The Stolen Children Read online

  Stephen picked up his phone and was silent for a minute as he read the message there.

  “Gaskell’s back at the station,” he told me. “They’ve got some information from the hospital.”

  “And they’ll fill us in when we get there?” I guessed.

  Generally, we frowned upon sharing details of cases over text because of privacy. The press was getting tech-savvy enough to hack mobile phones these days, and it’d be catastrophic for the police station to have a leak like that, especially from a phone belonging to Stephen or me. We were privy to the type of cases that a journalist might really get their teeth into.

  My thoughts turned again to the teenage boy and the cramped, dingy cupboard. I planned where we could start looking for information, and what questions I might ask the boy, when he was ready for it, which may not be for some time.

  “Doing alright?” Stephen checked.

  I’d clearly been silent for longer than usual and gave him a nod. “Just thinking.”

  Stephen’s stomach rumbled as I was parking up outside the station, and I sent him an incredulous look. “You’re hungry?”

  He shrugged. “Hey, it is lunchtime, Mitchell. And plus, I can’t control my belly noises, can I?”

  My lips twitched up at the side, but I just shook my head as I got out of the car. “You go ahead. I’m definitely not hungry.”

  Stephen looked at me with a frown for a moment before he nodded. “You want a snack for later?”

  I shook my head and turned away to head into the station, hearing Stephen’s sigh before he walked away towards the shop across the road. The police station probably kept the place in business with our frequent trips there at all times of the day.

  I sat down at my desk and checked my emails for updates while I waited for Stephen to get back. Gaskell popped his head out of his office a few minutes later, and I looked up.

  “No Huxley?” he asked.

  “Off to get lunch, sir.”

  Gaskell grunted. “I want both of you in here when he’s back.” He retreated back into his office and shut the door without waiting for an answer, and I nodded to myself.

  My emails didn’t offer much illumination on the new case, so I got started on preliminary paperwork, though there were large gaps that I couldn’t fill in yet. I still didn’t know who the teenage boy was, for example, or why he’d been kept prisoner in that house.

  I was staring into space, lost in my thoughts, when Stephen returned with a bottle of coke, a baguette and a couple of bags of crisps. One of which was my favourite flavour, and I guessed what Stephen was going to do even before he dropped it onto my desk.

  “I said I didn’t need anything,” I protested.

  Stephen looked at me sideways as he opened up his baguette and took a bite. “I made an elective decision,” he said around a mouthful of bread. “Your poor stomach will thank me.”

  I pretended annoyance at him and stuffed the crisps into my desk drawer, knowing that I’d eat them later, once I’d gotten over the shock of the place and into the nitty-gritty of elusive details and clues that didn’t match up that kept me in policing in the first place.

  “Oh, Gaskell wanted to see us,” I said.

  Stephen was only three bites into his lunch and made a sad noise in response to my statement. I couldn’t help but grin. Getting between Stephen and food had a tendency to make him irritable, but I guessed that he was as eager as I was to hear the information that Gaskell had for us. I guessed right, and Stephen put his lunch down with a sigh.

  “Alright, let’s go see what we’re working with.”

  “Aye.” I got up out of my chair. “Hopefully we’ll have fingerprints matched to a known criminal with an address, and we can wrap this up by tea-time.”

  Stephen sighed. “You sound like a newbie again.”

  “Jeez, are old-timers not allowed to hope around here?”

  Stephen sent me a wry look. “No. It’s forbidden.”

  I shook my head at him as I knocked on Gaskell’s door and received a call to enter almost immediately. We stepped inside and took a seat opposite Gaskell.

  The man looked much as he always did, which was to say, overworked and faintly annoyed. His thick eyebrows, semi-permanent brow furrows and slightly grizzled look gave him the look of an ex-military man, or a cigar-smoking hill farmer, neither of which I had any reason to think he’d even been. But despite his tired expression, I knew him to be diligent and fair and, after working alongside him on a difficult case, I trusted him and knew that he respected me in return.

