‘Christ, I’m going to be arrested for abducting a bloody minor,’ Jeff Waters muttered as he looked down at the little girl. He already had quite a few arrests on his police file. Adding Suspected Paedophile to the list wasn’t going to do him any favours when it came to getting visas for overseas assignments.
‘It was just a game,’ said Lucy. ‘We didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’
‘I know you didn’t, darling, but something went wrong and we have to see if we can put it right. This is the best place to talk, trust me.’
Setting her down, he led her across the busy road to the entrance of the playground. Coram’s Fields was a unique seven-acre park for children in the centre of the city, constructed on the site of the old Foundling Hospital. At the gates a sign read: ‘No ADULTS UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY A CHILD’. Right now, it was the safest place for Waters to be.
He had followed the child all morning, starting at her school in Belsize Park, then to her father’s office off Fleet Street, heading across to Hamley’s toy store in Regent Street, where Lucy was bought a talking pink poodle (‘Comes with Built-in Wi-Fi!’ said the box) and finally to the crowded farmers’ market that filled the central courtyard of the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury.
He had used his Nikon zoom to track the girl in the yellow T-shirt and jeans as she trotted behind her father with the toy poodle under her arm. His name was Mansfield; Waters called the office just after the pair had left and asked a few questions; he was good at teasing out answers from suspicious receptionists. Apparently Mansfield was taking care of his daughter today because she had an appointment at Moorfields Eye Hospital to have her new glasses fitted, which meant that either the wife worked or he was divorced.
Waters had kept the Nikon trained on the yellow shirt. It darted behind the Portuguese food stall, reappeared briefly by a woman selling iced cupcakes, and then slipped between a fence of dark blurs that proved to be a line of Chinese tourists taking photographs of London litter bins.
The crowd was denser on this side of the square because it was directly in the sun, and people were sitting on the edge of the fountains that never seemed to be working, eating sausage baguettes, waiting for friends, talking on their phones.
Lucy’s father had released her hand and was walking over to a bookstall, where he turned his back for a moment to examine a hefty volume of New York City photographs.
It was long enough. Waters had lifted the girl off her feet and made a run for it before she could cry out, slipping away down the steps and beneath the raised concrete platform of the precinct. To his surprise Lucy didn’t cry out. ‘You again,’ was all she said. Waters’s great advantage was his face, handsome, wide and friendly. Girls turned to him and smiled even before they realized that he was a photographer.
He had been following Lucy for days, and they had reached the point of smiling and tentatively waving, but Waters was under no illusions – Lucy was likely to turn and shriek in the way that only little girls could if he put a foot wrong now.
He figured he had less than ten minutes before her father thought of searching the park and all hell broke loose.
‘Why are we here?’ Lucy asked, clutching her pink poodle. ‘You said you knew about the witch.’
‘I do, Lucy, I just wanted to ask you something very quickly before we go back to your daddy.’ He crouched beside her, reducing his height to something more manageable and safe. ‘About the lady who went into the church. The one on Saturday.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Lucy warned him. ‘Tom agreed with me. His father works with my father. I’m nine months and seven days older than him, and I know all the rules of the game because my brothers used to play it, but they got bored with it and gave it to me.’
‘What game? Is this the game you were playing on Saturday morning?’ Waters checked over his shoulder, watching the plaza steps, expecting to see Mansfield appear on them at any minute.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy loudly and clearly in her best explaining voice, which you had to do because adults were slow. ‘It’s called Witch Hunter and you have to find the witches and kill them. And me and Tom looked for a witch and found the lady who was one, and we put a curse on her to make her die.’
‘How did you put a curse on her, Lucy?’ Waters’s sight-line remained fixed on the steps, watching for a distraught father.
‘You have to make her pass a test,’ said Lucy. ‘The man showed me how to do it.’
‘What man?’
‘He works with my dad but I don’t know his name. He brings the food.’