#taken Read online

  Tony

  Parsons

  #taken

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  About the Author

  Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and his first job in journalism was at the New Musical Express. His first journalism after leaving the NME was when he was embedded with the Vice Squad at 27 Savile Row, West End Central. The roots of the DC Max Wolfe series started here.

  Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages. The Murder Bag, the first novel in the DC Max Wolfe series, went to number one on first publication in the UK. All of the DC Max Wolfe novels have been Sunday Times top five bestsellers.

  Tony lives in London with his wife, his daughter and their dog, Stan.

  Also by Tony Parsons

  The Murder Bag

  The Slaughter Man

  The Hanging Club

  Die Last

  Girl on Fire

  Digital Shorts

  Dead Time

  Fresh Blood

  Tell Him He’s Dead

  For Nick Logan

  PROLOGUE

  As Personal as Hell

  It was nothing personal.

  She knew that the two men in the car behind her, driving far too close and grinning foolishly beyond the tinted windscreen, could have chosen any woman to bully.

  She had been driving out of the West End, crossing the Marylebone Road and starting to pick up speed on Albany Street, the long stretch of straight road that skirts Regent’s Park, and their big black four-by-four was suddenly there, filling her rear-view mirror, its diesel engine roaring and so close it was as if they wanted to drive straight through her.

  And although it was nothing personal, their behaviour did not feel completely random. They wanted to teach her a lesson.

  They wanted to show her. They wanted to show her good.

  It was nothing personal, but there was a reason why they were driving that close. She had done something to push their touchy little buttons.

  It could have been the car she was driving – the latest 7-series BMW, so new it still had that glorious showroom smell and sheen. And that would have been almost funny because it was not even her car – her battered little Fiat was in the garage, unable to squeeze past its MOT – but of course they did not know that.

  And perhaps it wasn’t the car. Perhaps she had pulled away too fast at the lights, anxious to be home, the hour late now, their insecure manhoods shrinking as she left them dawdling in exhaust fumes.

  Or perhaps they had been offended by the jokey sign in her rear window, black words on a yellow background. Baby, I’m Bored, it said, a single girl’s play on those Baby on Board signs you saw everywhere.

  Not my sign, she thought. And not my life.

  Or perhaps it was nothing to do with the brand-new car or the Baby, I’m Bored sign or the way she was driving. Perhaps they were just a pair of macho assholes. That was always a possibility.

  As she skirted Regent’s Park, all the beautiful Nash buildings to her right, like castles made of ice cream glowing in the night-time, and the park itself a sea of unbroken blackness to her left, the two vehicles were suddenly alone on that lonely stretch of road.

  All that darkness to the left, all that moneyed elegance to the right.

  And the car behind so close that if she braked it felt like they would crash into her.

  And now she was scared.

  Her foot gently brushed the brakes. Barely enough to slow her borrowed vehicle but enough to make its brake lights blaze red.

  The driver behind slammed on his own brakes, rubber shrieking, and his face tightened with fury as their vehicle receded.

  She put her foot down. She really needed to be home. She ached for home now.

  She was watching them in the rear-view mirror, watching their car get smaller, watching them far too closely, because she almost missed the sharp left turn in the road, she almost kept going, which would have been very bad indeed, but at the last moment she looked forward and cursed and tugged down hard on the left side of the steering wheel.

  She took a breath, held it, speeding past London Zoo, accelerating for the junction where she would turn right into St John’s Wood and the road for home. She exhaled with relief, seeing the light was green.

  ‘Imagine life is a highway and all the lights are green,’ her father had once told her, and she smiled at the thought of him.

  She turned right on her green light.

  And they followed.

  ‘Oh, what’s your problem?’ she muttered, already knowing the answer.

  She was their problem.

  St John’s Wood now, the huge houses behind iron gates, and the streets empty.

  And the black car filling her rear-view mirror.

  The car edged closer, so close it must surely touch, so close she had stopped breathing.

  And then suddenly they came to the big junction at Swiss Cottage and it was over.

  They roared past her, and she glimpsed their faces as they tore away, not even looking at her, their simple minds bored with their vicious little game.

  She exhaled. And she glanced over her shoulder to look at her six-month-old boy in the rearward-facing baby seat, feeling overwhelmed with relief and love.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, though she knew he was sleeping.

  Cars were the one guarantee of getting him to nod off.

  And then there were the big roads that led to the small roads home.

  The Finchley Road was clogged with traffic even at this time of night, but still no sign of the black car, and she turned right at the old church, up Frognal Lane, climbing all the while, heading for the rooftop of the city.

  Now the big houses of Hampstead were on either side, and she was still climbing. She slowly turned on to a tree-lined back road that looked as though it were in the heart of the country.

