AMAZINGLY, DETECTIVE SERGEANT Christine Royle answered her phone at the first ring.
“I didn’t think you’d be working at this late hour,” I said.
“I’m not. I redirect my office line to my mobile. Who is this?”
“Chester Newton,” I said. “My daughter, Amanda, was abducted three weeks ago. You came to my house.”
“Yes, Mr Newton,” she said. “I remember. How can I help you?”
“She’s gone missing again.”
“Where from?” the DS asked.
“From Darren Williamson’s flat in Didcot. It seems she popped out to go to the local shop at seven o’clock and has not come back. Darren says he went to the shop, looking for her, but the shopkeeper told him she never went in.”
“Where is this flat?”
“Above the Raj Tandoori takeaway, near Didcot station.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Jeans and a black T-shirt. And flip-flops.”
“Did she take anything with her?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Not even her phone. Just a five-pound note.”
Not even some honey and plenty of money, I thought, my mind wandering for some reason to Edward Lear.
“No other clothes or shoes?”
“No,” I said. “Darren Williamson told me she took nothing. She told him that she’d only be a few minutes.”
“Lots of people say that who want to go missing.”
“But why would she?” I said, getting somewhat agitated by the detective’s lack of urgency. “If you remember, she didn’t want to go missing last time. Someone injected her with ketamine and abducted her.”
“Are you implying that the two events are linked?”
“Bit too much of a coincidence otherwise.”
“But why would the same person take her again?” she asked.
What could I say?
Because I didn’t stop Potassium from winning the St James’s Palace Stakes.
I don’t think so.
I now so wished I’d told the police at the very beginning, after I’d received that first telephone call in the middle of the night at the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
But I hadn’t.
And now I was complicit in race fixing.
My whole future life flashed before my eyes: financially ruined; warned off by all the worldwide racing authorities, with my reputation totally destroyed; divorced, and quite likely homeless—that’s if my home wasn’t a prison cell by then. And, worst of all, maybe with a dead daughter on my conscience as well.
“But you must think it’s odd for someone to go missing twice in such quick succession.”
“Mr Newton,” she said slowly, “there are several members of the public in the Thames Valley Police region who go missing regularly, some of them almost on a weekly basis.”
“I can assure you,” I said firmly, “that my daughter is not one of those. She wouldn’t be missing without good reason. I believe she must have been abducted again.”
“Do you have any evidence for that?” she asked.
Yes, of course I do.
“No,” I said.
“I will file a missing person report, which will mean that all police officers will be looking out for her. At this stage there is nothing more I can do.”
“You could organise a search.”
“Not at night,” she said. “And not until we have some further information.”
“So will you go now and interview Darren Williamson to get that further information?” I asked.
“We will speak to him in the morning—that’s if your daughter is still missing. In the meantime, please inform me if she contacts you.”
“Is that all?” I asked in frustration.
“All for now,” said the detective. “Call me again in the morning.”
She hung up.
“Why do you believe that someone would abduct your daughter?” Toni asked intently, having listened to my conversation with DS Royle, or at least my side of it.
“I don’t know,” I lied. “But someone did it before.”
I told her about Amanda going missing from the party and turning up several hours later in Pangbourne, agitated and with ketamine in her system.
“But that’s crazy,” she said. “Who goes to all the bother of kidnapping someone and then lets them go without demanding a ransom?”
“You sound like an expert,” I said.
“But it stands to reason,” she said. “Kidnapping is a major crime. In the States, after the Lindbergh baby kidnap in the 1930s, right up until the 1960s, you could get the electric chair for kidnapping. That’s before our stupid lawmakers worked out that no one would ever be released alive, even if a ransom was paid for them, because the kidnapper had nothing more to lose by then killing their hostage.”
I rather wished she wouldn’t talk about killing hostages.
But she was right.
Why would anyone go to all the bother of kidnapping Amanda, only to then let her go again?
The answer, of course, was to intimidate me into fixing races.
So what would be the value in killing her this time?
None at all.
If whoever was responsible wanted me to fix another race, then killing my only daughter would not be the sensible thing to do. Taking her for a second time must be just further intimidation to make me comply with his demands.
Either he must let her go again or keep her alive as his hostage while demanding that I fix more races. He would surely work out that to kill her would be totally counterproductive to his cause, not only because then I certainly wouldn’t agree to any of his future demands, but also because it would bring the full force of the police down on his head.
But would he work it out in time? Before he carried through with his threat?
“Are you going to call your wife now?” Toni asked. “To tell her?”
“No,” I said decisively. “I’m not. Not tonight. It would send her into a blind panic, and there is nothing she could do anyway, not from Harrogate.”
“Harrogate?”
“Where her parents live. It’s in Yorkshire.”
She looked blank.
“About two hundred miles north.”
“So she’s not about to turn up here tonight?”
“Very unlikely,” I said. “But Amanda might.”
“Do you really think so?”
Did I?
Keeping a hostage safe, well, and unfound for days on end was not an easy task, especially if the kidnapper was intent on keeping his identity a secret from his victim. The necessary interactions between the two, to provide food, water, and sanitation, were fraught with difficulty and danger.
