The Lost Ones Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  BLOOD GUILT

  ‘Fast-moving action and a lot of twists make this debut novel a most enjoyable read.’

  — Marcel Berlins, The Times

  ANGEL OF DEATH

  ‘The nature of justice and its moral ambiguities are studied in this fast-paced novel.’

  — Left Lion Magazine

  JUSTICE FOR THE DAMNED

  ‘A violent novel that would make a cool British gangster flick.’

  — Crime Thriller Hound

  SPIDER'S WEB

  ‘Spider’s Web is a fast-paced, thoroughly researched, and heartbreaking novel.’

  — CrimeSquad

  ALSO BY BEN CHEETHAM

  Blood Guilt

  Angel of Death

  Justice for the Damned

  Spider's Web

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Ben Cheetham

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503940079

  ISBN-10: 1503940071

  Cover design © blacksheep-uk.com

  For Clare

  CONTENTS

  DAY 1 10.32 A.M.

  DAY 1 FOUR AND A HALF HOURS EARLIER . . .

  DAY 1 9.13 A.M.

  DAY 1 9.47 A.M.

  DAY 1 9.48 A.M.

  DAY 1 10.18 A.M.

  DAY 1 11.26 A.M.

  DAY 1 12.28 P.M.

  DAY 1 12.47 P.M.

  DAY 1 1.20 P.M.

  DAY 1 1.21 P.M.

  DAY 1 1.28 P.M.

  DAY 1 2.40 P.M.

  DAY 1 4.14 P.M.

  DAY 1 4.41 P.M.

  DAY 1 5.45 P.M.

  DAY 1 10.33 P.M.

  DAY 1 10.44 P.M.

  DAY 1 10.45 P.M.

  DAY 1 10.57 P.M.

  DAY 1 10.59 P.M.

  DAY 1 11.28 P.M.

  DAY 2 1.46 A.M.

  DAY 2 2.17 A.M.

  DAY 2 3.11 A.M.

  DAY 2 3.36 A.M.

  DAY 2 6.41 A.M.

  DAY 2 8.03 A.M.

  DAY 2 8.04 A.M.

  DAY 2 8.23 A.M.

  DAY 2 8.30 A.M.

  DAY 2 9.11 A.M.

  DAY 2 9.12 A.M.

  DAY 2 9.21 A.M.

  DAY 2 9.57 A.M.

  DAY 2 10.01 A.M.

  DAY 2 10.51 A.M.

  DAY 2 11.02 A.M.

  DAY 2 11.24 A.M.

  DAY 2 12.06 P.M.

  DAY 2 12.27 P.M.

  DAY 2 12.28 P.M.

  DAY 2 1.04 P.M.

  DAY 2 1.42 P.M.

  DAY 2 3.15 P.M.

  ONE WEEK LATER

  THE LAST DANCE . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAY 1

  10.32 A.M.

  OPERATOR: Caller, you’re through to the police. How can I help?

  CALLER: It’s my daughter. She’s gone and we think we’ve found blood.

  OPERATOR: What do you mean by ‘gone’?

  CALLER: She’s disappeared. We can’t find her anywhere.

  OPERATOR: How old is your daughter?

  CALLER: Nine.

  OPERATOR: What’s her name?

  CALLER: Erin Jackson.

  OPERATOR: And what’s your name?

  CALLER: Amanda.

  OPERATOR: OK, Amanda, I need you to tell me what happened. How long has Erin been missing?

  CALLER: I’m not sure. Maybe forty minutes. She was playing down by the stream.

  OPERATOR: You said ‘we’. Who else is with you?

  CALLER: A man and a woman. I don’t know their names.

  OPERATOR: Can you tell me where you are?

  CALLER: Harwood Forest. About fifteen minutes’ walk along the track behind Newbiggin Farm.

  OPERATOR: Could your daughter have wandered into the forest and got lost?

  CALLER: I . . . I don’t know. Maybe. Oh, God, it’s so red. It’s got to be blood!

  OPERATOR: I need you to stay calm and remain on the line, Amanda. Officers are on the way. They’ll be with you as soon as possible.

