Thursday's Child

By Tannis Laidlaw

Do You Love Psychological Suspense / Mystery Books? Thursday’s Child

Psychologist Fliss Whitelaw is off to Cyprus. There she’ll combine skills she learned as a competitive gymnast and as a psychologist with the specific exhaustive training she’s recently undergone. She’s a highly trained agent with the Kidnapper’s Trust sent to rescue an abducted child.

Some time later Fliss becomes increasingly suspicious that something is amiss at their tightly run organisation. Roland, their exacting boss, always spends enormous time and effort researching each potential case to ensure they meet strict criteria, but not lately. Further, agents are being deployed without the extensive training each gig requires. The chilling truth is that agents are being put in danger, to say nothing of the abducted children.

Fliss is terrified it’s only a matter of time before a kidnapping goes disastrously wrong.

Obsessively compelling, Thursday’s Child is an emotionally compulsive story that will grip you from the first to the last page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tannis Laidlaw
• Release date: Feb 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370524792

Tannis Laidlaw

Tannis has worn many hats: occupational therapist in her early days, psychologist, university researcher and lecturer at various universities and medical schools and now author. She's written many first drafts which are safely stored on her hard drive (perhaps, one day, to be revised...) but she has published four novels and two books of short stories. Two of the novels are in paperback as well as ebook format. She lives with her husband in various places: two homes in New Zealand - a town house in Auckland and an adobe beach house on an isolated bay in Northland - and, to take full advantage of the northern summer, a tiny summer cottage (off the grid and boat-access only) on a remote lake in North-western Ontario in Canada. All are places perfect for writing.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

About Tannis Laidlaw

Other books by Tannis Laidlaw

Connect with Tannis Laidlaw

Chapter One

She abseiled down the side of the building, stopping at the shutters, opening one slowly in case it squeaked, and then only enough to squeeze her body through. The night was soft and enveloping as only the Mediterranean climate seems to produce. She swung one leg onto the sill, steadied herself and brought the other leg under her so she could gradually lower herself onto the floor inside. Tiles, as expected. Her thin rubber shoes produced good feedback, almost like the silicon gloves covering her hands. Slowly her visual purple acclimatised and allowed shapes to appear in the gloom: a dresser, some toys, the small shape of the boy on the bed.

She held her breath better to listen. The murmur of voices from the room next door seemed unnaturally loud but Fliss told herself it was merely her own hyped state enhancing her hearing. A distant truck changed gears somewhere along the road to the airport, its sound an intrusion into the quiet. Only when she moved closer to the bed could she hear the breathing of the sleeping child. Her eyes were totally adjusted now and she could see the little boy sprawled on top of the covers, his short pyjama jacket rucked up under one arm. His mother said he was a heavy sleeper and she should know.

Fliss took a moment to let her heart settle. The next door voices stopped and she held her breath once more; and started again. Only then did her training mode cut in. She opened the harness strapped to her upper body. Seconds later she gathered the boy in her arms to fold him in as if she’d done so a thousand times. She had rehearsed again and again; the only difference was this time the sleeping child was real. She gradually tightened the straps, tucking one small hand in next to her own body. She straightened and the boy stirred. She held her breath again but the child was merely settling into the harness. She listened as she gave him a moment to regain a deeper sleep. The murmuring through the wall stopped again. Was that a creak from a door?

She needed to leave.

Now.

She moved back to the window and pushed the shutter open fractionally to accommodate her larger bulk. The abseil rope was exactly central, forming a line against the sky. After a quick glance down the three stories to the shadowy ground, she grabbed the rope, testing it once before swinging out into the black night. She adjusted her equipment with only one short glance up, knowing Mac had it all under control. Her job was to convey this precious wee boy onto solid ground as quickly as possible.

As soon as her feet touched down, she crouched low and ran hard. The lawn was large and made of mown grass, ridiculous in the hot and dry climate of Cyprus. But the very rich can have what they want and the boy’s father must have a residual craving for an English landscape.

