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  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Snatched

  STEPHEN EDGER

  Approximately one hundred and fifty thousand children go missing in the U.K. every year. That’s one child every three and a half minutes.

  ABDUCTION

  Every parent’s worst nightmare: seven year-old Natalie Barrett is snatched on Friday afternoon walking home from school. The police begin a desperate hunt to find her before it is too late. They fear the worst when a body is located near a golf course.

  THE FALLOUT

  Sarah Jenson is Natalie’s teacher. When one of the detectives on the case is suddenly killed, Sarah believes the events may be linked and begins to search for answers. With suspects stacking up, she is in a race against time to discover the true identity of the perpetrator before Natalie winds up as another statistic.

  UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

  Where were Natalie’s parents when they should have been collecting her? Why was Natalie so scared of her Uncle Jimmy? Could a convicted sexual offender from Sarah’s past be involved?

  Children not found within the first seventy-two hours, rarely return home alive. Sarah knows the clock is ticking…

  SNATCHED

  Abduction, terror, suspense and sorrow: Snatched is a breath-taking British crime thriller set in Southampton.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © Stephen Edger 2012

  Stephen Edger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  STEPHEN EDGER

  Snatched

  PROLOGUE

  'Where's mummy?' thought the little girl in the red coat, as she stood quietly next to the railings; her hood pulled up over her shoulder-length blonde hair to keep her dry from the intrusive and cold, wet raindrops. It had been raining most of the day, which had meant the class had not been allowed outside at break-time. She didn't like the rain as it stopped her from playing and having fun with her best friends. 'Stupid rain,' she thought to herself.

  The little girl's name was Natalie Barrett and she had been standing in the same spot for the last twenty minutes, waiting for one of her parents to arrive and take her home. It would probably be her mummy, as it was rare that her daddy came and collected her, and it wasn't the first time she had been left, waiting to be collected. She knew she should probably go and wait inside the door of the school, so that her teacher knew she was still there, but then mummy would get into trouble and Natalie would be told off for getting mummy into trouble with the school again. Natalie didn't like it when daddy shouted at her. 'No,' she resolved; she would stay where she was and wait for mummy's white car to pull up.

  Natalie looked back over her shoulder, towards the window of her classroom. She could see Miss Jenson stood, pinning some pictures to a large notice board at the far side of the room. Natalie liked Miss Jenson. She was a really lovely teacher, never really got cross and started every day with a smile. Natalie hoped she would grow up to be as friendly as Miss Jenson. Natalie wondered why Miss Jenson wasn't married yet as she would be a great wife and mummy. That's what Natalie thought anyway. Miss Jenson was much nicer than Natalie's mummy.

  Natalie liked coming to school every day. She was friends with almost every girl in her class and some of the boys as well. She always tried to be good and worked hard on every piece of work she was given. Earlier that day, Miss Jenson had read them a story and had then asked them to all write a story of their own. Natalie had thought hard about it and had chosen to write about a brave knight who fought a dragon, so that he could rescue a princess in her castle. Miss Jenson had collected all the children's stories, so that she could read them, and had then asked them to all paint a picture of the story that they had written. Natalie liked it when they painted. Miss Jenson always told her she painted good pictures.

  Natalie had painted a large grey tower in the middle of her page and a big green dragon, with fire coming out of his nose, to the left. She had then tried to paint a knight on a horse to the right of the tower but it had looked more like a man on a dog, than a knight on a horse. When everyone had finished their painting Miss Jenson made each of the class come to the front and read out their story while she held the paintings up. Miss Jenson had said that Natalie's story was very good and she had given Natalie a gold star to stick to the painting. Natalie smiled as she thought about that gold star. It was the fourth gold star she had received this term, which was more than any other child in the class. Natalie had asked if she could take her painting home to show her mummy, but Miss Jenson had said she wanted to stick it on the wall of the classroom but that it could be taken home at the end of term.

  Natalie didn't know what time it was, but she knew that mummy was very late today, as the lady in the yellow coat with the 'STOP' sign was packing up to go home. Natalie looked to her left and then to her right, to check if mummy's car was anywhere nearby but she could not see it. She wondered why mummy was late again. She hoped it wasn't because mummy and daddy had been fighting. They had been arguing a lot recently, ever since Uncle Jimmy had come to stay with them. She wished her mummy and daddy would stop fighting. Natalie looked to her left again and tried to picture in her mind where her house was. She knew that when mummy collected her, they drove down the road and turned left at the end. Then there was a long road with shops on the right-hand side and houses on the left that went on and on. About halfway up the road, they turned right and drove down a road, past the secondary school, until they reached the leisure centre, where she sometimes went swimming. Her house was on the road to the right of the leisure centre and she knew her house was number 46.

  Natalie knew she was supposed to wait for her mummy to come and collect her, but if daddy found out that mummy had forgotten to pick her up, he would be angry and would probably shout at mummy again. Natalie didn't want daddy to be cross with mummy, so she decided she would walk home. She knew she would have to be careful, and would have to wait for the green man before crossing the road, but she was confident she could find her way. Mummy and daddy would be so pleased to see that she had managed to walk home by herself.