  CALLER: Please hurry. Please hurry—

  DAY 1

  FOUR AND A HALF HOURS EARLIER . . .

  Tom Jackson stared at his sleeping wife. One of Amanda’s slender arms rested on the pillow above her shoulder-length auburn hair. The other was extended towards Tom. His clammy fingers lay against her soft, warm upturned palm. His eyes traced the long line of her neck, her strong jaw, her half-moon lips, the straight slope of her nose. In the muted metallic gleam seeping through the curtains, she possessed a kind of timeless beauty. Like an image sculpted from marble.

  He found his mind flashing back through the years to the first time he’d seen her. She’d been sleeping then, too. Cradled by the roots and shadows of Harwood Forest, she’d looked like something from a fairy tale. He’d watched her from behind a tree, feeling slightly guilty for doing so, but too spellbound to take his eyes off her. He’d jerked back out of sight when she stirred and opened her eyes. After a breathless moment, he’d risked another peek and seen her cycling away along one of the sandy tracks that crisscrossed the forest. His heart had tightened. Who was this girl? Was she from Middlebury? Would he ever see her again? He wasn’t religious, but he’d prayed that he would do. His prayer had been answered five years later when, once again by chance, he spotted her in a local pub. That was the night he’d fallen in love with her.

  Amanda moved her head and the light picked out lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, creases in her cheeks. Her face had always been like that – a slight shift in the light or her mood could add or erase years from it. Sometimes she barely seemed to have aged a day in the twenty-one years they’d been together. At other times Tom was struck by how old she looked.

  Amanda’s eyes moved beneath their closed lids. Tom wondered what she was dreaming about. Was she seeing what he saw in his good dreams or in his bad ones? Security and prosperity or uncertainty and hardship? Her peaceful face suggested the former. Of late his dreams – when he managed to sleep at all – were almost always a mundane echo of his waking fears. He saw court appearances, bailiffs, eviction. Worst of all, he saw himself having to go cap in hand to his in-laws.

  Heaving a sigh, he slid out of bed. Amanda stirred but didn’t open her eyes as he shrugged on his dressing gown. He quietly opened and closed the door behind him. Then he stood motionless for a moment in the silence of the morning. His gaze moved around the landing – four doors, a mirror, a framed landscape painting, a steep set of stairs leading up to the attic. It wasn’t a bad little house. But he wanted so much more. Wanted it so badly he felt it like an ache in his chest.

  Tom caught sight of himself in the mirror – rumpled short black hair, darkly stubbled chin, once-broken nose. He patted his stomach. He was still in reasonably good shape, although he was a little thinner on top and thicker in the middle than he’d been back when he acquired the bump on his nose.

  ‘Daddy.’

  The sleepy little voice came from an open door opposite. Tom padded into a bedroom with pink walls and a cloud-painted ceiling. A spray of faintly luminous stars arched over a bed crowded with stuffed toys. A sign hanging on the wall read, ‘Star light, star bright, watch over our sweet Erin tonight.’ A young girl was sitting up in the
bed, flushed with sleep, rubbing her eyes and squinting at Tom. Erin had her mum’s tousled autumnal hair and her dad’s dark-chocolate eyes. Her cute button nose and dimpled cheeks were all her own.

  ‘Shh, go back to sleep, sweetie,’ murmured Tom.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s early.’

  ‘Why are you up, Daddy?’

  Because today is the day that will decide our future, thought Tom. But he would never have said such a thing to Erin or her older brother Jake. He tried his best to keep his worries from them. Not that he always succeeded, especially where Erin was concerned. She had an almost uncanny ability to pluck his thoughts out of his head – something else she’d inherited from her mother.

  ‘Is it because you had a bad dream?’ asked Erin.

  ‘No. I had a good dream. I dreamt about you and Jake and your mum. That we were all happy.’

  A faint frown disturbed the smooth surface of Erin’s face. ‘But we’re happy already, aren’t we, Daddy?’

  Tom smiled. ‘Yes. Very. Now lie back down.’

