Summary of crime as follows:
Sonya Blythe filed a report on the 3rd of November 2014 stating her daughter, Tasmin Blythe, had been kidnapped from her popular charity ball held at the Baglioni Hotel near the suburb of Pimlico, London. An investigation was on-going but to no success. After the initial interviewing of all the guests at the charity ball, no new leads were forthcoming, and the case stalled.
I glanced at Carlyn. It wasn’t news to her that I was that girl. That my slave name was Pimlico after where I’d been stolen and that the missing person file on me could be closed thanks to my reappearance.
She knew that because she’d already uncovered the file on my disappearance. It was yet another reason she was on my side instead of persecuting me for stealing. She knew I was telling the truth.
I kept reading.
The case for Tasmin Blythe’s whereabouts is still on-going. Due to her own impatience in this matter, Sonya Blythe admitted in her confession that she felt let down by the police and took justice into her own hands.
Oh, my God.
My hands shook as I read faster.
After two months of research, which she willingly handed over to authorities, Sonya Blythe uncovered the man responsible for her daughter’s kidnapping was a Mr. Keith Kewet. A man who had a reputation for under-aged girls and a flashy lifestyle that couldn’t be maintained by his regular city planning job. Instead of alerting the task force in charge of her daughter’s disappearance, Sonya Blythe took it upon herself to subdue and imprison Keith Kewet in order to extract answers.
I slapped a hand over my mouth.
Sonya Blythe kept Keith Kewet alive for four days using her own techniques to extract the truth. She used a lie detector test from her contacts at work and enlisted other unsatisfactory methods disclosed during her confession. During this time, she managed to gather the truth that he was the culprit for her daughter’s disappearance, where he had taken her, and recorded all interactions as evidence.
As part of the video log Sonya Blythe recorded, she said she would turn him over to authorities in the morning, and hopefully, the London police could find her daughter and bring her home.
How had she done this?
Why had she done this?
I didn’t think she cared about me...yet, she’d hunted down my killer. She’d found him. She’d done something the police hadn’t been able to do.
Unfortunately, later that evening, Keith Kewet managed to escape the apartment in which he was being imprisoned, and Sonya Blythe chased after him.
She struck him with a well-aimed bookend to the back of his head, and he fell down the apartment steps. Neighbours heard the commotion and man’s screams and left their homes to investigate. There are multiple reports that Sonya Blythe then bludgeoned Keith Kewet to death, all while cursing him for taking her daughter. Despite his breaking a leg when he fell down the stairs and being unable to run, she didn’t stop hitting him until he was dead.
My eyes glassed with tears.
She’d killed...for me.
Instead of turning herself in to authorities, Sonja Blythe grabbed her passport, gave the video-tape of his confession to a neighbour, and jumped on a plane to Germany where a sex trafficking ring called the QMB, Quarterly Market of Beauties, was supposedly where her daughter was sent to be sold.
A few hours after her crime was reported, Sonya Blythe’s passport was frozen, and German authorities tracked her down upon her arrival into Munich. She was expatriated to England and found guilty by her own admission and sentenced to seventeen years with no parole for the manslaughter of Keith Kewet.
Authorities, both English and German, did their best to track down the QMB but to no avail. Both the trafficking ring and Tasmin Blythe are still yet to be found.
Tears plopped onto the file, turning the paper translucent and the ink glowing with every hardship my mother endured.
How could I think so terribly of her?
How could I ever believe she didn’t love me?
She’d committed murder for me.
She threw away her life, her career, her future all because she couldn’t let me go.
My heart, that’d somehow retained some of its childish whimsy—even buried beneath the hate I’d had for her and the survival I’d armoured myself with—howled in despair.
Carlyn reached over and patted my fingers still tracing my mother’s photo. “It’s okay. At least we know where she is and that she’s alive.”
A tangled laugh fell from my lips. “Like mother, like daughter. She’s in prison, and I’m about to be.” I looked up. “Could we at least share a cell? Could I be sent to England to serve my sentence?”
She smiled in pity. “Your mother is in a maximum security for murderers. Your petty theft isn’t enough to make you join her.”
How strange that I was both relieved and disappointed.
Sniffing back my jumbled emotions, I said, “Thank you for finding her for me.” Looking once more at my mother’s mug-shot, I slid the file back to Carlyn even though I wanted nothing more than to keep it and break her out of jail. “What will happen next? Am I officially under arrest? Seeing as I have no home or mother to go back to, I suppose I’d better start planning my future.”
Carlyn gave me a crooked smile as she slipped the paperwork neatly into a folder beside her.
And just like that, my mother was gone again.
The moment I was free and back in England, I would visit her. I would hold her hands and kiss her cheeks and thank her on my knees for doing her best to find me. I would beg her forgiveness for the awful, awful things I’d thought about her. And I would wait until she’d served her time and then find us somewhere to live, just us...together and far away from the life that had been so cruel in splitting our family apart.
And Elder?
I would continue to nurse a broken heart and hope to God he was happy...wherever he was.
Carlyn cleared her throat. “Well, I have a question for you before we go down that path.”
My head snapped up. “What question?” And why did her voice turn coy with suspicion?
“The man you said who rescued you. You said he was wealthy.”
I nodded slowly, my hackles rising, ready to defend Elder.
“I did.”
“And you still refuse to say his name?”
“I do.”
“Is he a member of the law?”
I frowned. “What?”
“Is he in any way associated with a police force, FBI, or member of overseas law enforcement?”
I shook my head. “There are many things I don’t know about him. I don’t believe so, but he might...why?”
She cocked her head, studying me for lies.
She wouldn’t find any answers because I was as blind as her on this topic.
“Could the men who took you have ways to hack into the police servers?”
I froze. “What? What does that mean?” I hunched, looking into the empty corners of the room. “You think someone is tracking me?”
She tried to soothe me unsuccessfully. “No. However...something strange happened overnight.”