  There was a private security guard in his van across the street. He glanced up at her without expression as she turned on to the private road that led to her home.

  And the way home was blocked by the big black car.

  They were waiting for her.

  She slowed and stopped, reaching for her phone, because this was so wrong, and it was against the law, and then it all happened very quickly.

  The two men were out of the car, their faces covered with some kind of mask, those masks that look like skulls, designed to halt the heart with a stab of fear, and they were walking quickly towards her car.

  As if it was all planned. All of it.

  She fumbled with the central locking but her doors opened on both sides, and someone’s hands were on her, gripping her by the arms just above the elbow, and the one who was on the passenger side walked round, his skull mask grinning in her headlights, to help drag her from the car.

  She was screaming for help.

  They lifted her from the ground as if she weighed nothing, the one holding her arms not changing his grip and the oth
er one lifting her by the ankles. They carried her towards their car and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

  And then the security guard was standing there.

  One of the men said one word.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  And the security guard didn’t. He stood there, a boy in the presence of two men – unmanned, paralysed, just watching as they loaded her into their car.

  And now she felt the violence in them. Not spite, or sadism, or wounded, woman-hating pride. But violence. Violence in the hands of deeply experienced professionals who did this sort of thing for a living.

  She saw her baby son, and she called his name, and the child was still sleeping on the back seat, wet-lipped and head lolling under the Baby, I’m Bored sign, and she let out a howl like a wounded animal because she knew with total blinding clarity that she would never see him again in this life.

  And that was when she understood.

  This was personal.

  This was as personal as hell.

  1

  It was the hour before dawn when I ducked under the Do Not Cross tape we had put up at the entrance to the private estate, early summer but bitterly cold, and I stood there for a moment, still waking up, watching the search team moving up the hill on their hands and knees like some slow and silent multi-backed beast.

  Flanked by silver birches, the small road rose sharply and briefly to its summit, where a brand-new car was now a crime scene. A cluster of blazing spotlights lit it up, brighter than daylight. All the doors were thrown open and the white-suited CSIs moved through it and around it with their tweezers, cameras and plastic evidence bags, faces anonymous behind their blue nitrile masks. Above the trees, the night pulsed with the blue lights of our response vehicles.

  Two women came out of the darkness, looking like a librarian and a supermodel, and on the frosty night air there was the vaguely metallic scent of vodka. Because the call comes in and you go, I thought. That’s the job. They don’t ask you if you have been drinking. They don’t ask you if you have taken a sleeping pill. They don’t ask you if you have adequate childcare. They call in the middle of the night and tell you a woman has been taken from her car. And so you go.

  The women were my boss DCI Pat Whitestone – slightly built, her eyes squinting sleepily behind John Lennon glasses, her fair hair streaked with grey at just forty – and TDC Joy Adams – young, black, extravagantly tall, her hair in tight cornrows. Joy was only a year out of Hendon police school and, I guessed, still up for a few shots of vodka on a work night.

  ‘You see her picture?’ Whitestone asked me. ‘The woman they took? She’s beautiful.’

  I had looked at the photograph that had been sent to my phone when I got the call. It had been pulled from the driving licence of Jessica Lyle, twenty-two years old. Long, dark hair framed a pale face. Her expression was photo-booth serious but her eyes were smiling, almost blazing with life. And even in the sterile mugshot that was the only photo ID we had so far, I could see that Whitestone was right.

  Jessica Lyle, the woman they had taken, was beautiful.

  ‘Her parents have arrived,’ DCI Whitestone told me. ‘They’re taking their grandson home with them as soon as the doctor has signed off on the kid. Have a word before they leave, Max.’

  I nodded. An unwanted suitor was the most likely reason for this kind of abduction. Having a word with the next of kin of a kidnapped woman meant finding out if the parents were aware of any bitter ex-partners or lovesick stalkers hanging around their daughter who wouldn’t take no for an answer and who could not tell the difference between loving someone and hurting them.

  And the other reason for this kind of abduction was that it was like being struck by lightning, totally random, the worst bad luck in the world.

  Whitestone shivered. It was June, but you would never guess it in this dead zone between night and day.

  ‘The father was one of us,’ Whitestone told me. ‘Frank Lyle.’

  ‘A cop?’ I said. ‘Still serving?’

  ‘Retired after thirty years in the Met,’ she said, her pale eyes weary behind her spectacles. ‘That never makes this stuff any easier.’

  Thirty years, I thought. How many enemies do you make in thirty years?

  Across the street a private security guard was standing by his van, sucking hungrily on a cigarette. His military-style uniform was several sizes too big for him.

  ‘What about Clint Eastwood?’ I said.

  ‘He claims he didn’t see a thing,’ Adams said. ‘Missed it in his toilet break.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘I haven’t finished with him yet.’