  As Erin returned her head to the pillows, he pulled the duvet up over her shoulders and kissed her forehead. He retreated slowly, watching her slide back into sleep. Perfect. That was the only word for her. She deserved the world and he was determined to give it to her. His thoughts returned to what awaited him in the coming hours, dragging another deep sigh from his lungs.

  He headed downstairs, made a coffee and took it into the small room he used as his home office. He approached a bookshelf lined with ambitious-sounding books such as Adventures in Making Millions and Becoming the Ultimate Entrepreneur, and more prosaically entitled ones such as Open-Cast Mining and Quarrying and Hydraulic Excavator Applications. He plucked out a book entitled Believe and Succeed and flicked through its dog-eared pages until he found the highlighted quote: ‘Do not fear. Fear is useless. Believe in yourself and there is nothing you will not be able to achieve.’ He murmured the words, clenching his fist as if to catch hold of them.

  He sat down at the desk. His gaze lingered on a blown-up photo Blu-tacked to the wall. At the photo’s centre was a crescent of grey-gold rock cut into the flank of a grassy hill. Meadows and thickets of trees dotted with an occasional house spread out from the base of the hill. The edge of a larger tract of woodland encroached onto the right-hand side of the scene. But it was what occupied the upper centre of the photo that drew and held Tom’s attention. To his eyes there was something strangely alien about the circle of five standing stones that crowned the rounded summit of the hill. The regularly spaced stones marked the edge of a disc of rough grass. They were in turn haloed by an earthen circle highlighted by the long shadows of a low sun. According to folklore, the stones were the Five Women, a coven of witches turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. Pagans gathered there every summer solstice to celebrate the longest day of the year. As a teenager, Tom had got drunk and watched white-robed druids silhouetted against the setting sun weave in and out of the stones to the beat of drums. He and his mates had performed a mocking jig of their own as the druids chanted, ‘We are a circle within a circle, with no beginning and never ending . . .’ Back then he’d thought all that crap was hilarious. A big joke. Now it made his head pound to think about it.

  Turning his attention to his laptop, Tom opened a file entitled ‘Speech to planning committee’. He scanned through the file, adding a word or two here, deleting one there. He’d been working on it for weeks, obsessively honing and fine-tuning. Three minutes. That was all the time he had to deliver the speech that would make or break his ambitions. He was determined to use every available second to maximum effect. He started a stopwatch and began to recite, ‘Mr Chair, members of the committee . . .’ When he reached the end, he hit the stopwatch again and checked his timing: 2 minutes 58 seconds. About as close to perfect as he was going to get. Just let those planning jobsworths dare reject his proposal.

  There was a soft knock at the door. Amanda poked her head into the room. Her hair was tied in a loose ponytail. Her strikingly green, almost oriental, eyes gave Tom an appraising look. ‘You couldn’t sleep,’ she stated.

  ‘I got a couple of hours.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  Tom pushed out his lower lip, cocking his head slightly. ‘Nervous . . . Ready.’

  Amanda nodded, satisfied by his answer. ‘Have you had breakfast yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll make you some.’ Tom started to say he wasn’t hungry. But, as she was so good at doing, Amanda read his thoughts and responded before he could speak. ‘You need to eat something.’ With a wry glimmer of a smile, she added, ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you know.’

  Tom smiled back at the line he’d heard her use so many times on the kids. ‘OK, but give me at least half an hour. I need a shower before I can face food.’

  On the way to the bathroom, Tom detoured into the master bedroom, opened the wardrobe and rummaged through the pockets of his suits. It wasn’t a shower he needed so much as . . . He found what he was looking for – a packet of cigarettes. He continued to the bathroom, locked the door and opened the window wide. He perched on the windowsill, blowing smoke outside. He hadn’t had a cigarette in weeks. He’d promised to give them up for good. But today was the exception to that promise. Today he needed every psychological and physiological crutch he could get. He flushed the stub down the toilet, brushed his teeth and rinsed with mouthwash. Like a knight preparing for battle, he took his time over getting ready, shaving his thick stubble and styling his hair meticulously, carefully choosing a suit and matching shirt and tie. Everything had to be just so. There must be no chink in the armour.