No sign of the dogs, thank goodness, or rather, thank Alain. She loped over the dark lawn making good speed until, just over half way to the boundary wall, the boy stiffened and took a deep breath. Fliss knew what that foreshadowed and immediately dropped to the grass. She held her left hand over his mouth while extracting a foil packet from her breast pocket with her right. In seconds she had broken it open and held it under the child’s nose.

‘Sedative needed,’ she said in a low voice. ‘On the lawn. Just over half way.’ The microphone, she knew, would pick up whatever she said. The boy’s small body immediately relaxed and his fluttering eyelids closed. She shot a glance at the window. To her dismay, a light flicked on then off. The shutter opened momentarily then was shut tight. The nanny was in the boy’s room and now knew he was gone.

‘Condition amber. Light in window for one second. Now dark again,’ she said, fully cognisant that anybody who had been in the light would be able to see outside in a matter of seconds. She cursed the sliver of a moon.

‘Condition amber,’ Fliss heard in her earpiece. She staggered to her feet, but in doing so, she fumbled the used sachet.

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ she said under her breath. ‘Dropped packet.’ She pulled the glove down to expose her knuckles. She used the bare skin to brush the grass below the sleeping child. Small circles gradually widening. Delicate as the flutter of a moth.

‘Ten seconds counting now,’ Cole’s voice said into her ear. As he counted down Fliss’s anxiety rose. Her searching knuckles found nothing. She glanced at the window. Were the shutters shut? No sound. Then her knuckles felt something. Sharp as a needle.

‘Found it. Coming now.’ She tucked the packet into her breast pocket and lurched back into her crouch before resuming her low and powerful dash to the ladder awaiting her on the edge of the property. She scrambled up and over the wall and into the waiting van parked in the shadows. She felt stupid. How many times had she practiced the one-handed manoeuvre? Not enough, that was evident. She put the seatbelt on, specially designed to accommodate the sleeping child. There. Back. Most of her job done. Where were the others? They needed to move out quickly.

Fliss bent over the boy better to check on his breathing, his hair soft against her cheek. ‘You’re a fine little lad, you are,’ she said into his ear then remembered the microphone. Who cares? The only one listening was Cole. She switched it off. ‘We’re going to find your Mummy now. Soon you’ll wake in her arms.’ His breathing was regular, rhythmic; all as it should be.

Through the darkened window, Fliss could make out a smudge at the top of the wall. Must be Mac and Alain safely back. But nobody entered the van. Come on, guys. Get on with it.

Something must be wrong. She leaned closer to the window. She could make out Mac with the coils of rope over his shoulder. Where was Alain? She risked a quick glance at her watch. They had to move out of there. The nanny was young and a silly girl, in Fliss’s opinion. Her Valentino was very married even if he was tall, dark and movie-star good looking. How he managed to make these nightly rendezvous with the young American nanny was anybody’s guess.

The boy shifted slightly in the harness. Soon now, she mouthed, rocking him slightly. The last thing she wanted was for him to awaken to frighteningly different sounds. Smell was anticipated; Fliss had sprayed his mother’s perfume on her clothes for the sake of familiarity. She stroked his back.

‘Sleep deeply, little man,’ she murmured. ‘Sleepy boy, good boy.’

She looked up to see another smudge at the top of the wall. Whew, Alain. Seconds later, Cole was starting the engine and beside her Mac was packing away his equipment. Her earphone picked up the soft conversation between the van back and the seats in the front.

‘What happened?’ she heard Cole ask.

‘I had to give one of the dogs a second dose. He was a big brute and the tranq wasn’t holding him. Sorry,’ Alain said in his French accent.

Mac looked out the back window of the van. ‘Condition amber, still. I can see lover boy, cycling back to his own hidey hole.’

The van turned onto a connecting lane which led to the main road to the airport.

‘He didn’t look this way?’ Cole, the driver, asked.

‘Nope. Same wobbly cyclist on his way home to wifey, as always.’

They had joked about how sex disconcerted the nanny’s lover. A new thought came to Fliss. Maybe it wasn’t only sex the two shared. What could make an accomplished cyclist wobbly? Marijuana? Cocaine? Not her problem.

Off the main road, the van turned away from the airport terminal and followed the perimeter fence for half a kilometre.

