Modern Fairy Tale: Blue Moon Investigations Book 23 by Steve Higgs

Author:Steve Higgs [Higgs, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Modern Fairy Tale. Thursday, 14th December 1542 hrs

The police came, responding to the garbled and somewhat confused call from Tempest’s father and the dozens of panicked parent calls that followed when Sophie Banbridge was abducted from the back of her car.

The Storyteller chloroformed the mother first, but perhaps in his haste to grab the girl and get away, he’d only given her a partial lungful and she had come around only moments later.

According to Mrs Banbridge, a man knocked on her door just as she was getting ready to pull away. She wound down her window to see what he wanted, assuming it was one of the other students – a boy from her daughter’s class perhaps, but he thrust his arm through the window, smothering her face and as she drew a breath to scream, the chloroform did what it does best.

When she came to, the back door of her VW Golf was open, and Sophie was gone. Obscenely, the Storyteller upturned a wicker picnic basket across the backseat, sandwiches, fruits, and cake spilling out onto the pavement outside.

Leading away from the car was a trail of little white cubes.

Tempest retrieved a couple to confirm what he was looking at: breadcrumbs.

Somehow Tempest knew they were on their way to grandma’s house. It turned out to be almost the case. Instead, they lived with grandma. Mrs Banbridge, having recently left her husband, was back with her mother.

Quinn arrived thirty minutes after the first cops on the scene. By then the pedestrian traffic had dwindled to nothing, the street cleared so the police could look for evidence. Dozens of statements were recorded but listening in it came as no surprise to Tempest that no one had seen anything worthwhile.

There were some who claimed to have seen a man carrying a small girl – Sophie was in her first year at the school and was only eleven years old. Others reported hearing the wolf or the bike, but only Tempest saw it silhouetted in the street.

Ludicrously, the one thing the witnesses agreed on was the presence of a crazy man blocking traffic and running in the road shouting at people. Tempest identified himself quickly so the police could dismiss the notion that the crazy man was in any way involved in the abduction.

Quinn spoke with the senior officer at the scene, another chief inspector, before approaching Tempest.

“I’m told you saw the person Olga described.”

Tempest and his father were sitting on the bonnet of his car. Each held a dachshund, both of which growled when Quinn drew near, proving what great character judges they could be.

“That’s right. The artist got him down to a tee. He wore one of the school coats so it could be that he is a former pupil.”

“I have officers looking into that already,” Quinn reported.

“Or maybe he just picked one up at a shop. There will be a uniform shop selling these somewhere nearby. They might recall him visiting the shop if it was recent. Equally, he might have picked it up at a second-hand sale and there is no chance to trace it if that is the case.

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