The Lost

Chapter 34

The young woman crouched down by the pushchair, smiling as she tucked the blanket around its small occupant.

‘Who’s a beautiful little girl, then? Yes, you are! You’re Mummy’s little angel.’

Her English was good but slightly accented. She was attractive but underweight, with dark shadows under her eyes that told of sleepless nights. Although her clothes were clean they were cheap and worn, and while the pushchair looked passable from a distance, up close the wear and tear was obvious on that as well. It was serviceable but rusted, with one stiff wheel that tended to squeak and stick.

Still, it served its purpose.

There weren’t many people in the park. A wino was drinking on a bench some distance away, lost in his bottle. Other than that, the only other users were the man and small boy in the playground. She watched them over the top of the pushchair, making yet another adjustment to the blankets and waggling the fluffy toy rabbit back and forth. They’d been there about half an hour, the father first pushing his son on the swings, then being led by him to the other playground equipment in succession. The little boy’s laughter carried clearly in the cold air, and the warmth in his father’s smile was infectious.

They were on the roundabout now. Or rather, the boy was. The father was on a nearby bench while the roundabout turned with a rhythmic creaking. The young woman’s baby-talk trailed off as she saw the man’s head droop and rise, droop and rise. Then it sank without rising, his chin tucked onto his chest. Her eyes narrowed.

Was he asleep?

Looking around, she saw that the other park bench was now empty. The wino who’d been there had gone. There was no one else nearby. Only the sleeping father, and the little boy on the slowing roundabout.

And her.

She stood up, scratching at the needle marks under her coat sleeve. She’d been told to just follow and observe, to report back. Nothing else. But this... surely this was an opportunity? It would be worth more than a report, maybe even earn her a night off from working the street.

The little boy had climbed off the now stationary roundabout and gone to the crawl-pipe. Further away from the sleeping father, on the edge of bushes. Twitchy from adrenaline and withdrawal, she looked down into the pushchair. The lifelike doll’s dead eyes stared back at her.

She made up her mind.

‘It was just bad luck.’ Gavin was watching Jonah as you would an unpredictable animal. ‘The people who sent her weren’t interested in you. You won’t remember, but back then I was part of a big joint op with NCA and Interpol, investigating illegal migrants found dead in a railway siding. We knew a gang of local traffickers was involved, but we thought they were just the facilitators for a much bigger organisation working out of the Balkans. We were right, but it turned out we weren’t the only ones doing the investigating. These bastards had been keeping my whole fucking team under observation, looking for weak points. And not just us, friends and family as well. Like you.’

There was a rushing in Jonah’s head. The lamplit cabin with its wood-panelled walls, the shaven-headed man sitting in front of him, had all taken on the hyperreal quality of a nightmare. It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

‘No,’ he said. But he remembered the young mother. Remembered her smiling at him as she’d tucked the blanket into the pushchair. ‘No, she couldn’t have just taken him like that. Somebody would have seen...’

‘Somebody did. CCTV picked her up leaving the park, but the cameras couldn’t make out what was under the blankets. She’d already been picked up going in with the same pushchair, so what was there to suspect? It was just another young mother taking her baby to the park. And Owen Stokes made a much better suspect. Obviously, they tried to trace her, but only as a witness. When they couldn’t find her, no one saw any need to follow it up.’

‘I don’t believe you!’ Jonah felt the onset of panic. ‘Theo would’ve have struggled or... or yelled! Or something! I’d have heard!’

‘But you didn’t, did you?’ Gavin raised the bottle of vodka and took another sip. Slower this time, more measured now he was in control again. ‘She grabbed him before he’d had a chance to make a noise. She was a junkie, you think a four-year-old was going to cause her any problems? As soon as she’d got him far enough away, she gave him a good crack to keep him quiet and pushed him straight out. There was a car parked not far away, and even if he had started to make a fuss, who was going to look twice at another harassed mother with a screaming kid?’

‘No!’ Jonah felt like he’d been kicked in the heart. ‘His shoe was in the culvert...’

