A DCI Anna Tate Crime Thriller

CHAPTER NINE

Anna could have asked the members of her team to deal with the parents while she got on with the investigation. But she chose not to, and not just because she knew from personal experience the hell they were going through.

She wanted to engage with them so that she could suss them out. After all, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that one or more of them was somehow involved in the abductions. It was unlikely but not impossible given that the kidnappers had seemed to know what to expect when they entered the nursery.

But first she had to make sure that Sarah, Emma and Paige were out of harm’s way. Ruth Brady wouldn’t be the only parent to point the finger of blame at them, and next time it might actually get physical.

DI Walker, her trusted wingman, was on hand to help her sort things out.

‘I’ve already arranged for one of the other meeting rooms to be made available,’ he said. ‘It’s on the other side of the hall. I’ll take them straight there and alert the techies.’

Anna thanked the three women for being so patient.

‘We’ll get your fingerprints and DNA samples and you can help us put together the e-fits,’ she said. Then she took Sarah to one side and told her that she needed to stay on the premises so that they could have another conversation.

‘There are questions I want to ask you about the nursery, Miss Ramsay,’ she said. ‘For instance, I’d like the names of everyone who has access to the building, including cleaners, workmen and other staff members not in today, plus former employees. Also, have you or any of the staff been threatened at any time? And is there anyone that you know of who has a grudge against you or the business? Perhaps you could start giving it some thought.’

Sarah didn’t react other than to nod and blow out her cheeks.

‘And don’t let what just happened get to you,’ Anna said. ‘Ruth and the other parents are in a fearful state and they need to vent their anger and frustration. Unfortunately you’re an easy target.’

‘I’m sure I’d feel exactly the same if I were in their position,’ Sarah said. Then she followed Walker and the others towards the hall.

Anna looked at her watch. It was approaching midday, which meant that almost three hours had passed since the children were taken. The kidnappers had had plenty of time to put distance between themselves and Peabody Street. Were they still in London? she wondered. Or had they fled the capital and driven to a pre-arranged secret location in the sticks?

She was pleased to see so many Met personnel on the scene. They were still arriving at the community centre – uniforms, civilian support staff, crime scene coordinators and computer technicians.

At the same time, things were happening outside. Several police helicopters had taken to the skies, ready to respond to a sighting or a tip-off from a member of the public. Beat coppers were on high alert and armed tactical teams were cruising the streets.

Meanwhile, counter-terrorism officers were searching for likely suspects on their watch lists, but the latest word from them was that they didn’t think this was the work of extremists.

Having the community centre right next door to the nursery was a godsend and Anna made a mental note to seek out and thank the management for letting them set up camp here.

She decided to see what progress was being made before going back to talk to the parents. After slipping outside she resisted the urge to light up a cigarette and headed for the mobile incident van on the forecourt.

The sun was still shining proudly in a clear blue sky and the temperature was continuing to rise.

There were more people on the street now, too. The Sky News team had been joined by crews from the BBC and ITV. The kidnapping had sparked a media frenzy, and Anna knew that soon she would have to mount a press conference and answer a barrage of questions.

The mobile incident van – or command centre as it was also known – was already operational. It was more like a small lorry than a van, and inside there was a desk, some chairs and a computer station with three screens.

An officer sat in front of the screens operating a keyboard, and DC Megan Sweeny from MIT stood behind him. She was a new addition to Anna’s team, having joined only a few months ago, but she had already made a big impression and seemed destined to rise swiftly through the ranks.

‘So what have you got for me, Megan?’ Anna asked her.

DC Sweeny grinned and pointed to one of the screens which showed a freeze-frame of a grey minibus.

‘We’re pretty sure that’s the vehicle we’re looking for, guv,’ she said. ‘It’s the first hit we’ve had from traffic cameras in the area. This particular camera is located in Manor Road, which is just half a mile from here. We can’t see inside the bus because of the tinted windows but we’ve managed to blow up and identify the registration. It turns out the bus was stolen a week ago from an industrial site in Greenwich.’

‘Bingo,’ Anna said. ‘You need to keep at it, though. I want to know where the fuck it’s going.’

‘Will do, guv.’

‘And I’m assuming this image is being circulated.’

‘Of course. The alert went out as soon as we got it.’

‘Well done, Megan. Let me know as soon as you get another hit.’

‘I’ve got something else for you, guv,’ she said, and picked up a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘Sarah Ramsay provided us with a list of the nine children but we’ve added to it. So now it includes the names of their parents and their addresses.’

Anna glanced at the sheet which included head-and-shoulder shots of the children.

