The Stranger on the Train (25 page)

Should he snatch him? Sweat trickled down Rafe's back. But then what? How would he get him to London?

He edged forward. No sign of anyone, but the back door to the house, only a few feet away, was ajar. Rafe opened the gate and stepped into the enclosure. The child was still intent on whatever he had in front of him in the grass. Keeping one eye on the back door, Rafe waved to attract his attention.

“Ritchie,” he whispered. “Ritchie.”

Ritchie looked up at once, his face creased in puzzlement. Man, it was Emma again. Definitely. The way one of her eyebrows went lower than the other when she was trying to think of something.

“Over here, mate. This way.”

Ritchie's face cleared. He smiled, his cheeks puffing up like a chipmunk's around the soother. He lifted his finger and pointed, gazing past Rafe, as if he could see something behind him. Rafe glanced quickly over his shoulder. Nothing there but the wooden gate.

“Hey.” He turned back. “Who are you looking at?”

He bent his knees to lower his face, trying to get Ritchie to focus on him.

“This way, mate. There's nobody here but me.”

Ritchie was still pointing at the gate and smiling. Then he seemed to change his mind. He switched his gaze to Rafe and held out his other hand. Something was in it, clutched in his grubby fist. Rafe couldn't see what it was. He inched forward, an ingratiating grin fixed to his face, hoping the little blighter wouldn't take a sudden dislike to him and start crying. Then the door to the house creaked open, and Philippa Hunt came out.

Hastily, Rafe transformed his step forward into a crouch. He patted the ground—checking the worm count?—and nodded at Philippa in an amiable way. She gave him a swift look and strode into the enclosure. She went straight to Ritchie and picked him up, hoisting him onto her hip.

“Come along,” she said.

Rafe watched the tail of her shirt flutter as she marched away.

Two more seconds. Two more seconds and . . . what? He could have . . . he could have got some kind of repeat sample for DNA. A hair or something. Shit, why hadn't he thought of it in time? No way was he going to get another chance like this.

Philippa had stopped by the gate.

“What's this?” Rafe heard her ask Ritchie. “What have you got there?”

She took something from his hand; the object he'd been holding out to Rafe. She tutted.

“Nasty,” she said to Ritchie, wrinkling up her nose. “
Nasty.
”

She dropped whatever it was into the grass. Then she took Ritchie through the gate and on back to the house. The door slammed shut behind her. Rafe heard the scrape and clang of a bolt.

He kicked at the grass. What a
fucking
loser! What was he, a fucking rabbit in headlights? He should have taken him while he had the chance. He kicked again. Now what? Carry on gardening? He looked around the enclosure. He'd been planning to take a string trimmer to that part around the walnut tree. The tree stood on a short rise, almost a hill. Green fruit, still not quite ripe, hung from the branches like dark pears.

Rafe stared at the fruit.

He loves sour things.

He crouched down again, hunting in the long grass where Philippa had dropped the object Ritchie had been holding. He found what he was looking for and picked it out of the grass.

A dark-green walnut, with toothmarks in it.

Rafe looked up. The back door was still shut.

He got to his feet, still with the green fruit in his hand.

Saliva glistening all over it.

Chapter Seventeen

Emma's eyes were full. She still had so many questions. What else had Antonia said to Ritchie? Had she seemed angry with him? How had he looked when he smiled?

But she looked at the walnut in its plastic sandwich bag, with the surprisingly large bite mark in the side, and all she said was: “We have to tell the police.”

• • •

Lindsay answered on the second ring.

“Emma!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? We've all been so worried. You weren't in your flat, and your phone—”

“I'm fine,” Emma interrupted, cutting her off. “I've got something I need to tell you.”

“Really?”

Emma announced: “We've got proof.”

“Proof?”

“That that's Ritchie they've got there in France. That's my baby that woman has in her house.”

There was a silence. Then Lindsay said: “Emma . . . what have you been doing?”

“Listen,” Emma said. “Listen, and I'll tell you.” She did her best to give as clear an outline of the story as possible, but the coffee grinder at the counter had upped its setting to “road drill,” and the women at the table beside her were laughing in great, cackling shrieks. The noise pressurized her. She got mixed up, speaking faster instead of louder until all her words came tumbling out on top of each other. Lindsay had to interrupt to ask her to slow down.

“Emma . . . Emma, take it easy,” she said. “I'm not getting everything you're saying. What was that last bit again? Did you say you had a sample from France of that boy's DNA?”

“Yes.” Emma took a breath. “I told you, didn't I? I told you it was him. I knew that woman messed with the DNA test. I
knew
she did.”

“But how—”

“You need to check this new sample against
my
DNA. Then you'll see he's mine. You'll see he really is Ritchie.”

Lindsay said: “And this DNA is on a fruit?”

“On a walnut, yes.”

There was a pause. Then Lindsay said: “Emma . . .”

“What harm can it do?” Emma asked. “You keep saying you want to help me. If you do, then this is the way.”

“I do want to help you,” Lindsay said.

“Then where's the problem?”