Fliss turned her microphone back on. ‘Can you see it?’ she asked in a low voice so the child would not awaken.

‘Yup. Here we go,’ Cole answered. The van slowed. Fliss waited for it to stop before unbuckling and moving to the van’s door, one arm steadying the harness and its contents. Mac preceded her so he could hold up the cut edges of the fence enabling her to scramble through and thence to the small plane. She nodded at the pilot as she buckled into the seat beside him. As soon as Mac and Alain climbed into the back, the plane revved its engines. She waved in case Cole could see. His job was to rid himself of the van and take a commercial airline back to the UK. The job of the others was to reunite mother and son in Bari on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

Fliss bent over and breathed in that unique little boy smell she well remembered from her younger brothers. She loved that scent, almost enough to want a child of her own. But not quite. Or rather, not quite yet. She was looking forward to handing the boy over to his mother; she really was. The sooner the better.

That dropped packet. Fliss swore to herself. A mistake like that could spell personal doom if not bring down their whole organisation. She cursed her own clumsiness. She was not looking forward to telling Roland and the rest of the team.

As the little plane circled to come down at Bari, Fliss was helped into a voluminous burqa. How women could wear such things in a hot climate never ceased to amaze her. But it was a godsend when you wanted to hide something, including a sleeping three-year old strapped to your body.

Bari had been chosen mostly because it was out of the way although they had also timed their arrival to coincide with that of a large Ryanair plane and its chaotic load of tourists. The date of this snatch was chosen because a particularly lethargic immigration guard was on duty. They had used Bari before because of him.

The boy’s mother would be one of those Ryanair passengers. Fliss had met her several times in the guise of Ann, flamboyantly red-haired Ann, who had puffy cheeks, bright makeup and wore gauzy caftan-like clothes.

Fliss walked behind Mac across the tarmac towards the low lying terminal; Mac in a shiny, somewhat Western styled suit and a scraggly beard, followed by his obviously pregnant wife in her burqa hunched slightly with the weight of their bag. Fliss kept her eyes down while Mac presented their passports to the old man and they were through.

Inside the terminal, a gaggle of tourists stood waiting for their luggage, but the majority, like the Moslem couple, had carryon bags only.

Fliss slowly walked to the women’s loo without a backward glance at her tall husband. It was crowded, as expected, and Fliss joined the back of the queue. She waited, eyes downcast, shifting whenever the sleeping boy moved, until her turn for the larger stall set aside for mothers and children. When she closed the door, she immediately swung off the heavy burqa with a sigh of relief and hung it on the back of the toilet door, relishing the air on her skin. Now for the next bit. She took a deep breath and set to work. She opened the bag, hung the mirror over the burqa, tucked her own dark hair behind her ears and pulled on the red wig. Ugh. Hot. She swiftly painted her eyelids a bright turquoise and hung giant earrings from each ear. She rubbed some lipstick onto each cheek for Ann’s high-colour look and smeared her lips with colour and gloss before shoving two sponges between her teeth and the walls of her cheeks. She shook out the caftan and dropped it over everything including the sleeping boy. She glanced at the time. One minute to go. She knew the original loo queue would be finished by now and anyone who saw the burqa-clad woman enter the stall would be long gone. Fifteen seconds after packing everything neatly back in her now bulging bag, she reached under the caftan and unstrapped the child, leaving the harness in place. She arranged the boy with his head on her shoulder and, gripping the bag with her other hand, opened the door of the stall. The moment of truth. Again Fliss’s heart was beating a tattoo in her ears. At one of the sinks and watching the stalls in the mirror was the boy’s mother.

‘Ann. Thanks for looking after him,’ the woman said in an unnaturally high voice, following the script as she had been instructed to do, even though they were alone and in spite of being told never to use names.

‘He’s very sleepy,’ Fliss said, telling the mother with this choice of words, the boy was sedated. She passed the child into his mother’s arms and Fliss noticed tears in her eyes. A woman pushed open the door from the terminal, glancing with disinterested eyes on the tableau and entered a stall.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ the mother breathed and briefly gripped Fliss’s arm. That wasn’t in the script and Fliss knew they had to move quickly before the woman did something which could jeopardise the operation. Fliss shoved her hands under the hand dryer as if to dry them. Effective white noise. The mother smiled through her tears, nodded and left, her arms wrapped around her small son.

