by Paul Clayton
‘Didn’t Henry go missing about a year ago? Just one night? Turned out to have been sleeping in the park and showed up fine in the morning? Would that be the Henry Baxter we’re talking about?’ Sergeant Chescoe turned to face them and folded his arms. He looked very pleased with himself.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Movement and darkness, always darkness. And his head hurt. That was all Henry could feel. One minute he’d been working his way around the garden of Parkside Tower, and the next he was trying to squeeze his eyes open in darkness.
His hands were tied tightly behind him and his shoulders had started to ache. His feet were free, so he shuffled round and lay on his back, which was more comfortable. Above him, he saw two tiny chinks in the blackness that flashed orange and white; together with the vibration shuddering through him and the brief noises he could hear, he knew he was in the back of a car.
A tiny, stupid part of him thought this was dreadfully exciting, an adventure worthy of the movies he watched on Netflix. And yet it hurt. Every bit of him hurt. His head ached and throbbed from where the blow had landed and, although he couldn’t raise his hands to check, he was sure there was an alarming egg-shaped bump on one side of it. He couldn’t raise his hand to see his watch and he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.
They were heading somewhere at speed. Several times the unlit space tilted like some bizarre theme-park ride, and the egg-shaped bump banged against a hard surface. There was carpet beneath his hands; it was rucked up and the ridges poked into his back.
The longer the journey went on, the more nauseous he felt. Whenever he travelled in the car, Frankie dosed him with pills and he wore a special band on his wrist to help quell the travel sickness. Now he had neither of those and, as he bounced about in the blackness, he became aware of his early evening meal trying to part company from his stomach. Sickness clawed at his throat. He swallowed time and time again, trying to force down the rising bile, but it was too late. What looked like an unusually large portion of McDonald’s nuggets spewed out of his mouth. His stomach started to contract even more, forcing everything up and out.
He could feel his face sweating in the pungent stench, which made him want to vomit more but there was nothing left to bring up. It was frightening how prodigious an amount of vomit an eleven-year-old travel-sick boy could produce. Tears flowed down his face, mingling with the sweat on his cheeks. Vomit covered the front of his jacket and he felt it, a seeping dampness forcing its way through his football top onto his chest. It stank. If this was some sort of Netflix adventure, Henry didn’t want to be in it.
Chapter Sixty-Five
The kitchen table seemed to be the family war room. Frankie, Shannon and Jonny sat around it, working out what to do. Nothing they’d learnt at the police station calmed the fear taking hold of Frankie.
‘Why aren’t they looking for him, Mum?’ Shannon demanded.
That was exactly what Frankie had asked Sergeant Chescoe when he’d turned back to them from his computer looking smug. ‘I found a note,’ he said. ‘He’s marked down as not high risk for the first twenty-four hours due to previous behaviour.’
Frankie fought a desire to punch the sergeant in the face. ‘Who made that decision?’
‘Seems like it’s your friend PC Ashley. There’s no report of Henry going missing yesterday, but there is a note on the file from last February that his disappearance was voluntary and future occurrences should be put on hold for twenty-four hours. Possible time waster, it says here.’
The words stuck in Frankie’s throat. ‘He’s not a time waster. He’s my son.’
At Frankie’s insistence Sergeant Chescoe had made notes, though she wasn’t sure how accurate they were. He muttered a word every so often as he typed. ‘Email. Picture. Barber’s shop.’ She couldn’t understand why he was making this so difficult. And where was PC Ashley? She’d come to think of Oliver as a friend. After he’d returned to the house last night to break the news that Henry had disappeared, he too seemed to have vanished into thin air.
She looked at her other children sitting with her round the table, eager to help. The events of the past two days were overwhelming her. On Monday morning she’d stepped out of the house ready to start a new job; now, less than forty-eight hours later, she was trying to convince this old fool of a sergeant that her youngest son had been taken by a person, or persons, unknown, and was currently being held against his will.
