Paul Finch - Stolen

The woman was called Janet Dawson, and she was het up. Lucy met her at her father’s house just after ten that morning. She was in early middle age and tubby, with curly fair hair running to grey, and a pale, worried face.

The address was 8, Atkinson Row, and it belonged to an OAP called Harry Hopkins.

‘I’ve been ringing Dad for the last three days,’ she said, ushering Lucy down a short hall into the interior of a terraced house so neat and tidy it could have passed for a show home. ‘I’ve been asking around too. His friends and the locals down the pub. No one’s seen him.’

‘He keeps a tidy home,’ Lucy said, looking around the lounge and then heading upstairs.

‘Oh, yes.’ The woman followed. ‘He’s always been very house-proud.’

‘There’s absolutely nothing out of place?’ Lucy asked, looking into the two bedrooms.

‘Nothing obvious. Oh … apart from out at the back. Do you know about that already?’

‘Yeah, I was told about that before I got here.’

What had really panicked Janet Dawson, on calling to see her father this morning and discovering the house empty, had been the back door and back gate, which were both wide open. She’d quickly called the police. Uniform had arrived first and, not liking it either, had passed the info to CID.

‘We’ll look down at the back in a sec,’ Lucy said, still checking around upstairs.

She noticed a large, circular cushion on the carpet next to Harry’s bed. A well-chewed rubber bone sat in the middle of it.

‘Your dad has a dog?’

‘Yes. Milly … she’s a Pekingese.’

‘Does he take her out a lot?’

‘Yeah. She gets at least two walks a day. But he leaves her in when he’s off to the pub or the bookies, or something like that.’ The woman’s voice trembled as she spoke.

Lucy pondered. She didn’t say it aloud, because she simply wasn’t sure, but the absence of the dog made foul play a little less likely. If you were going to abduct someone, would you really go to the trouble of abducting their pet too? It seemed more possible that something had happened to the old guy while he was out walking the dog, but if there’d been an accident, or he’d dropped dead from a heart attack, someone ought to have found him by now. And then there was the mystery surrounding the back door and the back gate.

‘Could your father have left her here, forgotten to lock up at the back, and she’s just run away?’ she asked.

‘I honestly don’t think she’d run away,’ the woman replied. ‘And I’ve never known Dad make a mistake like that before. Plus, why would he go out without his hat and coat?’

They went downstairs and through into the lounge, where the television was playing away to itself, a range of Saturday-morning chefs producing a selection of mouth-watering dishes.

‘And that’s not like Dad either,’ Janet Dawson said. ‘The telly being on.’

‘It was on when you arrived here this morning?’ Lucy asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Could he not just have left it on as a security measure while he was going out … you know, to make thieves think he was in?’

‘Yes, but he only does that at night.’

The implication was evident.

‘What time did you arrive this morning?’ Lucy asked.

‘Just after eight.’

‘So you’re worried the television might have been left on all night?’

The woman looked even paler than before. ‘I can hardly bear to think what that might mean if it’s true.’

‘Your father doesn’t own any other property that we might look around?’ Lucy asked. ‘An allotment with a shed perhaps? A garage?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’ Lucy walked back through the house to the kitchen, where she halted next to one of the spotless worktops. A mug containing a dry teabag and an unused spoon sat alongside the kettle. This was more suggestive than anything she had seen at the house so far .

Most telling of all, though, was the open back door.

Lucy pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves.

‘Oh, my God,’ Janet Dawson moaned.

‘It’s just a precaution.’ Lucy checked along the door’s edge and down the edge of the door-jamb. ‘There’s no sign of any damage here.’

‘I don’t think anyone forced entry. I mean, there’s no damage anywhere. And it’s not like there’s any sign of a scuffle. Nothing’s broken, there’re no blood spots or anything.’

‘So, if someone came into the house this way,’ Lucy said, ‘your father must have let them in willingly.’

‘I suppose so.’ Janet Dawson gave a weak, forced smile. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

Lucy didn’t mention that most of the violence in modern society was inflicted by persons known to the victim. Instead, she said, ‘How many of your father’s house-callers are in the habit of coming to the back door?’

‘I must admit … I can’t think of any who would do that, or why.’

They crossed the garden together. It was smoothly turfed aside from a crazy-paved path, with a brick platform on the right covered in potted plants. At odds with all this neatness, the back gate hung ajar.

‘The gate was like this, this morning?’ Lucy asked, again noting an absence of damage, which meant that this hadn’t been forced open either.

‘Exactly like it is now.’

‘We shouldn’t necessarily read something bad into this,’ Lucy said. ‘There are lots of possibilities here at present.’

Internally, however, she’d closed in on three main ones: a) an intruder had approached the house from the rear and had got inside that way, because Harry Hopkins had forgotten to lock up; or b) Harry Hopkins had gone outside himself, leaving the property by the back door and the back gate, and for some unknown reason had still not returned; or c) neither of those unpleasant alternatives had happened, and he was simply going about his everyday business, absent from home at this moment, again having neglected to lock up (and having left his hat and coat behind), and by pure coincidence had also been absent every time in the last three days when his daughter had phoned the house.

You wouldn’t earn a police commendation for working out which of those options seemed least likely.

Lucy stepped through into the back alley. ‘How often have you tried to contact your father in the last few days, Janet?’

The woman followed her out. ‘First it was every few hours, but then … I mean yesterday and last night, it was once every ten minutes.’

‘Is your father hard of hearing, by any chance?’

‘He wears a hearing aid, but no … he can hear when the phone’s ringing. He normally answers straight away.’

Lucy surveyed the alley. It was narrow, cobbled, and little more than a service passage running behind the row of houses. At present, it was clear of vehicles, or bins, or sacks of rubbish. On the other side, a high red-brick wall rose about ten feet, screening off the rest of the estate.

Lucy wasn’t comforted by this. A narrow backstreet hidden from view on one side.

She turned back to the gate – and stopped in her tracks. Like the house’s front door, the back gate had been painted a bright canary-yellow, but on the outside it had been spattered top to bottom with dried black trickle stains.

‘This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Oh.’ Janet Dawson looked genuinely surprised. ‘Dad’ll go mad if he sees that. He hates scruffiness.’

‘He’d scrub it off, would he? Even though it’s on the outside?’

‘Certainly. As soon as he saw it.’

Which likely means this has happened since he went missing , Lucy thought to herself. Or did it happen at the time he went missing?

She wondered what might have caused it. A vehicle travelling at speed would have kicked up ground water, spraying the gate, though not today of course; it was sunny today, unusually warm for mid-September. She glanced around. The cobblestones were bone-dry. Thinking about it, the last time they’d had proper rain – the sort that would leave proper puddles – was on Tuesday afternoon.