The Boy in the Photo

by Nicole Trope

  ‘Explain it to me, Michael. I don’t understand.’

  ‘The fire investigators think the fire was deliberately lit. They haven’t formally identified the remains they found inside the house but they obviously think it’s Greg.’

  ‘Deliberately lit?’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s more, Megan. Daniel was barefoot when he entered the police station but he only had a couple of scratches on his feet and a few blisters. His feet should have been in much worse shape. He didn’t say he lost his shoes until today even though that’s what everyone had assumed. If he didn’t have shoes and he had actually walked the ten kilometres in the cold with wet clothes, he should have had really messed up feet and be suffering from mild hypothermia. There is no way he should have been in such good physical shape.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why are they only saying this now?’ Megan asks.

  ‘They’ve always had questions. They wanted to give him some time to settle in before they spoke to him again. Detective Wardell feels… feels that he may have been given a lift nearly the whole way. She feels that there may be another person involved who may have also helped light the fire.’

  ‘Helped who light the fire?’

  ‘Helped Daniel light the fire, Megs.’

  Megan slumps onto a chair next to the kitchen counter. ‘Helped Daniel light the fire?’ she repeats.

  ‘Yes, they think that it’s possible he may have been responsible for the fire but also that he could have had help.’

  ‘I just don’t…’ Megan’s arms prickle and she scratches at her skin. What? What? What? How can Daniel have deliberately lit a fire that killed his father? It’s inconceivable.

  ‘It’s hard to hear, I know, and it may just be supposition – that’s why I didn’t want to say anything, but when Daniel mentioned Steven Hindley, Detective Wardell assumed a connection between the two.’

  ‘So maybe Steven lit the fire and stole the car? Maybe he didn’t want to hurt a child?’

  Daniel can’t have done anything to hurt Greg. It isn’t who he is. She knows that it would explain why he can’t talk about his father’s death: he feels guilty because the backpacker let him live. It would explain why he is so guarded and locked inside himself: he is afraid that the truth will be discovered. But even as these thoughts run through her head, there is a niggling, stray idea that who Daniel was is not who he is now. She has no idea of who he is now and therefore no idea of what he’s really capable of.

  No, no, I’m not going to think like that about my son, not my beautiful boy.

  ‘Detective Wardell also noticed Daniel’s tendency to refer to his father as “he”. It’s a distancing technique. It’s something people do to prevent themselves from connecting emotionally.’

  ‘I noticed it as well but maybe that’s just because he’s afraid of what might happen if he lets himself really feel this loss. It could be that he’s protecting himself. He wouldn’t do something like this. It’s… impossible.’

  ‘There isn’t a clear answer here yet, Megs. Detective Wardell hadn’t linked Daniel and Steven until today, but she had linked Steven to the fires. Until today she just believed that there was someone else in the house with Daniel and Greg. Today she realised that Daniel and Steven know each other – and according to her, Steven Hindley has a record, a very old charge from when he was a teenager. He’s from the UK and the police never would have known about it if he hadn’t gone missing.’

  ‘What was his record for?’

  ‘It was a long time ago and he was only a kid.’

  ‘So, what was it for?’

  ‘Arson.’

  ‘Arson.’ Megan drops her head into her hands. ‘Daniel could have been killed. He could have died.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Megs. I didn’t want Detective Wardell to push him any further today but he is going to need to talk to her again. Something happened there. It may even be that…’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m just thinking through some ideas.’

  ‘That what, Michael?’

  ‘That… that they planned it together. They may have planned this whole thing together.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Megan feels her throat close. She stands up and takes a deep breath. ‘He wouldn’t have done something like that. It had to have been the backpacker’s idea. He loved his father. How can they think he lit the fire, that he killed Greg?’ She remembers the knife, the crude, home-made knife with designs burned into the handle. Is it impossible that Daniel could have started a fire?

