3.03 a.m.
She wakes from a dream of drowning into a nightmare far more terrifying.
The dream ends abruptly, in the usual way: eyes snapping open, heart thudding, skin leaking sweat. The nightmare introduces itself slowly, though, and it starts with white noise.
It oozes from a baby monitor. The little lady in slumber in the other room is five, not a baby, but she’s got sleep apnoea and paranoid parents. Often, they’ve woken to terrifying sounds of choking. But now the monitor is emitting a crackly pattering sound. It’s closer to her husband’s side of the bed, and he’s a light sleeper, so clearly he’s already heard it, because on his side of the bed there’s nothing but a humanoid depression in the mattress, as if a heavy ghost sleeps there.
But seconds pass, sixty or more, and the white noise continues. And her husband doesn’t return.
One elbow in the ghost’s chest, she leans across to pick up the monitor, because this is obviously a fault with the machine, or a tuning issue, and that’s when she becomes aware of another noise. Her eyes, still adjusting to the darkness, latch onto the window, where the glass is soaked. Her waking brain makes the connection: the white noise isn’t interference at all but rain.
It’s July after all, the nights hot even when wet. At some point her husband has got up, felt the heat, figured it would make their daughter’s breathing worse, and gone into her bedroom to open the window. That’s why the noise of the rain is reaching her through the monitor.
But where is he? She rises, and grabs her mobile to check the time, and throws on a nightgown.
And takes her first step into the nightmare.
Around the corner of the hallway she hears the murmur of the TV beneath the throb of rain from beyond Josie’s door. It’s Nick’s go-to device for whacking the energy out of Josie when the little lady cannot sleep. But the living room can wait a moment.
In Josie’s room, the monitor’s receiver is on the floor, knocked there somehow, but thankfully out of range of the rain that lashes through the wide-open window. The sill, the undersheet at the foot of the bed, part of the floor, all sodden. Anna sticks her arm into the stinging downpour and drags the window shut. Something Nick should have done when he heard the skies rend open.
She slips as she turns to leave, both hands needed to break her fall. There is no pain, though, only rising confusion. And a seed of dread, which propels her quickly from the room. A single step into the living room is all she manages before halting so abruptly it’s as if she’s walked into an invisible door. She sags against the doorframe, heart thudding so hard it makes her head tremble. The sounds she heard: not the TV at all.
The room is dark, but she can see that the patio door is halfway open, rain shooting in to soak the carpet, fast and loud, and that’s all she can see.
Because there’s no Nick, no Josie.
But she drags her eyes away from it. She stumbles across the room and peeks behind the floor-to-ceiling room divider, but she already knew the dining room would be as black and lifeless as the rest of the house.
No Nick. No Josie.
Now she cannot avoid that patio door. She rushes outside, into the stinging rain, into the black. No Nick, no Josie. She calls their names, both of them, but of course there’s no answer. The world is black, and the rain distorts everything like a sheet of frosted glass, but she can clearly see that there’s…
No Nick. No Josie.
Beyond the high back hedge her eyes latch onto a fragment of street, and cars, and houses belonging to neighbours floating in tranquil dreams. She can see these things because the back gate is wide open. It’s never left open, which means it’s as good as a sign. Big and bright and neon and undeniable: gone.
A light is on in a house across the garden and the street beyond, and she thinks she sees someone at the bedroom window, and then the pain in her throat makes her realise she’s been screaming. She turns, meaning to get back, get to her phone, get the police, but she trips on the half-moon concrete step. One bracing hand thuds onto the step with a squelch, not a splash. And when her hand comes away, her skin is greasy, and the moonlight catches it, and she knows she’s looking at a palm coated in blood.
‘Hello, police emergency.’
‘Please, my daughter. She’s been taken. My husband and my daughter.’
‘Repeat that, please. Your daughter and husband, did you say? What’s your name?’
‘Anna Carter. It’s my daughter, she’s gone from the house. And my husband. They must have been taken.’
‘What do you mean by taken?’
‘Yes, taken. From my house. The door, the patio door, it’s wide open. They’re gone. They’ve been kidnapped or something. They must have. They wouldn’t go out. There’s blood on the step.’
‘What makes you think your daughter and husband have been kidnapped?’
‘They wouldn’t go out, not this late. Nick would have woken me. There’s blood.’
