Little Boy Lost Read online

  It was a woman who answered the door. Fiftyish, with unruly blonde hair that dropped onto her shoulders, and a slightly bloated face that was at odds with her trim figure. She was wearing a tight button-up white blouse, denim shorts and fluffy pink carpet slippers.

  ‘Hello again, Mrs Pope,’ Benning said. ‘I know it’s late, but we need to speak to your husband again. Is he in?’

  Her eyes flashed with annoyance. ‘Well I hope you’re going to say sorry for accusing him of kidnapping that young boy. He’s been in a dreadful state since then.’

  ‘I did not accuse him of anything, Mrs Pope. I asked him some questions pertaining to his relationship with the boy’s father.’

  ‘You mean his dad told you that Gavin probably did it.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean, Mrs Pope.’

  Anna was about to intervene when a man stepped into the hallway behind her, and said, ‘What’s going on, love?’

  Anna recognised him at once from the photo that was now pinned to the whiteboard in the ops room. Gavin Pope was of medium height with short brown hair liberally streaked with grey, a designer beard, and sharp features. He was ruggedly good-looking and it appeared to Anna as though he kept himself in shape.

  ‘Oh Christ, what is it now?’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to add to what I’ve already told you.’

  ‘There’s been a development in the Jacob Rossi case, sir,’ Anna said. ‘As a result I am now the senior investigating officer and there are some questions I need to ask you. My name is DCI Anna Tate. I’m a detective chief inspector with the Major Investigation Team.’

  Pope cocked his head to one side and frowned.

  ‘So what is this development? Has the kid been found?’

  ‘I’m not prepared to have this conversation on the doorstep, Mr Pope. May we come in?’

  Pope rolled his eyes and clucked his tongue.

  ‘I suppose you’ll have to. Let’s get it over with. My wife and I were just about to go to bed.’

  They were shown into the living room where the couple had been watching the television. It didn’t surprise Anna that the screen was showing news footage of the riots. She turned her back on it so that it wouldn’t be a distraction.

  Pope sat on an armchair and his wife, whose first name was Laura, stood behind him, fidgeting nervously with the top button of her blouse. Anna and Benning lowered themselves onto the sofa.

  ‘I’ll start by answering the question you just asked, Mr Pope,’ Anna said. ‘Jacob Rossi has indeed been found, but not alive, I’m sad to say. His body was discovered earlier today.’

  Pope’s jaw dropped and the breath whistled out of him. His wife’s hand flew to her mouth and she spoke though her fingers.

  ‘That’s awful. Please don’t tell us that the boy suffered in any way,’ she said.

  ‘All we know for certain is that Jacob was abducted on Monday and has been held captive since then,’ Anna said. ‘But the derelict building he was in was set light to by rioters and he died in the fire because he couldn’t escape. So our job is to find out who put him there.’

  Mrs Pope shook her head as a sob rose in her throat.

  ‘That is so terrible,’ she said.

  She placed a hand on her husband’s shoulder and squeezed it as the colour drained from his face.

  ‘I swear I had nothing to do with it,’ he said, his eyes locked on Anna’s. ‘There’s bad blood between Rossi and me – I admit that. But I’m not some nutcase who would snatch a child. You have to believe that.’

  ‘Right now I don’t know what to believe,’ Anna said. ‘All I know for sure is that you’re a man with a serious grudge against Mark Rossi. You want him to take responsibility for the impact the closure of his stepfather’s company had on your life. And because he won’t you’ve tried to make life unpleasant for him with threats of legal action and menacing phone calls and emails. Then two months ago you confronted him at an event and threatened him.’

  ‘I was drunk that night,’ Pope said. ‘I got carried away. But it was hardly a serious threat. He’s exaggerating if he says it was. Just like he’s exaggerating when he says I’ve pestered him with calls and emails. I phoned him a few times and fired off a couple of emails, but that’s all. You can check my phone record and see for yourself.’

  ‘When was the last time you had any contact with him?’ Anna asked.

  ‘It was at the do. I didn’t even know he was going to be there.’

  ‘I was with Gavin that night,’ his wife said. ‘Mark was prancing around as though he was the most important person there and even I felt like giving him a slap. He’s always had that effect on people, especially those who’ve worked with him.’

  ‘So were you also on the payroll of Glory Entertainment, Mrs Pope?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No I wasn’t. I work for a recruitment agency. But I met Mark on several social occasions.’

  Anna turned back to Pope. ‘And where are you working at the moment, Mr Pope?’

  ‘I’m between jobs,’ he said. ‘As a freelance producer-director I go through dry spells.’

  ‘Is that why you were at home by yourself on Monday when Jacob disappeared?’

  He licked his lips and swallowed hard. ‘That’s right. I didn’t go out all day.’

  ‘And what about since then? Have you been out at all?’

  ‘Of course, but only to the shops and the pub. I’ve spent most of the time working on some programme ideas and watching the news.’

  ‘But I take it that you’ve been alone so there’s no one who can verify that.’

  ‘During the day my wife works at the agency in Bromley,’ he said. ‘But we’ve been together every evening.’

  Anna turned to Pope’s wife. ‘And is it just the two of you who live here?’

