Kidnap (2 page)

My dad was already in the bath when my mum found the receipt and confronted him with it. He confessed everything, there and then. I sat at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the bathwater splash onto the floor as my parents yelled and screamed at each other.

My dad walked out the next day.

No, that's too simple a way of putting it…

My dad destroyed us the next day.

He left to go and live with Liz, and took everything with him. The TV, the DVD player, the car – and all the savings he and my mum had in their joint bank account.

He left us with nothing.

My mum tried to make the best of it, telling me we were better off without him – but I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me. She tried to get a job, but she hadn't worked since she'd fallen downstairs and hurt her back when I was a toddler, and she really struggled to find anything. In the end, she was taken on as a cleaner in an office block on the other side of town. By the time she'd paid for her bus fare there and back, there wasn't much left, but at least she was doing something positive.

Then, the bank repossessed our house.

While my mum had been looking for work, she'd fallen behind on paying the mortgage, and my dad wasn't coughing up anything to help. My
mum went round to Liz's house more than once to try and get him to man-up and pay his fair share, but it fell on deaf ears.

My mum and me ended up in a hostel for the homeless, and that's where we've been ever since. It's not too bad, I guess. We've got our own room, and we're not on the same floor as the drunks. But there's a lot of noise at night, and the police are called to a fight at least once a week, but we do our best to keep ourselves to ourselves.

The really sad part was that my mum lost her job not long after we moved in here. The bosses accused her of stealing a printer from one of the offices. A printer? What the hell would we need one of those for? Still, it didn't matter in the end. They fired her, and that was that.

She signed on for benefits, but we weren't entitled to much at all. I remember sitting in our room one evening, picking the bits of meat out of a supermarket own-brand ready-meal when she
said that she wished she
had
stolen that printer. At least that way she could have sold it and bought us a decent dinner.

It was a joke, of course. At least, I thought it was. But, the next night, I came home from school to find fish and chips waiting for me on the table. Not the cook-your-own kind, either – proper fish and chips with salt and vinegar, from the chippy! I hadn't tasted anything so delicious in months.

At first, my mum didn't want to tell me where she'd got the money for them but, in the end, she confessed that she'd nicked an X-Box game from the shop on the corner and sold it to some bloke in the local pub for ten pounds.

I didn't know what to think. My mum and dad had always brought me up to be honest and not to steal other people's belongings. But we were desperate, my mum said, and big shops had insurance policies for stuff that was stolen. The game she'd taken didn't actually belong to anyone, yet. Not really.

I could tell she was trying to convince herself again.

It wasn't long before I was going out with her to nick stuff. Unlike my dad, I've always been pretty good at drama, and it was my job to fall to the floor and pretend I was ill. While the shop staff gathered round to see what was wrong with me, she'd fill her bag with stuff. We always took food at first, because there was no way they could trace empty containers back to you. But, before long, we were also nicking stuff my mum could sell to her contacts in the local pubs and clubs.

We got caught – just the once – as the staff helped me up to my feet and double-checked again that my mum didn't want them to call an ambulance for me. The shop manager came out of the office saying he'd seen my mum putting stuff in her bag on the security camera. The police were called, and we were taken to the station for questioning.

Thankfully, my mum managed to convince them that the sight of me collapsing had made her feel confused and light-headed, and that she hadn't meant to steal anything. As neither of us had a criminal record, they let us go with a caution. I knew they'd be watching out for us in future, so we always went shoplifting separately after that.

And now, here I was, browsing the Internet on a laptop my mum had stolen that afternoon. She hadn't found a buyer for it yet, so I figured I might as well enjoy it while it was there.

I managed to break into the broadband account for the taxi company next door, and then I sat back and wondered what to do next. Aside from the occasional project at school, I hadn't been on the Internet for over a year, ever since we'd had the phone cut off at our old house. It was no good checking emails or logging into Facebook – I didn't have accounts like the rest of my mates. So I started to read through the classified ad listings on local websites. Maybe I could find someone who wanted to buy this laptop and save my mum the bother.

I was about halfway down the list of messages when I spotted it. There, hidden in among the pleas for the return of lost cats, and the people trying to sell off their old lawnmowers, was the ad that would change our lives forever.

I almost missed it at first. It was written in plain text, with no pictures or bold fonts to make it stand out. But what it said blew me away.

Ten thousand pounds!

That would really solve our problems! It would mean we could leave the hostel and move into a flat of our own. Mum could get a little car and not have to struggle on the bus if she got a new job.

I grabbed one of the mobile phones I'd nicked from the supermarket from where I'd left it
on charge, and rifled through the draw in my bedside table for a SIM card. There had been a rep for some phone company giving them away for free in the shopping centre a few weeks ago. I'd taken a handful, thinking they might come in useful one day. I guess I was right.

