The
mother stayed behind in a police car. By turns hysterical and stock still she
was restrained and comforted by two pale-faced woman PCs who looked as though
they’d much rather be out here in the chilly night air jogging along the
railway tracks with their armed and armoured colleagues and leading the search
party of sniffer dogs with their handlers, forensics people, the terrified
father, a specialist medical team, four priests and me.
The dogs, I felt, were plain insulting. The priests that Detective Chief
Inspector Cooke insists on having along on any operation involving me were
pious-looking and earnest enough, but seriously; what harm could they do? But
one of my chief strengths in these cases is my skill at tracking added to the
ability to reason and speak with the authorities; albeit in this case with
those very authorities who’d been unable, despite a full week’s warning that
the intended abductor might strike again, to keep a Member of Parliament’s daughter
safe in her own home. It’s true that certain breeds of dog can pick up scents
consisting of only a few parts in a million but even the best of them can’t get
round it when a kidnapper cuts the trail by climbing the wall of a disused
warehouse and thence along its roof to the next building and so down to the far
side of the high wall of a former brewer’s yard. They surely couldn’t follow such
a trail even if they were lucky enough to scent a molecule or two of the sole
issue of the marriage of the Right Honourable Sir Colin Orchard and the right pallid
Lady Charlotte Orchard, nee Hampshire.
I slipped down from the brewery wall, ignoring the stupid baying of the dogs
(bloodhounds, just to rub it in), and motioned the Chief Inspector to join me.
“He’s left the industrial part of the ruins. He’s on foot and he’s still got
the girl. In a sports bag. Synthetic leather, mouldering canvass and intensely
bitter old sweat. Some 1970’s aftershave too, so he’s not likely to be very new.
You’re looking for a former squash player, I should think. Not that they’ll
care about the details if they find him.” I nodded towards the police firearms
specialists. When the likes of Tanya Anne Orchard are stolen by an abductor
who’s already taken the children of three wealthy London families right out of their homes in
the same neighbourhood and the latest victim’s father is a Cabinet minister you
get more bang for your buck than the usual crowd of Special Constables and Sea
Scouts beating the bushes. Emphasis on bang. I wondered if the firearms boys
were the ones who’d been on guard duty when Tanya was taken from the attic
bedroom of the Orchards’ town house. I hoped they were more concerned with
putting the abductor down for her sake than to avoid police careers lived forever
close to the traffic laws and parking regulations of London . This time he’d even sent them a
warning note well in advance. Perhaps he was no longer thinking clearly; even
by the standards of whatever his pathology was.
“Where’s he headed, then?” panted the DCI,
catching up.
“Into the slum clearance across the fence. It’s logical; lots of empty terraced
houses secluded from the populated parts of the city, built on coal cellars
that’re handy for soundproofing and security and inhabited only by rats and the
occasional drugged-up squatter. Easy to secure against squatters, no law around
to object if he needs to enforce his privacy. Lots and lots of privacy. It’s
probably why you never found what’s left of the bodies.” Our quarry was a
frequent user of the Postal Service as well being as a dab hand with needle,
thread and scalpel.
I led the circus past the brewery’s high walls, through a gap in the
redevelopment site’s recession-neglected safety fence and onto weed-choked streets
whose abandonment testified to the victory of politics and bureaucracy over a
neighbourhood that the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy in six years of war.
The DCI held the herd back. The muscle formed
a protective cordon around the Minister who looked about ready to bolt into the
empty streets shouting for Tanya. Or order them to start an immediate
house-to-house and thus warn off our friend with the surgeon’s instruments. So
I’d have to do it quickly and I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.
The first street was empty. Nothing larger
than a scruffy pigeon dwelt there; nor anything in the first side of the second
terrace.
The DCI and two cops with a battering ram
and a pump-action lock pick just made it around the corner behind me when I
found the house. Identical to the others, it was a soot-blackened Victorian relic
of the railways and the huge families who served them. It stood like the blindfolded
skull of a giant with its padlocked door and boarded-up windows. Nothing with a
pulse now called that place home - though something with a good strong
heartbeat would be calling it hell if her six years had taught her the word.
Nothing pushed back at me as I approached the door, nor burned me when I placed
my hand on the lintel that marked the threshold. And now I also knew that I was
not alone.
Orchard would be sure to order a frontal
attack and Cooke’s experience of kidnappings and sieges would mean nothing to him.
A father might panic when his children are threatened and do violent,
dangerous, self-defeating things: especially a proud and arrogant one. Our
master chef could do everything he needed in the seconds needed to smash down
the door and I had just discovered that if Orchard and the SWAT boys went in
there before me there’d most likely be a clutch of Metropolitan Police funerals
within a fortnight and a bye-election in Yorkshire a week or two later. Boarded-up
lower storey windows.
He was in the back bedroom with Tanya and
she was at least still breathing, which made one of us. It was pitch dark but
my sense of smell isn’t the only reason Cooke employs me. Seeing his face in
the infrared glow of the girl’s life was like looking in a mirror once again
after so many decades. He had the same haunted, hungry eyes that I’m told I
have and he stood with the same thrumming strength I feel growing within me at
dusk.
I didn’t try to talk him down or negotiate in
any way. You can’t explain to such a creature that what he’s doing is wrong,
and in any case I had at last realized his true motive in all this. He was no
gourmet. He was old, but I was older and that counts for everything in these
matters; more even than a father’s love.
I brought Tanya out myself; alighting on
the pavement by the specialist medics. They had to start their procedures
immediately if this whole thing was not to be a waste of time – procedures they
must have hoped never to need and had only ever simulated at Porton Down. They
mustn’t be delayed by Orchard’s hysterics.
Minutes later Cooke and I stood together as
the biohazard van and the ministerial car raced away towards a carefully
misnamed secure ward in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“You’ll not be getting any forensics from
this one Chief Inspector,” I said. “A fire will gut the whole street before
dawn due to a faulty field generator, perhaps. It’s started already. And when
you’ve explained it all to him, Sir Colin will likely rush to sign the paperwork
to bulldoze these streets and get the concrete poured just as fast as can be.”
Cooke stared inquiringly at me. “You didn’t see what I saw.”
A father might panic when his children are
threatened and do violent, dangerous, self-defeating things. Especially a proud
and arrogant one. The house wasn’t a kitchen at all. It was a nursery.
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