From the Cradle Read Free Page B

they’d been talking about, and why he was so tired, and the smile vanished into the shadows with all the ghosts.
    Seven days ago on June 2nd, three-year-old Isabel Hartley, known to the public as Izzy since the tabloids had shortened her name for the sake of their headlines, had been taken from the living room of her family home in Richmond, where she was watching TV. Isabel’s dad Max had been out the front, waxing his beloved car. Then he got an important call from work on his mobile and went inside, leaving the front door open, and up the stairs to his office to dig out some papers. He was up there for twenty minutes. When he came back downstairs, Isabel was no longer in the living room. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.
    Max Hartley was something in the City, loaded, the kind of person who, according to common perception, had little devil’s horns beneath his hair and a pointy tail concealed beneath his Hugo Boss suit. The mother, Fiona, was a former catalogue model who counter-balanced her husband’s profession by organizing charity fund-raisers. They lived in one of the best postcodes in the country, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. The Hartleys never thought that their child would be taken from their front room i n th e middle of the afternoon, certainly not on a street like the one they lived on.
    Two days later, June 4th, another child had been abducted. Liam McConnell was two, a cheeky, chunky little boy with poor eyesight that forced him to wear glasses. His mum, Zoe, had left him in the car in Twickenham Sainsbury’s car park, strapped into his child seat, after realizing she’d forgotten to pick up her dry cleaning. She was only gone for two minutes, she insisted, though Patrick was sure it was more like five, maybe more. The woman in front of her in the queue had been arguing about a stain on her cashmere cardigan and Zoe, a freelance marketing consultant, described how she’d shifted impatiently from foot to foot, eager to get back to the car, on the verge of abandoning the dry cleaning when it was finally her turn.
    She had locked the car, could clearly remember the thunk as she depressed the central locking. But when she got back to her white Audi A4, the back door was open and Liam was gone. An hour later, when a uniform had asked to see the car key she hadn’t been able to find it. Then she remembered, on her way back into Sainsbury’s, bumping into a man who had almost knocked her over. The car key had been in her jacket pocket. Patrick was certain that the man who had bumped into her had taken the key – unless Zoe was making the whole thing up, that she had forgotten to lock the car and had concocted the story to stop her husband, Keith, who ran his own recruitment company, blaming her.
    Patrick had personally scoured the CCTV footage from the car park. One camera had caught the briefest glimpse of a man in a dark jacket carrying a child who looked like Liam, but it was impossible to see the man’s face or where he’d gone. Zoe insisted that the man who’d bumped her had been wearing a black jacket, but she had barely looked at his face, the photo-fit they’d put together from her patchy memory likely to be 90 per cent imagination. This hadn’t stopped the picture from being printed on the front of every newspaper in the country, sparking hundreds of calls from members of the public saying the man looked like their neighbour, their boss, their husband. Every single one of these unfortunate men had been eliminated from the investigation.
    Patrick wouldn’t say the last week had been the hardest of his life – he’d had much darker weeks – but they had been long, frustrating and exhausting. Huge pictures of Isabel and Liam hung in the incident room. Their images were burnt into the retinas of every man and woman on the team. But so far, though Patrick would never admit this in public, they hadn’t got a bloody clue what had happened to the two kids or where they were.
    It