  The woman nodded. ‘We don’t have any children. We gave up trying years ago.’

  ‘But that’s none of your business anyway,’ Pope said. ‘This is absurd. I can’t believe I’m a suspect.’ He switched his gaze to Benning. ‘When you were here the first time I answered all of your questions and let you search the house. What more do I have to do to convince you that I’m not in any way involved in this awful business?’

  It was Anna who responded. ‘You can start by being totally honest with us, Mr Pope. When you last spoke to DI Benning you told him that Mark Rossi is not the clean-cut family man that his fans think he is, and your wife has also been less than complimentary about him here tonight. So if there’s something you’re not telling us about the man – or why you dislike him so much – then you need to open up because it might well have a bearing on what’s happened to his son.’

  Pope ran a hand through his hair and started to say something, but then thought better of it. This prompted his wife to step out from behind the chair and crouch down on her knees in front of him. A look passed between them and Anna felt her pulse accelerate.

  ‘This is an informal interview, Mr Pope,’ she said. ‘So you are not obliged to answer our questions. But if you don’t we will have no choice but to assume that you’re withholding information and that’s an offence. And I can assure you that whatever it is we will eventually get to the bottom of it.’

  There was a long, pregnant pause, which ended when Pope said to his wife, ‘I’ll leave it to you to tell them.’

  Mrs Pope stroked the back of her husband’s hand and slowly stood up. Then she turned to face Anna and breathed in deeply through her nose before speaking.

  ‘The reason my husband hates Mark Rossi so much is that I had a brief affair with the man some years ago,’ she said. ‘Gavin has managed to forgive me and for my sake he hasn’t told anyone else. He can’t forgive Mark, though, and for that I don’t blame him. But before you jump to the conclusion that Gavin has even more reason for wanting to punish Mark, you need to know that I’m not the only woman the bastard has played away with. And Gavin is not the only husband who found out.’

  It was certainly a turn-up for the books as far as Anna was
concerned. For no particular reason she had assumed that Mark Rossi was a happily married man. But she should have known better than to take anyone at face value. Her own husband, Matthew, had made her and everyone else believe that he was content with the life they shared while behind her back he was shagging a work colleague.

  ‘OK. Tell me about this affair,’ Anna said.

  Mrs Pope looked at her husband for approval and he nodded.

  ‘It lasted for three months and it’s something I bitterly regret,’ she said. ‘Gavin and I were going through a bad patch after I’d learned that I couldn’t conceive. Mark flirted with me at a company Christmas bash and I stupidly gave him my mobile number. I didn’t expect him to ring, but he did and, well, you can probably guess the rest.’

  Anna looked at Pope, who was chewing on his bottom lip.

  ‘And when did you find out about this, Mr Pope?’ she asked him.

  His voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘It wasn’t until a year after it had ended. My wife went to work one day and left her phone behind. Out of curiosity I picked it up and scrolled through her messages. There were two from Rossi that she hadn’t deleted.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I confronted her and we had a big row. But she convinced me it was a one-off and only happened because of the problems in our marriage at the time. I threatened to punch Rossi’s face in but she talked me out of it and begged me not to let on to him or anyone else that I knew. She wanted us to stay together and for me to forgive her. So I did. My love for her proved stronger than my hatred for him. That’s why I used the excuse of the company liquidation to get at him. I couldn’t stand the thought that he could just get away with it like that.’

  Anna turned back to Pope’s wife. ‘So to your knowledge how many other extramarital affairs has Mark Rossi had?’

  Mrs Pope shrugged. ‘We only know for certain about one because both the woman and her husband worked for a short time at Glory Entertainment with Gavin. His name is Roy Slater and he left the company just before it went bust because his wife Ruth had a fling with Rossi. Roy found out about it on the same day she announced that she was leaving him. Days later she packed in her job and moved to France to live with her parents who’d retired there. Roy took it really hard and fell into a depression.’

  ‘So why did this never attract press coverage given Rossi’s high profile?’ Benning asked. ‘Surely it would have been fodder for the tabloids. And yet I haven’t come across any mention of it.’

  ‘That’s because Rossi’s stepdad paid him off to leave the company and not to tell anyone,’ Pope said. ‘His friends and colleagues were told about his wife’s affair with some man, but not who he was. I was the only person Roy confided in about Rossi and that wasn’t until a few months later when we met for a drink.’

  ‘Was this before or after you saw the message on your own wife’s phone?’ Anna asked.

  ‘This was sometime after.’

  ‘And did you tell him about your own experience?’

  ‘I chose not to because I had always made him and others believe that my own marriage was rock solid … I didn’t want him to know the truth.’

  Anna mulled this over for a few moments, then said, ‘So when was the last time you saw Roy Slater?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in months.’

  ‘We will obviously want to talk to him. Do you have his address?’

  ‘I’ve got it written down somewhere. I haven’t spoken to him for a while, though, either.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Do you know where he works, for instance?’

  ‘He was unemployed when we last got together. And he said he was struggling to make ends meet, partly because he had fallen back into his old ways.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’

  ‘He was betting again. Roy was a compulsive gambler all the time I knew him. I reckon it was one of the reasons his wife strayed. He used to spend most of his time in betting shops, casinos, and on gaming machines, but more often than not he was unlucky.’