‘It was planted, for fuck’s sake. They loosened the cover afterwards so it’d look like he could have crawled in.’

No, no, no... ‘You’re lying! How can you know any of this?’

‘Because the bastards were already blackmailing me. A few days before I’d got an anonymous email, with a video of me fucking a girl I’d picked up in a bar. Turned out it was a set-up. She was working for them, here illegally and underage as well. They gave me a choice. I could either have a retainer of five hundred a week, or they’d send the link to Marie, my chief and the press. Told me I had till the end of the week to decide.’

Gavin broke off to take another drink. Lowering the bottle, he shook his head.

‘Honest to God, I still don’t know what I’d have done, but I didn’t get the chance to find out. I was still agonising over it when Theo disappeared. I’d no idea they’d anything to do with that, but then the next morning I got another email. It said they were bringing forward the deadline and gave me an hour to decide. There was a photograph of Theo with it.’

It was as though all the air had been sucked from the room.

‘You knew?’ Jonah managed. ‘They sent proof, and you never fucking said anything?’

‘How could I? What do you think they’d have done to me if I had? To my family?’

Jonah tried to fling himself at him, yelling as he thrashed and wrenched at the ties binding his ankles and wrists. Unhurriedly, Gavin got up and brought the cosh down on Jonah’s knee. Something in it crunched, and a bolt of white-hot pain took his breath away.

‘Are you going to behave or do you want another?’ Gavin said, standing over him.

Jonah sucked air through gritted teeth, his eyes screwed shut. But the turmoil within him wouldn’t have allowed him to speak even if he could. After a moment, Gavin returned to the seat and sat down.

‘I was trying to keep him alive,’ he said, as though the violence hadn’t happened. ‘I tried, I really fucking tried. If I thought it’d help get him back, I’d have told you there and then, but what good would that have done? They wouldn’t have sent anything that could be traced, and if I’d said anything, they’d have killed him for sure. Jesus, you think I didn’t want to? I did the only one thing I could. I told them I’d do what they wanted if they let him go.’

Even though the news was ten years old, even though Jonah knew what the outcome had to be, hearing it for the first time he still found himself clinging to an irrational hope that his son had somehow survived.

That made it even crueller.

‘They didn’t, though,’ he said.

‘No.’ Gavin looked away. ‘They sent someone to my house. My house. A woman, butter wouldn’t have melted. Marie and Dylan were there, so I had to pretend it was work. She said she was an ‘envoy’, all very formal and polite. She apologised. Told me what happened in the park hadn’t been authorised and the person responsible would be punished. But that it couldn’t be undone.’

Jonah couldn’t breathe. ‘What’s that supposed to mean, “couldn’t be undone”?’

‘What do you think it means?’ Gavin made a helpless gesture, half shrug, half apology. ‘If I could have done any more I—’

‘What did they do to my son?’ Tears were blinding Jonah, smearing his vision. ‘Did they kill him?’

‘They never told me exactly what—’

‘Did they kill him?’

‘Of course they fucking killed him!’ Gavin yelled, slamming the cosh down on the seat arm with a heavy thwock. He paused, breathing heavily, then went on in a flat voice. ‘He was a four-year-old kid, what else were they going to do? These fuckers buy and sell people like livestock. You think they’d care about a child?’

Jonah felt his heart stutter, as though it was trying to stop. He thought he’d been prepared. Thought he’d accepted long ago that Theo was dead. But he hadn’t. The physical hurts were nothing compared to this ache of fresh loss. He sat immobile, stunned by it.

‘They didn’t say how, and I didn’t ask. But they were never going to let him go, not once that stupid bitch had taken him. I could’ve spared myself a lot of grief if I’d realised that earlier.’ Gavin took another drink, then raised the vodka bottle in a salute. ‘Happy now? You wanted answers, you’ve got them.’

Jonah had thought he’d hated Owen Stokes, but that was nothing to what he felt as he stared at the stranger in front of him. He began working on the tie behind his back with a furious resolve.