  “Mitchell, Huxley, you’re leading this one. The hospital called me, but I gave them your number in the future,” he said, nodding at me. “We’ve got some details on the boy and a tentative ID.”

  “Aye?” I said hopefully.

  Gaskell nodded. “He surfaced long enough to give us a name; Lawrence Wooding. I’ll let you look that up, but it looks like a match with a missing student. The hospital won’t release medical details on him without parental consent, so you’ll need to track down a next of kin.”

  I nodded. This was all good information, and I had my notebook out. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my memory, but that I found it easier to put my thoughts in order when I’d transferred them onto paper, like moving the information from one place to another freed up some space in my head for processing it better.

  Gaskell rounded it up quickly after that, and Stephen and I headed efficiently back to our desks to look deeper into what Gaskell had told us.

  I scanned the reports on the system and rubbed my knuckles over my slightly bristled chin absentmindedly.

  “He went missing about a month ago,” I said, frowning. “Him and his whole family.”

  Stephen was reading the same thing. “It was the school that reported him absent, and no-one could trace the parents, either. They all disappeared.” Stephen leaned back in his chair, making it creak.

  “He’s only seventeen.”

  I looked it over again, but little progress had been made in the case, which had only fairly recently been reported. The school had been lax with the speed of their report, I thought sourly.

  “Thoughts?” Stephen asked.

  I looked over at him. “Unsure as yet,” I admitted. “We need to look into the family more, the parents, to see if they were involved in anything shady. Then we need to see if we can talk to the kid.”

  “Lawrence,” Stephen said.

  “Yeah, Lawrence.” I thought how difficult a time the teenager had had, worse than I could imagine, and what a long road he had ahead of him. Stephen was silent, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. But we had work to do, and feeling sorry for the kid wasn’t going to turn up any answers on his missing parents, or the people who’d been keeping him locked up.

  “Let’s get to it, then.”

  Two

  One month ago

  Aaron clenched his hands on the steering wheel, his jaw tight and his shoulders so rigid that they ached. His wife was in the passenger seat to his left and was sitting very still, staring blankly ahead of her with her hands clasped tightly together in her lap.

  How dare they, was all he could think. How dare they take his son from his family and demand money from them. The leather of the steering wheel creaked with how hard he was squeezing it, and when the lights flashed up red in front, he had to slam on the brakes to bring them to a stop in time. His wife, Ellie, didn’t even seem to notice as she was jerked forwards in the seat and stayed completely silent. She seemed to be in shock, but Aaron was just angry.

  He’d worked his way up from nothing, and he’d put his blood and sweat into earning what he had now. Some low-lives threatening his son in an attempt to steal everything made Aaron so angry he was practically shaking.

  Ellie lifted her hand and put it on Aaron’s thigh in a comforting gesture that still made Aaron twitch, wound so tightly that he couldn’t help it. She didn’t usually touch him spontaneously these days, and he looked at her in
surprise.

  “It’ll be alright.”

  He wished that he believed her. He wasn’t entirely sure that she believed it either.

  They’d given up the money. They’d not gone to the police. The scum who’d done this had threatened his son’s life if they’d not complied, so, as furious as Aaron might be, he’d sucked it up and done it. Better to go back to living off toast and baked beans like he’d done in his twenties, than to lose his son. They could sell the house, and the company was still doing well. It wasn’t worth the risk. Aaron had wanted financial success since he’d been old enough to see how much it’d pained his mum to give him nothing more than chocolate coins and socks at Christmas, but his son came first.

  Always.

  “Not far now,” he said, rather than respond to Ellie’s reassurance. He wanted so badly for her to be right, but he had some insurance under his thickly padded jacket, just in case. It’d not been easy to get hold of it when they’d only had a couple of days to get the money as well, but he’d wanted a contingency plan, and there were always people willing to sell when you had money. It sat uncomfortably up against his ribcage now, making him uneasy and confident in equal measure.

