THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  ‘You all right, mate?’ Randy asked. Lobo had lost colour, and for one horrifying moment Randy thought he might be about to burst into tears.

  ‘Gonna puke,’ Lobo mumbled, stumbling for the door. Randy followed him a few seconds later, carrying Lobo’s cue. Lobo would be really pissed off if he’d lost his cue. Randy lifted his head in salute to the barman, a gesture that said, See, all it takes is a bit of tact.

  Outside, Lobo was bent almost double, leaning for support on the cornerstone of the building, heaving and splattering his new Nikes with acid-tainted lager. He pressed his face against the pink-speckled granite of the wall.

  ‘Ah, fuck,’ he said, when at last he started to feel better.

  Randy courteously looked off in the direction of Myrtle Street and waited for the spasm to pass. When Lobo had straightened up and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, he asked, ‘Think you can make it back to your car?’

  ‘It was just a bad pint, right?’ Lobo said, offended by the implication he couldn’t hold his drink.

  ‘Right. And when you get a bad pint, you get the urge to purge.’ Randy handed Lobo his cue as solemnly as if it was a ceremonial staff.

  They crossed at the lights, Randy slowing his pace, ready to catch his friend if he fell, thinking about the news item on the radio about that woman being murdered in Mossley Hill, already wondering if Lobo and Lee-Anne were the ‘youths’ seen knocking on doors in the area the previous Friday.

  ‘Hey!’ One second Lobo was there and the next he wasn’t, streaking over to a silver-grey Peugeot cabriolet, with its roof rolled down. He stood in front of the car, slightly crouched, with that dangerous smile — half-grimace, half-snarl — on his lips.

  Randy groaned. Peter was driving. He had a bemused, almost querulous look on his face.

  Lobo gripped his cue like a baseball bat and took a swing, cracking a headlamp.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Peter yelled. He jumped out of the car. Lobo threatened him with the cue, and he dodged back, then Lobo took another swing, samurai style, straight down the centre of the bonnet.

  ‘Not my car, you bloody lunatic!’ Peter yelled. The lights changed, but nobody sounded their horn.

  Lobo was screaming. He wasn’t saying anything, just screaming while tears coursed down his face, sweeping savagely back and forth with the cue. Peter went for Lobo, his head down, which probably saved him, because the cue caught him on the shoulder, where he would otherwise have taken a crack on the head. He went down and Lobo lifted the now battered cue to finish the job. Randy yelled, lunging at Lobo. He turned, eyes wild, and struck Randy a blow across the bridge of his nose. Randy felt a crunch, but no pain — not yet, that would come later — and fell to the ground, blacking out before he felt the impact.

  Chapter 23

  Shona ran from her car to Max’s house. Prayer had no power over him. He must have known she had sprinkled the holy water in his car. It had only made him angry, and now he had her file! What did he want with it? She felt a cold wave of faintness, knowing beyond any doubt that he would use it against her. To find her weaknesses. Perhaps there was evidence of what he had done to her. In the file. He had taken it to destroy it.

  She ran to the back of the house. This time the door was locked. She used her elbow against the glass. It would not smash. She took off her shoe and hammered the kitchen window until it shattered, then reached in and turned the latch. A splinter caught her wrist, but she barely noticed. Inside the kitchen, the smell of spices, coffee, strong cheese made her feel dizzy and sick. She resisted, fought the urge to turn and run, the need to vomit, and blundered into the hall.

  Her heart hammered in her chest. He might come back any minute, leathery wings creaking, stirring the air next to her cheek, she would turn, and he would be there, teeth bared, ready to strike. Suddenly aware of the blood dripping from her arm, she gasped. The smell! The smell of blood would bring him back. Panting with terror, she clamped one hand over her wrist and hurried to his sitting room. Bookcases with leaded lights stood in the alcoves of the chimney breast. On one wall, an etching of women in the throes of demonic possession.

  Shona looked away, but she had seen it. She couldn’t unsee the horrible vision of madness and evil: bodies writhing in awful torment, women tearing their clothes, their eyes bulging, as goblins and devils looked on, leering, reaching to touch their bare flesh.