‘Have you contacted your husband? Nick, did you say? Have you tried to call Nick?’
‘Yes. There’s no answer. On the mobile. It’s not in the house. Look, you gotta send people.’
‘Have you contacted friends to see if—’
‘They wouldn’t go out. They’ve been kidnapped.’
‘Was this recent? Did you just discover this?’
‘Just now. I woke up. They’re not here. You’ve got to send someone. They wouldn’t go out.’
‘How old is your daughter and what’s her name?’
‘She’s Josie. She’s five.’
‘Okay. So you woke up to find them gone, and did you say the door is wide open?’
‘The back door, the patio door, yes. There’s blood on the step. They wouldn’t go out, not this late. Send people who can find them, please.’
‘Has your husband ever taken your daughter out late before?’
‘No. They didn’t go out. Someone’s broken in and kidnapped them. The blood.’
‘Blood? Did you say blood? I thought you said mud. How much blood is there? And this is on the step outside your back door?’
‘Yes. Please, just send someone. They wouldn’t go out.’
‘Okay, I’m sending officers to your address—’
‘I live at—’
‘I’ve got it. Have you checked all rooms in the house? The attic? The cellar? Is the house empty?’
‘They’re not here. I keep saying. They’re gone.’
‘You’re certain there’s no one hiding in the house?’
Then it hit her. Hiding: the operator wasn’t thinking about Nick, about Josie – she feared an intruder could still be here. Anna immediately thought of the cellar.
The one place she hadn’t checked.
Maybe, far in the future, if everything ended happily, she might be able to joke about the cellar angle. There was none of that horror film creeping-towards-the-door, knife in hand, slowly reaching for the handle. Nick had some exercise equipment down there, so, with an image of a late-night need to burn calories and a terrible fall down the stairs, she rushed into the kitchen and threw open the door in the back wall and slapped on the light. Lurking intruders weren’t even considered. Bizarrely, she would have wept with relief if she’d discovered her family hurt and unconscious down in the cold brick room.
But: ‘They’re gone. There’s no one in the house.’
‘Officers will be there within minutes. This is what I need you to do…’
Shoving the cordless phone into her pocket, she grabbed a dirty T-shirt of Nick’s from the kitchen wash basket and stepped carefully across the living room carpet, avoiding streaks of mud from footprints. She could clearly see where they led from outside the house. Trying hard not to look at the blood on the step, even though the rain should have washed it away by now, she grabbed the handle of the sliding patio door and slid it across and locked it. Then she followed the wet footprints into Josie’s room, where she locked the window, too. The emptiness of that tiny bed was like a void in her own heart.
Secure the house. Lock all doors and windows but try to be careful not to touch places where the officers might be able to pick up fingerprints, especially the door handles.
It was only then that she understood why the operator had given such instructions: a fear that the abductors could return. It was an irrational worry, but that knowledge didn’t stop her from turning on all the lights in the house. She stumbled into the hallway and made sure the front door was locked. She caught her reflection in the mirror beside the coat hooks. Her dressing gown was soaked down one side, where she’d landed in the rain after falling. She didn’t look at the hand that had slapped into blood. But as she had rubbed her face with her other, muddied hand, her cheek was dirty. She pulled a wet wipe from a carton on the shoe cabinet and raised it to her face, but then stopped.
Do not wash yourself or change your clothing, please.
She didn’t understand that instruction, but it must be important. So she left herself dirty. With nothing else to do, the weight of loneliness and despair returned. She staggered into Josie’s playroom, where toys were scattered all over the floor. Usually a place of joy, of noise, but not tonight. Cold and empty, like an abandoned place, and screaming that her daughter was missing. She wanted to tidy.
Don’t move anything. Leave your home the way it is, please. Don’t pick up any broken glass, and do not clean the mud from the carpet. Try to stay in one room until the officers arrive.
She felt the weight of the cordless in her pocket and realised that the police weren’t the only people she should have called. Her finger jabbed and held the ‘1’ key, which speed-dialled a number.
‘Annie?’ a croaky voice said a few moments later. ‘Is it Josie?’
Attuned, her sister knew Anna wouldn’t call at such an hour unless harm or danger had befallen that most precious of things.
‘They’ve gone. Both gone.’
‘Gone?’