From a kidnapper’s point of view, the ideal scenario was to receive a large ransom payment quickly, preferably before any such interactions were needed. But in this case, the ransom would likely be a demand for me to fix a horse race, and that would require considerable time to set up, maybe as long as five or six days, if I had to enter a horse for a specific contest for the fix.
In the meantime, I would demand proof that Amanda was still alive—perhaps a WhatsApp video of her holding up the front page of that day’s Times newspaper—something that would likely place the kidnapper in even greater danger of her discovering his identity.
The obvious scenario, at least to me, was that Squeaky Voice would do what he had done before—release her and give me another opportunity to acquiesce to his demands, and threaten that the next time I didn’t … it would be body bag time.
He would probably say that there would be no third chance. Except that the same arguments would still apply. If I didn’t do what he wanted, would he actually kill Amanda, simply out of revenge? Or would he give up on me and find someone more compliant to terrorise?
So was it time for me to tell him to get stuffed and finally call his bluff?
That’s if it was a bluff.
Could I afford to take that risk?
There was nothing more I could do now anyway, short of driving aimlessly around South Oxfordshire searching for Amanda. I had called the police to tell them she was missing, but I had no means of making contact with Squeaky Voice.
I simply had to wait for him to call me.
Toni found some spaghetti in a kitchen cupboard, plus some pasta sauce in the fridge, and set about making us a late supper while I went upstairs to put the things back into James’s desk.
I put his middle drawer on the bed and put back into it all the stuff I had tipped out of it. Next I did the bottom drawer.
I put everything back just as I’d found it. I briefly flicked through the notebooks, but they were just full of equations and calculations, and a few lists, presumably something to do with his university maths course.
“It’s ready,” Toni called from downstairs.
“Coming,” I shouted back.
I went down and we both sat at the kitchen table, eating spaghetti and drinking the rest of the red wine.
“So what now?” Toni asked as she laid down her fork.
“We wait. There’s nothing else we can do. I’ve told the police, but they said they won’t do anything until the morning at the earliest. If she has been kidnapped, I expect that there will be some sort of ransom demand.”
“Why aren’t your cops taking it more seriously?” she asked. “Back home, this would be a big deal.”
“I suspect it’s because she was taken before and released unharmed. And they also seem to think that she might have gone missing on purpose.”
“Did they also think that last time?”
“I fear they did,” I said. “But I don’t know why. She was injected with ketamine and went missing from her own birthday party, when all her friends were here. She turned up three hours later, nine miles away, in a highly agitated state, and she couldn’t have walked that far in the high heels she was wearing. She could hardly stand up in them.”
“So how come the cops thought she disappeared on purpose?”
“Because she wasn’t raped, and there was no ransom demand.”
At least, I hadn’t told them of one.
“But even so,” Toni said, clearly quite angry on my behalf, “they should get a search party out now, looking for her.”
“They don’t have the manpower to search for everyone. I was told by a policeman that a person goes missing in this country every ninety seconds.”
“And he’s getting pretty fed up with it,” she said, laughing at her own joke.
I smiled, just. It might have been funny under different circumstances.
“Sorry,” Toni said.
My phone rang loudly into the silence.
I looked down at it lying on the table. Georgina was the name on the screen.
I picked up the phone and walked out of the kitchen into the sitting room, leaving Toni alone at the kitchen table. I closed the doors so she couldn’t hear my conversation.
“Hello,” I said, answering.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call me,” Georgina said with a hint of irritation. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Sorry. I fell asleep in front of the television. It was such a hot day at Ascot today. I’m totally exhausted.”
“How are things at home?” she asked.
What could I say? “Fine, except your daughter has been kidnapped again, and I’ve just been screwing an American blonde on the rug in the sitting room?”
“All good,” I said. “How’s your father?”
“Remarkable, considering what he was like when I arrived. The new carers started today, and amazingly, he seemed to like them. He was even flirting with the girl.”
“When are you coming home?” I asked.
“Are you missing me?”
“Of course.”
“I think I should be here for the carers tomorrow, and maybe on Saturday as well. Mum seems a little better and slightly more positive, but it’s hard for her, and I hate them being so far away. We’ve discussed about Dad going into a home, but Mum’s not very happy. I think it’s mostly because she doesn’t want to be left alone in this house. She says she’ll look after him for as long as she can. And the carers coming in every day will make a big difference.”
“You stay there for as long as you need to,” I said.
“I’ll look up the trains for Sunday,” Georgina said. “I’ll have to come home soon because I’m running out of my medication.”
“Sunday will be fine. I’ll pick you up from the station.”
My phone beeped and showed that I had another incoming call, but there was no indication of who was trying to reach me.
“I’ve got a call waiting,” I said. “I’ll speak to you in the morning.”
“Okay,” Georgina replied. “Night, night.”
She hung up and, with a degree of trepidation, I touched the “Accept” button on my phone’s screen.
“I told you it was easy to take your daughter,” said the squeaky voice.