Kidnap Read online

  Titles in Teen Reads:

  FAIR GAME

  ALAN DURANT

  HOME

  TOMMY DONBAVAND

  KIDNAP

  TOMMY DONBAVAND

  MAMA BARKFINGERS

  CAVAN SCOTT

  SITTING TARGET

  JOHN TOWNSEND

  THE HUNTED

  CAVAN SCOTT

  THE CORRIDOR

  MARK WRIGHT

  WORLD WITHOUT WORDS

  JONNY ZUCKER

  Badger Publishing Limited, Oldmedow Road,

  Hardwick Industrial Estate, King’s Lynn PE30 4JJ

  Telephone: 01438 791037

  www.badgerlearning.co.uk

  Kidnap ISBN 978-1-78147-571-3

  ISBN: 9781781476703 (Epub)

  ISBN: 9781781476710 (Mobi)

  Text ©Tommy Donbavand 2014

  Complete work © Badger Publishing Limited 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The right of Tommy Donbavand to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Publisher: Susan Ross

  Senior Editor: Danny Pearson

  Copyeditor: Cheryl Lanyon

  Designer: Bigtop Design Ltd

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Shopping List

  Chapter 2 Job Hunt

  Chapter 3 Car Park

  Chapter 4 The Hard Way

  Chapter 5 Child’s Play

  Chapter 6 You Have The Right…

  CHAPTER 1

  SHOPPING LIST

  I could feel the security guard’s eyes burning into the back of my neck. He’d been following me around the supermarket for the past ten minutes or so, convinced I was up to no good.

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  I stopped in the cheese aisle and picked up two blocks of cheddar from the shelf, holding one behind the other. Studying the label on the front block, I shook my head slightly to demonstrate that wasn’t what I was looking for – then I replaced the back block on the shelf, while sliding the front block up the fraying sleeve of my jumper.

  I continued down the aisle, casually lowered my arm down to my side and caught the hidden block of cheddar with my fingers. Then I reached into my bag for my shopping list and swiftly dropped the cheese inside.

  Cheese on toast for tea tonight, then.

  I was proud of this bag. The best one I’d built in ages. It was made of a stiff material that didn’t shake too much when I dropped things into it, and it was completely lined with tin foil to stop security tags from setting off the supermarket’s alarms when I was ready to leave. That was just as well, as I already had two mobile phones, a handful of DVDs, a jar of pasta sauce and a loaf of bread in there.

  Now all I had to do was get rid of the idiot in the guard’s uniform. Honestly, what kind of a man works in security at a supermarket? Couldn’t he get a job with the real police?

  I lifted my left hand up and scratched my nose, taking a quick look into the mirror I had taped to my palm. This was another brilliant invention of mine. It meant that I could keep watch behind me without having to turn around. Yep – there he was. Peering at me from around a shelf piled high with eggs.

  I’d seen this bloke a few times before. He was older than the other guards employed by this branch – maybe in his forties. He was overweight, too – which meant I could outrun him, if it came to a chase. That didn’t mean I fancied running out of here, though. I’d much prefer a casual walk home with my ‘purchases’.

  I had to lose him.

  I waited until a family passed behind me, their trolley piled high with shopping. For a moment, it took me back to the old days. Back to when my…

  No, I didn’t have time to reminisce. I had to lose the goon in the uniform.

  I dropped to my knee and pretended to tie my shoelace – then walked in a stoop at the same speed as the family’s shopping trolley. One of their kids watched me with a confused expression on his face.

  “I’ve got a bad back,” I said to him with a grin.

  A second later, I was able to slip around the side of the vegetable aisle and I was free. I paused to extend my hand mirror past the potatoes and saw the guard looking around in a panic, realising he’d lost sight of me.

  Poor sod. I hoped they wouldn’t take the cost of what I’d nicked out of his wages.

  Acting as calmly as I could, I strolled towards the exit.

  As I approached the security scanners by the door, I felt myself tense up a little. Despite the tin foil lining in my bag, there was always the possibility that I’d torn the lining a little when I’d dropped one of my purchases inside, and that the alarms would go off. I readied myself to run at the first sound of them.

  Nothing. Yes! The bag was working perfectly. Now I just had to cross the car park and I’d be home free.

  “Oi! You!”

  I turned to see the security guard racing out of the supermarket behind me. He must have seen me as I’d made for the door. Damn!

  Swinging my bag over my shoulder, I broke into a run, making for the gap in the fence behind one of the trolley bays. The hole led to a patch of waste ground at the back of the estate. Once I was there, I’d be able to get away easily enough.

  I lifted my hand mirror to check on my pursuer, and was surprised to see how close he was getting. He was fast for his size!

  I reached the gap in the fence and tossed my bag through. Then I dropped to my hands and knees to crawl to freedom. I’d almost made it when the security guard grabbed hold of my ankle.

  “Get back here!” he snarled.

  For a moment, I almost kicked the guard away in an effort to be free – but then I remembered some of the best advice I’d ever been given. “If you fight back, they’ll get you for assault as well as shoplifting, and that’s far more serious.”

