‘“Carla,” I said, “Keep away from the rubbish!” I told her . . .’ He squeezed the toy close to his chest, looking both angry and defensive. Then his face crumpled, and Jenny saw only his distress and anxiety for his child.
‘She’ll have a nice new bedroom to come home to, won’t she?’ Jenny said, gently.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve ruined her life.’
‘Mr Wood,’ Jenny said, ‘does your wife know what’s happened to Carla?’
He nodded, miserably. ‘She’s on her way. She only went for a few days to her sister’s.’
People always used a qualifier in these situations: ‘She only . . . I was just . . . I’d only turned my back a minute . . .’ As if the scant lapse of time should have kept their child safe. For some, the closeness of death changed their view of life, so that safety, order, reliability became ephemeral, transitory, and every moment was filled with the menace of potential disaster. What, Jenny wondered, would Paul’s parents say, when they were found? And why hadn’t they reported him missing? From Friday to Monday night and not a word. Did they fear police prosecution — or had they been prevented from coming forward for some other reason?
Chapter 7
The surprise had been how easily it had been accomplished. Messy, yes, but astonishingly brief. A sliver of steel had destroyed what had seemed, until the moment it ceased to be, invincible. It was remarkable, awesome. Hatred had been the driving force: she had prevented the achievement of an objective. She had got in the way, had become an obstacle to be overcome. Afterwards, there had even been a kind of sorrow, a kind of regret. But death was ugly, it banished real pity, and so both sorrow and regret were muted, and all that was left was a throb of anger.
The boy’s memory played like a colour video with surround sound. He tried to make it stop, but the pictures wouldn’t go away.
‘EAT the fucking burger. You wanted it, now eat it. Don’t you—Don’t you DARE throw up, you little pig. Throw up, and I’ll make you eat THAT! I’ll get you a straw and you can suck it up!’
Jenny’s face stared down at him. Her eyes were the same shade of green as the cat’s. Her jaws were empty, but a deadly cunning flickered behind the blank, dull lifelessness of her eyes. He tried to eat, but he couldn’t make his stomach stay still, and he retched.
He was awakened by the sound of his own thin cries. The dream had confused him: everything had got mixed up — the now and the before. People, even. Jenny was nice, wasn’t she? Jenny, with the glow of light around her face, and the voice like wind chimes. She never shouted. She would never hurt him. Would she? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Trust, safety, love, all seem so fleeting, so easily taken away. Like the big, solid, cheery, snowman he built after an April snowfall — by midday he was gone, leaving an untidy jumble of scarf and carrot nose and umbrella in a dirty melt of snow. He never found the button eyes. They had vanished for good.
He gathered together the soft toys — teddy bears, donkeys, lions, polar bears, owls, monkeys, penguins (not the pigs — not the pigs!) — and placed some by the door, facing out. Two more guarded the window. He kept a polar bear and a lion for himself, tucking them in either side of him and waited, unsleeping, for the morning to come.
* * *
Paul looked too tired for the photo session on the Tuesday morning, but the photographer promised it would take no more than twenty minutes. Sergeant Mike Delaney arrived just in time for the session. He had been called out when the boy was found and it was he who had requested a Police Protection Order, so he felt a responsibility for the child, and he wanted to be there when Diane Seward took her photographs.
Mike was first-generation Irish — part of the constant stream of Irish émigrés that had quit the Old Country, first during the Potato Famine of the 1840s, and later, when the depression of the 1930s wiped whole families from the face of Ireland. His parents had come over in 1935, in the hope of finding work and decent housing. What they had found was the squalid, sooty, back-to-back terraced slums of Scotland Road and Everton Brow.