‘I know somebody has got him. I don’t know what he’s done, or why they’re doing it, but he’s in some sort of trouble.’
Jonny gave his mum a hug. ‘Shan, let’s see if we can look at Henry’s Facebook account.’
He passed his phone to Shannon and her fingers danced across the screen. Suddenly there was Henry beaming out at them from his Facebook page. ‘How did you do that?’ said Frankie. ‘I thought all this was supposed to be private.’
‘It is, but his password’s really shit.’ Shannon tapped on the screen again and a list of Henry’s latest posts appeared. ‘He’s posted nothing on here since Saturday evening. And looking back, I don’t think it’s a dare or anything like he did last year.’
Jonny sat staring into space looking thoughtful.
‘Both of you are telling me everything you know, aren’t you?’ asked Frankie.
‘Course we are, Mum. At least I am.’ Shannon looked at Jonny. ‘And you are, aren’t you?’
Her voice broke Jonny’s train of thought. ‘What? Sorry, I was thinking about that postcard. Why do you think you know where it is, Mum?’
‘I don’t know, but as soon as I saw the picture I thought I’d seen it before, or at least heard about it. I’ve not been able to work out more than that.’
‘Give it here,’ said Shannon. ‘We can try and find out where this is. That might jog your memory.’ She put the postcard on the table. Taking out her own phone, she photographed it and spent several minutes tapping and swiping. As if by magic, the picture of the two cottages and the lighthouse suddenly appeared on her screen.
‘How did you do that?’ Frankie peered at the picture. Even though it was now full screen, she still couldn’t place it.
‘Reverse image search. It doesn’t always work. Now we stick this picture into Bing or onto Google. If there’s a picture like it on the Internet, it’ll match it and tell us where it is.’
‘And here’s me thinking I was the mother of three kids and I’m actually the head of MI5. Go on, then. Do it.’
Frankie and Jonny crowded round Shannon’s shoulders. The picture disappeared and the screen changed so that the original picture was now on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side of the screen was a column labelled ‘similar images’ with small thumbnail pictures of white lighthouses. Shannon started to scroll down.
‘There. Third one down in the third column. Click on that one,’ said Jonny.
The pictures disappeared and rearranged themselves so that the one on the left was of a white lighthouse with two small cottages at its base. It was taken from a different angle to the one on the postcard, but all three of them were convinced it was the same location.
‘Where is it?’ asked Frankie.
Shannon swiped at the screen. ‘It’s a place called Healy Cove.’
Jonny was quick off the mark. He soon had a map up on his own phone to show the location. ‘It’s there,’ he said, sliding his fingers to enlarge the map.
Frankie’s eyes flitted between the photograph and the map that Jonny was holding out. She had a life devoid of photographs; the one album she owned was packed with pictures of the children at various times in their lives, but never of her. The snapshots of her life were contained inside her. She knew that this picture was in there but, as Jonny showed her his map, she knew it was not a place she’d ever been to. It wasn’t a place that held her memories; it was somewhere she’d been told about.
‘We
had a wonderful day at the seaside once. The only one I can remember. A long drive in the car and a walk through some woods to a tall white building that stood next to the sea, with two little white houses at the bottom with green windows. It was the most perfect place. I hoped that one day I could live in one of the little white houses and be able to stand in my garden and watch the sea.’
And as she found the memory, she heard the voice.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Henry wasn’t sure how long the journey went on for. He drifted in and out of a post-sickness snooze; every so often a heaving lurch of his stomach produced another small mouthful of bile which dribbled from his lips onto the pool of rancid vomit on his T-shirt.
Eventually the vehicle stopped. Henry waited and held his breath. He could hear voices outside the car, two voices at least, but it was hard to make out what they were saying. He lay still, the stench of sickness filling the gloomy space.
He started nervously as the tailgate lifted upwards and he found himself blinking in the light of a torch. Two figures, both in dark clothing and wearing balaclavas that revealed only their eyes, stood looking at him. One was much taller than the other.
