Little Boy Found: They Thought the Nightmare Was Over...It Was Only the Beginning.

by LK Fox

  Rising, I took all the pictures of Ben’s old life, laid them next to each other on the kitchen table and tried to understand why he had never shown them to me. I felt sure that if I called and asked him about them he would think I was being obsessive and paranoid.

  He looked so young in the pictures. I didn’t feel comfortable looking at the wife. She was quite plain and hard to make out because she was squinting into the sun, sometimes shielding her eyes, never smiling. She reminded me a little of the woman at the school who had witnessed my accident.

  You know why he doesn’t want you to see these, I told myself. They’re from his old life, the one he left behind to marry you. There’s a logical explanation for everything . . .

  I went back into the hall and studied the red baseball cap once more, then set it down by my laptop and went to the Nike website. Nike were always building subtle changes into their designs. It was an older style, so maybe he had owned it for years. I had certainly never seen him wearing it. For all I knew, it could belong to someone else entirely.

  The apartment was dead silent and I needed to calm down, so I did what any other horticulturalist would do; I made tea. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I examined my phone. The screen had split into an iridescent rainbow and wasn’t working properly. The shot of the BMW was more difficult to read, but was just about intact. Could Ben have been driving it? I had no way of knowing.

  All right, I thought. Work the whole ridiculous idea through and see what you get. Why would Ben set out to kill his own son? And the answer came roaring back: To hurt me. He’d known our relationship was failing long before Gabriel vanished, because I spent more time with the boy than I did with him. He was jealous.

  I remembered our argument soon after the police had found Gabriel’s body. ‘I don’t see how you can be so callous. He was your own flesh and blood. It’s as if you don’t care.’

  What if that was it, and he really didn’t care?

  I picked up the house phone and rang his mobile, but hung up before it could be answered or go to voicemail. Finally, confused and frightened, I headed back to Gabriel’s room, curled up on the single bed and fell into an uneasy asleep.

  After about an hour, I was awoken by a variety of aches and pains. I had a couple of saucer-sized bruises on my back and my leg hurt like hell. As I cleaned myself up, I forced my mind to consider practicalities, namely finding a way back to Buckingham. I supposed I could sit outside the flat and wait. I could see another great headline: HORTICULTURAL THERAPIST CHUCKS IN JOB TO STALK LONELY MISFIT.

  I decided to call the garage. I thought it was worth checking when he was due to pick up the car. The mechanic asked me to hold the line and returned to say that the owner was coming to collect his vehicle around half six.

  I rang off and looked at my watch. Rush hour had already started and it had begun to rain again. I ran to my car.

  Turning off Google Maps, I trusted my instincts and cut through the backstreets. I reached the garage at 6.45 p.m. I’d missed him.

  Over the past year, I’d become convinced that Gabriel might just have been randomly targeted. He’d been the last pupil left in the playground. He was small and vulnerable, the kind of boy who didn’t run away when he was called over by a stranger. I tried to place myself inside the mind of his abductor. Who can I target? Someone who won’t cause trouble, someone easily led.

  When I first met Ben, it took him a while to explain that he was a single father. It never seemed a barrier to me. The biggest obstacle was feeling that Ben was so far out of my league I’d never stand a chance with him. Knowing he had a son just made him seem like an appealingly responsible adult, the kind of guy who wouldn’t send you a text message explaining that he needed to see other people for a while. Kaylie once said to me, ‘You know the only real difference between straight men and gay men? Straight men say they’ll never leave you and suddenly vanish. Gay men say they’ll leave you all the time and never go.’

  Ben never said he would leave, though, right up until he went. I could hardly blame him, given the extraordinary circumstances. He’d buckled under pressure. Disappointing, but it happens. Sometimes I used to take Gabriel to the office with me, and we would look in on Ben at lunchtime, and he was always like, ‘What are you doing here?’ He was barely able to make time for us. Maybe he saw too much of his wife in his son’s eyes. I gave up trying to understand his growing coolness towards me and just accepted it as a fact of life.

  Ben told me that his wife had made him face up to the truth about his sexuality. She knew before he did. But the matter had remained unresolved between them, because she had died. We have this fantasy in our heads that we leave behind tidy lives. The truth of it is, we arrive after the movie has started and leave before the end. I just wanted one thing to be resolved. Was that asking so much?

  I was still thinking about this, sitting there in the steaming traffic, when I realised that Buckingham’s BMW had just pulled out in front of me.

  I thought of putting my foot down and ramming his car, knocking him clear on to the pavement.

  I was terrified of Buckingham getting away and me losing my only lead. If I lost him this time, I knew I would never find him again, and I would never know the truth. The obvious thing would have been to challenge him, but I had to think about how best to do it.

  Right now, we were separated by the stop–start traffic. If I did catch him, how could I make him tell me what he did to Gabriel? There was the option of torturing him into confession. Rough justice – that always played well with the police, especially when there was no proof of any wrongdoing by the victim and the torturer was a borderline social misfit already known to every officer in his neighbourhood.

  He might as well have put a fish-hook in me. I had to follow. I wasn’t doing it for Gabriel any more. I was doing it for myself.

