Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher Read Online Free PDF Page B

are all the ingredients I need for my cake. If you shout them out I’ll tip them into the bowl.’
    Eggs were cracked. Flour was sieved. Margarine was scraped out of a tub. The children giggled appreciatively. They liked nothing better than a mess. David was allowed to stir and told to make a wish. When he didn’t answer Bernie put it down to shyness and continued, ‘Now, what do you need to cook a cake?’
    ‘An oven!’
    ‘That’s right. An oven. But we couldn’t have an oven here. Not close to so many children. That would be dangerous, wouldn’t it? So we’ll need some magic. What’s the magic word?’
    ‘Abracadabra.’
    ‘Not loud enough!’
    ‘ABRACADABRA!’
    As he pulled away the white cloth to reveal a cake, with icing and three candles already flickering and running with melted wax, the adults’ attention was distracted. Someone was hammering on the front door and shouting. Emma waited for a moment, thinking that Brian would answer it. But he was in the kitchen swapping blue jokes with some lads from the rugby club and he pretended not to notice.
    The audience turned back to Uncle Bernie to give him his due applause and Emma went to the door. She opened it to a teenage girl with wild white hair. Traces of moisture hung to her hair, like frost on a spider’s web, and her breath came in clouds.
    ‘Please,’ the girl said. ‘I need to talk to my father.’ Then she saw him through two open doors. Owen was holding the cake, and Bernie was already packing away his equipment in a cheap suitcase.
    ‘It’s Mum,’ she shouted towards him. He looked up and saw her for the first time. ‘She’s gone again. Disappeared.’
    As if, Emma thought, the woman had been part of his magic act. As if he had covered her with a cloth and she had vanished, like the mixing bowl full of ingredients.

Chapter Five
    Ramsay had the weekend off but on Sunday morning he went into the police station anyway. He would have been more reluctant to volunteer for extra duty if Prue had been around. Prue was his lover. Not live-in, though he spent much of his free time in her house in Otterbridge. According to his mother he might as well be staying there. Mrs Ramsay was a chapel-goer and expected him to make an honest woman of Prue.
    ‘If you think that wife of yours will come back to you, you’re fooling yourself,’ she’d said. She’d always had the knack of putting him down. And perhaps she was right and he was hoping Diana would turn up one day on his doorstep, laden with expensive shopping, her adventures over.
    Now Prue was away. She worked as director of a small arts centre and was touring the Highlands and Islands with her youth theatre group, playing in schools and community centres. It was as much about giving her unemployed Tyneside teenagers a good time as developing acting and directing skills, she said. They would end up at the Youth Drama Festival in Kirkwall.
    She was obviously enjoying every minute of the trip. When she remembered, she phoned up to rave about the scenery, the history, the whisky. He missed her more than he had expected, became quite sentimental when he thought about her.
    ‘Why don’t you come?’ she’d suggested during the last phone call. She’d sounded tired, exhilarated and a little bit drunk. ‘Take a couple of days’ leave and fly up for the weekend.’
    He’d been grateful for the invitation but he’d turned her down. It would be like taking her out to view the scene of a crime. As one of Prue’s arty friends would have said, they both needed their own space. He knew Prue would prefer to work without distraction.
    So on Sunday morning he went into the office. Sally Wedderburn was working too, clicking furiously at the computer keyboard, determined to make her mark on a high-profile case. There had been a number of child abductions in the area and the most recent had hit the headlines. The press hadn’t made a connection with the previous incidents. Perhaps the police themselves