Anna blurted her tale. It drew Jane’s equivalent of a gasp of shock: just slow, heavy breathing, in part because she knew a show of distress would add to Anna’s own. But it didn’t help to calm Anna’s fizzing nerves.
‘My god. What are the police doing to find them?’
‘They’re coming round now. They say I have to stay here. I can’t look for them.’
‘Look, I’ll get ready and come round. Father will drive us there immediately. But do as the police say, Anna. Stay there.’
‘They didn’t go out, Jane. They wouldn’t. Why would Nick take Josie out? Why wouldn’t he wake me up first?’
‘I’ll be there in the next few minutes, Anna, okay? Just sit and wait for me, and for the police. Don’t go out to look for them. But phone people. Phone everyone you can think of.’
‘Father will blame me, Jane. He’ll think I left a door unlocked.’
‘No. No. No one is going to blame you. Nick will have taken Josie out somewhere, that’s all. Just stay. I’m coming.’
Anna desperately clutched that notion: maybe Josie had been hurt in the night, might have fallen when she went to the bathroom. Unwilling to panic Anna, Nick had taken Josie to hospital.
She heard Jane trying to shout Father awake. She wanted to stay on the phone, to remain anchored to her sister because the alternative was to drift away across a cold and silent and dark ocean. But she didn’t want to hear Father’s reaction. So she killed the call. The silence dropped upon her like heavy rain. But it didn’t last long.
There was a knock at the door.
Two officers, one female. She was short, pretty, young, which highlighted the rugged presence of her larger, older colleague, and together they looked like a snapshot of old and new police disposition. She would be college educated, versed in people skills, designed as a romantic ideal of the community-based officer, while he seemed to hark back to the bygone image of hard cases getting things done by foot chases and booting in doors.
And they played their roles. The male ignored her and cast his eyes beyond, reading the interior of the house. The female immediately introduced both – Constables Lowth and Adams – and said, ‘You’re Mrs Carter? You reported your daughter and husband missing from the house, is that right?’
‘Yes. They wouldn’t go out. They must have been taken away.’ The cordless was thrust back into her pocket, having failed again to get an answer from Nick’s mobile. She looked past the officers and was dismayed to see a single police car on the dark road. ‘Is it just you two? Have you got people out searching? My sister thinks we should check hospitals, just in case Josie got hurt.’
Lowth pointed at the pocket holding the cordless. ‘We’ll do that, don’t worry. Have you tried calling their mobiles?’
The big man, Adams, stepped past her and peeked into the bathroom.
Anna said, ‘Nick’s got a mobile. It’s just a dead line. But they wouldn’t have gone out.’
‘We’ll try to find them, Mrs Carter. You should try to calm down. Are you certain your husband took his mobile with him?’
Anna watched Adams step up to the main bedroom and cast his appraising eyes inside.
‘It’s not in the house. I would have heard it ringing.’
‘I’ll need the number,’ Lowth said.
Anna recited Nick’s number, and the officer dialled on her mobile.
‘So what did you say woke you?’
‘The baby monitor in Josie’s room. The window was open. The rain.’
‘Okay,’ Lowth said after a pause. ‘And I’ve got to ask. Drugs, alcohol? Have you had any this evening?’
Anna looked like she’d been physically struck. ‘Do you think I imagined this or something?’
‘I didn’t say that, Mrs Carter. I ask because—’
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Nothing like that. I can’t believe…’
Lowth nodded. ‘Okay. Please be calm. I had to ask. Have you called friends and family, just in case they—’
‘They wouldn’t go out. But I did, I called a couple.’
‘Just a couple?’
‘Well… nobody is up at this time. They would have called me if they knew. But Nick wouldn’t have taken Josie out, not at this time of night.’
‘No connection on his mobile.’ Lowth hung up her mobile. ‘What about your mobile, Mrs Carter? Where’s that?’
Anna felt in her dressing gown pocket but found only the cordless. Had she put the mobile in her pocket? ‘I don’t know. I thought I picked it up. Am I allowed to go out and search for them?’
Lowth’s answer: ‘It’s best if you stay here, Mrs Carter, in case they come back. As for friends and family, if you could get me their numbers and addresses, we can check with them. Double-check, I mean. Can we see the living room?’
Anna led quickly. Once there, she pointed at the patio door. ‘That was wide open. Are others on their way?’