Fliss’s relief was enormous, and momentarily she could hardly stand. It was always the same. Anxiety fluctuating between eighty and ninety percent, little sleep and the huge sense of responsibility for hour after hour. Until it was over. Elation would come but now all she wanted was to be by herself where she could legitimately collapse.

Fliss, still as red-headed Ann, left the women’s loos at Bari Aeroporto and walked straight outside into the warm Italian morning. She headed to the rental area of the car park and stood under a large arrow which directed traffic out of the airport. Within a few minutes, she spotted Alain at the wheel of the little Opel.

Once she was settled in the front passenger seat, he grinned at her. ‘AOK?’

‘All according to plan,’ she said. ‘And no repeats of stupid bungling.’

‘These things happen no matter how hard we train,’ Alain said, but they both knew such carelessness with the sachet could ruin everything.

‘The others are away?’

‘They are,’ he said as he headed out of the airport. ‘I saw them drive off three minutes before I picked you up.’

Alain swung the car onto the autostrada which would take them north to Pescara Aeroporto where they were booked as Mr and Mrs Montgomery to fly back to London.

‘The hideaway okay?’

‘Sami was up there yesterday. She’ll be leaving now, I presume.’ Faleuma Malu Faasoomauloa, otherwise known as Sami from her Samoan origins, did much of their background planning. She had rented an isolated farmhouse cottage for the family in the foothills of the mountains in the Parco Nazionale inland from Pescara. The boy and his mother were to stay there for three days before being joined by the mother’s husband. Planning. Meticulous planning. Once the husband arrived, control was passed back to the family. Where they went, where they lived, what became of them was up to them. Kidnappers Trust had supplied the husband with EU passports and new identities for them all. Fliss silently wished them well. She had found the mother genuine and the little boy’s smell was still clinging to her own body.

‘I’m going to sleep for a week,’ she said to Alain.

‘With me, I hope,’ he said, but when he caught sight of her strained face, he said, ‘Chill, girl. All in good time.’

‘That light in the window,’ Fliss said. ‘What do you think happened?’ She’d thought her heart would stop when she saw it.

‘She found the boy gone, undoubtedly,’ Alain said. ‘But what is the normal explanation? Gone to the toilet? Wandering in the house? That’s all. Probably she started searching then. Big place. Don’t worry so. We had time. This one was a success.’

‘Except for my spectacular fumble.’

Alain sighed.

Chapter Two

Bunty put the last of the glasses into the dishwasher and shut the door. It had been a great 81st birthday party with over twenty friends showing up. Not the big bash she’d had last year when even Chad, her son who lived in New Zealand, had made it home with his daughter Annaliese for the birthday celebrations. And, of course, to settle Annaliese into a student flat in Oxford. No Chad this year but Annaliese had come yesterday to help with the party. Bunty had seen her onto the bus back to Oxford early this morning.

She had originally hoped her granddaughter would live with her in the village; there was certainly plenty of room in the house, but Oxford was too far for a comfortable daily commute and besides, young people should be with other students when at university. Barely a week went by that her granddaughter didn’t come for Sunday lunch.

Bunty looked at the time. It was Wednesday, her favourite day of the week but a day crammed with things to do. She gathered together her French books into one bag and her library books into a second and slung her handbag over one shoulder. Her French lessons were held in the library – part of a new initiative not only to cater for the local elderly population, but also to involve the library in something other than lending books. Besides which, she could park at the supermarket and do her weekly shopping after finishing at the library.

They were to talk about interests today. She had composed, for homework, a sentence or two about Lucas, the African child she was supporting.

J’ai prendre un enfant de Les Enfants du Monde – qui habite à Lesthoto en Afrique. Il y a dix ans.

She wasn’t absolutely sure she had it right but it was as right as she could make it. Mme Lefebvre would correct it, anyway.