  Good tip, that. I didn’t want to spend a night in the cells charged with attacking this poor fella. He was only doing his job, after all. So I went straight to plan B – distraction…

  As the security guard tried to drag me back through the hole in the fence, I reached into my bag and pulled out the jar of pasta sauce I’d just nicked. Lying back to get the best angle, I tossed it over the fence.

  SMASH!

  The jar smashed to the ground right beside the guard, making him jump and briefly let go of my ankle. This was my chance. I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my bag, and ran onto the waste ground.

  This time, I turned rather than using my mirror and grinned at the sight of the guard trying to squeeze his way through my escape hole. It wasn’t happening.

  “I’ll get you next time, you little monster!” he roared after me.

  No, I thought. You won’t, mate.

  I didn’t stop running until I reached an alley part-way into the estate and I spotted a female figure waiting with her own bag at the other end. It was the person who’d given me that good advice.

  “I thought you weren’t coming, Joe!” she said with a grin. “Thought you’d been caught.”

  “No chance,” I said. “Slippery as an eel, me.” I eyed the other bag with interest. “What did you get?”

  My fellow shoplifter opened her bag and I studied her haul – two packets of minced beef, a few cans of cola, and… what was that at the bottom? It couldn’t be! A laptop! That would bring in a few quid.

  “Yes!” I said, offering a high-five. “Nice one, Mum!”

  CHAPTER 2

  JOB HUNT

  Before we go any further, I want to get a few things straight…

  My mum and me �
�� we’re not bad people. Yes, we have to go on the rob for food, and for stuff we can sell to pay the bills. But that’s not our fault.

  It’s my dad’s.

  We used to be a happy family. We had a nice house, a nice car – and we even went on holiday every year. Nowhere posh like Spain, or whatever, just to a cottage in Cornwall – but it was always brilliant. My dad even bought me a surfboard one year so I could have a go at hitting the waves. Honest to God – a proper surfboard!

  Then, he met her.

  Liz.

  She worked at the place where my dad was the manager – a company that printed menus for restaurants and takeaways. If you’ve had one of those pushed through your letterbox recently, chances are it was printed at my dad’s work.

  My dad and Liz started to have an affair behind my mum’s back. Actually, that’s a bit of a joke. He was so rubbish at hiding where he’d been and who he’d been with that he got found out almost straight away.

  He wasn’t a very good actor, my dad.

  I remember the night it all kicked off as though it was yesterday. He came home late from work, saying they’d had to reprint some pizza delivery menus in a hurry because they’d spotted a couple of spelling mistakes. He said he wasn’t hungry after staring at pictures of pizzas all evening long. He just wanted to have a bath and go to bed.

  So he dumped his wallet and his keys on the side just like always, and went upstairs to run his bath. Only the idiot left the receipt from his hotel room there, without thinking. The hotel room he’d been at all evening with… her.

  My dad was already in the bath when my mum found the receipt and confronted him with it. He confessed everything, there and then. I sat at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the bathwater splash onto the floor as my parents yelled and screamed at each other.

  My dad walked out the next day.

  No, that’s too simple a way of putting it…

  My dad destroyed us the next day.

  He left to go and live with Liz, and took everything with him. The TV, the DVD player, the car – and all the savings he and my mum had in their joint bank account.

  He left us with nothing.

  My mum tried to make the best of it, telling me we were better off without him – but I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me. She tried to get a job, but she hadn’t worked since she’d fallen downstairs and hurt her back when I was a toddler, and she really struggled to find anything. In the end, she was taken on as a cleaner in an office block on the other side of town. By the time she’d paid for her bus fare there and back, there wasn’t much left, but at least she was doing something positive.

  Then, the bank repossessed our house.

  While my mum had been looking for work, she’d fallen behind on paying the mortgage, and my dad wasn’t coughing up anything to help. My mum went round to Liz’s house more than once to try and get him to man-up and pay his fair share, but it fell on deaf ears.

  My mum and me ended up in a hostel for the homeless, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. It’s not too bad, I guess. We’ve got our own room, and we’re not on the same floor as the drunks. But there’s a lot of noise at night, and the police are called to a fight at least once a week, but we do our best to keep ourselves to ourselves.

  The really sad part was that my mum lost her job not long after we moved in here. The bosses accused her of stealing a printer from one of the offices. A printer? What the hell would we need one of those for? Still, it didn’t matter in the end. They fired her, and that was that.

  She signed on for benefits, but we weren’t entitled to much at all. I remember sitting in our room one evening, picking the bits of meat out of a supermarket own-brand ready-meal when she said that she wished she had stolen that printer. At least that way she could have sold it and bought us a decent dinner.

  It was a joke, of course. At least, I thought it was. But, the next night, I came home from school to find fish and chips waiting for me on the table. Not the cook-your-own kind, either – proper fish and chips with salt and vinegar, from the chippy! I hadn’t tasted anything so delicious in months.