  Natalie looked around for Miss Jenson once more but could not see her through the classroom window. She could just about see the picture of her tower and dragon hung to the notice board where Miss Jenson had been stood, moments earlier. She smiled, as she thought about that gold star again, before turning and walking up the road. She started to hum to herself as she walked.

  She had only made it a hundred yards when a car, as red as her coat, pulled up and the man behind the wheel opened his window and called out to her. The sudden noise made Natalie jump, but as she turned, she recognised the face of the man behind the open window. He asked her where she was going and she told him she was walking home. He asked her where her mummy and daddy were and she lied, saying they were at home and knew she was walking. She felt bad about lying to the man, but then she didn't want to get mummy and daddy into trouble with the school or the police.

  The man asked if she lived nearby and she said she lived near the leisure centre. He said he knew where that was and asked if she would like a lift home in his car. She told him that she was not supposed to accept lifts from strangers. He smiled nicely at her and told her that her mummy had asked him to drive her home. The man said she should get in the car, as she was getting wet in the rain. He opened the door for her and she got in.

  She noticed that the seat was very soft and comfortable and the car was quite warm inside. The car was much bigger than mummy's car and she wondered why daddy didn't have a car like this. The man asked her to fasten he
r seat belt and pulled away from the kerb. She wasn't allowed to sit in the front seat of mummy’s car, so this was quite a treat. The man asked her if she wanted to listen to the radio and she said she did, so he turned it on and she began to hum along to the song that was playing.

  Natalie checked that he knew where the leisure centre was, and he said that he did and smiled warmly again. She smiled back and he told her that she looked very pretty when she smiled. He was such a nice man. He told her that she could probably become a model when she was older. She told him she wanted to become a teacher like Miss Jenson, or maybe a writer. He smiled again and said they were also good jobs and that she would probably make a very good teacher. This pleased Natalie and she smiled again.

  Natalie saw through the man's window that he had driven past the road with the secondary school on it and she told him he had missed the road. He said, 'Whoops,' but that he knew a different road that would bring them back around to the leisure centre. She said, 'Phew,' and began to hum along to the music again. The man pulled a white paper bag out of his coat pocket and passed it to her. She opened the bag and saw that it was full of brown toffees, like her grandpa used to give to her. The man told her she could have a toffee, for being such a good girl. She told him mummy didn't let her eat sweets before dinner, but he said one toffee wouldn't hurt, and they could keep it a secret between them; mummy didn't need to know.

  Natalie removed a toffee and handed the bag back to the nice man. She placed it in her mouth and began to suck it. It tasted sweet, but was too hard to chew and she knew she would need to keep sucking it until it softened. She did like toffees.

  As Natalie continued to look out of the window, at the stupid rain, falling against the glass, she suddenly felt very tired and covered her mouth, to hide her yawn from the man. She didn't want him to think she might fall asleep before she got home. She continued to look at the rain drops and could feel her eyelids starting to close. She tried to fight the wave of fatigue, as it enveloped her, but it was a fight she wasn't going to win. The last thing she remembered was the man telling her it was okay if she wanted a quick nap before they reached their destination.

  And then she was asleep, away in a world full of fairies, dragons, knights and princesses, where good always overcomes evil; the lost innocence of a child's imagination. She didn't see the man behind the steering wheel turn off the road and head in the opposite direction to her house.

  MONDAY

  1

  Sarah Jenson slumped into her chair and let out a sigh of satisfaction: it was lunchtime! The children would be out in the playground for the next hour, and although she still had a hundred and one things to do, she would at least have twenty minutes when she could eat her lunch and have a well-deserved sit down. It had been a hectic morning, but then every day, teaching Year 2 primary school children, was hectic!

  So far today, they had spent an hour looking at and learning to say the numbers twenty-one to thirty, and this had been followed by an hour of learning and singing a song for a forthcoming assembly. The assembly was themed as ‘springtime’, and the Headteacher had tasked the Year 2s with performing "Morning has broken" to start the assembly. Sarah had been teaching the children a verse per week, for the last month, by making them sing the verse every other day, while she played the background music through her MP3 player. They had already mastered the first verse and could sing this without reading the words, but the second verse was proving trickier, and several of the less-bright children were muddling the lines of the verses. But Sarah had always been a fighter and she would persevere with it until they could all sing, without reading the words.

  The final half an hour of the class had been spent looking at different foods and identifying them, using French names. Teaching modern languages was not a mandatory part of Key Stage 1 Learning, but the school preferred the children to receive an insight into other languages, even in Year 2. It was part of the reason Sarah had opted to join St Monica's Primary School in Southampton. Sarah, herself, had a degree in Modern Languages and was semi-fluent in both French and Spanish, and she believed that the sooner a child grasps an acceptance of alternative languages and cultures, the better. It had been an interactive lesson. Sarah had instructed the children to bring in one item of food from home each. Most had brought in a tin of something their mother's had found at the back of the cupboard that they were never likely to eat in the future. The class would then learn the name of each food item. Sarah had brought in a large baguette and a selection of French cheeses and had shared the food out with the children. Most had said they did not like the smell of the Camembert or the Roquefort, but the Roulé had gone down a treat.

