Lost Child: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by D. S. Butler

  The bleached blonde girl beside me huffed under her breath impatiently, but I refused to be rushed.

  Finally, Dawn heaved herself to her feet and plodded along the aisle. When she was safely off the bus, I stood up.

  “Finally,” the blonde who’d been sitting next to me said with a scowl.

  I took a step to the side and gestured for her to go ahead of me. “After you, if you’re in that much of a rush.”

  She scowled again, no doubt picking up on my sarcasm. We shuffled forward, and when I stepped down onto the pavement, I was glad to see that Dawn was already way ahead of me, walking up to the High Street.

  I walked in the same direction, figuring I wouldn’t run into her again as long as I walked slowly and gave her plenty of time to get out of the way.

  There were a number of mobile phone shops in the city, but I wanted to get a replacement iPhone. But as I walked along the High Street, I realised I had no idea where the Apple Store was in Oxford, or even if there was one.

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t looked it up on the Internet last night. How stupid! In fact, I couldn’t recall there ever being an Apple Store in Oxford.

  I stopped a young man in a suit to ask him if there was an Apple Store. He had an iPhone clutched in his hand, so I figured he’d know.

  He barely glanced up at me. “Nah, I think the closest one is in Reading,” he said before looking back down at his phone and continuing to walk on.

  This wasn’t a good start, but I didn’t have to have an iPhone. In fact, now that I wasn’t sure I’d be going back to Dubai and resuming my job over there, I should start being more careful with my money. A cheaper phone would serve just as well for now.

  The first shop I entered had lots of phones on display. Most of them were linked to contracts, though. I looked around in dismay for a few minutes before walking up to the counter and asking the young man with heavily gelled hair and traces of acne on his cheeks whether they had any phones to purchase without a locked-in contract.

  “Yeah,” he replied looking bored and waving his hand in the direction of the display beside the door. “There’s a few over there.”

  He turned away, so I guessed that was the extent of his customer service. I thought about kicking up a fuss but decided against it.

  I walked across to the display by the door and examined the phones. None of them looked particularly impressive, and they didn’t have the prices on them. I picked one with a large screen with a dark grey metallic finish. I wouldn’t be familiar with the operating system but how hard could it be?

  “I’ll take one of these,” I said loudly to the man behind the counter. I didn’t bother walking back over to him.

  He looked up, irritated that I was disturbing him again. I could see the blue Facebook screen reflected in his glasses. Here was someone who obviously took his job seriously.

  “What’s the model number?” he asked sulkily.

  “Why don’t you come over here and have a look for yourself?”

  His whole body slumped as though producing one big, sulky sigh and then he finally got up from his stool and stalked across the store.

  He peered at the phone I pointed at and then walked back to his computer.

  “We haven’t got one in stock,” he announced. “We can get one by Wednesday.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. I had come into Oxford today purely so I could get a phone and take it home with me today, not so I could order it. If I wanted to do that, I would have just done it online.

  “Perhaps you could tell me the phones you do have in stock, so I’ll be able to pick one.”

  Again the heavy sigh. He didn’t answer but began tapping away on his keyboard, and I hoped he was checking stock rather than replying to a Facebook message.

  A few seconds later, he looked up, rolled his eyes, then looked back at the computer screen and continued to type. I sighed and looked out of the window.

  There was another phone shop over the street. I was just about to leave and try that one instead when he got up from the counter and walked over to me.

  “We’ve got this one and this one and these are in stock today.” He pointed at two rather unattractive phones.

  “And if I pick one of those, I can take it home with me today and use my own SIM card with it, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, they’re not locked into a contract.”

  One of the phones he’d pointed out was narrow and thin, but I was used to a phone with a large screen and thought that would be annoying.

  “Which is the cheapest of those two?” I asked.

  He pointed to the dark grey one and told me a price that made me cringe.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take the dark grey one.”

  It seemed to take forever to fill in the form and process the order, but fifteen minutes later, I finally had my new mobile phone.

  I left the shop gripping the plastic bag tightly in my hand, relieved to get out of the store and away from the unhelpful shop assistant.

  The shopping area was busier now, even though there was still an hour until the office workers would be leaving their offices for lunch. I had ten minutes to kill before the next bus to Woodstock. Remembering Mum had asked me to pick up milk on the way back, I decided to go to the small Sainsbury’s near Debenhams and then cut through to the back of the bus station. I didn’t want to waste any more time than necessary. If there had been any developments in the police investigation, I wouldn’t hear about them until I got back to Mum’s.

  I’d only walked a few steps when I saw Daniel not far ahead of me. He was dressed in his usual work gear of a dark grey suit and a light coloured shirt, open at the collar. Daniel never wore a tie. It was a throwback to his artist roots. Maybe he figured it made him look young and trendy and less like a 9-to-5 office cubicle worker.

  A similarly dressed man was walking next to him, and they both held large takeaway cups from a coffee chain. I made no move to wave or call out. Instead, I just watched him. Something about the way he was behaving seemed off. As they walked towards me, I could see he was smiling.

  The police had a vital lead in his daughter’s disappearance, and Daniel was back at work, joking around with a colleague. Was that normal?

  Why shouldn’t he be at work? If the police wanted to contact him, they could contact him at work just as well as they could if he was at home.

  He was just smiling with a colleague, probably being polite, that was all. I needed to give him a break. I was too hard on him. It was wrong to fall back into our old antagonistic roles. He was Jenna’s father, and he must have taken her disappearance just as hard as Kate.

  Determined to be more understanding I took a deep breath and stepped out of the shop doorway I’d been sheltering in.

  I gave him a tentative smile and called out. “Hi.” I held up the plastic bag in my hand. “I’ve just been to get a new phone.”