The big male, Adams, stepped across to peek into the dining area beyond the shelving unit room divider. Lowth pointed at the muddy footprints on the carpet. ‘You’re certain you didn’t make these when you went outside?’
‘No, I didn’t. They were already there. The step outside, there’s…’ the word was hard to eject ‘…blood.’
Avoiding the wet areas of carpet, especially the sodden section just inside the doorway, Adams slipped on protective latex gloves and dragged open the patio door and splashed torchlight into the dark. Lowth nodded at the sleeping bag on the sofa.
‘Was there an argument between you this evening? Might that be why your husband left the house?’
‘He wouldn’t go out with Josie this late. Look, I explained all this on the phone. You can see it out on the step. They might be hurt.’
‘I don’t see clothing around. Does he sleep dressed, Mrs Carter? Maybe he puts dirty clothing in a wash basket at the end of the night?’
Anna didn’t understand her point, but before she could ask, Adams finally found his voice.
‘I see footprints in the grass. If there was blood on the step, the rain’s taken it.’
Lowth stepped up for a look. Adams shone his light at the lock and the handle, both sides of the door. ‘No forced entry here. Lock looks fine. Only unlocks from the inside.’
‘What does that mean?’ Anna said. ‘You think the door was left unlocked?’ Was this her fault after all?
Lowth turned to face her. ‘We really can’t assume anything just yet. Could you get me a recent photo of them both, please? Is that your address book?’ She moved past Anna and picked up a battered little booklet from the coffee table, where the base for the cordless sat.
‘Yes. Most of our friends will be in there. There’s a photo album in Josie’s room.’
‘Could we go to Josie’s room, please?’
All three made the journey, following the wet tracks. In the hallway, Adams stopped and tilted his head back.
‘Got a ladder for this?’ He was tall enough to reach overhead and try the sliding bolt on the attic door. It wouldn’t budge.
‘Why do you want to look up there? It’s empty. We have a garage at my father’s for our stuff.’
Lowth ushered Anna onwards. Adams followed, attic forgotten. Beside the door to the kitchen was the cubbyhole at the end of the hall, a curtained alcove with a desk and desktop computer and a box where they kept all their bills and other paperwork. Adams pulled the curtain for a glance inside.
‘I can get a photo of Nick,’ Anna said. She ducked into the cubbyhole and quickly returned with a passport, which Lowth took with a curious look as they moved into the kitchen.
Adams spotted the cellar door and opened it. He stabbed torchlight inside. As he shut the door, he glanced at the fridge and said, ‘That’s a mean stare-down face. He’s a big guy.’
On the fridge was a picture of Nick in just shorts. Heavily bearded, shaved head, muscled and tanned and growling at the camera, his hands clenched into raised fists. He looked like an animal. It was a picture Nick had had taken when he was cutting fat for a bodybuilding competition, and now used to put him off raiding the fridge for junk food.
Anna ignored the remark. She walked through the other door in the kitchen. ‘This is Josie’s room.’
As soon as Adams had had a look at the wet floor and shut window in there, he turned to head out of the room. Lowth handed him the address book and got in front of the doorway, as if to prevent Anna from following him. She asked for the photo album. It was on a little shelf above the bed. Anna handed it to the police officer. She heard a loud click and knew that Adams had returned to the trapdoor. She realised why.
‘He’s going into the attic. My god, do you think my husband and daughter are hiding? It locks from the outside. Why on earth—’
‘We have to check the whole house, Mrs Carter. I’m sorry. We have to do that. We’re not assuming anything.’ Her eyes cast around. ‘This is a very bare room.’
Despite the officer’s claim, Anna sensed a direct assumption. But she understood why. This was a tiny place that Anna had planned for a washing machine and tumble drier, since it was a kitchen annex, but Josie had wanted it as her bedroom. Hardly five feet wide, laminate wood floor, no hallway access, and bare but smooth plaster walls. Not a single toy or poster. The cheap four-foot bed was the only indication that a child slept here. A cold room, but, again, how Josie wanted it. Visitors had made the same remark, the same assumption, the officer just had, and Anna gave the police officer the same answer as always.
‘Josie has trouble sleeping when her mind races. She can’t sleep with toys and things around. She’s got a playroom. What she wants here is “Just a sleepy place”. It doesn’t mean we don’t care.’