Daniel Neville, aged 3 (parents Belinda and Wesley)

Liam Brady, aged 3 (parents Ruth and Ethan)

Grace Tenant, aged 4 (parents Laura and Kenneth)

Simone Green, aged 4 (parents Wendy and Phil – divorced)

Toby Chandler, aged 4 (parents Rebecca and James)

Abdul Ahmed, aged 4 (mother Melek – father deceased)

Justine Brooks, aged 4 (parents Rachel and William)

Molly Wilson, aged 5 (parents Janet and Ben – divorced)

Sahib Hussein, aged 5 (parents Sabina and Rafi)

Below was a list of addresses, all of them within a couple of miles of the nursery.

‘This is great, Megan,’ Anna said. ‘I want everyone involved in the case to have a copy. But don’t release it to the media until I say so.’

Anna then went in search of the crime scene manager for an update on the forensic sweep of the nursery. But on the way she was collared by an anxious-looking PC. He was with a thin, grey-haired woman who must have been in her late sixties or early seventies.

‘You need to speak to this lady, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Her name is Felicity Bradshaw and she lives on Peabody Street a few doors down from the nursery. She actually saw the children being taken away.’

Anna felt a jolt of anticipation as she introduced herself.

‘Please tell me exactly what you saw, Mrs Bradshaw,’ she said.

The woman spoke in a voice that was loud and clear, though charged with emotion.

‘I was walking back from the shops,’ she said. ‘I saw the minibus parked outside the nursery. It hadn’t been there when I walked past the spot earlier so I assumed it had only just arrived. And it struck me that it was a different colour to the buses that are usually parked outside. They’re blue.

‘Anyway, I was just approaching it when the children came marching out of the nursery so I stopped to watch them. As usual they were all wide-eyed and in a state of high excitement. They didn’t look at all distressed. They were in a line and holding hands and three men in suits were with them. One of the men actually smiled at me and I smiled back.

‘The children were talking and laughing as they were herded onto the bus and I enjoyed watching them. The men then got on with them, but I couldn’t see them once they were inside because the windows were blacked out. As soon as the door closed the bus drove off and I assumed they were going on an outing.’

‘Did you notice anything else?’ Anna said. ‘Anything at all?’

Mrs Bradshaw thought about it for a beat and said, ‘Actually I forgot to mention the young woman who was there.’

‘Woman?’

‘That’s right. She was standing just inside the door and it looked as though she was welcoming the kids on board the bus.’

‘Can you describe her for me?’

‘I didn’t really pay her much attention, but I think she had short reddish hair and was wearing a yellow top and jeans. I suppose she must have been in her early twenties or perhaps even younger. But I do remember that she was greeting the kids with a big smile while handing out what looked like sweets from a bag.’

CHAPTER TEN

The parents had been moved from the cafeteria to the largest of the meeting rooms. It looked out on the forecourt so they could see all the activity through the slatted blinds. The room had been due to host a lunch for a group of local pensioners. The lunch had been cancelled and the chairs and tables rearranged so that the parents could sit facing Anna when she spoke to them.

By the time she got there twelve people had turned up – four married couples, two divorced wives without their ex-husbands and two husbands without their wives. That left five of the parents who were still absent. Anna was told that the police hadn’t yet been able to contact the parents of four-year-old Toby Chandler or Phil Green, the father of Simone Green, who was also four. But the mother of Abdul Ahmed had been informed and was on her way to Peabody Street. Meanwhile, Molly Wilson’s mother was stuck at home with two other children and a family liaison officer was with her.

Anna’s plan was to provide them with an update and then later her team of detectives would interview them individually. She wanted to find out as much as possible about them and their children. She needed to know if any of them had their suspicions about who might be involved in the kidnapping. She wanted details of where they lived and worked, and access to their phone records. She also needed to check whether any of them were on the criminal records database.

Doing all that here rather than in their homes would speed up the process considerably. Time was a major factor now and it was already working against them. But at least they were beginning to make some progress. They had identified the minibus believed to have been used and were now tracking it across London.

And they had a witness who had seen the children boarding the vehicle. The same witness had also revealed that there was a fourth gang member – a young woman who’d been waiting on the bus to greet the children. No doubt her role had been to make them feel comfortable in the presence of so many strangers.

Anna felt ill-at-ease as she stood before her audience of desperate mothers and fathers, and she was aware that beads of sweat were gathering on her forehead.

She began by giving the parents the option of staying in the community centre for as long as they wanted or being taken home to wait for news there.

‘You might find that being here together for a time will help you cope with the situation,’ she said. ‘Officers are available to answer your questions and we can be of assistance when it comes to talking to the media. They are likely to hound you for interviews, which we would advise you to decline for the time being. Just let it be known what you’d prefer to do.’

She then asked them to introduce themselves and the first to respond was Ethan Brady, who said, ‘I’m Liam Brady’s father. You’ve already met my wife so you know that our son has cystic fibrosis. If he doesn’t get his medication he could die. So you need to do whatever you can to get him back quickly.’

