From the Cradle (3 page)

But there was no hump. At first, Helen thought she was just lying uncharacteristically flat under the duvet, which was pulled up, as though she was hiding. Fear flooded her entire body, as though dropped on her out of a bucket above her head. She ran over to the bed and whipped back the duvet.

Frankie was gone.

Chapter 2
Patrick – Day 1

He was hallucinating children. There, in the space between lamp-posts, a shadow thrown against a wall by the headlights of a passing car. Another at the entrance to an alleyway, submerging into the darkness like a night-swimmer going under, slipping from sight. A small figure in the rain, weaving between legs in a crowd. A white face against a smudged bus window. A city of little ghosts. Then he would blink and rub his eyes and the child would be gone.

‘You look shattered.’ His partner, DS Carmella Masiello, looked over at him. It was just past eleven
P.M.
, and DI Patrick Lennon was giving Carmella a lift to the new-build apartment she shared with her
other
partner, Jenny. He wondered if she knew how much he envied her. His own home life couldn’t have been more different.

‘Your eyes – they look a little like a basset hound’s.’

‘Thanks, Carmella. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself. I was told once that I have sleepy eyes, and that it’s sexy.’

He temporarily angled the rearview mirror towards himself so he could see his own eyes. He did look knackered. He hadn’t been taking care of himself, not the way Gill used to – she was always buying him eye serums and moisturisers that he felt embarrassed using. ‘But you don’t want to ruin your good looks,’ she would say, further embarrassing him. He was six foot two, with brown hair and matching eyes, and he’d been told he looked more like an alt-
country
singer than a cop. He didn’t believe it though – he didn’t think he was anything special and neither, apparently, did his partner.

Carmella’s laughter drowned out a whole chorus and half a verse of the Cure song that was playing on the car stereo. ‘There’s a difference between sleepy and knackered,’ she said when she finally got hold of herself.

‘There’s also a big difference between having me as a partner and having Winkler.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

He smiled, then remembered what they’d been talking about, and why he was so tired, and the smile vanished into the shadows with all the ghosts.

Seven days ago on June 2nd, three-year-old Isabel Hartley, known to the public as Izzy since the tabloids had shortened her name for the sake of their headlines, had been taken from the living room of her family home in Richmond, where she was watching TV. Isabel’s dad Max had been out the front, waxing his beloved car. Then he got an important call from work on his mobile and went inside, leaving the front door open, and up the stairs to his office to dig out some papers. He was up there for twenty minutes. When he came back downstairs, Isabel was no longer in the living room. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Max Hartley was something in the City, loaded, the kind of person who, according to common perception, had little devil’s horns beneath his hair and a pointy tail concealed beneath his Hugo Boss suit. The mother, Fiona, was a former catalogue model who counter-balanced her husband’s profession by organizing charity fund-raisers. They lived in one of the best postcodes in the country, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. The Hartleys never thought that their child would be taken from their front room i
n th
e middle of the afternoon, certainly not on a street like the one they lived on.

Two days later, June 4th, another child had been abducted. Liam McConnell was two, a cheeky, chunky little boy with poor eyesight that forced him to wear glasses. His mum, Zoe, had left him in the car in Twickenham Sainsbury’s car park, strapped into his child seat, after realizing she’d forgotten to pick up her dry cleaning. She was only gone for two minutes, she insisted, though Patrick was sure it was more like five, maybe more. The woman in front of her in the queue had been arguing about a stain on her cashmere cardigan and Zoe, a freelance marketing consultant, described how she’d shifted impatiently from foot to foot, eager to get back to the car, on the verge of abandoning the dry cleaning when it was finally her turn.

She had locked the car, could clearly remember the
thunk
as she depressed the central locking. But when she got back to her white Audi A4, the back door was open and Liam was gone. An hour later, when a uniform had asked to see the car key she hadn’t been able to find it. Then she remembered, on her way back into Sainsbury’s, bumping into a man who had almost knocked her over. The car key had been in her jacket pocket. Patrick was certain that the man who had bumped into her had taken the key – unless Zoe was making the whole thing up, that she had forgotten to lock the car and had concocted the story to stop her husband, Keith, who ran his own recruitment company, blaming her.

Patrick had personally scoured the CCTV footage from the car park. One camera had caught the briefest glimpse of a man in a dark jacket carrying a child who looked like Liam, but it was impossible to see the man’s face or where he’d gone. Zoe insisted that the man who’d bumped her had been wearing a black jacket, but she had barely looked at his face, the photo-fit they’d put together from her patchy memory likely to be 90 per cent imagination. This hadn’t stopped the picture from being printed on the front of every newspaper in the country, sparking hundreds of calls from members of the public saying the man looked like their neighbour, their boss, their husband. Every single one of these unfortunate men had been eliminated from the investigation.

Patrick wouldn’t say the last week had been the hardest of his life – he’d had much darker weeks – but they had been long, frustrating and exhausting. Huge pictures of Isabel and Liam hung in the incident room. Their images were burnt into the retinas of every man and woman on the team. But so far, though Patrick would never admit this in public, they hadn’t got a bloody clue what had happened to the two kids or where they were.

It was as if they had evaporated.

A red light caught them and Patrick saw another phantom infant flash before his eyes, running between the stopped cars. His whole body thrummed with the need for sleep.

‘When you were younger,’ he said, ‘did you ever think you’d be spending your evenings locked in a room with a paedophile with a comb-over and halitosis?’