  They wound further up the pitch-black road, having left the light of York behind them long ago, and now there was nothing but the car’s headlights to illuminate the way. The sky clouded over densely enough to show no sign of where the moon was, and Aaron tried not to see that as a bad omen.

  Not long now, he tried to tell himself. Then he’d see his son again, and they’d go home as a family. He wanted nothing more.

  The sat nav calmly informed them that they’d arrived at their destination and, uncertainly, Aaron slowed the car to a halt, peering out at the blackness. There wasn’t much to see, and Aaron felt a shiver of unease make its way across his tense shoulders.

  A tap on the window made both Ellie and Aaron jump violently. Aaron’s car door opened up before Aaron could collect himself, and then a thickly muscled arm appeared. Aaron instinctively backed away, shoving away the man trying to grab hold of him. Ellie gasped in shock or pain beside him, and Aaron twisted around to check on her.

  “Ellie!” he yelled when he saw her being manhandled out of the car. Distracted, someone grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the warm, lit car into the darkness outside. There was nothing but the wind, his own frantic breathing and the harsher breaths of the big man with an iron grip on him.

  “Get the hell off me,” he snarled, struggling against the bigger man like a trapped rat.

  A voice growled back, “Shut up. You wanna see your son, you’ll behave.”

  Much as he hated being manhandled and dragged around, Aaron grudgingly acquiesced. He could sense that there were others around him and, when the car doors slammed shut behind him and the car’s inner lights shut off, he could make out the fainter glow of torchlight in the distance.

  His eyes began to adjust slowly as his captor pulled him off the tarmac road and onto rutted grass, stumbling and struggling to find his way.

  “Somebody, turn a torch on,” a man’s voice said from behind him, the same man who was holding him firmly and dragging him forwards.

  A torch clicked on nearby and Aaron looked anxiously around for his wife, but the torch was trained on the ground, and he couldn’t see her.

  “Ellie?”

  He received a hard smack over the head for it and heard no response from his wife.

  The thugs led the pair a good distance across the field, the long grass soaking Aaron’s shoes and the base of his trousers, and the uneven ground almost giving him a twisted ankle.

  “Where are we going?” he said but was just shoved forwards silently. It was eerie, the keening wind rushing past his ears and nothing around but darkness, and Aaron’s heart was racing. He could help but fear that their captors had brought he and Ellie out here to dispose of them, not to retrieve their son at all. But it was too late to wish he’d acted differently now, and at least he had his insurance still tucked under his arm.

  When they finally came to a halt, there was the sound of gently rushing water and the moving torch beam reflected off the rippling surface. The sound of footsteps approaching from the front was accompanied by bobbing torch beams which blinded Aaron when they got too close. He hissed and tried to shield his eyes, but the man who was holding tight to his arms wouldn’t let him.

  “Where’s my son?” he demanded, harsh and hard. He was cold and afraid, and it made him angry.

  “We’ll get to that,” a new, deep voice said, coming from the dark space above a torch so that Aaron couldn’t see his face. “Allow me to remind you, Mr Wooding, that we’re the ones asking questions here. I can still gut your son, remember?”

  Aaron thrashed against the man, still keeping him pinned. “You don’t touch him!” he snapped. “You-”

  A heavy fist landed against his stomach, knocking the breath from his lungs and making him fold forwards with a strangled gasp.

  “Your son is perfectly safe,” the man continued evenly. “But only as long as you cooperate. Are you going to cooperate, Mr Wooding?”

  Aaron gritted his teeth as he straightened up, thinking longingly of putting his hand under his arm and… but he couldn’t yet. He still didn’t know where his boy was.

  “Yes,” Aaron snapped. “I’ll cooperate.”

  “Good. How much is your son worth to you?”

  Aaron blinked. “What do y-?”

  “Quiet. We’re not done with you yet, nor your son. You’ve got enough padding in your bank for another transfer, don’t you think?”

