The Child Taker & Slow Burn by Conrad Jones

behind him.
    “Sorry about that, but I need to be careful about what I say,” he said quietly.
    “Okay, what leads have they got?”
    “Nothing.” He sighed again. “The family liaison officer indicated that the investigation team are looking at the family for the abduction. None of them were actually there when the kids were taken and so they’re all suspects.”
    “Oh my God, that’s ridiculous.” Grace was shocked.
    “Not so ridiculous. I overheard the liaison officer asking Hayley if Karl was having an affair with his brother’s wife.” Tank whispered into the phone.
    “Oh dear, that puts a different perspective on it,” she said slowly.
    “Exactly, you can see why the investigation is focusing in on the family,” Tank said. “I don’t buy it one bit, all they are doing is wasting time and allowing the trail to go cold.”
    “We’ll have a good look at the scene, and I’ll call you if we find anything.”
    “Grace,” Tank said.
    “What?”
    “We need to get one step ahead of the kidnappers, and at the moment the police are miles behind them and looking in the wrong direction.”
    “The light’s fading fast here, we’ll get on it now. If we find anything then you’ll know about it first.”

Chapter Twelve
    Coniston Water
     
    Grace Farrington crouched down and touched a clump of flattened grass. It was about a yard away from a barbed wire fence which separated the campsite from the woods. Nettles and dock leaves grew in clumps along the edge of the trees and brambles snaked around the fence posts. To the left, the grassy slopes ran gently down towards the lake. To the right was the road which led to the nearest village, and directly behind her was the woods through which the twins were carried off; or at least that’s what the police thought so far. It was a cloudy evening and across the lake in the distance mist shrouded the peak of Coniston Old Man.
    “There’s a footprint here,” Grace said. Tara was a few yards away studying the area.
    “Could be where the father entered the woods?”
    Grace moved closer to the fence and looked at the sharp metal barbs. There were two barbs with a dark brown substance on the tips of them. “Someone entered here. I think this is blood.” She said as she took a small plastic tube from her belt and swabbed the barbed wire. She placed the swab into the tube and then sealed it. Beyond the wire, the undergrowth was thick, and there was a green carpet of brambles. “I spoke to the campsite owner earlier, and he said that the only time animals graze on this land is through the winter months, so anything we find, tracks or blood, is human.”
                  “What about pets?”
                  “No pets allowed.”
    “Well the brambles look pretty dense here, and he was badly scratched around the ankles, it would fit.” Tara pointed into the trees.
    “Let’s see if we can follow his trail.” Grace pulled the top wire up, and Tara climbed through the fence. When she got through, she reciprocated the action to allow Grace to follow suit.
    “The branches are broken there.” Grace pointed to the base of a sycamore tree. The lower branches were snapped off, but the exposed wood was still pale in colour and slightly damp to the touch. “It’s a recent break.”
    “It looks like he’s gone in at an angle,” Tara noted. In daylight, the most obvious route was straight on, but the evidence said that Karl had progressed through the trees at a tangent to the fence.
    “Well it was dark, and he was moving blindly towards the noise,” Grace mused.
    “The brambles are ripped over there, and his statement said that he’d stumbled over and then got up again.” There was a thick swathe of undergrowth and thorny brambles ripped from the forest floor and clumped together. Tara moved to the right and they walked on for twenty yards or so. There was a gap between two oak trees and the vegetation on the floor looked damaged and torn.