“Come in,” Lindsay said. “Come and meet me at the station today, and we'll talk about it.”

“But you'll do the test?” Emma persisted.

Lindsay hesitated.

“I'll have to talk to the DI first,” she said. “Before I can authorize anything like that.”

She suggested a time for them to meet at the Fulham Palace police station. Emma ended the call in frustration. She was no closer to knowing whether things were going to go anywhere than before she'd picked up the phone.

She said to Rafe: “I don't think Detective Hill is going to like this.”

“I thought this might happen.” Rafe was hunched forward, stirring the remains of his coffee with a spoon. “I don't know much about DNA, but I do know that we've got no proof of where I got that walnut from, or who was eating it. Plus it's contaminated. I touched it, and so did that woman Philippa. Though, to be honest, I don't think either of us touched the sticky part of it that Ritchie chewed. But still. It might be hard to convince the police.”

“Well, then,” Emma cried, “we won't wait for them to make up their minds. We'll just go ahead and organize our own test.”

“Maybe,” Rafe said. He sat back, flipping the spoon between his fingers. “I think we're going to need some extra muscle here. Maybe I should phone Mike again.”

“Mike? Your friend who gave us the address?”

“Yeah. Mike's a bit of a golden boy. Detective sergeant since January, in the Drug Squad. But he's a decent bloke. He'll vouch for us, at least. Make a couple of calls on our behalf.”

“Ring him, then,” Emma urged.

Rafe dug his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans. It was lunchtime, and the queue for the cashier stretched back as far as the door. The customers had to bellow their orders to be heard. Rafe took his phone outside to talk in peace. While she waited, Emma stroked the bag on her lap, smoothing the gnawed, misshapen fruit inside.

Come on, little walnut. It's all up to you now. Don't let us down.

• • •

Emma had thought it was just going to be Lindsay meeting them at the police station, but to her surprise, when she and Rafe were shown into the room where she'd watched the tape of Ritchie at the airport, Detective Inspector Hill was there as well. So were a couple of other people she didn't recognize. One of them, a large, untidy-looking man with very fair hair and eyebrows, nodded at Rafe in a friendly way.

“Mike!” Rafe sounded pleased and surprised.

Detective Hill, on the other hand, didn't look any friendlier than usual. He was leaning against a table, his arms folded, his bulgy blue eyes colder than ever.

“I've told DI Hill what's happened,” Lindsay explained to Emma.

Five pairs of eyes bored into her. Emma didn't waste any time.

“This,” she said, holding up the plastic bag with the walnut inside, “has got Ritchie's saliva on it. We got it from him in France. If you compare the DNA with a sample from me, it'll prove once and for all that I'm his mother.”

Her hand shook. The bag crackled. She took a firmer grip on it, holding it straight out in front of Detective Hill. He kept his arms folded and stroked at his moustache.

“All right,” he said. “All right. Without for the moment even going into how you managed to
obtain
”—a glance at Rafe—“this item, my main question for now is: Are we to just keep on repeating DNA tests on this French child until you get the result you want?”

Lindsay looked compassionately at Emma.

“I only want it repeated once,” Emma said. “That other test was wrong. How can it hurt to just do this? You'll see it shows he's mine.”

“It may well do,” Detective Hill said, “but we've already had a test done that shows he's someone else's. There'll need to be some quite solid grounds to order a repeat. And, with respect, how do we know that this . . . what, walnut? . . . came from that child in France? That it's not something Ritchie was eating here in London before he disappeared?”

Rafe said: “Walnuts don't grow in the UK.”

There was a silence.

The other detective, a thin man with a biggish nose, spoke up: “Actually they do. My aunt has an orchard in—”

“I doubt if Ritchie was in your aunt's orchard recently,” Rafe snapped.

Emma burst out: “Anyway, so walnuts grow in the UK. So what? There could be walnut trees all over London for all I care. But how many of them grow outside my flat? And even if Ritchie found a walnut somewhere before he was kidnapped and chewed it, why on earth would I have kept a half-eaten piece of fruit lying around the flat and not thrown it away?”

She thrust the plastic bag out again, so they all had a clear view of what was inside.

“Look,” she said, “you can see it's just starting to go ripe. Ritchie's been gone for over two weeks. If this walnut had been lying around the flat for that long, don't you think it would have gone rotten by now?”

She waited for Mr. Orchard to say that walnuts never rotted, or something like that. But he didn't. Nobody spoke for a minute.

Then Detective Hill said to Mike and Rafe: “Could I have a word?”

“Of course.”

Detective Hill got up off the table. His coat made a swishing noise as he left the room. Rafe caught Emma's eye and made a face—a quick, comical downtwist of his mouth at the sides. Then he followed Detective Hill and Mike out to the hall. After glancing at each other, so did Lindsay and the man whose aunt bred walnuts.

Emma was left on her own. The room had a cloying smell: crisps, and the harsh, chemical tang of whiteboard marker. Beside the table, the whiteboard was propped on a frame, with writing on it, as if someone had been giving a lecture. “Public Perceptions of the Community Support Officer” was circled on the board. Arrows pointed out from the circle. At the end of one of them, a cartoon stick man flexed his biceps and brandished a gun. Underneath him, someone had scribbled the word “Rambo.”