  She sobbed, pulling open a cupboard door beneath the first bookcase, looking for her file. It contained CDs. The next was stacked with video tapes. She pulled them out onto the floor, heard them clatter against the floorboards.

  The glass-fronted shelves were filled with books. She would have passed them over, moved to another room, continuing the search, but one of them had slipped and lay flat on the shelf. Red and black. The colours of pain and hatred, wickedness and suffering. A vile, reptilian creature, half-human, half-gargoyle stared out from the cover. The title stood out against the rest: The Myth of Satanic Abuse.

  A pocket of rage burst within her. She fumbled the text from the cupboard and tore off the cover. There were others. Scores of them: some with lurid covers, some with plain leather binding, bound editions of periodicals, encyclopaedias. She felt hemmed in by the sheer weight of them. Perversion, abuse, cruelty, all of them reduced to nothing but faulty memory and hysterical invention. She dragged them out, first in ones and twos, then, as her fury grew, they tumbled like rocks from a hillside, gathering in mounds on the floor.

  She trod on them and twisted them, tore and shredded them, her face sweating, distorted, her hands, miraculously strong, healed by the destructive power vested in her.

  She moved onward, upward, seeking out the room that was his sanctuary.

  * * *

  Max noticed the blood first. It had splashed unevenly onto the parquet flooring of the hall and was smeared on the walls and stair rail. The front sitting room door was open, and a sliver of light slashed the dimness of the hallway. He edged up to the door and pressed a hand near the hinge until it swung open with a sigh. The room was in disarray: tables overturned, records and CDs strewn about, pictures askew on the walls and, in a pile in the centre of the room, he saw his books, his precious texts, collected over many years. They had been twisted and torn, pages ripped and ripped again, bindings broken in such a rage that tassels of string hung from the remnants of spines.

  This hurt more than the intrusion, this senseless destruction — desecration — of careful, serious scientific study. He felt ravaged. He stood gaping at the ruin of his books, gasping for breath and then, furious, he turned and strode through the house, screaming like a soul in torment, careless of the danger, wanting to meet the violator of his world.

  Each room was the same. His books, some of which were long out of print and irreplaceable, were ruined. These texts provided historical precedence: past folly illuminating present insanity. In these historical works were the precursors of present psychological ailments: demonic possession supplanted by multiple personality disorder, the horrors of incubus and succubus by alien abduction and experimentation, the current wave of paranoia over satanic abuse, particularly prevalent in the States, mirroring a similar hysterical reaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He picked up the torn fragments of a text on demoniacs from the floor by his bed. Its spine had been torn away, and curled, lolling like a dog’s tongue, the glue and binding exposed, yellowed and brittle with age. Pages had been dragged from it and screwed up or ripped. Pieces lay strewn about the place.

  Max sat on the edge of his bed and put his head in his hands. Who had done this? Who? He looked up, his heart suddenly thudding. His office. His files, records, research notes, computer, database — all of it. He ran up the final flight of stairs to the attic room that extended from the front to the back of the house.

  He closed his eyes and groaned. The filing cabinet drawers stood open. Papers and hospital records littered the floor. A bottle of ink had been spilled, soaking the lecture notes he had been preparing
the previous night and dripping onto the rug beneath.

  Frantic, he searched through the records, but they were so disordered and damaged, it was impossible to see what had been taken. He misdialled the first two attempts he made, because his hands were shaking so badly, but on the third try, he got through. ‘I need to report a burglary,’ he said.

  * * *

  In the shadows of the street Shona listened. When she heard his yells reverberate through the rooms, the pain of his loss made her tremble with fear. After the frenzy of destruction, she had felt sated, vindicated in a strange way. But now, the thin, shrill scream of adrenaline through her system returned, and in the silence that followed her terror grew.

  * * *

  Jenny sat up late, working on her lecture notes, trying to make sense of what was happening to her. Sleep was impossible, too trivial to consider under the circumstances, its very necessity seemed an imposition. Since none of it made sense to her, she turned to the boy — Alain. This naming was difficult to get used to.