Bunty parked close to Waitrose and walked to the library at the far end of the car park. She was in good time to take back her current books and choose several more. The library was modern in design and outlook and Bunty loved its atmosphere. She glanced at the selection of displayed books. Good, a PD James she hadn’t read, an author she loved and a woman who had produced book after book when even older than herself by a good few years. She next glanced at the returned books which had not yet been filed. Another good way of finding books she liked. She ran her fingers over the spines, reading each author as she went. Aha. A Minette Walters she hadn’t read. That young woman wrote wonderfully complex stories.

Bunty joined her French class at the far end of the library. She enjoyed the lesson, as always, and walked with several of them afterwards for coffee. They were planning a group expedition to Paris in the autumn. They picked up where they had left off, good-naturedly arguing about their itinerary, something which changed each time they met.

Bunty dumped her French bag and the new library books into her car before grabbing a supermarket basket. Now that the village shop handled so few items, she shopped carefully from a list each week when she was in town. Last year for her birthday, Chad had treated her to a chest freezer which sat in her garden shed. Being able to buy specials and keep them frozen until wanted had improved Bunty’s life considerably.

Waitrose was crowded, as usual, but she did pick up some boneless, skinless chicken breasts at a considerable saving, loading up with several packets destined for the big freezer. She found a soft Camembert on special too. As she waited in the queue she thought she might have lunch (le dejeuner) on her terrace (would that be ma terrace?). Camembert. Lovely.

In the parking lot, she opened the boot of her car, nudging the basket as close as she could without crowding the car next to hers. A young mother was attempting to buckle in a screaming baby who had definite ideas about the whole procedure. A boy of two or so with a nose that needed wiping was playing with the baby’s pushchair behind the car.

‘Better go see your Mummy,’ Bunty said to him. He was so small, the parking lot was an unsafe playground. The boy ignored her, banging the pushchair against the fender of his mother’s car. After that one attempt, Bunty left him alone and finished unloading her groceries from the cart into the boot.

As she reached up to close the lid, the child careered the pushchair into the back of her legs. Her arms flailed, sliding ineffectively over the shiny car and she went down in a heap, twisting away from the shopping cart and landing on the tarmac with an audible crack.

Through the hot pain spiking from the vicinity of her hip, Bunty heard the young mother yell at the child. ‘What have you done, you naughty boy?’

‘Help me. An ambulance, please,’ Bunty managed to say. ‘No, don’t move me. An ambulance.’ She knew her hip had snapped in the fall.

The young mother was gripping the squirming child with one hand and pressing numbers on her mobile phone with the other.

‘Ambulance, please,’ she said, her voice shrill. ‘A lady’s on the ground. Waitrose car park, near the recycling bins.’

Bunty lay propped up in the hospital bed feeling distinctly off colour. The doctor had just been in to say the operation for the hip replacement had gone smoothly and she would be taking her first steps on her new hip the next day. She had always prided herself on having a good memory but the time between the ambulance being called and awakening in the recovery room after her op was hazy. She remembered being asked if she wanted pain relief in the ambulance (what a silly question) and she knew she was headed for one of the Reading hospitals. She remembered Annaliese’s face, meaning she must have come down from Oxford to be with her. Bunty hoped Annaliese hadn’t missed anything important – she was a postgraduate student after all – neither studies nor her all-important dancing practice. Not for her grandmother’s broken hip.

‘Now, who’s a popular girl?’ said a nurse surely younger than Annaliese. She was carrying two bouquets of flowers.

‘Who are they from?’ Bunty asked.

‘I’ll give you the cards,’ the nurse said as she put the bouquets on the windowsill. ‘Here.’

Bunty opened the first card. Chad. Sent via wire or whatever they use nowadays, from New Zealand. How lovely. The second card said The Paris Trippers and the message read, ‘Get fixed quickly, please. We don’t want to postpone our Paris trip!’

‘Will I be well enough to travel by September?’ she asked the nurse.

‘Heavens yes,’ the young woman said. ‘If you do the physio exercises, you’ll be fit in a month or two.’

‘Good,’ Bunty said with a little cough. ‘I have a lot of sightseeing to do.’