  ‘All of this is just supposition. They are right at the beginning of the investigation. Detective Wardell wouldn’t have even said anything if I wasn’t a detective as well. They may be completely wrong. If he did light the fire, there must have been a reason.’

  ‘But how can you think, how can anybody think he could have done such a thing? It’s… it’s monstrous. He can’t be a monster… He’s my little boy, he can’t be a monster.’ She walks back and forth, her legs needing to move. Her heart is racing. She shakes her head. She will not accept that this is possible. No, no, no.

  ‘Please don’t do this to yourself. If he did it – and I do mean if – then maybe he felt he had no choice. We don’t know anything about his years with Greg. We don’t know how bad it got. That’s why you’ve taken him to see Eliza. We’ll figure out what happened but we do need to give it some time.’

  ‘What if he did actually light the fire? God… it’s… it’s unthinkable. I can’t have raised a child who would do such a thing.’

  ‘But you haven’t really raised him, Megan, not for the last six years.’

  Megan flinches at the cruel truth of his words. ‘I… I guess not, but then what do I do now? What do I do if I feel, if I know that there is something he’s not telling us, some secret he’s keeping? What do I do?’

  ‘All I can say is what I’ve said before, and that’s one day at a time. I know it’s not very helpful but it’s the best we can do right now.’ Michael walks over and plants a soft kiss on her forehead. ‘It will be okay, Megs. We’ll make sure it’s all okay.’

  She leans into him gratefully but she knows that sometimes things cannot be made okay.

  Twenty-One

  Twelve days since Daniel’s return

  At seven the next morning, Megan knocks on Daniel’s door. In her hands are her computer and the box covered in pictures of him. She opens the door and finds him already up, his eyes on his PlayStation.

  ‘You’re up early,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, I wanted to level up.’

  ‘Okay, but I think that it would be best if you didn’t play games before school. I’d rather you sleep, and if you do wake up early, maybe read.’ She speaks softly but firmly. He needs to know there are boundaries. She had assumed he would be up early, knowing that starting school would cause some anxiety. Yesterday’s interview is not something she’s going to talk about with him, not until Eliza has spoken to him first. He has enough to deal with today.

  ‘So, I wanted to show you some stuff, some things on my computer and in this box.’ She wants to show him as much as she can before he starts school, hoping to help him understand how much he is loved so that he can feel the certainty of her support as he navigates a new world. She also hopes that he will understand that the things his father said were not true.

  Daniel doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on his game and then he shakes his head and grimaces. ‘Game over,’ he says.

  ‘Good, now can you look at this with me?’

  Daniel sits up straighter in his bed. ‘Yeah, okay.’

  She hands him the box first. He runs his hands over the top of it. ‘They’re all pictures of me.’ A small smile appears on his face, a real smile, a smile she remembers, and her heart tugs at the sight.

  ‘Yep, all pictures of you. It’s an old shoebox but I covered it with pictures of you.’

  ‘I was an ugly baby.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ she laughs. ‘You were be
autiful. You didn’t like to nap though, not like Evie.’

  He continues tracing his fingers over the box. ‘That’s me at the birthday party where you hired the animal farm.’

  ‘Yes, they made a big mess in the garden.’

  ‘You made a farm cake with green icing.’

  ‘I did. Nana helped me.’

  ‘That’s me with Lucy, when she was little.’

  ‘It’s from the day she came home from the airport.’

  ‘When’s that from?’ he asks, pointing at a picture of the two of them on a beach. Daniel is four years old.

  ‘It’s from a holiday we took to the coast. It was only for a few days.’

  ‘Who took the picture?’

  ‘Dad did.’

  ‘Dad did? You look happy.’

  ‘I was.’

  The smile appears again and Megan cannot help stroking his back, just a quick, light touch. He doesn’t pull away and her face splits into a grin at that fact.

  ‘I want to show you what’s inside.’ Megan takes the lid off and pulls out a newspaper article. ‘This one was in the Sydney Morning Herald,’ she says, handing him the article with the headline: ‘Police urge the public to be on the lookout for a father and son’. Megan watches Daniel read the article.