‘Ten years,’ he said, emotion making his voice unsteady. ‘You knew what happened to him for ten years, and you said nothing.’

‘You think I enjoyed it? Having to live with something like that? Jesus, why do you think I fucked Chrissie? I wanted you to find out, because at least then I could stop pretending!’

‘You fucking coward!’

‘Oh, here we go! Because this is all my fault!’ Gavin’s grin was savage. ‘You wanted to know why I dragged you into all of this? Well, this is why! It wasn’t only your life you fucked up! You think we’d be sitting here now, on this shitty boat, if you’d not fallen asleep and let a crack whore walk off with your son? Thanks to you those bastards owned me! They said jump, I jumped!’

A cold anger was spreading through Jonah. ‘You got well paid for it.’

‘Oh, fuck off! I earned every penny in that bedsit! Every fucking penny! Jesus, some of the things I had to do... And you even fouled that up as well. Three quarters of a million gone, because you stuck your fucking nose in! Now look.’ He gave the laptop bag a derisory kick. ‘A lousy hundred grand. How far is that supposed to get me?’

A preternatural calm seemed to settle over Jonah. The pain from his torn wrists seemed distant and unimportant as he continued working at the tie.

‘Tell me their names.’

‘Why, what good’s that going to do?’ Gavin waved the bottle at where Jonah was bound on the cabin floor. ‘It’s not like you’re going to do anything about it.’

‘Then there’s no reason not to tell me,’ Jonah said. In that moment nothing else mattered. ‘I want to know who killed my son.’

Gavin sat back, pretending to think. ‘OK, well, let’s see. The local boss was Lee Sissons, who ran things with his sons, Patrick and Jez. The order to have you followed would have come from one of them. Except — no, hang on. That’s right, he disappeared not long afterwards. And his sons not long after that. In fact, pretty much everyone involved with them either died or disappeared. Inside six months all their operations had been taken over by their rivals. Funny that, isn’t it?’

The vodka sloshed as Gavin swigged from the bottle. Lowering it, he looked at Jonah with contempt.

‘When they said the people responsible would be punished, they didn’t just mean the junkie who took Theo. Snatching a police officer’s kid is bad for business. And that’s what this is. The drugs, trafficking, prostitution or whatever, it’s a business. Big business. The people behind it don’t just own gangs, they own politicians and bankers as well. It’s an international industry, a giant machine. And if someone throws grit in it, then it gets cleaned out. So if it’s payback you’re wanting, you’re too late.’

Whatever had happened to them, it wasn’t enough. Jonah felt no satisfaction, only a seething frustration that the people who’d murdered his son were out of reach. Except for this man.

‘What about the woman who took Theo?’ he said, unmindful of the blood dripping from his hands as he struggled with the tie. ‘The one with the pushchair?’

‘Oh, she was the first. They wanted to make an example of her, so they cut off her hands and dumped her body in an alleyway.’

Jonah stopped, the nylon tie momentarily forgotten. ‘What was her name?’

‘It won’t mean anything to you—’

‘Was it Ana Donauri?’

Gavin’s surprise was confirmation enough. ‘Who told you?’

Jonah didn’t answer. He couldn’t begin to guess how Eliana Salim could have known, but now there seemed an inevitability about it. Gavin leaned forward, gripping the cosh.

‘I said who fucking told you?’

Jonah looked Gavin in the eye, wrenching at the tie again. Come on, you bastard...

‘It was Eliana.’

‘Don’t piss me about. Even if you’re telling the truth about her being alive, there’s no way she’d know about that.’

‘No?’ Jonah managed a shrug. ‘Well, she did. She told me to remember the name but wouldn’t say why.’

‘Fuck, this is — fuck!’ Gavin looked as though he’d been punched. He jumped up and came to stand over Jonah, cosh held ready. ‘Where did you speak to her?’

‘I got a text telling me to go to Slaughter Quay last night. I didn’t know who it was from until I went there and saw her.’

‘So she just turned up, out of the blue?’ Gavin’s sneer was wafer-thin. ‘Why would she want to meet you?’