Ethan Brady was much taller than his wife and came across as far more assertive. His narrow face sported designer stubble and his dark eyes had a piercing quality even from a distance.

He was about to say something else when one of the other fathers leapt to his feet and fixed Ethan with a hostile stare.

‘That’s typical of you, Brady,’ the man shouted. ‘But this time it’s not all about your precious fucking son. The rest of us have as much reason to worry as you do.’

‘I’m not saying you don’t,’ Ethan reacted. ‘But you know how ill Liam is.’

‘Sure we do, because you and your wife never stop telling us. I’ve told you before that I don’t think a kid with cystic fibrosis should be allowed in the nursery anyway. It’s too risky. And the staff ignore our kids because they spend too much time fretting over him.’

Anna was taken aback by the outburst and stepped in to stop things getting out of hand.

‘Please would you not raise your voice or be disrespectful to others, sir,’ she said. ‘One of the reasons for bringing you together like this is so that you can offer support to each other.’

The man puffed out his chest and appeared keen to carry on his rant but his wife took hold of his arm and pulled him back onto his seat. Ethan glared at the back of the guy’s head but remained silent, much to Anna’s relief.

‘OK, so let’s now moderate the tone and can you please carry on telling me who you are,’ she said.

Mr Angry turned out to be Kenneth Tenant, father of four-year-old Grace, the same man who had apparently threatened a PC when he was refused entry into the nursery earlier.

He was a rough-looking individual with stern features and a downturned mouth. His behaviour revealed what Anna took to be simmering tensions between him and the Brady couple. She just hoped the situation they were in did not make matters between them much worse. The last thing she needed was the parents turning on each other as the pressure on them mounted, as it surely would.

They got through the rest of the introductions quickly and with no more awkward moments. Anna then tried to inject an element of optimism into the proceedings by telling them that the minibus had been picked up on a traffic camera. She also told them what the neighbour, Mrs Bradshaw, had seen.

They were shocked to hear that a young woman had been involved. And all were adamant that they had no idea who the perps were.

‘This is a very unusual case in that so many children were taken,’ Anna said. ‘We don’t yet know what the motive is, but it’s possible that we’ll hear from the kidnappers soon if their intention is to demand a ransom.’

‘And what if that’s not what they want?’ asked Simone Green’s mother, Wendy, who had reverted to her maiden name of Ryan. ‘What if they took the kids because they want to …’ Her voice broke. ‘What if they want to do bad things to them?’

‘I think that’s extremely unlikely,’ Anna said, but stopped short of ruling it out altogether. ‘And for what it’s worth, we also think it’s doubtful that the kidnappers are terrorists. I’m sure if they were we would have heard from them by now.’

She was then asked to explain how the children had been taken so she talked them through what she’d been told. There was sympathy expressed for Tasha Norris, but a good deal of vitriol was directed at all the staff, especially Sarah Ramsay.

The others echoed what Ruth Brady had said earlier and Toby Chandler’s mother, Rebecca, revealed that she had raised the issue of security with Sarah Ramsay on several occasions.

‘Before we moved here from Stratford we sent our daughter to a nursery that had much tougher procedures in place,’ she said. ‘It had a fingerprint entry system and a webcam so that we could watch our kids from home. I told Sarah that I didn’t think her nursery was as secure as it should be. She disagreed and told me that it met government requirements and that she took safety seriously.’

‘But that’s total bollocks,’ said Daniel Neville’s dad, Wesley. ‘At the end of the day she’s a businesswoman who doesn’t even have a kid of her own. With her it’s all about money and what happened at her nursery in Lewisham last year cost her a small fortune. So the last thing she wants is to have to fork out on expensive security equipment.’

‘Could you tell us what happened in Lewisham, Mr Neville?’ Anna asked.

Wesley, a pot-bellied black man with sunglasses perched on his head, said, ‘A little girl died after choking on a grape at the Peabody Nursery there. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death and she had to pay a three-hundred-thousand-pound fine for gross negligence.’

Anna hadn’t heard about the case and it annoyed her that nobody back at the station had made her aware of it. Surely officers researching the nurseries would have unearthed the information before now. She would have to ask Sarah about it when she next spoke to her. Right now, however, she couldn’t see how it would have a bearing on what had happened this morning.

She checked her watch, saw that she had been with the parents for forty-five minutes, and decided it was time for her detectives to talk to them individually.

She finished off by telling them that she and her team were doing everything possible to find the children.

‘Scores of officers are already involved in the search,’ she said. ‘We’ve set up a mobile command outside on the forecourt and for the time being we’re using this community centre as a base for our operations. Officers all across London are on the lookout for the minibus and I’ve already issued a short television appeal for information.’

Kenneth Tenant shot to his feet again and this time he locked his angry gaze on Anna.

‘I just watched the interview you gave on the telly earlier,’ he said. ‘One of the reporters asked you a question that you didn’t answer because you got interrupted. So I’ll ask it now. Is it true that your own kid was snatched ten years ago?’

