Tom and Anna on the Trail: The Case of the Missing Schoolgirl

By Jim Connelly

When a newly-arrived migrant girl is kidnapped as she walks to school, the police are baffled.
But not her classmates, Tom Sinclair and Anna Kavanagh, who set out to find her and bring her captors to justice. A heart-warming story of two children's courage and persistence as they battle the odds for the sake of their friend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Timothy Connelly
• Release date: Mar 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992454715

Book preview

Hello!

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My name is Tom and I live in Melbourne.

You might have heard of me because I was in all the papers a while ago, and on TV, when the trial was on, and before that, too.

You might have heard of Anna, also, for the same reason. She lives a few streets from me and is in my class. We do everything together.

Anna and I always get on OK. Because she lives near me and we both have bikes, we ride round a fair bit after school and in the holidays. Anna’s got something wrong with her leg, so she’s better riding a bike than she is walking. I’ll tell you more about that later on.

There’s another main person in this story. She doesn’t come into it for a while, but it’s because of her the whole story happened.

Chapter One

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Things began in a terrible way. It was towards the end of last year. We were all going to school as usual, pretty happy, with the normal complaints about the teachers and some of the other kids and sometimes our oldies.

There was a kid in our class called Soraya. She was fairly new and we didn’t take much notice of her at first. Nobody did. She couldn’t speak much English when she came, but she improved a lot. She was all right. Nobody was nasty to her. She used to look at us playing in the yard, and was beginning to join in a bit before it all happened.

Her mother came for her in her car after school, and there were a lot of other kids in the car, who we guessed were her little brothers and sisters.

That was odd, because Soraya lived not far from the school, and she walked by herself every morning.

Then, that day, she wasn’t there. At our school, they ring up the parents if someone isn’t at school and they haven’t sent a note beforehand.

The secretary must have rung up, but the first we thought something was wrong was when Mrs Driscoll – she’s our teacher – was called to go to the Office and one of the trainee-teachers came to look after us.

Mrs Driscoll came back looking worried, then the kids at the back said they saw Soraya’s parents’ car come in and park beside the Principal’s. Soraya’s mother had a handkerchief to her face, they said, as they hurried in to the Principal’s office. A bit after that a police car came as well. Mrs Driscoll was called away twice more. We didn’t get much work done with all that going on, and there was some whispering about something terrible having happened to Soraya.

Just before lunch the Principal came in with another man. Someone said he must have been a policeman because he had shiny shoes. They told us that Soraya had left home for school, but hadn’t arrived, and asked if anyone had seen her. Well, no one had. They probably wouldn’t have noticed her even if they had seen her. Except Anna and I would have, because we’re good at noticing things.

We all felt pretty bad about Soraya and told our parents as soon as we got home. There was no riding our bikes that afternoon.

*       *       *

You couldn’t call us a gang. There’s just the two of us, and we don’t take any secret oaths or leave mysterious messages for each other. About the only thing we do is talk – and ride our bikes.

And we notice things. We remember car number plates and see if we can tell what people are like from their faces. Things like that. Once we saw some builder’s pegs at the back of the park, and when we told people about them, it started a lot of protests, so they had to stop building. My dad always says I should become a detective when I grow up.

Every now and then a couple of the kids from school hang round with us, but they soon get sick of us talking all the time.

We like to check up on things, so we go round to different places just to see. Sometimes we explore new places. My dad says we know our suburb better than the dogs do.

I’ve got a big brother, but he laughs at us a lot. His name’s Trevor. He used to have a bike, but he reckons he’s too big for one now, so he walks, he and his mates. They walk everywhere, when they could get there in half the time if they used their bikes.

After Soraya disappeared we weren’t ever allowed to ride alone, or even walk anywhere by ourselves. But we kept on thinking about what happened. Nobody forgot Soraya, though we stopped talking about her so much. Some of the kids at school were saying that Soraya might even be dead.

One day, just before the Christmas holidays, we saw a police van down the street. That was a couple of months after Soraya’s disappearance. They got out a lot of stuff – tables and chairs and boxes – and put them in one of the shops just before they closed for the day.

Anna and I started thinking and guessed they were going to have a display in the street about Soraya.

The next day was the day we broke up for Christmas. Sure enough, there were police people in the street asking everyone if they remembered anything about what happened. They had a dressmaker’s dummy dressed just like Soraya in her school uniform. A policewoman came into our class and asked us again if we remembered anything at all, but nobody could think of anything.

We could tell by the way they all spoke they didn’t have any clues at all, and they didn’t seem to have much hope they would ever find her. Perhaps they even thought she was dead.

It must have been terrible for Soraya’s family. It was bad enough for us.

We hung around on our bikes, in the shade, watching the police. We finished school early because it was our last day, so we had a lot of time before tea.

One of the policemen turned round to us.

‘You kids know Soraya?’ he asked us.

‘She was in our class, with Mrs Driscoll,’ Anna said.

‘Are you going to catch them?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know if it’s them. Probably just one, I’d reckon.’ He spoke very seriously to us.

‘It’s nearly always just one,’ he added. ‘One day, we’ll come up with him. One day.’

Anna’s pretty smart, and she noticed how he said, him.

‘What if it was a woman?’ she said in a dreamy kind of voice.

‘Not much chance of that,’ the policeman replied. ‘I’ve never heard of that before. It’s always a man.’

After a while we rode home. Very slowly and not saying much. We were both thinking the same thing. That happens to us a lot.

I stopped off when we came to Anna’s front gate. She looked at me. ‘Do you think we could do something about it?’ she said. ‘About finding Soraya?’

It was a while before I replied. This was a big decision. ‘This would be bigger than anything we’ve ever done,’ I said. There was another silence before I added, ‘But it’s Soraya we’ve got to think about.’

‘Not ourselves.’ Anna finished what was in my mind. ‘That policeman didn’t seem to have any idea about where she is and who took her,’ she went on.

‘I think they might have stopped trying,’ I said.

‘And that’s all the more reason why we should try to do something ourselves,’ Anna said. I could hear a note of determination in her voice, and I was beginning to feel that way myself.

Anna went on. ‘It’s awful to think of Soraya being