  Max seemed confident that, having made the first steps, Alain would soon confide in her. ‘He evidently trusts you,’ he had said. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked for your help.’

  ‘Or it could be that there was no one else he felt he could turn to and he was desperate.’

  Max raised his eyebrows. ‘Quite possibly.’ He knew better than to bullshit her.

  ‘What do I do about the grandparents?’

  ‘Nothing you can do. They have to come. We can’t prevent that. Anyway, most likely Alain feels guilty — he’s tried to be the good little boy, and in his own eyes he’s failed, disastrously. Of course his grandparents must come.’

  Jenny stood and paced to the French windows. At night, she worked in the dining room because it was beneath one of the spare bedrooms and her nocturnal prowling was less likely to disturb Fraser or the children, if they were fostering at the time.

  The work was not going well. Thoughts of her argument with Fraser kept intruding, spoiling her concentration and preventing her from establishing that intense yet essentially detached mood she needed in order to write. Fraser had consistently refused to explain where he had been earlier that day, and of the events of the Tuesday night he would only say darkly, ‘If I could tell you, I would.’ Jenny had made some acid remarks she had regretted immediately, and Fraser had stormed off again.

  She sighed, staring over at the small pool of yellow light in which her laptop, notebook and pen sat, almost as if arranged for a photograph. Beyond these, just visible in the gloom was her card index system, which housed her references to articles and texts, with page numbers and brief summaries.

  Still life of writer’s block, Jenny thought, allowing her morose mood to make her maudlin and self-pitying. She drew back the curtain, impatient with herself, and looked out over the garden. Its flowers and shrubs could be seen only as lumpy dark masses in the grey light of a waning moon.

  After his return from the police station to make his statement, Fraser had kept his distance. Was he afraid that she might ask more difficult questions, or was it guilt, part of the distancing process that preceded separation? She had seen it in him on so many occasions, as the time drew near for a child to leave them. She had always considered the growing reserve towards a child a strangely cold reaction in a man she knew to be warm and loving, but she understood that a degree of detachment was necessary to Fraser to make the pain of loss bearable.

  She had felt a glimmer of it herself, as they went through the final stages of Luke’s adoption. Writing reports, attending meetings and case conferences in preparation for the adoption became a way of thinking about him as a foster child, rather than as the little boy they had loved — even doted on — for eighteen months. Jenny had known the level of Fraser’s devastation at their impending bereavement — for that’s how it felt — by the degree of aloofness he displayed towards the child in the final weeks. He withdrew, both physically and emotionally, and not just from Luke. A shiver of alarm ran through her. Perhaps she had misinterpreted his quietness, his despondency, in the weeks preceding Luke’s placement, thinking it was for Luke when there was another cause entirely.

  Fraser was having an affair. The realization hit her with the force of a slap. He must be — otherwise, why the secrecy, the distance, the rumbling gloominess? The telephone calls from Mr Hunter had posed the same question to both of them: Have you had any children adopted? Since she hadn’t, the call must have been aimed at Fraser. But if that were true, why had Hunter asked to speak to her in the first place? To warn her, perhaps? Or was it an act of impulse, a flash of anger, the desire to hurt someone as he had been hurt? Jenny tried to remember the phone call clearly, the sequence of question and answer, the pauses and the intonation, although she knew it was futile. What she knew now would colour her memory of what had happened then. Did Mr Hunter sound bitter, or did she remember him that way because it happened to coincide with her current theory of infidelity? Her mind went on, constructing a story that wove into her theory, and made sense of the phone calls.

  Mr Hunter had recently found out that his wife was having an affair. He had identified Fraser as the lover. Had Fraser and this woman had a child together? Jenny’s stomach did a slow, sickening roll. Did Fraser have an affair because she, Jenny, was sterile?

