Read Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher for Free Online

had been slow in considering a link, had been reluctant even to take the cases seriously. At the beginning the children had turned up safe and well close to home. They were very young – all under five – and their stories were confused. There was no evidence of assault. Perhaps they had just wandered away. Perhaps the stranger with the sweets had been a friend of the family – someone at least, with no malicious intent – or a figment of the child’s imagination, an excuse to cover naughtiness.
    ‘How’s it going?’ He sat on the edge of her desk, so close, that he could smell her perfume. Prue teased him sometimes about his ‘worklings’, the eager young women who turned to him for support and advice, but the thought of any social entanglement embarrassed him.
    ‘Slowly. The place was packed. You’d have thought someone would have seen what happened.’
    In the most recent incident a three-year-old boy had been taken from a burger bar in a retail complex on the outskirts of Otterbridge. He was a guest at a birthday party which was being held there. His mother had taken him inside and waited until he’d handed over the present, then she’d gone shopping. She’d bought wallpaper from a DIY store and wandered round a car showroom, eyeing up the family saloons. When she returned to the burger bar an hour later the boy was gone.
    ‘I spoke to the people who held the party myself. Of course they were devastated, but you can understand how it happened. It was Saturday afternoon, and they had a long table in the main restaurant. There were twenty kids, all riotous. None of them would sit still.
    They ran back and forwards to the toilet. It must have been hard to keep track of them all.’
    ‘Any witnesses where he was found?’
    ‘Not yet. He seems to have materialized out of thin air.’
    The boy had been found four hours later wandering along the seafront at Whitley Bay, clutching a bag of chips, crying. It seemed that nothing had happened during his adventure to distress him. The tears had begun after he’d been abandoned.
    ‘The social worker’s talked to him again but she hasn’t come up with anything new. She can’t even be sure of the reliability of what we’ve got.’
    ‘What have we got?’
    ‘A ride in a car and a fun fair.’
    ‘The fun fair at the Spanish City?’
    ‘Presumably, but most of the rides are shut at this time of the year and no one remembers a single bloke with a kid. I’ve left a pile of witness statements on your desk.’
    ‘Thanks!’
    She smiled up at him then returned to her computer screen. He moved on to his own office.
    His desk was stacked with piles of paper which had appeared during the weekend – expense-claim forms for his signature, Home Office circulars, Sally’s witness statements. He ignored them all and began by flicking through a file of incidents which had been reported over night.
    At first he skipped over the missing person report without really taking it in. He was concerned about children and this was an adult. Then he went back to it. Kathleen Howe. The walker. He had seen her and the girl on the roads round Heppleburn several times since Marilyn had turned up, panic-stricken, on his doorstep in the autumn. Once the girl was carrying a violin in one hand and a music case in the other. Another time she recognized him and raised her hand in greeting as he drove past. It was an apologetic gesture. She didn’t stop or break her stride. The mother never acknowledged him.
    What had happened now? Had the girl overreacted to her mother’s absence again? Perhaps this time she had taken his advice by phoning the station instead of knocking on the door of a stranger. He unclipped the form from the file and looked at it in more detail.
    It had been the husband, not the daughter, who had phoned the station.
    Ramsay considered the piles of paper on his desk, then swivelled his chair so his back was turned to them. He was curious and he wouldn’t concentrate on