  Finally satisfied, Tom returned downstairs. Amanda was at the cooker. Erin was munching cereal at the kitchen table in her pink princess dressing gown. She gave him the same serious, appraising look as her mother had done. With a twinge of sadness, he suddenly found himself thinking, She’s growing up, in a few years I’ll lose her, like I lost Jake. ‘You look really nice, Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, sweetie.’

  Amanda set down two plates of scrambled eggs and bacon. They ate a few forkfuls in silence, then Tom asked, ‘So, what are you two doing today? Any plans?’

  ‘We were thinking of going for a walk in Harwood Forest,’ replied Amanda.

  Tom glanced out of the window. The sun was already bright in a clear blue sky. ‘Looks like it’s going to be hot. What about Jake? Is he going with you?’

  Amanda raised her eyebrows as if to say, What do you think?

  ‘Jake never goes anywhere with us any more,’ said Erin. ‘He just stays in his room all day. I don’t know what he does in there all that time by himself.’

  Tom and Amanda exchanged a knowing glance as Erin continued, ‘I wish he would come with us, like he used to.’

  ‘Tell you what, sweetheart, I’ll talk to him,’ said Tom.

  ‘He won’t listen to you, Daddy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I can be very persuasive when I want to be.’

  Tom pushed back his chair and stood. Amanda followed him into the hallway. ‘Erin’s right, Tom. You’re just going to annoy him if you wake him up.’

  ‘It’s the second week of the summer holidays. We’re in the middle of a heatwave and he’s barely set foot outside his room.’

  ‘He’s fifteen, Tom.’

  ‘Exactly. When I was his age I was working ten-hour days on the farm during the holidays. By seventeen I was living on my own. If Jake had to fend for himself, he wouldn’t last a week.’

  Amanda listened with an air of having heard it all before. ‘Times have changed. Kids grow up more slowly these days.’

  Tom shook his head dismissively. ‘I don’t buy that. We’re too easy on him, that’s what it is. But, do you know what, I wouldn’t give a toss if he lay in his pit till midday every day so long as he got out there and enjoyed himself when he was up.’

  ‘He does g
o out sometimes with Lauren.’

  ‘Yeah, another weirdo. She’s even more miserable than he is. I swear if that girl smiled, her face would crack into—’

  ‘Are you calling your son a weirdo?’

  Tom caught the sharp note in Amanda’s voice and softened his own. ‘No, of course not. He’s a good kid. He just needs a kick up the arse sometimes.’ He turned and started up the stairs.

  ‘Just because you’re stressed, don’t take it out on Jake,’ Amanda said to his back.

  Is that why I’m doing this, to take my mind off the way I’m feeling? wondered Tom as he made his way to the attic. Maybe it was, in part, he conceded, but it still needed doing. He’d let things slide with Jake for too long. For months they’d rarely seen each other, and barely spoken when they had. He realised a good part of that was his fault. He’d buried himself in working on the quarry proposal and everything else that went along with it. But on the few occasions he’d tried to connect with Jake, he’d come up against a brick wall. It was almost as if they were strangers. As if all the years of playing, laughing and talking had been swept away by a wave of adolescent hormones.

  A sign on the attic door read JAKE’S ROOM. Underneath it someone had scrawled in black marker, ‘Keep the fuck out!’ Tom entered Jake’s bedroom without knocking. Sunlight filtered through black curtains, gloomily illuminating a chaotic scene. The floorboards were strewn with books, magazines, screwed-up clothes, plates of partly eaten sandwiches and pizza. The walls were papered with posters of death metal and goth bands Tom had mostly never heard of – although he’d heard their music thumping through the floor often enough. One wall was dominated by a poster of a pentagram with a lustrous black snake coiled around it. Multi-coloured candles in various stages of melting were clustered around a laptop on a desk. A book lay open on a bedside table. Tom gave a little shake of his head at the chapter title: ‘Occultism and Witchcraft’. He’d never thought a son of his would be into all that nonsense. He recalled what he’d said to Amanda a few weeks back when the pentagram poster first appeared – You know something, Jake’s the kind of kid I would have ripped the shit out of when I was in school. Amanda hadn’t spoken to him for two days after that.