  Aaron snarled. “Give me my son.” The fist to the gut didn’t surprise him this time. They weren’t going to give him their boy. They wanted more.

  “You’ll get him plenty after you’ve transferred the money,” the man said coldly. “But maybe he isn’t worth that much to you? Is your bank balance more important, Mr Wooding?”

  “Of course not.” Aaron was shaking with rage, still hunched over. He could barely see in the dark, and he didn’t know where Ellie was, since he hadn’t heard a peep from her since they were grabbed. He hoped that she was sensibly staying silent and wasn’t unconscious. Worry for her and his son fired him up, and he couldn’t wait any longer, anticipating itching under his skin like ants.

  Fury overriding caution, he threw his head back, the back of his skull colliding with the nose of the man behind him with a solid, wet noise. Suddenly released, Aaron fell forwards, sticking his hand under his coat, pulling the weapon from its holster. His boy in his mind and rage rushing through him, he levelled the gun where he thought the leader was and pulled the trigger, the sound of it shockingly loud in the dead night.

  The still tension erupted in movement and noise, with the kidnappers yelling and torch beams waving wildly. Aaron jerked himself free when someone tried to grab him again, bringing up the gun and firing again. There was a loud yell, but Aaron couldn’t be sure whether it was from being hit, or the shock of the gun going off.

  “Ellie!” he yelled, desperate to know where she was and that she was alright.

  A torch shined directly in his face suddenly blinded him and threw up a hand to cover his face. He never saw it coming, but felt it like a punch to the chest, no different to the punch to the gut earlier. The impact crushed the air out of him, and he wheezed before collapsing.

  Torchlight still in his face, he couldn’t see properly, but looking down at himself, a stain spread across his chest. He tried to raise his hand to fire again, to hit whoever who’d done this to him, but while he managed to squeeze the trigger, he couldn’t seem to raise his hand high enough to point it upwards. Before he could get off another shot, someone kicked the gun out of his hand.

  “Your son will pay for this,” a voice told him from above, and Aaron groaned, lurching forwards as he tried to grab the man, but he just fell forwards. Aaron tried to turn his head but couldn’t. His chest felt hot, like it was burning, and he couldn’t breathe.
Liquid bubbled out from between his chapped lips.

  The torches disappeared away from Aaron, leaving him alone in the dark. Aaron lay on the wet grass and thought what a terrible mistake he’d make. He tried to fix Ellie and his son’s faces in his mind, but he hardly felt that he deserved to. He’d failed them both.

  Three

  Progress was slow but steady, as bits and pieces of information began to emerge, and I rubbed my head. Stephen came over with a mug of strong coffee for me, and I gave him a grateful nod. “Ta.”

  He sat down and sipped his tea. “What’ve we got, then?”

  I straightened in my chair, wincing as my stiff back complained, and scanned over the notes I’d made.

  “Alright, well, it’s looking likely that it was some kind of ransom or hostage situation,” I started. “Lawrence, the boy, belongs to a pretty wealthy family. His father started up a dieting company about a decade ago, and they’re doing extremely well. What’s that face mean?”

  Stephen’s expression had scrunched up like he’d smelled something bad. “Nothing. Can’t stand dieting companies, products that pretend they’re some stupid miracle cure and rip people off. Immoral, isn’t it?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Not really relevant right now, but I hear your point.”

  “Making money off other people’s misery, that’s what I think.”

  “Moving on,” I said pointedly. “He attended a prestigious private school, er, Prince’s school, it’s called. His teachers said he’s a bright lad, looking to do business at Oxford or something like that.”

  Stephen made a noise of acknowledgement, looking sombre.

  “Apparently he went missing on a weekend and didn't turn up to school on the Monday.” I paused. “You talked to the hospital, didn’t you? Anything useful?”

  Stephen grimaced. “We couldn’t get a next of kin from the school. They only had records for the parents. So, without that, the hospital won’t share it. He’ll be assigned someone from the state to be his advocate if no relatives show up soon.”