  At first, my mum didn’t want to tell me where she’d got the money for them but, in the end, she confessed that she’d nicked an X-Box game from the shop on the corner and sold it to some bloke in the local pub for ten pounds.

  I didn’t know what to think. My mum and dad had always brought me up to be honest and not to steal other people’s belongings. But we were desperate, my mum said, and big shops had insurance policies for stuff that was stolen. The game she’d taken didn’t actually belong to anyone, yet. Not really.

  I could tell she was trying to convince herself again.

  It wasn’t long before I was going out with her to nick stuff. Unlike my dad, I’ve always been pretty good at drama, and it was my job to fall to the floor and pretend I was ill. While the shop staff gathered round to see what was wrong with me, she’d fill her bag with stuff. We always took food at first, because there was no way they could trace empty containers back to you. But, before long, we were also nicking stuff my mum could sell to her contacts in the local pubs and clubs.

  We got caught – just the once – as the staff helped me up to my feet and double-checked again that my mum didn’t want them to call an ambulance for me. The shop manager came out of the office saying he’d seen my mum putting stuff in her bag on the security camera. The police were called, and we were taken to the station for questioning.

  Thankfully, my mum managed to convince them that the sight of me collapsing had made her feel confused and light-headed, and that she hadn’t meant to steal anything. As neither of us had a criminal record, they let us go with a caution. I knew they’d be watching out for us in future, so we always went shoplifting separately after that.

  And now, here I was, browsing the Internet on a laptop my mum had stolen that afternoon. She hadn’t found a buyer for it yet, so I figured I might as well enjoy it while it was there.

  I managed to break into the broadband account for the taxi company next door, and then I sat back and wondered what to do next. Aside from the occasional project at school, I hadn’t been on the Internet for over a year, ever since we’d had the phone cut off at our old house. It was no good checking emails or logging into Facebook – I didn’t have accounts like the rest of my mates. So I started to read through the classified ad listings on local websites. Maybe I could find someone who wanted to buy this laptop and save my mum the bother.

  I was about halfway down the list of messages when I spotted it. There, hidden in among the pleas for the return of lost cats, and the people trying to sell off their old lawnmowers, was the ad that would change our lives forever.

  I almost missed it at first. It was written in plain text, with no pictures or bold fonts to make it stand out. But what it said blew me away.

  Two-man team required for one-off job.

  £10,000 fee. No questions asked.

  Tel: 0111 494 81254

  Ten thousand pounds!

  That would really solve our problems! It would mean we could leave the hostel and move into a flat of our own. Mum could get a little car and not have to struggle on the bus if she got a new job.

  I grabbed one of the mobile phones I’d nicked from the supermarket from where I’d left it on charge, and rifled through the draw in my bedside table for a SIM card. There had been a rep for some phone company giving them away for free in the shopping centre a few weeks ago. I’d taken a handful, thinking they might come in useful one day. I guess I was right.

  I snapped the SIM card into the phone and dialed the number in the ad with trembling hands. The call was answered after three rings.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m… I’m calling about your ad. You’ve got a job you need doing?”

  A pause, then…

  “That’s right. You think you can handle it?”

  I tried to sound tough. “I can handle anything.”

  “That’s g
ood,” said the voice on the phone. “Because I want you to kidnap my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 3

  CAR PARK

  I stood in the shadows of the car park and gripped my mum’s hand tightly. I was wearing my hoodie, and she had a scarf covering her face. This is where the voice on the ‘phone had told us to meet him, and I didn’t want him to get a good look at us. Not after what he’d told me his ‘little job’ was all about.

  My mum hadn’t been keen when I told her about my call, but the prospect of ten thousand pounds in the bank eventually persuaded her that this was worth doing, despite the risks.

  After a few minutes, a sleek, expensive car eased its way into the parking spot beside us. A man in a well-cut suit and long overcoat climbed out of the back. He was older than I had expected – in his mid to late fifties perhaps – and he had thick, black hair which was greased back. A diamond ring sparkled in the dim light.

  “Are you Roger?” he asked in a gruff voice.

  I nodded. I hadn’t used my real name when I’d called him. I’m not stupid.

  He looked my mum and me up and down in our scruffy jeans, trainers and sweatshirts. I suddenly felt very, very poor.

  “Are you sure you can handle this?”

  I took a step forwards, and tried my best to look tall and mean, which wasn’t easy as I only came up to this guy’s chest.

  “We can handle it,” I said. “You got the money?”

  The man paused, then pulled a plain envelope from his jacket pocket. “£5,000 now, £5,000 later.”

  “Sounds fair,” I said, taking the envelope and sliding it into my own pocket. I really hoped he couldn’t tell that my hand was shaking. I’d never held so much money in one go before.

  The man reached back into the car and produced a folder. On the front was a picture of a girl of eleven or twelve years old. “This is my daughter, Tiffany,” he said. “Inside you’ll find details of where she goes to school, how she gets there and what she does in her spare time.”

  I glanced down at the girl in the picture. It was a school photo. She had long, blonde hair, tied into pigtails.