  Ella

  Now that there were two of us, I couldn’t just keep hanging around outside the house, so I waited in the car until Mrs Summerton came out and went to the shops with Gabriel in his ridiculously huge buggy. We followed and found a parking space in the high street. That was when I discovered that Mrs Summerton had taken my advice to heart. They had named my son Gabriel. I overheard her talking to one of the shopkeepers.

  I liked Sausage; she was the one you had to keep an eye on. There was something about her that I didn’t trust. She wasn’t as maternal as she’d first appeared. She was thinner than I remembered and scarier-looking, always dressing in inappropriately elegant clothes. I could imagine her complaining how she had no friends now that she had become a mother, and how hard it was to keep up her fitness regime with a baby around. It wasn’t as much fun as she thought it would be. I thought about what Sausage had said to her: ‘It’s just what you need right now.’ Why? Did she have a dark past? Did she think that a child would keep her on the straight and narrow until she one day decided to burn the house down or something? Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure that Gabriel was safe with her. I decided to move my deadline back for the fourth time.

  I consulted my notes. In the past two months, Mrs Summerton had begun to visit her old city friends once more. Women had come to the house on three separate occasions, career types; the three Hs – hair, hips and heels. They pretended they were interested in Gabriel but it was obvious they were just doing their ‘one visit’ duty. They made vague promises to come back, but I knew they never would.

  Then there was a meeting in the Costa Coffee shop in Ashton High Street, during which her former boss – a good-looking dude she’d probably had a couple of bouts of drunken post-successful-client-pitch sex with before meeting her husband – had tried to talk her into coming back to the office. She said she wasn’t ready to go back to work. She told him she had to talk to her partner about it – now, that was interesting. Not husband but partner. Poor old Sausage had been downgraded.

  I followed that damned buggy everywhere. The original six-week deadline turned into a ten-month deadline, with possible furthe
r extensions. Sometimes I got so close that Gabriel caught my eye, and after a while I was sure he started to recognise me, because he’d gurgle and laugh and hold my gaze. Whenever I saw him I blew him a kiss.

  It seemed to me that Mrs Summer was showing Gabriel less and less affection. And when she did it was all false and showy, not like love from a real mother, the birth mother. She was the thief mother, treating my little boy like a lifestyle accessory.

  I watched and listened and tried to talk to the same people Mrs Summerton talked to, but if you’re going to walk around a town hoping that the locals might open up to a stranger, Ashton isn’t the place to do it. I also followed her to the dry cleaner’s, where she asked for a load of party dresses to be washed and pressed. She said she was going to store them away because she had no need of them any more – but it was the way she said it, sort of wistfully, like she really missed her old life. I waited behind her at the chemist’s counter while she refilled a prescription. The clerk asked, ‘Have you had these before?’ and she said, ‘Oh yes, many times. Believe me, I know all about the side effects.’

  I sat near her in coffee shops and listened to the needy phone calls she kept making to her ex-boss. She was cutesy and flirtatious, always asking about what was going on in the office these days. She obviously missed being there and getting all the work gossip. She was hiding something, I was sure of it. Several times, people called at the front door and she nearly jumped out of her skin, as if she was half-expecting the police to turn up . . . although maybe it was just her usual hyper-tense state.

  I knew what was going on. Mrs Summerton had not been prepared to feel quite so alone, stuck out there in commuter-land with a small child to look after while her husband put in ever longer hours at work. No one to talk to except ancient, bad-tempered neighbours and a couple of former office colleagues who were too busy to hold boring conversations about the joys of clearing up hurled breakfast cereal. She wasn’t a real mother, she was a fake, and I was going to catch her out.

  It was obvious that the novelty of having a child wouldn’t last for ever, so I put in some extra hours at the weekends. It was Buck who suggested taking a local job, so I got some Saturday work in a nearby jewellery shop. Our only customers were bored housewives buying earrings for each other’s birthdays, and the owner was happy to leave for his lunchtime triple scotch and let me take charge. It meant I could remain close by, walking past the house during my lunch hour and visiting after work, sometimes even ducking out in the afternoons.

  Mrs Summerton never bothered to draw the curtains, but now Gabriel was often set up in the kitchen, right near the buggy he was fast outgrowing, so it was harder to see him. Sometimes he was left in a baby-seat in the front room, and then I was careful not to get too near to their bay window in case I made him jump and caused him to cry. I let him see me in his own time, and whenever he did my heart skipped a beat.

  Once, one of the crabby old neighbours asked me what I was up to, hanging around, but I felt I had as much right to be there as anybody else. After all, I was the real mother, not her. I got stopped by people in the street and questioned a couple of times, but I always had a plausible answer ready.

  Buck was the one person who never seemed to think I was doing anything strange. He was very supportive. He didn’t say much, but he was always happy to listen to new plans and ideas. He thought it would be a good idea if I changed my look every now and again, to stop anyone getting suspicious, so in Ashton I tried changing my appearance, adding a jacket, glasses, jeans, a cap – even a wig one time, but it was ridiculous and made me stand out more.

