Losing You by Nicci French

Author:Nicci French [French, Nicci]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2006-01-23T13:00:00+00:00

I went into Charlie’s bedroom once more, my head buzzing. Charlie talking to a man. It seemed like important information, but even when I was talking to Laura I had thought of a snag. I believed that Charlie had been snatched by a man and here was a witness who had seen her talking to one. But it had been too early. With my day of driving around, I had a map of Sandling Island inside my head and I could picture exactly where Laura had been when she saw Charlie and where Charlie had been, and she was at the beginning of her paper round. Whoever the man was and whatever their conversation had been about, Charlie had gone on to deliver half a dozen more newspapers. So who had he been?

The sheep clock told me it was twenty past three. In a couple of hours or so we should have been boarding the plane to Florida. I sat on the floor, among the mess, and once more stared around. Perhaps Charlie had been snatched randomly, and there were no clues or patterns. Or perhaps I would find, among the clutter of her teenage life, some sign. I began with the drawers of her desk. One by one I opened them and tipped out their contents. I picked up each object and looked at it before replacing it in the drawer.

A lightbulb, a tiny velvet cushion in the shape of a heart, several coloured crayons of various lengths, metal and plastic pencil sharpeners, notepads with nothing in them except blank pages, certificates for swimming and hurdle-jumping, a head teacher’s merit award I’d never seen before, for an excellent essay on Great Expectations, an empty bottle of perfume, a crumbling bath bomb, several tangled necklaces, a box of broken pastels, ink cartridges, sanitary towels, tampons, ancient catalogues, last year’s birthday cards from friends – I looked through each one – Thinking Putty, dried-up Pritt Sticks, her old mobile phone minus its SIM card, a canister of safety-pins, a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights, two small boxes of matches, a bookmark she’d made in primary school with cross-stitch embroidery, a few old glossy magazines, a large shell, a battered copy of Lord of the Flies, another of The Outsider, a small torch that didn’t work, scented candles that had never been lit, hairbands, a thin white wristband with the message ‘Make Poverty History’, a travel sewing-kit, some knickers (clean), gel pens, cartridges for her printer, an ancient Beanie Baby she’d had as a small child, a watch that had stopped working long ago, a bright cotton scarf with an inkstain at one fringed end. There were folders full of GCSE work, and I leafed through every sheet of paper, just in case there was something among the algebraic formulae, the scientific data, the graphs and maps, dates and jottings that would point me in a new direction.

I rifled through the scattered possessions on her desk once more, then stopped abruptly. Her laptop.

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