Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(46)

The street was pleasant, one of the posher areas of town, and lights glowed in the windows behind curtains. Layla checked her watch and picked up the pace, seeing that the bus was due in less than five minutes.

The side of the road was lined with cars where the residents parked, and a couple of cars pulled into vacant spaces as she passed. A man in a suit, carrying a bunch of roses, got out and hurried up the steps to a front door with big white pillars, and a woman with a small boy and girl emerged from the other car, the children whining that they weren’t allowed fish and chips for their tea.

“You can have them tomorrow, now shut up!” she said. She followed along behind Layla, the children whining and dragging their feet.

“I don’t want to eat steamed vegetables,” the little girl was saying. Layla smiled, remembering the protracted torture of being made to eat her greens as a little kid. She looked back as the little boy dropped the school satchel he was carrying.

“Pick that up! The ground is wet!” his mother trilled. Layla thought how much she was looking forward to Friday, when her dad always got fish and chips on the way home from work.



There was a railway bridge with an underpass, which cut through to another residential street close to her bus stop. It was now dark, and the underpass up ahead was poorly lit, but with the family following behind, Layla felt more comfortable taking this shortcut.

But just as Layla entered the underpass, the mother and her children took a right into the gate of a house and their voices dropped away. The noise from the surrounding street was muffled and Layla’s feet echoed in the enclosed space. It was dank and stank of urine, and she hurried on to the other end. She emerged at the end of another residential street, and next to the arches of the underpass was an overgrown play park, and a large house whose windows were in darkness. There were no streetlights, and at first she didn’t see the black van parked at the curb in the shadows. Just as she came level, the side door slid open, and a tall man dressed head to toe in black reached out and clamped a square of surgical cotton over her nose and mouth. His other arm encircled her shoulders in a powerful grip and yanked her off her feet and bundled her into the van. It happened smoothly, almost as if he gathered her in his arms and pulled her inside the van. There was a brief moment where her hockey stick caught on the edge of the door, but he pivoted her around deftly.

The back of the van was empty apart from a small mattress. They went down soundlessly, hitting the mattress together. The man used the might of his large frame to keep Layla still for the fifteen seconds it took the drug soaked into the cotton over her nose to take effect, and for that brief moment, she fought back, writhing, until the drug hit her system and she went limp.

The street was quiet, and in the dark pool of shadows by the alleyway, no one saw the gloved hand drop Layla’s mobile phone into the drain by the van.

The door slid closed with a soft click, and a moment later the engine started, and the van moved along the quiet residential street, joining the traffic at the main road and on toward Exeter.





24

On Friday, Kate woke when it was still dark, and skipping her usual morning swim, she left her house very early to drive up to Altrincham on the outskirts of Manchester. For an hour the sun struggled to come up, and when the dawn finally broke, only an eerie gray light filtered through the clouds. With the light came the rain, hammering on the car roof as she crossed the hills and moors. She arrived just before lunchtime and was starving as she drove through Altrincham.

She’d phoned Paul Adler the day before, and he’d been very helpful and amiable on the phone, answering all of her questions. He had even offered to meet her in person at the pharmacy, which he still owned, to give her some photos he had of Caitlyn. Kate was dreading having to go back to Malcolm and Sheila, but she thought she’d take one last roll of the dice and go up and have a look at where Caitlyn lived and collect the photos. It was something. On the way back she would call in to see them in Chew Magna.

Tristan had a “performance review meeting” with Ashdean University’s HR department. He had been working as Kate’s assistant for three months now, and on her recommendation, he would be made a permanent member of the staff. It was a meeting he couldn’t miss. Kate had promised that she would call him with any updates.

Kate grabbed a sandwich from a petrol station and wolfed it down in her car. She then drove to her first stop, the house where Malcolm and Sheila lived when Caitlyn went missing. Altrincham was quite a smart, well-heeled little suburb of Greater Manchester. Their old house was a small, modern terrace that was now a solicitor’s office for a company called B. D. and Sons Ltd. It had recently been renovated and had gleaming sash windows with the name of the firm stenciled on the glass. The black soot had been sandblasted away from the bricks to reveal their original biscuit color. The front garden was now a small car park. Kate got out of her car and stood on the pavement for several minutes, staring at the house and willing some kind of feeling or insight. She tried to imagine Caitlyn leaving the house or returning after school, but nothing came to her, so she got back in her car and drove on.

Her next stop was the church hall where Carter’s youth club had been. It was demolished in 2001, and now it was part of a vast distribution center that ran half the length of the street. As Kate stood outside, watching huge lorries come and go, she wondered what had happened to the river that ran out back of the youth club. The corrugated building seemed to cover acres.