him back to the office so I can see if he’s been chipped.’ She looked ruefully at her bandaged wrist. ‘If you could get him into the back of the van for me? We can’t let him wander around the streets.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Peter, glad to be of help. The woman opened the back door of the van and Peter picked the cage up and placed it carefully on the floor.

  ‘Could you move it right to the front?’ she asked. ‘I can secure it better then. I don’t want it sliding around.’ Of course not, he thought, it’d scare the dog. Peter slowly and gently pushed the cage in, murmuring to the dog to relax it, and climbed in himself so he was squatting with his back to the woman.

  When undergoing an operation or a surgical procedure and injected with an intravenous anaesthetic and asked to count back from ten, it is round about five before darkness washes over the patient. It is often a derivative of sodium thiopental that has been administered. That is what was in the body of the

  syringe that Clarissa plunged into him as his back was turned, together with benzodiazepine to keep him under.

  Peter had to inject himself four times a day with insulin because of his non-functioning pancreas. That’s the price paid to live as a type-one diabetic, and he was more aware than most people of the sensation of a needle going into his flesh. He realized immediately what was happening. Two thoughts flashed through his mind: I’ve been injected, and, why? He felt the sting in his right buttock, but both of his hands were still wrapped round the cage with the dog and he was bent uncomfortably, confined in the narrow space of the small van. He tried to turn round but the woman’s hand was suddenly on his neck, jamming his head uncomfortably against the cage. He tried to kick, but the weight of her body was pressed against his heels.

  For a second he was more confused than alarmed. Is this

  some kind of joke? was his last, coherent thought, then he felt a roaring in his ears and a blackness darker than night enveloped him like a cloak.

  15

  Several hundred miles and an hour’s time difference away from London, Kathy flew into Flughafen Stuttgart, the city’s airport, home of Mercedes and Porsche. She had only hand luggage with her and there was no queue at passport control. She walked into the main concourse and looked around the clean, modern building with genuine pleasure. The Germanic lettering, the umlauts, the capital letters of the nouns, and the signature letter of the ‘esset’ that represented double ‘s’ in German script and looked like the Greek letter for Beta, greeted her like old friends.

  Kathy loved Germany. It was a love affair that had started as an exchange student in grimy, flat-as-a-pancake Berlin, been nurtured in a six-month ERASMUS university stint in Hamburg, and had been topped up ever since. She even quite liked the food. She spoke excellent German and the signs around her and the conversations she heard were as easy to understand as if they’d been in English, but they were, to her eyes and ears, pleasingly exotic. She heard a man’s voice call her name; it was her Siemens contact Max Brucker.

  ‘Max, good to see you. Wie geht’s? What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  Max smiled. Kathy was tall, about five ten, one metre seventy, but she only just reached Max’s shoulder. She was

  surprised by the rediscovery of just how big he was. ‘Bestens, Kathy, und wie geht’s du?’

  He took her solitary piece of hand luggage. ‘I thought I’d come and meet you,’ he said in English. Now it was Kathy’s turn to smile. She had forgotten, or maybe hadn’t acknowledged to herself, just how attractive she found Max. She thought to herself, just for a few hours I’m going to behave normally. Just for a few hours I’m not going to brood on the past or worry about the future. Maybe I’ll even flirt with him. Peter’ll be fine round at Sam’s. I worry too much about that boy, it can’t be healthy. Max smiled back. He thought Kathy was very attractive.

  Five streets away from where Peter lived, Annette Fielding took a migraine tablet out of its disproportionately sized piece of packaging, the same as a book of stamps, containing just the one blister-packed tiny tablet, and washed it down with some water. She didn’t like taking them. She thought she’d start building up an immunity to them and they were incredibly expensive, but she had no choice. Her head was killing her. The events of the next few hours certainly wouldn’t help.

  Sam, her son, had three friends over for the sleepover that was happening later, making four twelve-year-old boys who had to be fed and entertained. Tonight, with the agonizing pain in her head, she was dreading the noise levels. Frederica, her daughter, was out with some girls from her school but had promised to be back at a reasonable time. Like that’s going to happen! she thought. Freddie was sixteen and always vague about time. Declan, her husband, was stuck in Newcastle because of some systems glitch at work and wouldn’t be home until about 2 a.m. Well, she’d cope, she always did, but by God, she thought, I feel awful. If only she could crawl into

  bed, close the door and spend the next couple of days there. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  She made a cup of tea and looked despairingly round the small kitchen that still had a pile of washing up left from breakfast waiting patiently by the sink. The plates with their congealed food were stacked on top of each other; the cutlery sat there accusingly. The dirty tines of the forks pointed at her, why haven’t you cleaned us yet? She opened the dishwasher. That was full – at least it was full of clean plates rather than dirty ones, let’s be thankful for small mercies – and she started to unload it.

  To put them on to a work surface she had to move a basket of laundry whites in a crumpled, sulky heap waiting to be ironed – school shirts and Declan’s shirts mainly (why was she the only one in the house who seemed able to iron, for Christ’s sake? Why couldn’t Declan do some, it’s not that hard, is it?), and another basket of coloured laundry waiting to be washed. The dog nudged her hopefully with its damp nose; he needed feeding. And they were running short of milk. There was a bowl of fruit going off on the kitchen table and a big stack of the children’s schoolbooks that needed sorting out. There were unopened letters on top of the fridge, some of them bills and credit card statements, and she had seven messages on her phone, she could see the red digits glowing at her. Even inanimate things were nagging her now, and the whiteboard in the kitchen for messages seemed to be covered in reminders of other things that needed doing.

  Sometimes, and tonight was one of those nights, Annette

  felt completely overwhelmed by life, outraced by the tide of things that needed to be done.

  The migraine headache was really kicking in now. Christ, I feel awful, she thought. Annette sat down on the tiled floor

  of the kitchen and buried h
er head in Dizzy, their retriever’s, fur for comfort. She felt nauseous and hoped the pill would take effect before she was actually sick. The dog smelt warm and comforting and licked her hand consolingly. Down at this level she could see that the kitchen floor needed cleaning and so did the skirting boards. Why did skirting boards have a groove in them that served no function but to get clogged with dirt? Whose bright idea was that? Why have I even got skirting boards in the sodding kitchen? She felt like crying. No, she thought, I feel like howling and then crying.

  There was something she felt she hadn’t done, something important, but couldn’t bring it to mind. She was feeling too ill to concentrate on the thought. Then her stomach spasmed and she thought, ‘Oh God, here we go,’ and quickly made her way to the toilet. She ran the taps in the basin in case any of the boys overheard her, and was sick into the bowl as quietly as she could be, holding her hair up with one hand so it didn’t get dirty.

  Jesus, now she really did feel terrible. All she wanted to do was curl up on the loo floor but that simply wasn’t an option. Dimly, she heard the phone start to ring in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, go away!’ she groaned.

  In Stuttgart, in her comfortable room at the five-star, quietly luxurious Althoff Hotel, Kathy let the phone ring five times and then hung up. She enjoyed staying in hotels. She liked the solitude and anonymity. Annette must be busy, she thought. She had promised Peter she wouldn’t phone him anyway – ‘It’s like you’re checking up on me, Mum.’ He’d be fine. She undressed and got into the shower. It was roomy, spacious and had a large, powerful jet, much better than the one at home. She turned the heat up to the maximum her body could bear, revelling in the

  sensation. A shower after a journey, she thought, what could be more fun than that. The bathroom gleamed and shone through the transparent shower screen. She felt intensely happy.