  Sarah stood, from her slouched position, and surveyed the battle-site that was her classroom. There were chairs left pushed out during the mad rush to the door, when the bell had sounded. There were also cheese and bread crumbs on the tables, as well as various pieces of stationery; scattered on the floor, including pencils and erasers. The official school cleaners would not be around until four o'clock when all the children had left for the day, so Sarah knew that if she didn't attempt to get things straight now, it would only get worse. She quickly collected up the stationery items and wiped the tables down with a damp cloth, systematically pushing in the wayward chairs as she went. Within five minutes the place was looking in a much more reasonable state.

  Sarah returned to the chair she had been sitting in earlier, behind her large teacher's desk, and fished out a plastic tub of pasta from her handbag. It was the previous night's left-over Lasagne, but Sarah didn't mind as she quite enjoyed cold pasta. Besides, she would need the carbohydrates as the next class was P.E. This afternoon, they were scheduled to be in the main assembly hall, which doubled as a gymnasium with various climbing and vaulting apparatus hinged to the walls. It would take about ten minutes to set it up so she would have to start preparing, before the school bell sounded again, to indicate the return of the class.

  Sarah happily munched on her pasta and allowed her mind to wander, but a thought kept niggling at her brain. Natalie Barrett had not come to school this morning and no phone call had been received from the parents to indicate why. Natalie was such a bright girl and something of a star pupil for Sarah. It didn't matter what task Natalie was given to do, she always managed to deliver, at a standard higher than her peers. She had a particular talent for creative writing and art, and Sarah had very high hopes for her going on to become something great in the world. It wasn't unusual for Natalie to be absent from school as there had been a couple of times already this year when her parents had excluded her from school, because of some kind of domestic dispute. It amazed Sarah how such a smart young girl could ever have come from two such parents. Sarah wasn't a snob but she definitely considered herself higher up in the evolutionary food-chain than Mr and Mrs Barrett.

  It was a shame that Natalie had missed the French class, as in previous lessons she had shown she had a real aptitude for modern languages and was already demonstrating ability with pronunciation. The lesson probably would have gone much smoother, as well, as some of the other children seemed to look up to Natalie and performed better in lessons when Natalie was on-form. She was such a sweet girl, kind to all her classmates and even at this age it was clear she was going to be popular with the boys when she reached secondary school. She was a pleasure to teach and subconsciously Sarah hoped that if she were to become a mother herself, one day, she would have a child as advanced and well-adjusted as Natalie Barrett.

  Sarah's eyes wandered to the large notice-board, which was currently displaying the children's stories and paintings from Friday afternoon. Most had written stories about talking animals; such was the current cinema-craze to produce computer-animated films about fluffy, talking creatures. One boy, Anthony, had pretty much plagiarised the plot to Monsters Inc. for his story, and his painting of a large, turquoise coloured blob was clearly his interpretation of Sulley from the film.

  The painting that stood out so vi
vidly now was of a princess trapped in a grey tower by a fire-breathing dragon. It was the picture that Natalie had painted to accompany her story. It wasn't uncommon for little girls to write stories about princesses, but something in the story had struck a chord with Sarah, and it had her wondering if there was anything more to it than just a child's vivid imagination. Sarah had taken a psychology course as an element of her teaching degree, and was aware of studies that explained how children would often associate scary episodes of their lives as evil creatures in stories and it had made Sarah wonder just who the dragon in Natalie's story could be. Clearly it was something or somebody that scared Natalie, as indicated by the flames protruding from the dragon's nose. Sarah remembered common experiences that traumatised children included abusive parents, fears of family separation and dangerous animals. Sarah had no idea which of these possible scenarios, if indeed any, applied to Natalie. Sarah determined at that point that she would raise her concerns at the next parents’ evening, due in a fortnight.

  Sarah glanced up at the clock above the notice-board and saw that it was nearly time for the children to return from their break, so she quickly put her empty plastic lunch tub back in her handbag and threw away the disposable, plastic fork she had been using. She glanced down at her phone and saw that she had missed a call from her partner Erin, a detective in the local police force. Erin had not left a voice message, so Sarah figured it probably hadn't been an important call. She considered whether she should phone her back, but decided she needed to start setting up the apparatus in the assembly hall, so she put the mobile back in her handbag and grabbed her gym clothes, which consisted of a pair of pink jogging bottoms and a white t-shirt. Sarah was only thirty and had worked hard, to keep her body in a slim and reasonable shape, with a carefully balanced diet and regular evening trips to the gym. Her latest buzz was for Zumba and she had been attending a weekly class for the past three months. She was due to be attending a class that evening, but had already made plans to spend the evening with Erin instead, so she would have to book in an extra exercise session later in the week. Sarah quickly changed into her clothes and headed for the hall.