Both of them immediately stepped backwards and one lifted an arm to shield their mouth from the smell. The other pulled up their jacket collar to cover their mouth. Making a few small retching sounds, they reached in and lifted Henry out of the car.
Henry stood on the ground, trying to find his balance. The fresh night air hit him like a spout of water from a hose. As the salty, misty night air did its work, he staggered, went as pale as if he’d been covered with whitewash and crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
He felt himself being picked up in someone’s arms and carried across uneven ground. Looking upwards, he saw a tower with panes of glass on top of a white column. There was the sound of a door being unlocked and he was carried into the building and placed on the floor. This time his legs held out and his eyes opened.
The room was circular, with straight white-stone walls from which the paint was peeling. A metal staircase dominated the space. The smaller of his two captors grabbed his hand and led the way up the stairs, metal step after metal step. At the top, the door was pushed open and Henry stepped out onto an enclosed platform.
The breeze had picked up. Heavy with salt, the chill night air wrapped around him. He gripped the railing and peered down at the crashing surf below. The larger of his two assailants was now behind him on the platform and gestured to a small door in the glass chamber. Opening it, he pushed Henry through.
There were two large glass discs back-to-back like huge car headlamps. Henry was pulled over to one side. His hands were untied, wrapped around a small railing that encircled the lamp and tied once more.
He slid to the floor, grateful for the rest and yet fearful of what was to come. He stared out through the windows. Cracks of dawn light sent shimmering rays over the sea. He could see the white-foam tips of the crashing waves catching the pale watery sunlight. Fresh salty air assailed his nose. Henry was at the seaside.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
‘We need to get to that place. The place in the postcard.’ Frankie was leading the discussion at the kitchen table as though it were a cabinet meeting.
‘Healy Cove?’ Shannon flicked the picture onto the laptop screen once more. ‘Jonny knows where it is on the map.’
‘Is there a train?’ Frankie looked to her son for help. Jonny started searching pages and stabbing at the screen on his phone. ‘Train to Canterbury, then a connecting train to Queenscliffe and a bus to Healy Cove.’ His face fell. ‘Looking at the timetable, if we left now we wouldn’t get there till early evening.’
Queenscliffe. Another memory punched Frankie’s gut.
‘What’s the matter, Mum?’ Shannon saw that Frankie seemed not to have heard Jonny’s words.
‘Nothing, darling, nothing. We need to get there. As soon as possible.’
‘You sure you don’t want to wait until the police get back to us?’ Jonny looked at her and she heard the hesitation in his voice.
‘We’ve got to find your brother, right? The police don’t seem to be doing anything to help us. I don’t know what’s happened to him. Please God it’s nothing bad. PC Ashley went off to report Henry missing, and that’s the last we’ve seen or heard of him, too. And what’s that miserable old fucker at the police station, Sergeant Tesco or whatever he’s called, gonna say when we tell him we’ve looked up the postcard on the Internet and it’s a place in Kent, and we need them to send police there because that’s where we think Henry is being held? That old bastard will piss himself laughing.’
‘Okay,’ said Shannon, ‘I hear all that, but how do we get there? You gotta be realistic about this, Mum. We don’t have a car.’
Jonny jumped up from his chair. ‘Mum, put what you think we need in a bag. I’ll be back.’
The backpack sat on the kitchen table. Frankie had no idea what they needed because she didn’t know what they were going to do. For some reason, she threw in some T-shirts and some spare underwear, followed by two bottles of orange crush, an enormous family pack of crisps and a torch. It would have to do; it was hardly the stuff of an SAS mission, but enough for a trip to a lighthouse.
She couldn’t think straight. None of this made any sense at all yet memories kept sliding into place. Queenscliffe.
***
Jonny had never actually stolen a car before, but you couldn’t live on the edges of a council estate within sniffing distance of London during your teens and not learn how to hot-wire one. It was part of the route to manhood.