His parents had raised a family of five girls and a boy in a two up, two down with an outside privy and no bathroom. Mike remembered the gas mantles, and although his sisters told him they were long defunct when he was born, he could swear he could recall the yellow-blue light, the throaty exhalation of gas down the pipes, and a faint smell of coal tar. Bath night was once a week: buckets of water heated on the stove and poured into a zinc bath in front of the fire in the back room. Mike was the youngest. He had been born when Eileen was forty, and they had all but given up on a boy to complete their family. He had also been their favourite — doted on by his mother, viewed with distant pride by his father and fussed over by the girls, adored for his curly hair that had darkened from ash blond to tawny in his late teens. His mother, now in her eighties, still regarded him as her boy, even though he was now the age she had been when she gave birth to him. He had dealt with Saturday-night drunks, the riots of the 1980s and more recently the drug addicts and their gun-carrying pushers, but his mother’s chief worry was that he might catch cold if he didn’t wrap up well, and she constantly fussed that he couldn’t be eating enough, sneaking him extra cheese sandwiches for his carrying out if he chanced to call in on his rounds. Eileen believed that the rosary would protect from any evil, and to please her, Mike carried one with him on duty, despite having given up the faith some fifteen years earlier.
* * *
The warmth, the strange mixture of stillness and vibrancy which he associated with the Campbells’ house was marred by something between Jenny and Fraser. He sensed a restraint — even strain — beneath Fraser and Jenny’s polite conversation, and so it came as no surprise, when the photographer took Paul into the garden for the better light, that Fraser said, ‘Look, I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
Jenny glanced over at Mike.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, knowing full well it was difficult not to mind six foot four of solid flesh.
‘Can’t this wait?’ Jenny asked.
‘I don’t think it can,’ Fraser said.
‘All right,’ Jenny said, as if making up her mind not to be embarrassed. ‘All right. You get a call from the same weirdo who called me, and you say nothing. What am I supposed to think? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
It sounded lame. They all heard it, and Mike felt embarrassed on Fraser’s behalf.
‘Very considerate,’ Jenny said, then seemed to regret the heavy sarcasm of her reply. ‘What did he say?’ she asked.
‘More or less what he said to you.’
‘More — or less?’
‘The same, okay?’
Mike felt it was time to step in. ‘An anonymous phone call or what?’
Jenny took a breath and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Mike. I had a call from someone claiming to be a private detective. He asked if I’d had any children adopted and rang off when I said I hadn’t.’
Fraser nodded, indicating that his call had followed the same pattern.
‘And you think it could have something to do with young Paul?’
She hesitated, balking at the use of that name, then shrugged. ‘I really don’t know, but it spooked me.’
Mike thought for a moment. ‘If he calls again—’
‘He did,’ Jenny said. ‘Just before you arrived. I answered. He asked to speak to Fraser.’
Mike turned his steady gaze on Fraser. No wonder Jenny was upset. She must be wondering what else he was hiding from her.
‘I tried the number trace,’ Fraser said, and Mike noted the defensive hunch of his shoulders. ‘He’d dialled 141. The number was withheld.’
‘Maybe. When was the first call?’
‘Sunday. As far as I know,’ Jenny said, glaring at her husband.
Fraser looked uncomfortable.
‘Fraser?’
‘I don’t know, Mike. Earlier in the week. Wednesday — no, Tuesday.’
Jenny’s gasped in outrage and Fraser carried on, not speaking loudly but in a firm, clear voice. ‘A couple of calls — that’s all. I thought it was a crank, Jen — if we ignored him, he’d stop.’
‘Look,’ Mike said, ‘it could be just a crank, like you said. Someone local, making connections from the news coverage and the appearance of a little boy at your house.’
‘You think they could be watching us?’ Jenny said, simultaneously glancing out into the garden to see that the boy was safe. Mike followed her gaze and saw the photographer positioning him gently, checking the light, talking to him, trying to get a response, failing.
* * *
He had learned early to be still and very quiet.
Hide away. Hide away from the sharp eyes and the angry voices, be small, go far away, and they won’t see you. They won’t hurt you.
The boy looked to the left of the photographer. They wouldn’t let him hide. They had found him and brought him here. He knew instinctively there are other ways of hiding, of finding refuge. He retreated, locking the doors and barring the windows of himself, fleeing down a pathway, losing himself in a maze until even he can’t find where he is. And still he did not feel safe.
