“Scared me ball-less, Sir. I was on my arse, babbling, whilst Joe was dying.”
“No. I don’t believe that, and if you look deep down, neither do you.”
“I guess not. I tried to help him.”
“You did help. You made sure the last thing he saw in this world was someone who really cares about him. We should all be so lucky.”
“Joe said that girl’s scream signifies that something terrible is about to happen.”
“I heard her once. My father died the same night.”
Josie closed her eyes and tried a quiet laugh that came out as a strangled sob. “So, I guess I’m the lucky one, hearing her twice.”
Kett suddenly pushed himself forward. “Wait. Twice?”
“Yes, Sir. The second time right after I though Joe had died, for the first time.”
“Christ, Leigh. If you’re right, that means this ain’t done yet. Something else is going to happen today…”
Josie surfaced from Kett’s stifling office near nine in the morning. Christ, her shift was technically only half way through, and it had already changed her life. Technically, because Kett had just ordered her to take a few days off, to come back fresh after Joe’s funeral.
It was the right thing, and something she needed to do.
The squad room was running as competently as ever, but with a subdued air. There were no good-humoured cracks, no harmless, bawdy comments. Dust motes spun listlessly through heavy air drained of brightness and laughter, and now coloured dull grey instead of red and gold.
Colleagues caught her eye, a few nodded. She made her way to her desk and sat down heavily.
Sunday morning, nine-o-clock. The one person who could lift her spirits would still be in bed, dreaming a bunch of lovely, untainted dreams. No matter. Josie needed her anchor, her innocent muse. She tapped speed-dial one and waited with her head down.
“Mum?” The voice was stifled with sleep.
“Hi, darling.” Josie could barely speak.
There was a rustle of covers and pyjamas and toys and, most likely, a torch. “Mum?”
Emily’s youthful concern shook Josie into lucidity. “Just thought I’d let you know, Em, I’ll be home early today. Soon.”
Her six-year-old practically squealed, in the way of children going from lethargy to fully alert at the speed of sound. “Now?”
“Soon, darling, soon. Tell Simon to make blueberry waffles for ten.” She needed them.
More squeals and a sudden hang up, and Josie found her lips had curled up into a smile. She placed the phone gently back into its cradle, lost in thoughts of Emily and Joe and the unpredictability of life when a large shadow fell across her desk.
“Leigh.”
It was Paul Kett and he was drip-white, as if he’d spent the last night walking with ghosts.
Josie felt a dreadful sense of foreboding…
… and remembered Joe’s words: she only screams when something terrible is going to happen.
… as Kett spoke words no sane person should ever have to hear.
“A six-year-old girl was just abducted from Coney Street. It’s him, Leigh. He just took another kid from under our Goddamn noses.”
PART 3
The girl’s name was Kayleigh Bryant. She was six. Emily’s age. Before she realised what she was doing, Josie was already dipping a toe into those dreadful waters, wondering, suffocating, delving deeper and deeper, until she no longer had to wonder, and deliberately dragged herself back to reality before fear for her safe Emily debilitated her.
“I’m staying,” she said to Kett’s back. “I can’t go home.”
“You’re no good now, Leigh.”
“I will be, Sir. My… my daughter’s six.” She met his eyes as he spun around. “I can do this. I want to.”
“Fine. Listen!” His calm, raised voice quieted the station. “CID will be here soon. This little girl must be found. That’s all.”
Josie felt a bloom of respect. With that economical sentence Paul Kett had just delivered a blunt order, in disguise, to everyone to bypass their rivalries and get their jobs done fast. He’d reminded them of the stakes and delivered it all with a modicum of respect.
He gave her one more moment. “Joe will have to wait a while, Leigh. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
The centre of York on a Sunday afternoon bore no relation to the York where Joe Morris met his snarling death. Tourists and locals thronged the streets in a mismatched muddle of the purposeful and the pointless. Josie fought her way through the masses to get to the latest crime scene, this one on Low Petergate, just past a French Cafe. She was a spare on this, and thus forced to go it alone. Her quick calls to Emily and Simon were the polar opposites- to the first all apologetic and angry, to the second all fury and understated desperation.
Cops were everywhere. Josie knew about a third of them, the rest regarded her appearance with everything from mild disinterest to outright suspicion. She quickly got among them, deciding the best foot forward was the one that joined the fray.
She found herself on the edge of a group of policeman, and at their centre stood the distraught parents.
Josie came to a thundering stop, a tangle of emotions suddenly confusing her feet. The mother was hysterical, hanging on both to her husband and a big policeman. A WPC was trying to coax her away from the scene and, most likely, to a waiting ambulance. The father was just standing there, shell-shocked, as if all the worlds and dreams he’d ever built has come smashing down around him.
The expression on both their faces broke Josie’s heart. It screamed the single word: please! The fear they radiated was a manifestation of the unspoken fear every parent in every corner of the world would always secretly harbour.
Please find our daughter… please bring her back to us.
Little Kayleigh Bryant, their daughter, was a black-haired six-year-old with a scrunched up nose and a happy-go-lucky nature. She’d been hiding from her dad in a clothes’ shop when the man had grabbed her. She’d been wearing a royal-blue dress with frills and pictures of Princesses on the front and had been carrying her little red blanket, the comforter that never left her side.
Josie had to look away from the distraught parents. She found herself face to face with another new recruit, Stuart Anders, a tall gangly youth with a face like a horse, and teeth to match. “Jesus, Josie,” he said under his breath, “there’s a hundred cops here, it seems, with nothing to do.”
“What happened? Do we even know which way he took her?”
Anders nodded to a mobile van blocking half the street. “They’re checking surveillance right now. Trouble is,” he made a motion with his head that included all the cops and the Sunday shopping crowd. “easy to get lost.”
Josie checked her watch. Noon. “That’s two hours already,” she said. “Christ, it all seems so slow when you want stuff to happen.”
Anders pointed as a second van’s doors were flung wide and six cops jumped out, followed by some civilians. The cops were waving A4 sheets as if in triumph.
Josie knew what that meant.
“Eye-witness sketch,” Anders now looked a bit brighter. In such depression even the merest token is inspirational.
Josie waited until her turn came for the handout. The composite was grainy, showing a blonde-haired man with bushy eyebrows, long straggly hair and a hook nose. Dark eyes. But probably his most outstanding feature was his spade-like chin. He’d been wearing a blue jacket and jeans, and carrying a rucksack.