Rule One: don’t diss your own doorstep. He ran down their street and turned into Earlsdale Avenue. One street away and the house prices started to rocket. Large baby wagons and grand family cruisers lined both sides of the road. Mums back from the school run were now doing Pilates in front of the telly. He needed a little bit of luck; hopefully one of them had left their car waiting for him.
He trudged along the far side of the road, keeping an eye out for passers-by as he reached out to check door handles, praying that his touch was gentle enough not to set off the alarms. When a car door didn’t yield, he walked nonchalantly to the next.
Stealing seemed such an old-fashioned word. His mates talked of ‘twocking’, taking without the owner’s consent. That’s what he was doing, looking for a twoc. And he’d bring it back. But today his mum’s need was greater than some yummy-mummy’s. He heard his mate Damien’s voice: ‘It’s all part of an unfair system.’
Jonny repeated the mantra in his head to keep his confidence high. He had several mates for whom stealing was breathing. He’d been out with them, never taking anything himself but watching what they did. Now he had a cause and a need, and he understood that stealing to fulfil a demand wasn’t a crime at all. For his generation, it was a way of balancing the books.
He made it to the other end of the street and was starting to despair when he saw something that gave him hope. A car was sitting in the driveway of a house with the front door of the house wide open behind it. ‘Fucking hell,’ thought Jonny as he looked at it. ‘Why couldn’t it be a shitting Mazda?’
The car was a metallic-blue Porsche Cayenne, not what he’d thought of choosing but if it was the only car in the avenue he had a chance of driving away, then what the hell? He walked up the driveway to the front door of the house. There was no sign of life, which was good. He stood, poised to knock on the open door and plead some fake errand if necessary. Then he saw what he wanted: lying on a side table just inside the hall was a black-and-silver electronic key fob emblazoned with the Porsche logo.
Jonny couldn’t believe his luck. He knew this was a gift – a gift his family needed and he was going to take the chance. He stepped into the house and up to the table, holding his breath and ready to turn and run at the slightest sound. He leant forward, swiped t
he key fob and turned away.
Pulling himself into the driving seat, he closed the door.
Some bastards who lived in these vast houses could distinguish the noise of their own car driving off at a couple of hundred feet, even if they couldn’t hear the sound of the bloody alarm blaring out at two in the morning. Reaching forward and pushing the ignition button, he held his breath. ‘This is for you, Henry. I hope you’re fucking worth it, brother.’
Chapter Sixty-Eight
‘Oh my God.’ Shannon’s mouth dropped open as she stared out of the kitchen window.
Frankie joined her in time to see Jonny climb out of what looked like a very expensive car. He strolled up to the flat and burst through the door.
‘What’s going on, Jonny?’ She squared up to him.
‘He’s nicked a car.’ Shannon beamed in admiration at her brother.
‘I borrowed a car from a mate. Okay?’
‘Who do you know who has a car like that? They cost a fortune.’ Frankie didn’t believe him for a minute. She and Shannon stood side by side, pinning Jonny against the cooker.
‘I thought we wanted to find Henry, so I went out and borrowed a car.’ He looked suspiciously keen to avoid their gaze. ‘From a mate.’ He coughed. ‘We can go to this Healy Cove place and find Henry. My mate would like the car back by this evening, and I’d like to return it, so this is our one chance, yes?’
Frankie opened her mouth to argue but Jonny continued. ‘We can do this, Mum. Or I can take the fucking thing back right now.’
‘Before anybody notices it’s gone missing?’ Shannon gave him a high-five. ‘Let’s go, Mum.’
Jonny corrected her. ‘Before anyone notices my mate has lent it to somebody for the day. Yes?’
Frankie watched them, unsure of what to say or do. There were some moments when being a mum was even harder than talking about contraception. She knew what he’d done, yet she could see how desperate he was to help. If they didn’t use this car, what would they do? Memories of her own past told her she should be proud of her son. He’d taken a big risk.