  Anna thought about this and it occurred to her that Roy Slater might have been desperately searching for a way to hit the jackpot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Please don’t leave me here,’ Chloe screamed, as her mind raged in all directions.

  Wesley turned back towards her, his face screwed up as though in pain.

  ‘I got you out of there, but it don’t mean you’re now my responsibility,’ he yelled.

  But Chloe was desperate. She reached out, grabbed the sleeve of his jumper.

  ‘Take me with you. Please. I don’t know what to do.’

  Wesley stared at her for a few seconds, and then looked up at the burning building in which his friend Ryan lay dead. Tears flowed from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. In any other circumstance, Chloe would feel sorry for him, but right now she was preoccupied with getting somewhere safe.

  They hadn’t moved from this spot since escaping the fire. They had watched the flames spread from the gift shop to the shops either side of it. Wesley had cried like a baby while calling out Ryan’s name. And Chloe had struggled to stay on her feet as her head spun and a wave of nausea washed over her.

  The fire brigade still hadn’t turned up, but the street they were on behind the shops was beginning to fill up with rioters. Some were already pushing over wheelie bins and throwing things at the row of offices that ran parallel with the rear of the shops.

  ‘I’m going to my flat,’ Wesley said, turning back to her. ‘The one I shared with Ryan. You don’t want to come with me. You should go and get help.’

  Chloe moved so that she was standing directly in front of him. He was several feet taller than she was.

  ‘Please take me with you,’ she begged him. ‘I’ll be safe there. I can try to contact my mum. She’ll come and get me.’

  He looked down at her, the flames from the fire reflected in his eyes, and she could see his mind working.

  She knew she was taking a risk. After all, she didn’t know him and he had not been happy that his friend had rescued her from the street. Plus, how would he react if and when he found out who her mum was? It was a risk she had to take, though. After all, it was thanks to him that she was alive. He could have left her to die in the shop, but he hadn’t. For that reason she felt she could trust him.

  He flicked his head in the direction he’d been about to walk off in.

  ‘I live in the block you can see over there,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us about ten minutes to get there so stay the fuck close to me.’

  Chloe saw the block of flats towering above all the other buildings. Most of the lights were on and the sight of it filled her with hope.

  She held on to Wesley’s sleeve as he started walking and she had to almost run to keep up with him. Her breath was thumping in her ears and it seemed like every bone in her body was hurting. At the same time her eyes stung and watered, and her stomach lurched with dread.

  But she kept going because she felt safer than she had since those men had taken Tom away. She was no longer alone. At last someone had taken her under his wing.

  And she didn’t even care that he was one of them. A rioter. A man whose hatred for the police had caused him to behave so badly. And so violently.

  Up close the block was huge and imposing. It stood at the end of a street that was strewn with debris, including bottles, bricks and household rubbish.

  There were groups of youths hanging around, but they weren’t rioting. They were talking, smoking, looking at their mobile phones. Perhaps waiting to be told where to go next to cause trouble.

  Some of them watched as Wesley strode towards the flats with Chloe clinging to his sleeve. But if he noticed them he didn’t bother to show it. He just stared ahead, his face set in stone.

  They entered the block, which was grim and dark. Graffiti covered the walls and the air was thick with the stench of urine.

  Neither of them spoke as they went up
in the lift, but Chloe continued to grasp Wesley’s sleeve. She wasn’t sure he even noticed she was still holding on to him. It was as though he was lost within himself while struggling to deal with what had happened to his friend.

  Chloe was trying not to be sick, but her stomach felt like it was being repeatedly hit with a hammer. She closed her eyes and a picture of her mum flashed in her mind. She desperately wanted to get in contact with her, and not only for her own sake. She wanted to know that she was safe and hadn’t fallen victim to the violence like so many other people including Tom. She was, after all, a target for men like Wesley. He and Ryan had made it clear that they hated the police. It was why they were running riot and trying to destroy everything in their path.

  Chloe had started to fear that her mother might already be dead. It was an unbearable thought and she kept telling herself that God wouldn’t let her suffer such a terrible loss all over again. She wanted to believe that the worst had already happened to her, and that she would soon be out of danger and reunited with her mum. But for that to happen she needed Wesley’s help.

  When the lift door opened Wesley stepped out and Chloe walked with him along the landing to his flat. He unlocked his front door with a key and left her to close it behind them.

  He went straight through to a small, untidy kitchen where he poured himself a glass of tap water before lighting a cigarette.

  Chloe stood in the doorway and tried to think of something to say to him, but her throat felt so tight that she couldn’t get the words out.

  Wesley then brushed past her and she followed him through the living room and out onto a balcony. They were six floors up and the view across London made her heart jump. There were fires everywhere – some big, some small – and it looked as though dozens of bombs had dropped onto the capital.

  ‘That’s where we just came from,’ Wesley said, pointing. ‘I can’t get my head around the fact that I’ll never see Ryan again.’

  They could see that the fire had spread further, claiming more shops and reaching higher into the sky.