The next day she was coughing every minute or so and her chest hurt. She stood upright for the first time with the physio but she didn’t have the energy to do more.

‘Have they given you anything for the cough?’ The physio asked.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Bunty managed to say. ‘If they have, no one’s mentioned it to me.’

‘I’ll have a word with the nursing staff.’

Bunty nodded, glad she didn’t have to do anything. She felt amazingly weak.

The cough kept her awake half the night, as much due to her guilt at the noise she was making in the four-bed ward as the coughing itself. The doctor didn’t examine her until the following morning. ‘Let’s have a listen,’ he said as he put his stethoscope onto various parts of her chest. She had a difficult time suppressing her cough while the stethoscope was pressed into the doctor’s ears; she didn’t want to deafen him.

‘I don’t much like what I’m hearing, Mrs, erm, Mrs Bell,’ he said. ‘I think it might be a touch of pneumonia and at your age, we’ll need to get onto it straight away.’

Bunty went into a coughing spasm and was unable to make the retort she intended. Why, then, did it take from three o’clock yesterday when the physio expressed her concern till now for something which needed attention straight away?

Chapter Three

Five days later the team met in another isolated farmhouse, not in Italy this time, but deep in the countryside inland from Dundee in Scotland. Fliss arrived early, mainly to savour the isolation before the others arrived but also because she loved Oakenbrae Farm for its old fashioned charm that oozed homeliness. The house and land were owned by Roland DeVere, the brains behind Kidnappers Trust, but he visited the estate rarely. It was maintained by people who farmed the neighbouring block. Bruce and Janet were middle-aged folk who ran their sheep over the Oakenbrae paddocks and provided housekeeping services and catering for when the team met there. As far as they were concerned, periodically Roland held weekend sporting parties for his friends. His guests made sure they took advantage of their roles in the setting and were seen tramping the nearby hills or fishing in the pools along the stream which spilled down the valley to the Dee.

Fliss sat outside on a lichen-covered garden seat where she could feast her eyes on the long view down the valley. The early September sunshine was fitful but after the cloying heat of Cyprus, she relished the cool. And the quiet. The debrief to come would inevitably be noisy but mostly she was worrying about the discussion involving the dropped sedative packet. Then there was Alain, too.

Fliss’s reverie was broken by the sound of the farm’s four-wheel-drive truck as it crunched along the gravel drive. Damn, her period of quiet had passed all too quickly. She walked around the side of the house in time to see Alain, Mac, Cole and Sami clambering out of the truck. Janet from the next farm stepped down from the driver’s side and walked to her farm truck parked on the side. She waved as she drove back to her own farmhouse not far down the road.

The team. Fliss’s introspection vanished with the delight she felt at the team’s reunion.

Sami spotted Fliss. ‘Hi there,’ she called. ‘Roland sent me a text to say he’ll be here by three.’

‘Janet’s left loads of goodies for making our own sandwiches,’ Fliss told them all as she helped with the bags. ‘And a pot of her homemade veggie soup.’

Everyone was adhering to the unspoken rule that no discussion of the completed job took place before Roland arrived. Nobody found keeping such a ruling easy when a mission had just been completed and emotions were still fresh.

They finished lunch by one-thirty and Alain, Mac and Fliss set out on the short walking trail which would take them high up the hill on the other side of the valley to one of Fliss’s favourite places, a cairn near some woodland which afforded a picture-perfect view of Oakenbrae Farm.

‘Smell the air,’ Mac said. ‘All my Scottish blood revels in it.’ Mac, with his mixed Caribbean heritage, loved pointing out he had the most viable connection to Scotland.

‘Fresh,’ said Alain. ‘Personally, I could use it about ten degrees warmer.’

‘Sook,’ Fliss said. ‘This is bracing, good for you, invigorating.’ She danced forward, turning to the two men. ‘It’s moments like this I live for.’ The hills formed a green backdrop to her exuberance, the heather glowing in purple patches like moss on a gigantic rock. She laughed and pirouetted away from them, momentarily feeling like a delighted child again.

‘You have a sad life,’ Alain teased. ‘I live for a sumptuous meal at some posh London restaurant served with lashings of red wine and a