Anna drew a deep, steadying breath and said, ‘It is true that my daughter was taken from me, Mr Tenant, but as I made clear to that reporter it has absolutely no relevance to what’s happening now.’

‘Well, it’s relevant as far as I’m concerned,’ he said.

‘And why is that, Mr Tenant?’

‘Surely that’s bloody obvious.’

She held his gaze and said, ‘Not to me it isn’t, Mr Tenant. So perhaps you could explain what you mean.’

His wife tried to say something to him but he gestured for her to be quiet.

Then his eyes narrowed and he said, ‘If you’ve been searching for your own little girl for ten years and still haven’t found her, then why should we trust that you’re up to the job of finding our kids?’

She’d known where he was going with his accusation as soon as he began the sentence; each of his words felt like a blow to her stomach, but Anna knew she had to roll with the punches. The man was clearly distressed and aggression was obviously a coping mechanism that helped him avoid becoming outwardly emotional.

‘I have been appointed as the senior officer on this case and I can assure you, as will the entire MIT that have chosen me to be the leader of this investigation, that I am up to the job, Mr Tenant,’ she said, keeping her voice low and even. ‘The circumstances surrounding my own daughter’s abduction were entirely different to this. And for reasons that you may or may not be aware of, for most of the last ten years I’ve been the only person looking for her. But in the search for your children and the people who took them I have the support of every police officer in the country and access to an unlimited amount of resources. Plus, I hope you can take comfort from the fact that, because of what I’ve experienced, I can more fully appreciate exactly what you and the other parents are going through.’

Tenant’s whole demeanour changed in an instant and blood coloured his cheeks. He ran a hand through his thin brown hair and blew out a long, slow breath.

Then he shook his head and said, ‘I’m a fucking dickhead and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had a go at you like that. I’m just worked up and my mind’s all over the place.’

‘No need to apologise, Mr Tenant,’ Anna said. ‘Just please understand that myself and my colleagues will not rest until we find your children.’

After telling the other detectives to stay with the parents until the family liaison officers arrived, she made a swift exit from the room.

She went straight outside and round to the side of the building where she rested her back against the wall and fired up a fag, her first of the day.

The blood was beating in her ears and adrenalin charging through her body. It wasn’t that she was hurt by what Kenneth Tenant had said. It was that his words had made her realise just how hard it was going to be to head up this particular investigation.

She wasn’t going to be able to squeeze the memories to one side like she usually did while working. It had started already. She was being reminded of how it had felt after her daughter had been taken from her. As each moment had passed, she’d known that she was less and less likely to see Chloe ever again. Anna had walked around in a fog for weeks, out of sync with her surroundings, and the pain was constant, crushing and unbearable.

She closed her eyes and dragged heavily on the cigarette, then let the smoke drift from her nostrils.

She tried to keep the memories at bay by focusing on the nine children who were missing. But she couldn’t. Her hands started to shake and the cigarette fell from her fingers as her back slid down the wall. When she hit the ground she put her head in her hands and her mind spiralled back through the years to when her life was changed forever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

July 2009

It was the end of Anna’s first week as a detective constable in the Met. She was feeling tired but upbeat as she left the station in Eltham and headed home at the height of the Friday evening rush hour.

She knew it might take her up to an hour to get to Vauxhall, but that was OK because she had the whole weekend to look forward to. She’d be able to relax and unwind while spending quality time with Chloe.

She still found it hard to believe that her daughter was two already, and would soon be three. The time had flown by; it seemed like only yesterday that she’d given birth to her little bundle of joy.

Back then everything was perfect. She and Matthew had just celebrated their third wedding anniversary, and the future had looked really bright.

But that was before he began to change. It started when he was overlooked for a promotion at work. It was a big blow to his ego and he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was jealous of his wife’s success as a copper.

He became argumentative and controlling. And then he embarked on an affair with a woman in his office which lasted for five months. When Anna found out, he was contrite and begged her to forgive him. But she couldn’t because she knew she would never trust him again. She also knew that Matthew Dobson was no longer the man she had married.

At Anna’s insistence, he moved out into a rented flat. And he wasn’t happy when she applied for a divorce. Throughout the process he pleaded with her to take him back. But the voice of reason in her head convinced her not to.

The divorce was finalised six months ago but Matthew had not given up trying to win her back. When his widowed mother died two months later, leaving him and his sister a sizeable inheritance – over a quarter of a million pounds each – he actually believed it would make her change her mind. But, of course, it didn’t and he was mortified.

They’d been granted joint custody of Chloe. Matthew had her every other weekend and occasionally, by mutual agreement, on weekdays. Chloe had actually spent the last two nights with him at his flat in Chiswick. He’d asked to have her so that he could take her to his sister Charlotte’s birthday party.