‘Oh god, don’t remind me. It’s in my nostrils. What causes that smell?’

‘Rotting gums. They should send him round schools as a warning to children about cleaning . . . Or maybe not – what the fuck am I saying?’

The interview had been a waste of time. Chris Davis was sixty now and had served his time for the abduction of a little girl thirty years before. But as he lived only a few streets away from Isabel Hartley and her family, he was on the list. But he hadn’t done it. He had an alibi for the disappearances of both Izzy and Liam.

It had been almost a week since Isabel had vanished, and five days since Liam. The chances of finding them diminished with every passing day – no, every hour.

‘What do you think they should do to people like Davis?’
Carmella
asked. ‘Chemical castration? String ’em up? You should hear me ma, the things she says about child murderers. Like Baby P – she was on one of those Facebook groups calling for his stepdad to have his balls ripped off in front of a baying crowd, and salt rubbed into his bleeding, empty . . .’

He winced. ‘Carmella! Please!’

‘Sack.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘With respect, Sir, you’re a lightweight! All those muscles and tats, everyone thinks you’re such a hard man, don’t they? But they don’t know what I know – you’re a sensitive little flower at heart, aren’t you?’

He made a mock-scary face at her and she laughed, then looked serious. ‘But I want to know – what
do
you think?’

Lock them up in the dark forever. Put a bullet through their skulls. Make them pay for the pain they’ve caused.
But he didn’t say that. He said, ‘I don’t care what happens to them afterwards. My job is to catch them.’

Carmella raised a dubious eyebrow. She was a pretty woman, thought Patrick. Actually, that wasn’t the word. ‘Pretty’ was a well-kept suburban garden. Carmella was more like a wild meadow into which someone had chucked random handfuls of seeds, with her corkscrewing auburn hair, dark Italian eyes and Dublin accent.

Patrick’s mobile rang.

‘Oh shit.’ All he wanted –
all
he wanted right now – was his bed. His body screamed at him to ignore the chiming phone.

‘Can you get that?’ he said, nodding at the dashboard where the phone vibrated on the plastic.

She studied the display. ‘It’s Mike.’

DS Mike Staunton was another member of the MIT and part of the team investigating the abductions. He was young, keen, good at his job, slightly irritating.

Carmella held the phone against his ear.

‘Mike.’

‘Sir. Where are you at the moment?’

‘Driving home. Why, what’s happened?’

‘I just got a call from the station – someone’s phoned in and reported seeing a man with a couple of little kids going into an abandoned building on the Kennedy Estate in Whitton. They reckon they can hear kids crying. It’s probably nothing but thought I’d better call you – want me to check it out?’

‘The Kennedy? We’re about five minutes from there. Leave it with us.’

Carmella sat up in her seat. ‘The Kennedy?’

‘Yeah. My favourite place to go just before midnight.’

He fiddled with the CD player, looking for something to buoy his spirits and wake him up.
Inbetween Days
came on and he turned it up.

Beside him, Carmella groaned. ‘Not this lot again. Haven’t you got anything current?’

He drummed the steering wheel and nodded his head. Passing a bus stop he saw a toddler dash in and out of sight. Another hallucination. ‘Carmella, I’ll make a Cure fan of you if it’s the last thing I do.’

The Kennedy Estate was one of those places where the police went in pairs, where, in his less politically correct moments, Patrick thought the
Jeremy Kyle Show
must hold their castings. A snakepit, where the most poisonous and dangerous members of society slithered, but also a sad place, where elderly residents barricaded themselves away, where children were born not with a silver spoon but its opposite: rusty, burnt, smack-stained. Hope didn’t come to die among these ugly high-rises and piss-stinking underpasses, because hope had never dared venture here.

‘JFK would be so proud they named this shithole after him,’ Carmella commented as they drew up outside a dark building on the edge of the estate.

They got out of the car and looked up at the building. Most of the windows were boarded up. Not a single light shone in the remaining flats. It was, it seemed, abandoned, ready for demolition, or perhaps the council would wait for nature to do its work, let it crumble, or leave it for future civilisations to marvel at. In the meantime, it provided a haven for squatters.

‘Is it always this quiet around here?’ Carmella asked.

Patrick looked about. ‘It does seem unusually tranquil.’

From within a nearby tower block, a dog howled and a man shouted for it to shut the fuck up.

Carmella said, ‘That’s the word I would have used. Tranquil. Reminds me a little of the place Jenny and I went on honeymoon.’ She sighed.

‘Most people who live here are too afraid to come out after dark.’ He lifted the boot and took out a sturdy torch. If he was an American cop he would have a gun, but he had no weapons with him at all. Still, the intention here was to investigate, that was all. The first sign of danger and he would call for back-up, although this wasn’t remotely reassuring – it only took a second for a finger to pull a trigger, or a hand to plunge a knife . . . ‘Stay close behind me.’

The front door of the building collapsed from its hinges when he pulled it, almost landing on his foot.

‘That was the first booby trap.’

They went inside and were instantly hit by the stench of shit and rot. Patrick tried the light switch. Of course, it didn’t work. They paused in the stairwell next to the lift, the doors of which stood open, revealing several bags of stinking rubbish.

He gestured for Carmella to follow him up the stairs, the torchlight bouncing off the graffiti-defaced walls. Lots of pictures of penises. Big ones, small ones, hairy ones, spurting ones. Mostly big, hairy, spurting ones. It was enough to give a man a complex.