  ‘The police were looking for us,’ he says.

  ‘They were.’

  ‘Why does it say Detective Michael Kade?’

  ‘Because Michael was the detective in charge of your case.’

  ‘And then you married him?’

  ‘Yes, but only just over a year ago.’

  ‘So, if I hadn’t been taken by Dad, you never would have met him, so me being gone was kind of good for you.’

  Megan takes a deep breath and then she touches Daniel’s chin with just the tip of her finger to be sure she has his attention. Again, he doesn’t flinch, and she feels bolstered to carry on. ‘You being taken was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life, the very worst.’

  He leans back away from her and drops the article back into the box.

  Megan’s stomach plummets but she carries on, opening her computer. ‘This is my “Find Daniel” blog, and here you can see the Facebook posts I did. Here are all the articles that were written about it, and here – look at this. This is me on television.’

  Daniel watches as she clicks through screens. ‘You look really sad,’ he says, sounding mystified, after watching two television clips.

  ‘I wasn’t just sad, Daniel, I was heartbroken. Can you see? Do you understand now?’

  ‘You looked for me,’ he says slowly.

  ‘We all looked for you. Connor and James and Nana and Pop, we all looked. This box is filled with the stuff we did: see, there’s me in a magazine and here are some posters that I put up all around the neighbourhood. I hired a private detective and paid him for years and the police also kept looking. No one stopped looking for you until you walked into the police station in Heddon Greta.’

  ‘Then why,’ he says slowly, ‘didn’t you find me?’

  ‘Your dad made sure that I couldn’t. You know that.’

  ‘He kept me safe. He kept me safe from you,’ Daniel says, his voice raised. ‘You didn’t want me anyway. You just didn’t want him to have me.’ He shoves the box away from him and moves his legs, forcing Megan to catch her computer before it falls off the bed.

  ‘That’s not true, Daniel,’ she says, trying but failing to keep her voice steady. ‘I wanted you to have both your parents.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ He shakes his head and moves around her so he can climb off the bed. ‘I don’t want to see this anymore. It’s all lies, all of it.’ He rushes out of the room and she hears the bathroom door slam shut. He leaves her sitting crestfallen on his rumpled blue duvet.

  She wants to go after him but cautions herself to wait, to give him time. Instead, she plays a clip of one of her television appearances, pondering if the woman she is seeing could have anticipated what kind of a child would come back to her. Is the child who has returned the kind of child who would start a fire? Is he the kind of child who would hurt someone?

  ‘Megs, I have to leave,’ Michael calls from downstairs, forcing her to leave her old self where she was. After putting the box and the computer in her bedroom, she goes downstairs.

  ‘How did it go?’ asks Michael.

  ‘He thinks it’s all lies.’

  Michael shakes his head. ‘Poor kid, Greg really did a number on him.’

  Megan nods. ‘And it feels like he’s still doing it.’

  Mr Gordon is waiting for them outside the school office. ‘Daniel’s teacher is Mrs Oxford, and she and the whole year-six class are very excited about meeting Daniel,’ he says.

  He places a hand gently on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘You can say goodbye to Mum here, Daniel.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Megan, holding Evie on her hip and feeling flustered. ‘I thought I would—’

  ‘Bye,’ says Daniel, quickly, firmly, leaving her no room to argue.

  Mr Gordon nods at her and she understands she is dismissed.

  Back in her car she feels jittery and sad, just as she did on the first day he started kindergarten.

  At home, after Evie goes down for a nap, she goes into her studio. Mr Pietro has told her that she can return to work whenever she feels ready but she’s not sure when that will be. She wants to be home with Evie until she’s around eight months at least. Her mother would be happy to babysit for her one day a week and, until Daniel returned, she had been considering this idea, but now she’s not sure. She doesn’t think she will have the capacity to give her students what they need as she struggles to help Daniel adjust and as they settle into life as a family.

