Fallen Angel

Kevin Lewis

 

FALLEN ANGEL

FRIDAY

 

‘He won't kill my little boy, will he?'

It was just before three on a sticky July afternoon, but, despite the stifling heat, all the windows in the small terraced house on the outskirts of Croydon were firmly closed, turning the living room into a makeshift sauna.

Christina Eliot's voice cracked as she spoke. Her eyes bloodshot, desperately looking for signs of reassurance, she searched the blank faces of the four men in the pastel-coloured living room, but there was none to be found. Beads of sweat ran down her forehead, her face was pale and drawn, and her usually immaculate shoulder-length brown hair had clumped into sticky strands behind her ears.

David sat beside his wife, his thick-set features struggling to cope with the heat. Dark wet patches had formed under his arms and at the base of his spine. The other men in the room were not faring much better. When one had tried to open the window, Christina had immediately asked him to close it. She couldn't bear to hear the happy sounds of the children – many of them Daniel's friends – playing outside.

It had been a little more than forty-eight hours since her eight-year-old son, Daniel, had gone missing. The sheer horror Christina and her husband David had experienced when they realized their only son could not be
found had subsequently been replaced by an absolute and all-consuming terror when they discovered he had been kidnapped.

The first contact had been through a text message to Christina's mobile phone – a number Daniel had long ago learned off by heart in case of an emergency.
I HAVE YOUR SON. CALL THE POLICE AND HE DIES
. The message went on to provide a user name and password for a Hotmail account. At first they thought it was some kind of sick joke, until they logged on and found two messages sitting in the draft email section. The first contained a short video clip of a terrified Daniel in a bare room pleading for his mother. The second laid out the kidnapper's demands.

The instructions had been crystal clear: if Daniel's parents ever wanted to see their son again, they would have to pay a ransom of £25,000 and follow the kidnapper's rules to the letter. The drop-off was to be made by David Eliot on Friday. The money was to be in used bills with random number sequences, and under no circumstances were the police to be involved. A single slip or deviation from any of these instructions, and Daniel would die.

Why on earth would anyone kidnap their son? She was a secretary on thirteen thousand a year, he a mechanic on not much more. Their home was partly owned by a housing association, and Daniel attended the local state school. How could they be expected to raise £25,000? What sick bastard would do something like this?

During the next few hours they had maxed out their credit cards, borrowed from friends and family, and
withdrawn their small savings before finally requesting an urgent meeting with their bank manager. Their desperation to get hold of such a large sum of money and their refusal to leave the manager's office led to the police being called and the Eliots being escorted out of the building. It was at this point that Christina broke down and told the officers of the kidnap demand. Shortly afterwards an unmarked car carrying two plain-clothes police officers posing as insurance salesmen arrived at the door of their home.

With little money to give the kidnapper and fearing for the safety of their son, the Eliots soon agreed to let the police take over the case. Detective Chief Inspector Colin Blackwell, one of the officers posing as a salesman, had sat down with the parents and explained that, while he was not able to make any promises, in the entire history of the Metropolitan Police's Kidnap and Extortion Unit they had never lost a single soul and that they were not about to start now.

As for the money, Blackwell had produced £5,000 and suggested handing this over, along with a handwritten note from the mother explaining that this was all they could afford in the short term. It was a technique the police had used in the past to draw the kidnappers out, force them to engage in negotiations and therefore buy them more time to track down the victim.

Neither Christina nor David had been convinced. If Blackwell had access to a special fund for these kind of cases, then why not simply pay all the money?

DCI Blackwell had been in the force for nearly thirty years and had spent the last seven as the head of the
kidnapping unit. In his experience the whole thing stank of opportunism – the relatively small amount of cash being asked for pointed to someone desperate for money who had made the mistake of thinking this might be an easy way to get hold of it. Most of the cases Blackwell dealt with involved rival gangs kidnapping one another as part of their brutal turf wars. This was amateur hour. ‘Whoever did this is completely out of their depth,' he reassured them. ‘We're going to be ahead of him every step of the way.'

That had been on Wednesday. Since then a team of specialists from Blackwell's unit, officially known as SCD7 (Specialist Crime Directorate), had begun to monitor all communications in and out of the Eliots' house from the fifth floor of their high-tech base at New Scotland Yard. There had been daily emails containing more disturbing video images of Daniel and regular threats about what would happen to him if the kidnapper's demands were not met. All they were waiting for were the final details of the drop-off.

At 3.08 p.m. Christina's mobile rang. Everyone sat up as a charge of adrenalin shot through the room. They all looked at the phone as it vibrated on the glass coffee table. Christina turned to face Blackwell, who was already talking quietly down the phone to colleagues back at base. ‘Are you ready?' he asked the person at the other end of the phone. When he received the acknowledgement he wanted, he nodded at Christina, doing his best to give a look of encouragement.