Lowth nodded with a reassuring smile. ‘My boy’s the opposite. He needs a mountain of toys on his bed or he won’t sleep. Why don’t you show me the photos? And talk me through the events of this evening, leading up to when you discovered your husband and daughter missing.’
Anna wanted to sit on Josie’s bed but the officer told her she shouldn’t. They stood side-by-side and Anna allowed the other woman to flip the pages in the album. It immortalised Josie playing with toys, and riding her bike on the driveway, and donning school uniform, and so much more. Despite the emotional assault of recounting ‘events of the evening’, the heavy emptiness of the room faded from Anna’s heart as she watched Josie’s five years from baby to little lady pass in sixty seconds. The officer paused over the most recent picture of her. Ginger hair, long and wavy, in a photo from a month ago. In that, and others, she wore a colourful beaded necklace, a gift from her grandmother that she wore constantly, even asleep, even in the bath.
‘I’m going to take a thousand more when Josie comes home,’ Anna said, wiping away tears running down her cheeks. She slipped the photo out of its sleeve.
But the officer took it from her. ‘Do you mind if I take this?’ It killed the moment, which brought it all crashing back upon Anna. ‘Is your neck okay?’
Anna realised she’d been scratching at her neck. She stopped. At that moment Adams appeared in the doorway and said, ‘Mrs Carter, Chief Inspector Miller would like a word, please.’
That was when she became aware of other voices in the house. More police, who she hadn’t heard arrive. And a Chief, which meant she’d been taken seriously.
Detective Chief Inspector Lucy Miller, Homicide and Major Enquiry, was a trim forty-something with a creased beige skirt suit as functional as her short blonde hair and negligible make-up, and she was in Josie’s playroom, standing amid the carpet of toys. She nodded a greeting and introduced herself and her colleague, Detective Sergeant Liam Bennet, an older man, very tall with an acne-scarred face, who was taking photos of the room on a tablet computer that seemed like a regular mobile in his big spade of a hand. Miller didn’t move but Bennet stepped up to shake her hand, which seemed to swallow hers. His movement was ungainly, as if he was unused to being so tall.
‘Have you been out searching?’ Anna asked, slotting away the cordless after another failure to find Nick. She no longer expected to reach him on his mobile, but each time the call went straight to voicemail was a stab in the heart.
Miller gave her a smile, soft, slight, enough just to offer a sense of comfort. ‘Ah, we’re going to do what we can to bring your daughter back to you. Josie, she’s called?’ Her voice was scratchy, as if she had a cold or a dry throat, and the accent mild, but certainly not Yorkshire.
Anna looked at Josie’s painting table. It reminded her that the last time she’d seen her laughing had been right there, just moments before she sent the little lady to bed. Josie had gone with a long face because Anna had yelled at her for drawing on a wall. Anna couldn’t get that sorrowful look out of her mind. Dabbing at what seemed like an endless flow of fluid from her eyes, she said, ‘Yes. My husband is Nick. Have you got people out looking?’
‘Well, we have to take this slowly and gather more information, but we’re taking your claim very seriously. Local policing teams across Yorkshire have been informed of a possible abduction, but we need more information before we do anything like issue public alerts. And I am trained in hostage crisis negotiation. So, please, accept we’re not downplaying anything here. I know you’ve told this before, dear, but I need you to run through for me exactly why you think they’ve been kidnapped.’
She didn’t like the sense of doubt she got from the woman’s body language. The uniformed police officers had expressed the same emotion once they’d been in the house a minute or so. She knew kidnapping was a rare offence, but surely it wasn’t alien to these people, even in urban Sheffield. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
Miller didn’t directly answer that. ‘I can list Josie as missing on the Police National Computer. And the Missing Persons Unit, they can build a profile based on data from previous cases. Those are important first steps.’
‘Can? You mean you haven’t done that yet? Why not?’
‘Apologies. This is very confusing for you, I completely understand. I’ll explain, I will. A couple of things first, though.’ She waved Nick’s passport, which Adams must have handed to her. ‘Your man, does he have friends or family abroad?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Just a moment, dear. Let me ask a few things first. Number two, and I apologise in advance for this, but I do have to ask it – does he ever hurt Josie?’
‘What? Of course not. What makes you think that?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think that at all, dear, but it’s a question that’s got to be asked. Lastly, he drives a Vauxhall Comb. . .
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