* * *
‘There’s no point in jumping to conclusions,’ Mike said. ‘We’ll see what the media come up with. If we get no joy and you get another call, we’ll set up a phone trace, okay?’
Diane had finished and was occupying the boy by pushing him on the swing at the end of the garden. They watched him for some moments through the open door, his passivity an expression in itself of his extreme unhappiness, and then Mike said, ‘Case conference Friday, yeah?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny answered. ‘Hopefully we’ll know who his parents are by then.’ She was back in professional mode, her spat with Fraser set aside in the interests of the child. ‘I’ll be away in Nottingham until late tomorrow,’ she added, ‘but Fraser will deal with anything that comes out of the media coverage.’
Mike drove the photographer back to Merseyside Constabulary Headquarters, through the potholed and grimy streets that edged the leafy, middle-class park community like the outer crust of a geode.
‘Nice-looking kid,’ Mike commented.
‘Beats taking snapshots of corpses.’
Mike grimaced. Diane Seward was a scene-of-crime officer, her main strength being forensic photography.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The gallows humour doesn’t appeal to everyone. He’s gorgeous.’ She patted her camera bag. ‘If these don’t bring ’em out in droves looking to claim him, I’ll give up photography and become a garage mechanic.’
Mike winced. ‘We’re not Pet Rescue, you know, Di. If his mum and dad come forward, I’ll be happy.’
Diane shot him a sideways look. ‘I wouldn’t build my hopes up of happy ever after, if I were you,’ she said. ‘I did a voluntary stint in Bosnia a couple of years back. It was with a charity trying to get families back together who’d been split up by the war. That boy has the look of the kids I photographed. A look of horror like you couldn’t imagine, let alone fathom. I don’t think he feels he can ever be safe again.’
* * *
Most of the children placed in Jenny and Fraser’s care were school-aged and, barring holidays, that gave Jenny long stretches of writing time. She had never needed much sleep. Her mother had called her ‘Jumping Jenny’, and since the loss of her child and all hopes of motherhood as a result of her ectopic pregnancy, Jenny’s writing maintained her link with sanity during the long hours of the night.
She had worked Friday to Monday night and would have the next four days off, giving her the opportunity to present her pre-tour lecture — or lectures, to be precise. She was timetabled to present the same talk twice, to allow nurses on shifts to have the choice of a morning or afternoon session. She saw the Nottingham trip as a kind of dress rehearsal for the full tour and would adjust the content in line with audience reaction, adding or subtracting material depending on the make-up of each group she was scheduled to speak to.
She hated leaving Fraser to cope with the boy, especially since Granada News would be making an appeal on their Wednesday bulletins to anyone who thought they might know him to contact the police, but her lecture had been set up months ago and would be difficult to reschedule before the autumn because of the full lecture tour, and her promise to Fraser that they would go on holiday together.
She had missed her customary four hours of sleep because of the photographer’s session, but the train journey provided a pleasant prospect of three hours’ snoozing, followed by a good meal and a drop of wine before getting an early night.
The social work assistant arrived. Amy was a big, friendly woman, extrovert and lively. ‘Hiya, Paul,’ she said, ruffling his hair. Paul shied away, but she seemed not to notice. ‘We’re going to have a great time tonight, aren’t we? Has he eaten?’
‘No,’ Jenny said.
‘Well, I’ll rustle us up something in a jiffy, eh, love?’
They had been lucky to be allocated Amy: it was rare for social work assistants to be asked to supervise children in the home, they were often simply too busy anyway, but Jenny had contacted Roz, their link worker, and explained her worries about Paul: he was evidently wary of men, and she was concerned that he wouldn’t cope without a female presence for a full twenty-four hours. Normally she would have taken advantage of a reciprocal arrangement she had with another foster carer for babysitting, but Phyllis could hardly stay a night away from her own foster children, and Jenny didn’t want to put Paul through spending a night in strange surroundings.