I snapped the SIM card into the phone and dialed the number in the ad with trembling hands. The call was answered after three rings.

“Hello?”

“I'm… I'm calling about your ad. You've got a job you need doing?”

A pause, then…

“That's right. You think you can handle it?”

I tried to sound tough. “I can handle anything.”

“That's good,” said the voice on the phone. “Because I want you to kidnap my daughter.”

I stood in the shadows of the car park and gripped my mum's hand tightly. I was wearing my hoodie, and she had a scarf covering her face. This is where the voice on the ‘phone had told us to meet him, and I didn't want him to get a good look at us. Not after what he'd told me his ‘little job' was all about.

My mum hadn't been keen when I told her about my call, but the prospect of ten thousand pounds in the bank eventually persuaded her that this was worth doing, despite the risks.

After a few minutes, a sleek, expensive car eased its way into the parking spot beside us. A man in a well-cut suit and long overcoat climbed out of the back. He was older than I had expected – in his mid to late fifties perhaps – and he had thick, black hair which was greased back. A diamond ring sparkled in the dim light.

“Are you Roger?” he asked in a gruff voice.

I nodded. I hadn't used my real name when I'd called him. I'm not stupid.

He looked my mum and me up and down in our scruffy jeans, trainers and sweatshirts. I suddenly felt very, very poor.

“Are you sure you can handle this?”

I took a step forwards, and tried my best to look tall and mean, which wasn't easy as I only came up to this guy's chest.

“We can handle it,” I said. “You got the money?”

The man paused, then pulled a plain envelope from his jacket pocket. “£5,000 now, £5,000 later.”

“Sounds fair,” I said, taking the envelope and sliding it into my own pocket. I really hoped he couldn't tell that my hand was shaking. I'd never held so much money in one go before.

The man reached back into the car and produced a folder. On the front was a picture of a girl of eleven or twelve years old. “This is my daughter, Tiffany,” he said. “Inside you'll find details of where she goes to school, how she gets there and what she does in her spare time.”

I glanced down at the girl in the picture. It was a school photo. She had long, blonde hair, tied into pigtails.

“I don't want to know how you're going to do it, or when,” said the man, handing over the folder. “That's up to you. Just make sure you call the number when you've got her.”

“No problem,” I said. “We won't let you down.”

The man turned to get back into his car, when my mum spoke out for the first time.

“Why are you doing this?”

The man slowly turned back to face us. “The ad said ‘no questions',” he growled.

“I know,” said my mum. “But – your own daughter…”

Another pause, longer this time. When he spoke again, his voice sounded harder.

“You remember that boy who was kidnapped while he was on holiday with his family in Greece last year? It was all over the news.”

Mum nodded. “I remember.”

“The public was horrified by the crime,” said the man. “Horrified to the point of rushing to donate money into a fund to help his devastated
parents find their little angel. They got over five million pounds in the first week alone.”

“And you want to do the same with Tiffany?” asked my mum. “You're going to sit there on TV, crying and asking people to help find her so that you can line your own pockets?”

“You're starting to sound very virtuous for someone who's just taken ten grand to kidnap an innocent little girl,” the man rumbled.

I stepped in. “We've only got five grand.”

The man snarled. “I told you – you'll get the rest when you've got Tiffany.”

He got into his car without another word. He nodded to his driver and they drove away, leaving us standing in the shadows. I felt the bulge of the money stuffed into my pocket and realised that we were now deeply involved in a crime far more serious than nicking a few DVDs from the local supermarket.

Now, we just had to figure out how to do it.

We studied Tiffany's file for the next two days. The school she went to was a private facility where the well-off sent their kids to be educated away from, well… away from the likes of me, I suppose.

A couple of nights a week, she stayed behind after classes to either play hockey or to practise her show-jumping. She even had a horse of her own, a pale-brown thing called Chestnut that was kept in an exclusive stables on the outskirts of town.

That's where we decided to make our move.

My mum rented a van with the money we now had, and we parked it part-way down the track leading to Chestnut's stables. We were both dressed in farmer-type clothes, and my mum was writing something on a clipboard. Then, at exactly the time we'd been promised in her file, Tiffany came walking along the lane, carrying her riding helmet.

My mum jumped out of the van. “Sorry,” she called out, waving her clipboard, “you can't go any further, I'm afraid. There's been an accident at the stable yard.”

I was hiding at the back of the van, so I couldn't see Tiffany, but I could hear the panic in her voice.

“Accident?” she cried. “What kind of accident?”

“Some idiot fell asleep at the wheel of his Landrover and ploughed into the stables. One of the horses was badly injured. The vet is there now, putting it to sleep.”

Tiffany gasped. “Which horse?”

My mum looked down the list she pretended to have on her clipboard. “Let me see… ah, here it is. A light brown eight-year-old called Chestnut.”