‘Why do you think? She wanted to hear how her sister had died.’ Jonah shifted slightly, trying to position himself to kick out at Gavin’s legs. If he could bring him down...

‘She’s come a long way from when you knew her. Expensive clothes, a big car. She told me about you and her. How you’d used her.’

The leather gloves made a small squeaking sound as Gavin’s fist tightened on the cosh. ‘You’re lying. She didn’t say that.’

‘Yes, she did. She told me she lived in fear every day because of you. Why did you make her go back to those bastards? Were you on their payroll as well?’ Jonah stared at him, incredulous. ‘You were, weren’t you?’

‘I told you, it’s a business,’ Gavin said coldly. ‘When a new crew take over, they get all the assets. I was one of them.’

No wonder Gavin had wanted Salim released so quickly, Jonah thought. He didn’t want to risk her telling anyone about a pet detective on the gang’s payroll. And that was why he’d wanted to be her handler, dropping Wilkes off at the pub so he could meet her on his own. That way he could control the information he fed back to his team.

Except he hadn’t really been controlling anything.

‘You really are a piece of shit,’ Jonah said.

‘Yeah, well, we don’t all have your moral high ground.’ Gavin had begun tapping the cosh against his leg, a rapid, agitated rhythm. ‘I didn’t just do it for myself, I was looking out for her as well. You think they can’t get to people in prisons or detention centres?’

‘Right, you did it all for her. She doesn’t see it that way, though. She told me she felt sickened when people started calling you a hero. What do you think she’ll say when she finds out you killed her sister?’

For a second Gavin seemed about to come at him again, then he snatched up the bottle and flung it across the cabin. It hit the wall but didn’t break, spilling vodka as it fell to the floor with a discordant clatter. The cabin filled with the sharpness of raw alcohol. Gavin stood rigidly in its centre, his breathing ragged as though he were in pain.

‘Why’d you do it?’ Jonah asked.

Gavin glared at him, but even that seemed like too much effort. He went back to the padded seat and slumped down.

‘I was tired. So fucking tired. All the lies, the fucking fear. Never knowing when it was all going to blow up in my face. There was no end to it, but after ten years you get so you don’t care anymore. Or think you don’t.’ All the energy seemed to have left him. He passed a hand over his face. ‘I’d been getting sloppy. Taking payments from other gangs, making promises I couldn’t keep. And the DPS were already on my back. I knew it was only a matter of time before they put together a case against me, and then I’d be fucked. As long as I was useful I was fairly safe. Even the bastards pulling my strings would think twice about killing an active police officer. But one who’d been disgraced, who they thought might start talking, that was a different thing. I couldn’t run and leave Marie and Dylan. I was getting desperate, and then, to cap it off, the sister showed up.’

‘She had a name,’ Jonah said. ‘She was called Nadine.’

Gavin gave him a sour look. ‘She was a threat. I thought the Armenians had killed Eliana because they’d found out she was an informer. But they didn’t know about me and her. If they’d had any idea I’d been her fucking handler I’d have wound up with my throat cut, cop or not. If her sister knew about us, the last thing I needed was her mouthing off.’

‘How did she find you?’

‘She didn’t.’ A spasm seemed to cross Gavin’s face. ‘I found her.’

He’d learned that a missing persons report had been filed for Eliana Salim. Fortunately, he’d found out early, before it had raised any red flags. Salim’s murder was an old case, left to gather dust beneath years of official embarrassment. There was nothing to say that the woman reported missing now was the same person whose dismembered body had been found years before. But Gavin had his own reasons for heading off any awkward questions. So he’d pulled the report to see who’d made it.

It was a Kenyan post-grad student called Daniel Kimani.

‘The name didn’t mean anything to me, so I went to talk to him,’ Gavin said, slumped back in the seat. ‘He lived in a shared house in Notting Hill. Typical student. Told me he’d filed the report on behalf of a friend but wouldn’t say who. I was wondering how hard to lean on him when the door opened and Eliana’s sister walked in.

Gavin closed his eyes at the memory. He shook his head.