Paul flung his arms around Jenny and refused to let go. ‘Amy’s here to take care of you,’ Jenny said, adding, ‘Fraser will be here, too.’ Paul’s grip tightened, and she realized this had been the wrong thing to say.
Jenny carried him to a chair and sat with him clamped to her, talking over his whimpers of protest, giving details of where she was going and what she was going to do. Fraser looked on with a hurt, puzzled expression on his face.
She’s going, and I’ll be all alone again. What if—?
A flash of light, a glint of steel—
Paul raised his hands, striking out, defending himself.
Jenny held him, gently restraining him, and he twisted round to look at her. She saw stark terror in his eyes. He clung to her once more, and she explained that she would be away for only a day. ‘I’m going to check the house over, to make sure everything’s all right before I leave. Will you help me?’
Fatigue had slackened the boy’s grip, but for a moment he held her tighter, then he got down from her lap and took her hand, leading her to the kitchen. He went to the little cupboard that housed the boiler and, opening the door, reached inside and took out the back-door key. He had been with them only four days, but he knew all the door keys, window keys, hooks, locks and latches in the house.
He took Jenny on a tour, securing every lock, but hesitated outside Jenny and Fraser’s bedroom. She knew that he wouldn’t feel safe unless he had been through all of the house, so she said, ‘I think all the locks need checking, don’t you?’ Jenny led the way, but Paul secured the locks himself. She made it Paul’s responsibility to lock the front door after her, and her last image of him was his face staring solemnly out at her, before he put his weight behind the door and slammed it shut.
There had been something stoical in his expression as she waved to him, and he stared back, unresponsive, his hands by his sides. As if he did not expect her to return.
The rhythm of the train lulled her, and she slipped into a doze, waking with a start when the tannoy clacked and the driver warned them of an approaching station stop. Something had been bothering her since the first day she had brought Paul into their home. So intangible she could not say, ‘This isn’t right’ or ‘That makes me uneasy.’ Rather, it was a vacancy, an empty place. She thought hard. Something different about Fraser? God knows he’s been acting strangely. Something about Frase
r . . . The ghost of an image taunted her for some minutes, and she took to replaying the day she brought Paul home. Fraser shocked, pale. Paul’s night terrors. She had gone to him, and when she returned, something had changed. Something tangible, real . . .
The picture! The one on the chest of drawers. It was missing. Had Fraser hidden it? Why would he do that? The way he watched the boy unsettled her. He had a muddled, distracted look — the look of someone trying to find something he had lost . . .
* * *
Amy was to stay with them overnight and through the following day, until Jenny’s return. They were in the kitchen, the portable TV on as background noise. Fraser rose half out of his chair, then collapsed back into it. The boy on screen was dark haired and sallow skinned. He had been snatched from outside his own front door. The police were looking for him. Amy heard the name — Connor something. Fraser looked from the boy, sitting at the kitchen table, painting himself safe with the carefully constructed bars of his house, to the television. Amy sensed his tension and glancing up from the pancakes she was making, saw him lining up the two images in his sights, making a comparison.
‘Fraser?’ she said, following his gaze, but the boy’s image had gone, and the presenter had moved on to another news item.
The telephone rang and Fraser jumped up. ‘I’ll take it in the sitting room,’ he said. ‘I’m expecting a call from school.’
He picked up the receiver on the fourth ring. At first, he thought the caller had hung up. When he spoke, Fraser recognized ‘Mr Hunter’s’ voice immediately.
‘Would you know him?’
No time for interruptions, just one question and then the line was dead. No point in trying to trace the call. He tried anyway — carefully, precisely punching in the numbers: one . . . four . . . seven . . . one . . . and heard the message: ‘The caller withheld their number.’
He replaced the receiver, his hand shaking. As he stood looking stupidly at the phone, it rang again. Fraser snatched it up. ‘Meet me,’ he begged, not waiting for the caller to speak. ‘Please — at least talk to me.’
THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists Page 6