They'd been gone a long time. What were they all talking about? Surely it was a case of a simple yes or no? Then it struck Emma that what Rafe had done, pretending to be a gardener like that, might well be against the law. Oh, this was great. Just wonderful. Were they going to arrest him now, thanks to her, on top of everything else?

The door opened, and Lindsay came back into the room. She closed the door behind her.

“We've decided,” she said.

Emma waited.

Lindsay glanced down, delicately spreading the fingertips of both hands on the table as if she was playing the piano. Then she looked up again.

“First,” she said, “I need to say something. There are still several other leads we're following up on. That child in Manchester I told you about, for one. We've got a car number, we're—”

“If you follow that lead,” Emma said in a hard voice, “you'll be wasting your time.”

Lindsay sighed.

“Emma,” she said, “we're going to do the test.”

Thank God.

“DI Hill isn't happy,” Lindsay said. “You really shouldn't have gone back to that house at all. Or Mr. Townsend shouldn't. Another thing you should know is that the DI has discussed this with one of our colleagues, an expert in DNA, and he says there's a high chance that the walnut will show up nothing at all. The acid from the fruit will almost certainly have destroyed any DNA that was on it. And since it's been lying around for quite a while, and handled by several different people, testing it is going to be very difficult. It could take days. Weeks, even.”

“But I—”

Lindsay held up a hand. “But Detective Sergeant Evans,” she said, “assures us that your friend Rafe wouldn't have done what he did unless he honestly thought there was a very good reason. So that's our decision. We're going to go ahead with it.”

Emma breathed again. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

“One other thing I must tell you,” Lindsay said. “If Ritchie's DNA does shows up on the walnut, all it means is that we would have grounds to have the official test repeated. On its own, the walnut won't be enough for us to just go out there and take him back. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then.”

Lindsay nodded.

Then she said: “We've always looked for him, you know. I know you think we haven't, but we have.”

She sounded quite emotional, for her.

She said: “I would love if the test showed it was Ritchie.”

“So would I,” Emma answered simply.

She didn't want to spend any more time talking. She wanted to get things moving. Take the next step.

“What happens now?” she asked. She was prepared to go anywhere for the DNA test. To a lab, or a clinic, or the hospital. Whatever she had to do.

Lindsay said: “We're going to check the walnut against a sample of Ritchie's DNA from your flat. We'll take a sample from you as well. Also one from Mr. Townsend, so the lab will be able to tell which DNA on the walnut is his. We can do that for you today. A specialist is on his way right now.”

The specialist, when he arrived, took details from Emma: her name, her date of birth, her address. He filled them all out on a form. Then he held up a stick with a white cotton-wool ball on one end, like a giant earbud.

“Open your mouth, please,” he said.

It was like being at the dentist. Emma sat on the gray plastic chair and opened her mouth wide. She felt a ticklish pressure swooping around the inside of her cheek. This was what it had been like for Ritchie. She was almost certain he'd have tried to bite the stick.

The earbud was whisked away. Emma's lips and the inside of her cheek were dry. She licked around them with her tongue. The specialist rubbed the cotton-wool ball over a square of card. Then he folded a flap over the card, sealing it shut. He put the card into a plastic bag, along with the form he'd filled out with Emma's details.

“That's it,” he said. “You can go.”

She left the room, elated. Finally. After all that, Ritchie's walnut was on its way. Where had Rafe got to? They'd never have agreed to this if it wasn't for him. She'd never have
got
the DNA if it wasn't for him. Imagine if this was it. The final proof. She couldn't wait to talk it over with him.

Outside the police station, Rafe's friend Mike was standing with his hands in his pockets, swaying a little on his heels as he looked out over the street. He was a big man, as tall and bulky as Detective Hill, but kinder looking, with small, crinkled eyes. When he heard the door opening, he turned at once.

“Emma,” he said, and came to shake her hand. “Mike Evans. Good to meet you.”

“Thank you for being here,” Emma said, suddenly shy in front of Rafe's friend. She didn't mention his having given them the address in France, in case she wasn't supposed to know where that had come from.

“No problem,” Mike said. “I owe your friend Rafe. We trained together in Brixton; he got me out of a couple of situations. He's got a good head in a crisis.”

“Where is he now?” Emma asked.

“Having a little chat with the governor. Probably getting a slap on the wrist for what he's been up to.”

“A slap on the wrist.” Emma was dismayed.

“Don't worry. Our Townsie'll be all right. As long as he doesn't get up to anything else before he heads off to South America, or Juliet won't be too happy with him.”

“Juliet?”

“His girlfriend.”

Emma was startled. Rafe had a girlfriend called Juliet?

“I'm sorry.” Mike comedy-slapped his hand to his forehead. “I forgot you and Rafe don't know each other that well. Come to think of it, I haven't seen Juliet for a while myself, but they've been going out for . . . what? Two years? Last I heard, she was making plans to take a gap year and join Townsie on his travels.”