  She stands in her studio, a small room off the kitchen that used to be one of two offices downstairs. One of the first things she did when they moved in was to install a larger window so she had enough light to work.

  She stands looking at the painting she was working on two weeks ago. It’s of Evie, asleep, sprawled across her cot, her black curls framing her face. After a few minutes of standing on the spot, staring, she knows she will not be able to work. Instead she gets her computer.

  In the living room she opens it up and sends Tom and Sandi a message. She thinks about explaining everything that has happened but decides against mentioning the interview and the police and their terrible suspicions. Instead she tries to put into words what she is feeling.

  ‘I think Daniel is struggling with his father’s death. He seems to be distancing himself from feeling anything at all, and I think that because he’s doing that, he’s not connecting with me either. Two nights ago, I heard him pleading with someone and I thought he was asleep but I don’t think he was. He told me he wanted to talk to his father and he started pressing buttons on the phone he carries around to try and call him. I don’t know what to do to help him. The therapist doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.’

  Only Tom is online, although she knows that he may have just left Facebook open. But after a few minutes, he replies to her message.

  ‘Did he actually think he could call his father?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I think he was just desperate and maybe kind of half asleep. I’m not sure he knew what he was doing. The phone doesn’t have a SIM card.’

  ‘That must have freaked you out a little.’

  ‘It did. He had a photo of Greg up on the phone and he was talking to that.’

  ‘I guess it’s something people do sometimes. My father used to speak to a picture of my mother after she died.’

  ‘It could mean nothing but I’m worried that even though he knows his father is dead, he’s still trying to deny it. It feels like that may be the one thing standing in the way of him settling back into his life with me.’

  She supposes both she and Daniel are struggling to accept things in their own ways. Did Daniel light the fire? Did someone help him light it? Was he involved in some elaborate plot to kill his father? No, no, not p
ossible.

  She waits for Tom to reply, wishing it was Sandi instead. Sandi is easier to talk to.

  ‘I’m not sure how to help here, Megan. Of course it’s hard for him to accept his father’s death. He’s a kid.’

  ‘I know. I want him to just be a kid, to be like he was before he was taken.’

  ‘But that can never happen, Megan. Can you imagine how hard it is for him to be there and to see you with a new husband and a new child? He must feel like you moved on with your life and forgot about him.’

  ‘But you know that’s not what happened. We’ve been speaking for six years and you know how long it took for me to even contemplate dating someone.’

  ‘I know that, but Daniel doesn’t. He’s only young and he’s hurt, remember. Maybe he never considered the idea of you marrying again. I know I could never marry again.’

  ‘It’s not something I expected either.’

  ‘Yeah, but you have even though you said you wouldn’t, and now there’s another child in the picture. He didn’t have a sister and now he does. I’m sure it’s confusing. Try to see it from his side.’

  Megan looks at the words on the screen and considers shutting down her computer.

  She can’t help feeling that his anger over her marriage to Michael is still there, regardless of what he’s said. She wonders if she should not have simply unfriended him on Facebook and taken down her blog so he couldn’t find her even though she knows she would have found that near impossible to do. There is something about talking to someone who has experienced the same awful thing she has that keeps her coming back. No one else can really understand how difficult this is for her. But all her conversations with Tom are starting to feel the same, as though he feels she betrayed him and Daniel’s return is just a reason for him to keep reminding her that she told him she would never marry again. She is tired of having to defend herself to a man she’s never even met.

  After a few minutes of silence, she writes, ‘Tom, I can’t explain to you why I married again, and in any case, I don’t think I owe anyone an explanation. I never missed a day of worrying about, thinking about and missing Daniel. You know that, you’ve been there through it all with me. I know this may be hard for you because he is home and Jemima is not, and I am so sorry for that, you know how sorry I am, but I was looking for some help from a friend. That’s all.’