  Not that either of the parents ever noticed. Sausage usually drove straight into the carport, gave his wife a peck on the cheek, checked on Gabriel and headed upstairs to change into an ugly hand-knitted red sweater and jeans, returning with stacks of paper and a laptop. I began to realise that they hardly ever spoke to each other. They obviously had nothing in common.

  I went through their bins and found some tags for good-quality children’s clothing brands, so at least Gabriel was being dressed properly.

  But soon Mrs Summerton began changing her habits. She took to going out at the weekends, and she used the car – which was a worry, because she was fond of a drink and as blind as a bat. She usually returned a couple of hours later, and on one occasion at least had definitely been hammering the Beaujolais all afternoon. And she kept taking her prescription meds – I saw her through the bathroom window, washing down stuff from amber bottles. I suppose she could have been taking aspirin, but I was willing to bet they were something stronger.

  I think it was this habit that started the pair of them arguing. Soon the sniping became a regular feature of their time together. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their body language told me all I needed to know. After the fights, instead of making up and making love, they went to separate ends of the house and stabbed away at their laptops.

  There was something very wrong. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about the survival of their marriage, and my little boy’s future.

  One day, Mrs Summerton came into my jewellery shop and hastily bought a man’s silver bracelet. She asked about getting it engraved, then changed her mind and said she’d take it as it was. While we were waiting for her credit card to go through she looked at me as if to say, Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?, so I quickly handed her card back and thanked her before moving to the stockroom. I never saw the bracelet on Sausage’s wrist, though.

  *

  The months passed and the seasons changed and nothing really moved on. I relied on Buck more and more for support, although we remained like brother and sister. It didn’t seem to bother him that we weren’t intimate. I knew we had a spiritual connection, which was much more important.

  My trips to the Summertons’ home became more perfunctory and took on the bored regularity of hospital rounds. It wasn’t as if I ever saw her beating Gabriel or anything. There wasn’t much to see at all. I had trudged through snow and ice, fog and rain, stood in the shadows between the rhododendron bushes as always, just for a few minutes at a time, watching for any movement in the house, but of course the kitchen was right at the back and I could hardly start clambering about in their garden.

  A few shoots started to rise in the manicured flower-beds around the close, and the first rays of watery sunlight touched the back of my neck. I kept my phone at the ready to snatch a photo whenever I could, and took to holstering a small, sharp Japanese kitchen knife in my back pocket, just in case I encountered any crazies, what with having to hang around in the open air so much.

  I carried on watching and listening, frozen, while Gabriel made his first headlong charge up and down the hall, giggling and burbling with delight. Despite his parents’ troubles, he had settled in well. I began to feel less like a guardian angel and more like a dog who refused to leave a graveside after its master had died.

  And in my heart, I knew my time of watching had to come to an end.

  Nick

  I’d seen enough movies to know how to tail another car; you just had to stay close but not too close.

  Turned out it wasn’t quite as easy as that. We weren’t on a Los Angeles freeway, so it was more frustrating than exciting. I spent most of my time worrying about the possibility of hitting pedestrians.

  Buckingham had seen the Peugeot when we crashed in front of the school. Even given the low light and the weight of traffic, I needed to stay five or six vehicles back. In the labyrinth of dug-up lane-changes, there was a likelihood of losing him at junctions.

  We headed west and out towards the suburbs. The BMW swung down on to the ring road around the Broadway, then took a lorry-choked turn-off that led all the way from a no-go zone to the yummy-mummy professional belt. As I drove, I tried to understand what was going on in Buckingham’s head.

  After Gabriel died, I read so many books and articles about abductors that I probably messed up my online profile for ever and sent red
flags to every law-enforcement agency in the country.

  As I watched the car turning I thought, Why here? None of this adds up. Abusers are meant to have low IQs and blue-collar jobs. Who is this man that he could bring himself to kill a child? Was it about control, or about resolving his own terrible childhood experiences?

  We headed down a suburban high street, full of fancy German kitchen shops and Spanish restaurants, and into one of the side roads, where Buckingham turned off so sharply I only just managed to keep up with him. The traffic thinned out with each cross-street, and I had to be more careful. I dropped further behind, but I knew that, if he was wary enough, he would soon notice he was being shadowed.

  Keeping my eyes on his car, I called Ben’s direct line, but my call went straight to voicemail. I had it in my mind to let him know where I was and what I was doing, just in case something went wrong. I tried his mobile, too, but the same thing happened. It was strange. I knew he must be able to see my number coming up, so why didn’t he answer?

  At the next junction, I was forced to draw up just three cars back. It was getting too risky to continue, but just as I decided to park it, he decided to pull over.

  We had almost reached the end of the network of residential roads. Ahead, a large housing estate had suddenly appeared, the way they seem to pop out of nowhere when you’re driving about without knowing where you are. The buildings were covered with satellite dishes, sprouting like toadstools along balconies. Powerful spotlights floodlit the walkways. It was a confusion of parking bays and dead ends. This neighbourhood was one of those city peculiarities; million-pound homes butted against low-income housing, two sets of lives existing in parallel, touching only when the wealthy residents needed cleaners.