  Whitestone and I stood in silence, watching Joy approaching the security guard as she pulled out her notebook; not exactly the silence of old friends, but the silence of two professionals who had worked together for years.

  Whitestone took off her glasses to clean them on her sleeve, giving her face a vulnerable, owlish look. You would never have guessed it from her bookish appearance, but Pat Whitestone was the most experienced detective in West End Central’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command. She put her glasses back on, nodded briefly, and we started up the tree-lined road towards the car. It felt like it could be in the middle of the countryside. There was a sign by the side of the road:

  EDEN HILL PARK

  Private Estate

  No thoroughfare

  No dogs

  Whitestone was carrying a small stack of transparent stepping plates so she could build an uncontaminated path to and from the crime scene. When we reached the top of the hill, she had me hold the stepping plates while she pulled blue plastic baggies over her shoes. The car was so new that it still had the showroom smell of new leather, polished chrome and fresh paint. It smelled like money. Baby, I’m Bored said a sign in the rear window. One of the CSIs was photographing the empty baby seat on the back seat.

  Whitestone took the stepping plates from me and pressed her glasses to the bridge of her nose.

  ‘And talk to Jessica’s flatmate,’ she said. ‘Snezia Jones. This is her car.’

  The road levelled out and as I walked towards the pulsing blue lights surrounded by silence I could sense that this was one of the highest points in London. The air was almost alpine-sweet up here. I inhaled deeply as the road opened up on to Eden Hill Park estate. It felt like a secret that had been hidden from the city. You would never guess it from the modest entrance, but the estate was large, consisting of a block of luxury apartments and a variety of houses that ranged from huge modern buildings with two-storey glass walls to a line of tiny ancient cottages that had somehow survived the wrecking ball of the property developers. All over Eden Hill Park the lights were on as the residents stared out at the convoy of police vehicles parked outside their homes. I took the lift to the top floor of the apartment block. Doors were open all along the corridor. The news had spread fast. There was a uniformed officer standing outside the apartment I was looking for. The doctor was leaving.

  ‘The kid all right, doc?’ I asked him.

  ‘The baby is about the only one who is doing well. The parents are in a state of shock. So is the young lady. Miss Jones. The flatmate. Keep it as short as you can.’

  Inside the apartment, two women were embracing on the sofa and a man was holding a sleeping baby. Jessica Lyle’s parents and her flatmate. They all turned to look at me as I walked in.

  Frank Lyle was a tough old ex-cop with cropped steel-grey hair, assessing me with cool, unimpressed eyes as he gently rocked his sleeping grandson.

  Mrs Lyle was still stunning in her fifties, the image of her daughter three decades from now. If she survives, I thought, then pushed the thought away.

  The flatmate, Snezia Jones, was perhaps thirty, tall and thin and almost albino-pale, her hair so blonde it was just this side of white.

  Both the women had been crying. I told them my name and showed them my warrant card.

  ‘I just have a few questions about Jessica,’ I
said.

  But the parents had questions for me.

  ‘Why would anyone take Jess?’ Mrs Lyle said. ‘Are they hurting her? What are they doing to her?’

  ‘Stop it, Jen,’ Mr Lyle quietly told his wife. ‘Please stop.’ He smiled gently at her then turned to me, lifting his chin, the smile fading away. ‘Anything you find show up in IDENT1?’

  IDENT1 is the police database containing the fingerprints of ten million people who have ever had contact with the law.

  ‘We haven’t got that far yet, sir. I just wanted to ask you—’

  ‘But do you have any prints?’ he said, flaring with impatience, and he rocked his grandson a bit harder as he turned his face away and coughed – the hawking cough of a lifelong smoker. The baby whimpered in his sleep. ‘Fingers, shoes, tyres? Come on. There must be tyre prints, at least. I can’t believe you’re so incompetent that you can’t even find tyre prints!’

  I took a breath. Whitestone was right. Dealing with old cops never made our job easier.

  ‘Our forensic people are still working on that,’ I said. ‘As you know, Mr Lyle, any tyre marks will have to be cross-checked against the cars of the residents. We assume the assailants were wearing gloves. Our search team has been out there all night and if they dumped gloves, we’ll find them. We’re going to find your daughter, sir.’

  His mouth twisted with hard-earned wisdom. He knew as well as I did that every minute that passed without us finding his daughter, the less chance there was that we would find her alive.

  ‘Spare me the slick PR spin, son. Just do your fucking job.’

  ‘Frank,’ his wife said.

  ‘Has your daughter been threatened by anyone?’ I said, looking from the mother to the father and back again. If Jessica Lyle confided in either of them, it would more likely be her mother. ‘Any ex-boyfriend, or someone stalking her, or—’

  ‘Everyone loves Jess,’ the flatmate said.