  She went through to the kitchen and brewed a jug of coffee, and then left it to go cold while she struggled with the concept of Fraser as an adulterer. She hadn’t suspected a thing. She was furious with herself for her own trusting stupidity and stricken by Fraser’s cool and callous pretence. How long had it been going on? Long enough presumably for the child to have been born: why else would Mr Hunter ask if they’d had a child adopted? If she felt humiliated, an ingenuous fool, how must he feel, having brought Fraser’s child into his own home — having discovered that his wife had deceived him twice over?

  Ever practical, the question of where and when posed itself. Had Fraser carried on an affair with this woman while Luke slept upstairs? Or — the thought made her heart contract with fear — had he left Luke alone and met his lover elsewhere? Either way, Jenny could not prevent a surge of bitter emotion from rising in her, burning the back of her throat.

  She felt used, a dupe. How simple she had been, believing all his complaints of extra paperwork, the confusion caused by the new syllabus, his heavy work load, sympathizing with his perpetual tiredness.

  ‘God!’ Furious with herself, she stood and rushed from the room, unable to bear her own thoughts any longer. As if she could leave these torturing thoughts within the four walls of their home, she grabbed her jacket and keys and quietly let herself out of the house.

  The night was clear, noticeably cooler than of late, and a light shower at around midnight had left the garden fresh and the air sharp. The pavements around Sefton Park were pungently fragrant.

  Jenny crossed the deserted road, skipping lightly over potholes puddled with tarry water, and debated briefly which was safer: walking around the perimeter of the park, a target to drunks and kerb-crawlers, or taking the more sheltered gravelled path that ran parallel to the road, which presented a greater number of hiding places for a prospective mugger. She opted for the drunks and kerb-crawlers, reasoning that she was likely to be more agile than the former and would hear the latter coming and melt into the shadows.

  The thin crescent of moon struggled with the orange glow of the streetlamps. Few stars were visible in the combined pall of mauvish light which hung like a fog over the park.

  During her half-hour walk Jenny saw two cars: a private-hire cab and a police car. The police stopped and warned her of the dangers of night-time strolls around the park, and after a short-lived and rather childish rebellion against their good advice, in which she walked a further half-mile, Jenny turned for home, having resolved nothing.

  She had almost reached the house when a sudden flare of light caught her eye and Jenny looked towards a car parked perhaps twenty-five yards down the road from the
house. It was some dark colour, impossible to discern in the distorting sodium glare of the streetlamps. She hadn’t noticed it when she had left the house, but then she had been in a foul mood and had anyway turned left as soon as she’d got through the gate.

  The driver — a man? A woman? Impossible to tell at that distance — had lit a match and was shielding it with one hand. The tip of the cigarette glowed red and, as the match flame faltered and died, the figure looked up at Jenny, and although it was too far away for her to see clearly, she felt a shiver run down her spine. It may have been the way the flame played along the lower line of the jaw and threw deforming shadows, but the driver’s face had an infernal quality, a look of such malevolent intensity that Jenny hurried into the house, her heart beating fast.

  Chapter 24

  Mike Delaney telephoned at seven thirty a.m., just under an hour into the first deep sleep Jenny had managed all night.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ He sounded surprised. He had worked with Jenny long enough to know she could function well even on only four or five hours’ sleep.

  Jenny surfaced from a cramp-inducing position on the sofa and made a couple of ineffective swats at her hair in an effort to tame it. Her neck was cricked, and her right shoulder felt like it had been wrenched from its socket.

  ‘What do you want, Mike?’ she asked grumpily, edging a cushion behind her and grunting as hot needles shot from her shoulder blade to her neck.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mike said, then, interpreting her silence as an invitation to get on with it, he took a breath and began:

  ‘The body we found at Mrs Fournier’s house,’ he said.

  ‘The mother, yes?’

  ‘Not the mother.’

  Jenny tugged unsuccessfully at the tangles in her hair. ‘Mike, please don’t tell me you’ve found another body.’ She answered without thinking, swamped as she was by her own misery, and struggling against tiredness. Mike did not reply immediately, and her heart skipped a beat. ‘Have you found another body?’