Lee Weeks - Trafficked

It was a lucky thing that Amy had her drawing pad and her Macramé in her bag. Now she had nothing to do, she would do that. She sat on the chair by the desk. First of all she would draw a picture of Lenny. She sucked the end of her pencil as she thought hard about his face. She wanted to get it right. She wanted to get it so perfect that everyone would know who it was.

Mann made his way through Heathrow, picked up his small suitcase and headed out through ‘Nothing to Declare’, where he was handed his weapons’ case, which had been carried separately, locked away in the hold, before he followed the signs for the exit.

The ragged line of people holding cards up behind the flimsy barrier looked hopefully at Mann. He had reached the end of the line when a short-haired blonde woman in her early thirties wearing dark trousers and a slim-fitting brown shirt rushed up to him, coffee cup in one hand and a sticky bun in the other.

‘Detective Inspector Mann?’

He nodded.

She introduced herself. ‘DC Rebecca Stamp, but you can call me Becky. You hungry? Need to stop for a coffee? Long flight?’

‘I’m fine, thanks. I slept well. Lead the way.’

He followed her through to the car park. He watched her as she strode along beside him. She had that athletic gait that policewomen had, as if she were marching along with a rucksack on her back. Women competing in a male-dominated world didn’t lose their femininity, it just changed—became more assertive—showed they knew what they wanted and how to get it. She was no more than five foot two and came to just under his shoulder, but she wasn’t one of those women you should offer to reach things for.

She was still holding her bun in one hand and her coffee in the other when they arrived at level three of the short-stay car park. They stopped at a black Audi A2. She put her coffee on the roof whilst she looked for her keys.

‘Shit! Sorry, my keys are somewhere. I had them in my hand a minute ago.’ She put the bun in her mouth whilst she searched.

‘Left-hand jacket pocket.’

She stopped and looked at him incredulously before aiming the rest of the bun at a bin ten feet away and scoring a direct hit.

‘Thanks.’

She unlocked the car and got in, put her coffee in the cup holder in the centre of the red leather dashboard and started the engine. She switched the Bose sound system on and drove out of the car park.

‘Thanks for picking me up,’ Mann said.

She turned to look at him. He smiled.

‘That’s okay…you’re welcome.’

‘Did you have trouble recognising me?’

She giggled—deep and throaty, dirty, almost. She had a lovely broad mouth, strong laughter lines—a healthy tom-boy beach-babe look. She looked like she would be the last girl left at the campfire, drinking beer with the boys, long after the other girls had gone to bed.

‘Six foot, Eurasian, snazzy dresser—no trouble. I did my research. I have booked you into a B&B near to where I live. I thought it would make sense for us to be close.’

‘Sounds great.’ He gave her a mischievous smile.

‘Chief Inspector Procter—he’s the man in charge of the kidnapping—wants to see you as soon as poss. I said I would fill you in on the way to the school. Then we go and meet the rest of the team. Hope that’s okay?’

‘It all sounds good. I bet the rest of the team can’t wait.’

She swung him a look to check if he was joking, saw that he was and broke into that deep, rich laugh again. Her eyebrows and her eyes were a few shades darker than her hair, he noticed, which was the colour of gold, and her eyes were fringed with long, dark lashes. It gave her a striking Northern Italian look. She wore no makeup.

‘Yeah, right! Pleased as punch. No one’s quite figured out who asked for you. We didn’t think we needed help.’

‘Don’t worry. I didn’t want to come. Offer I couldn’t refuse—that kind of thing. But it’s nice to be here.’ He looked wistfully out of the window. It was early and the air had that spring brightness, that expectancy to it that the sky was just waiting to burn off the morning haze and reveal a blue day. The roads were also just beginning to get choked with commuter traffic. ‘I haven’t been back here for a long time—too long.’ Mann stared out of the window. ‘Where are we going first?’

‘The school in Rickmansworth. In this traffic it should take us about an hour.’

‘You’ve been out there already; what was your impression?’

‘Posh school…awfully nice people but clueless. Let her walk out with a complete stranger. We get to see the Head at ten, thought you’d like to look around first.’

‘Did you work on the other kidnappings?’

‘Yes and no. We didn’t even know about them till after the event. When Amy Tang went missing we sent out an alert around the boarding schools with Chinese kids. We got some information back about the abduction of two others—both boys, from two separate schools on the outskirts of London. One was ten, the other was twelve. Both were released after the ransom was paid.’

‘Big money paid to release them?’

‘Two million US each.’

‘How did the ransom demands come?’

‘All the same way—by email, via one of those scam sites for claiming an inheritance that you never knew you had.’

‘Has it been traced?’

‘We’re still working on it. Someone knows his computers. He sent it around the world first. It came back with the logo of a bogus company plastered on it—BLANCO. We checked it out—there are a lot of companies called that, unsurprisingly. We traced it back to a Nigerian working in a taxi rank—he didn’t have a clue how someone got hold of his dodgy identity. We decided it was a red herring.’

‘Where was the money dropped?’

‘In all three cases it was a different route, but same method. In Amy Tang’s case it was dropped in a bin off Gerrard Street in Chinatown.’

‘By whom?’

‘By an employee of CK’s, apparently, no one knows who. Getting cooperation from any of the Chinese families has been very hard. They would rather just pay up and shut up. A local crack addict was then paid to pick it up; he gave it to a lad on a courier bike and we think the courier had it taken off him at some lights. I don’t know whether that was the end of the chain or not. It was elaborate and it worked. We lost it. We only got that much from CCTV footage.’

‘Did he use the same method of abduction? Was it always the same man?’

‘Hundred per cent it’s the same man, though he was more cautious with the first two abductions. But the emails were written by the same person. The collection was virtually the same.’

‘Were the other children able to give a description of him or where they were held?’

‘No, they said they were kept blindfolded and that they slept a lot. Must have been kept sedated.’

‘Did the others have triad links?’

‘Both kids were from Mainland China—mega-wealthy parents but no direct triad links that we could find. The usual suspect business partners along the way, but nothing obvious.’

Becky beeped hard at a green MG that cut her up. Mann smiled to himself—he could see that she loved her car. She whizzed in and out of the traffic and she drove it with a passion—like a man—hard on the revs, aggressive, unapologetically.

‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘We’ve drawn a blank. We’ve been out searching all vacant, newly rented properties in a ten-mile radius—so far, nothing. She could have gone anywhere from there. There are links to motorways north and south. She wasn’t reported missing until Sunday evening—that’s thirty-six hours after she left. She could be anywhere.’