The Baby-Snatcher

Chapter Five

Ramsay had the weekend off but on Sunday morning he went into the police station anyway. He would have been more reluctant to volunteer for extra duty if Prue had been around. Prue was his lover. Not live-in, though he spent much of his free time in her house in Otterbridge. According to his mother he might as well be staying there. Mrs Ramsay was a chapel-goer and expected him to make an honest woman of Prue.

‘If you think that wife of yours will come back to you, you’re fooling yourself,’ she’d said. She’d always had the knack of putting him down. And perhaps she was right and he was hoping Diana would turn up one day on his doorstep, laden with expensive shopping, her adventures over.

Now Prue was away. She worked as director of a small arts centre and was touring the Highlands and Islands with her youth theatre group, playing in schools and community centres. It was as much about giving her unemployed Tyneside teenagers a good time as developing acting and directing skills, she said. They would end up at the Youth Drama Festival in Kirkwall.

She was obviously enjoying every minute of the trip. When she remembered, she phoned up to rave about the scenery, the history, the whisky. He missed her more than he had expected, became quite sentimental when he thought about her.

‘Why don’t you come?’ she’d suggested during the last phone call. She’d sounded tired, exhilarated and a little bit drunk. ‘Take a couple of days’ leave and fly up for the weekend.’

He’d been grateful for the invitation but he’d turned her down. It would be like taking her out to view the scene of a crime. As one of Prue’s arty friends would have said, they both needed their own space. He knew Prue would prefer to work without distraction.

So on Sunday morning he went into the office. Sally Wedderburn was working too, clicking furiously at the computer keyboard, determined to make her mark on a high-profile case. There had been a number of child abductions in the area and the most recent had hit the headlines. The press hadn’t made a connection with the previous incidents. Perhaps the police themselves had been slow in considering a link, had been reluctant even to take the cases seriously. At the beginning the children had turned up safe and well close to home. They were very young – all under five – and their stories were confused. There was no evidence of assault. Perhaps they had just wandered away. Perhaps the stranger with the sweets had been a friend of the family – someone at least, with no malicious intent – or a figment of the child’s imagination, an excuse to cover naughtiness.

‘How’s it going?’ He sat on the edge of her desk, so close, that he could smell her perfume. Prue teased him sometimes about his ‘worklings’, the eager young women who turned to him for support and advice, but the thought of any social entanglement embarrassed him.

‘Slowly. The place was packed. You’d have thought someone would have seen what happened.’

In the most recent incident a three-year-old boy had been taken from a burger bar in a retail complex on the outskirts of Otterbridge. He was a guest at a birthday party which was being held there. His mother had taken him inside and waited until he’d handed over the present, then she’d gone shopping. She’d bought wallpaper from a DIY store and wandered round a car showroom, eyeing up the family saloons. When she returned to the burger bar an hour later the boy was gone.

‘I spoke to the people who held the party myself. Of course they were devastated, but you can understand how it happened. It was Saturday afternoon, and they had a long table in the main restaurant. There were twenty kids, all riotous. None of them would sit still.

They ran back and forwards to the toilet. It must have been hard to keep track of them all.’

‘Any witnesses where he was found?’

‘Not yet. He seems to have materialized out of thin air.’

The boy had been found four hours later wandering along the seafront at Whitley Bay, clutching a bag of chips, crying. It seemed that nothing had happened during his adventure to distress him. The tears had begun after he’d been abandoned.

‘The social worker’s talked to him again but she hasn’t come up with anything new. She can’t even be sure of the reliability of what we’ve got.’

‘What have we got?’

‘A ride in a car and a fun fair.’

‘The fun fair at the Spanish City?’

‘Presumably, but most of the rides are shut at this time of the year and no one remembers a single bloke with a kid. I’ve left a pile of witness statements on your desk.’

‘Thanks!’

She smiled up at him then returned to her computer screen. He moved on to his own office.

His desk was stacked with piles of paper which had appeared during the weekend – expense-claim forms for his signature, Home Office circulars, Sally’s witness statements. He ignored them all and began by flicking through a file of incidents which had been reported over night.

At first he skipped over the missing person report without really taking it in. He was concerned about children and this was an adult. Then he went back to it. Kathleen Howe. The walker. He had seen her and the girl on the roads round Heppleburn several times since Marilyn had turned up, panic-stricken, on his doorstep in the autumn. Once the girl was carrying a violin in one hand and a music case in the other. Another time she recognized him and raised her hand in greeting as he drove past. It was an apologetic gesture. She didn’t stop or break her stride. The mother never acknowledged him.

What had happened now? Had the girl overreacted to her mother’s absence again? Perhaps this time she had taken his advice by phoning the station instead of knocking on the door of a stranger. He unclipped the form from the file and looked at it in more detail.

It had been the husband, not the daughter, who had phoned the station.

Ramsay considered the piles of paper on his desk, then swivelled his chair so his back was turned to them. He was curious and he wouldn’t concentrate on other work until he had checked this out. He picked up the phone.

‘This missing person from the Headland?’ he asked. ‘She turned up yet?’

‘If she has no one’s told us. But, they don’t always, do they?’

‘I’ll deal with it if you like. Talk to the family anyway.’

‘Why?’ The voice was suspicious. Routine missing persons shouldn’t have interested Ramsay. ‘Something going on there that we should know about?’

‘Nothing like that.’

How could he explain his feeling that something was wrong? He could hardly say, ‘I went there once. The lassie was more worried than someone her age has a right to be. And there were no blackberries.’ He’d be a laughing stock. So he said nothing.

‘Well, if you’re short of work you’re welcome to it.’ The voice at the end of the phone had turned sulky. The receiver was replaced with a thud.

Ramsay drove back down the road along which he’d just travelled. There was a straight avenue of dripping trees before he came to the familiar grey terraces of Heppleburn and the road to the coast. As he drove he half expected to see the ramrod-straight figure of Kathleen Howe marching towards her home, carrying her canvas shopping bag and another excuse for her unexplained absence.

As on the previous occasion he had to wait at the level crossing. A coal train was rattling slowly on its way to the power station. On the other side of the line, beyond the barrier, a pedestrian was waiting to cross. He was a large man in a black PVC cape and Ramsay imagined the moisture trickling from the greasy collar into his neck. As the barrier lifted and Ramsay drove slowly across, the man peered into the car, sticking his head right up to the passenger window, so close that for a moment Ramsay was afraid he intended to jump in front of the vehicle. It occurred to Ramsay as he drove on towards the club that he should have stopped, and at least asked the man for his name and address. Already he was thinking of Kathleen Howe’s disappearance in terms of a police investigation.

The Headland was covered with a fine drizzling mist which hid the Coastguard House from view. Ramsay drove slowly past the club and towards the houses of Cotter’s Row. A red minibus loomed out of the fog ahead of him. He had seen it before parked in the street close to his cottage. It collected people who had no transport and took them to the ten o’clock service at the Methodist church in Heppleburn. He pulled in to let it pass and had a glimpse, through windows spotted with rain, of elderly faces.

He parked outside the Howes’and waited for a moment, suddenly daunted by the prospect of an encounter with Marilyn Howe. He thought he should have brought Sally Wedderburn with him, then told himself he was overreacting. When he knocked on the door Kathleen Howe would probably open it herself.