Page 77 of Little Children

Forty-Eight

Stacey hadn’t yet revealed to anyone what she’d found on the CCTV at the kebab shop.

It wasn’t like there was anyone to talk to anyway. The rest of the team had been deployed on other tasks, and she was sitting in an office on her own. Normal day really, except if she leaned back in her seat far enough, she could see the top of Blackpool Tower.

Before sharing her findings, she wanted to scour the CCTV collected for Noah to see if she could spot a similar vehicle around the time he vanished.

Until she had incontrovertible proof that the cases were connected, she suspected the Blackpool team would try to convince her that Lewis had thrown himself into the back of the van as part of an elaborate running-away plan.

She opened the CCTV file within the Noah case file and was pleased to see it labelled clearly. She was sure that Adil was responsible for the organisation.

She clicked onto the pier footage first. Ten seconds in, she saw Noah leaving through the front doors of the pier onto the Promenade. He was noticeably shorter than Lewis, who appeared tall and gangly for his twelve years.

Noah was a half foot smaller and carried a little more weight. Having been kept away from the case, it was the first time she’d laid eyes on a moving image of the boy.

She watched as he hesitated, as though unsure where Wetherspoons was.

He came forward and began walking to the right. Stacey could see the edge of the crossing, and he walked past it, obviously choosing to cross the road without the help of the flashing green man.

From what she’d seen, the pub was literally across the road.

He’d come out of the pier but hadn’t made it across the road to the pub on the other side. How was that even possible?

Stacey returned to the folder and saw that the majority of the remaining footage was from the trams.

She clicked into a word document titled ‘Tram CCTV’.

She read the short paragraph that explained that many of the trams had been fitted with an Obstacle Detection Assistance System, basically a camera that detected obstructions on the line ahead and then knew to apply the service brake to avoid collisions.

She could see from the files that Adil had collected all the relevant footage and labelled it in time order. Obviously, he would have checked them all, but he wouldn’t have known what to look for. Adil hadn’t known about the van that had abducted Lewis.

She knew from the pier footage that Noah exited it at 9.31 p.m.

She located the file nearest to that time, labelled as ‘9.23’. She opened the file and was immediately transported to the front of the tram as though she was driving it herself.

Her heart stopped as she saw a dark-coloured transit van parked at the tip of the taxi rank, right where Noah would have crossed the road.

She scoured the files for the next tram that had passed through.

That file was labelled as ‘9.37’. She clicked into it.

The van was gone and likely so was Noah.

She sat back in her chair, knowing she didn’t have solid proof that it was the same van or that the people inside had abducted Noah… but the coincidence didn’t sit well in her stomach.

She was wondering what to do with the information when her phone dinged.

She frowned as she read the short message Bryant had sent her.

What the hell was he up to now?

Forty-Nine

Bryant worked hard to keep his face neutral as Moss parked the car in front of the property he’d visited the day before.

The face of the woman who lived here had remained in his head in the hours since. As soon as he’d known for sure they were heading here, he’d considered every option available. More than anything he wanted to march into the DCI’s office and call out this man for the disgusting piece of shit that he was.

The only problem was that he had no proof. The best he’d got was an unauthorised photo taken at a crime scene. That wasn’t going to put Moss in front of the people who could throw him off the force.