‘Jesus Christ, when I saw her I thought... Anyway, she must have known from my face, because she just looks at me and says, “You’re him, aren’t you?” Turned out Eliana had written to her about this detective she’d met.’

He gave Jonah a crooked smile.

‘So that was it. I’d fucked myself. She was in the country illegally, so she’d had to get Kimani to file the report for her. But once I got them talking it was obvious they didn’t know anything I needed to worry about. If I’d let it go, they’d never have got any further. Once they knew who I was, though, I had to do something.’

‘So you killed them.’ Jonah didn’t try to keep the disgust from his voice.

‘I told you, I needed a way out. And then when I saw Stokes, everything sort of fell into place.’

Fell into place. All those lives, Jonah thought, still pulling at the tie.

‘What about the other man you murdered? Who was he?’

An oddly furtive expression crossed Gavin’s face. ‘Just a rough sleeper I found in an alley. Somebody no one would miss. If it was just the two of them it’d be too suspicious. I couldn’t have that. It had to look like they were random victims.’

So he’d found one. Jonah had thought nothing else would shock him, but that did. He used it as a goad, clenching his jaw as the nylon tie bit deeper into his flesh. It had snagged in a flap of torn skin on the heel of his hand. If he could get it over that, he might be able to wrench free.

But Gavin was rising to his feet. He seemed calmer now as he went to retrieve the vodka, holding it up to see how much was left in the bottle.

‘You know, I’ve thought about telling you for years,’ he said, after taking a drink. ‘I wondered how it’d feel to get it off my chest. That’s why I let you wake up. I was still in two minds whether to or not, but it was now or never. And you know what? It makes fuck all difference.’

Draining the bottle, he set it down. The cosh hung from his hand as he came over.

‘Tell me how to find Eliana.’

‘Not until you—’

The cosh struck the meat of his thigh before Jonah could move. He cried out, trying to kick Gavin’s legs out from under him, but it was a futile effort. Easily evading it, Gavin laid into him with the cosh, the solid leather weight smacking into bone and muscle with deadening impacts.

‘All right!’ Jonah yelled. ‘Her number’s on the phone! The small one!’

Gavin stopped. He looked over to where both phones were lying on the laptop bag. There was an almost hunted look on his face when he turned back to Jonah.

‘If this is a trick...’

Jonah let his head sag. ‘It’s not. There’s only one number on it.’

He watched as Gavin went to the phone. Go on, call her. He couldn’t see how Salim could help now, even if she wanted to. But Jonah would take a savage satisfaction from her knowing that Gavin was alive.

She’d be able to work the rest out for herself.

Gavin picked up the phone as though afraid of it. He looked uncertainly over at Jonah.

‘How do I know—’

But before he could finish, there was a noise from the far side of the cabin. Looking past Gavin, Jonah felt his heart drop.

Chrissie’s daughter stood in the doorway.

Her hair was tousled from sleep and her eyes were large and unfocused. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ she mumbled.

Gavin was staring at the little girl, his face a picture of dismay. Then his shoulders sank.

‘Ah, fuck.’

A coldness was spreading through Jonah. ‘Gavin, no—’

‘Where’s Mummy?’ the little girl repeated, rubbing her eyes.

‘It’s all right, sweetheart.’ Gavin slipped the cosh and Salim’s phone into his pockets as he went to her. ‘You’re just having a bad dream.’

‘I want Mummy...’

‘Shhh, it’s OK. Let’s get you a glass of milk and put you back to bed.’

‘Don’t, please!’ Jonah said, as Gavin picked her up. The little girl was unresisting, cuddling sleepily into his shoulder. ‘You don’t have to do this! She won’t remember anything.’

‘You need to be quiet,’ Gavin told him, picking up Jonah’s phone as well. ‘Don’t make it any harder than it has to be.’

‘Please! You can still let them go,’ Jonah begged. Gavin ignored him, pausing by the sink to collect a container of milk. ‘Wait...!’

But Gavin was already carrying the little girl out, pulling the door shut behind them.