  The amenable smile that had been on Daniel’s face as he chatted to his colleague disappeared when he saw me. His facial expression hardened, and he turned to the man next to him and said, “I’ll see you back at the office.”

  His colleague nodded and looked at me curiously before walking on.

  Daniel didn’t say anything to me. I clutched the mobile phone bag to my chest. “I needed a new phone because the police took mine.”

  “I remember.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t like the idea of not being contactable at the moment. It set me back a bit, though.”

  Daniel didn’t respond.

  “Have you heard anything else from the police this morning?”

  Daniel shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

  “You’re back at work then?”

  My gaze slid down, taking in his dark, sombre suit. It seemed odd to see him dressed for work, holding a cup of coffee as though it was just a normal day.

  “Yes, I’m back at work. Do you have a problem with that?”

  I frowned. “Of course not. I didn’t think you wo
uld feel up to being back at work. I wasn’t trying to criticise.”

  Daniel regarded me in a way that told me he thought that was exactly what I intended to do. “It’s easier to be at work. The time passes faster. If I stay at home, I just sit there thinking, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  I nodded. “Hopefully we will hear something soon,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  Daniel said goodbye and then walked off without looking back.

  Daniel and I had never hit it off, but before Jenna’s disappearance, it hadn’t really been a problem. Kate was so easy-going, and she always smoothed over any minor disagreements. Daniel irritated me, but all the things about him that wound me up now seemed trivial. I disliked his bragging, boastful behaviour, but when it came down to it, I’d never thought Daniel was a terrible person. I wasn’t sure quite how we got to this point. He looked at me with intense dislike. It was no more than I deserved, I suppose, after putting him and Mum through the ringer after Kate died. He hadn’t forgiven me for that.

  I walked on, lost in thought, heading towards Sainsbury’s. I ducked inside, grabbing two pints of milk before queueing up at the automatic checkout counter.

  I was halfway along the road back to the bus station when a familiar figure caught my eye on the other side of the road.

  I turned abruptly, causing the person behind to nearly crash into the back of me.

  They muttered a few rude words under their breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not even bothering to look at them. I was too focused on the person on the other side of the road.

  It was Luke’s brother, Philip Bowman.

  I hadn’t seen him since the day Jenna went missing. He’d had his own fair share of tragedy, and it was still apparent in the way his shoulders slumped in a way they never used to.

  I held up my hand to wave and called to him across the street. He heard me and turned, and although he was some distance away, I could have sworn he paled when he saw me.

  I called his name again, thinking perhaps he hadn’t recognised me.

  Looking left and right I waited for a gap in the traffic so I could cross the road and talk to him. But before I could, he quickly turned on his heel and stalked the other way.

  I frowned. Didn’t he recognise me? Still waiting for a gap in the traffic, I called out again, convinced he hadn’t realised it was me. I’d spent so much time at his and Luke’s house when we were teenagers. We’d been close, and I couldn’t believe he would ignore me deliberately. I waited for a white van to pass in front of me and then darted across the road, but by the time I did so, Phil was already out of sight.

  I walked on, looking in the shop windows as I went past, glancing down each alleyway, but there was no sign of him. Recalling the expression on his face when he’d seen it was me made me feel uncomfortable. Why was he trying to avoid me?

  I walked on towards the bus stop, feeling strangely out of sorts. It had been nice seeing Luke yesterday, a reminder of how things had been before my world had turned upside down. After Daniel’s coldness, I’d selfishly wanted to talk to Phil and brighten my mood. It hurt to be ignored.

  It was probably just because Phil didn’t want to talk about the past, maybe it was too painful for him. I could understand him wanting to build a new life and surround himself with people who didn’t know how he’d lost his wife and young daughter.

  The bus was already waiting in its designated bay at the station when I got there. I climbed aboard and showed my ticket to the driver. There were a number of other passengers already sitting in the downstairs seats, but I was relieved to see that Dawn wasn’t one of them. I felt a wave of relief tinged with guilt, after all, I promised her mother I would try to find time to talk to her.

  I sat back in my seat and thought about Phil Bowman’s strange reaction. Did he purposely avoid me because he didn’t want to talk to anyone who might mention his wife and daughter, or was there another, more sinister reason?

  Chapter Sixteen

  During the bus journey home, I tried to come up with a feasible explanation for why Luke’s brother had completely ignored me. Had I imagined the look of panic on his face? Maybe he had simply been in a rush. But something about his reaction worried me. It wasn’t nice to think that he had gone out of his way to avoid me, but the feeling of unease I couldn’t shake wasn’t just because my feelings had been hurt. I couldn’t get rid of the knot of fear in the pit of my stomach.

  When I got home, I found Mum sitting on the sofa, flicking through an old photograph album. Her eyes were red, and she’d been crying, but she smiled up at me as I walked in.

  “Your SIM card was delivered,” she said. “I left it on the kitchen table for you.”

  “Great.” I held up the plastic bag I was carrying. “I got the milk and a new phone. It isn’t the one I wanted, but it will do. I’ll see if I can get it set up now.”

  I headed to the kitchen and grabbed the small envelope from the table. I unboxed the phone and looked at the manual that had come with it. It took me awhile to get to grips with the new phone because I wasn’t used to the operating system, but as long as I knew how to use messages and I could use the phone to ring people, I was happy.

  I’d be able to learn how to use the other apps and web browser later. The only app I downloaded was Facebook because I had formulated a plan as I travelled back on the bus.

  The thing that worried me most about the police keeping my phone was that the person who sent the photograph of Jenna might try to get in touch with me again. Would the police tell us if there had been more messages sent to my old phone? I’d have liked to think they would, but after Daniel had suggested I could have altered the photograph of Jenna, I wasn’t sure they trusted me.

  I logged onto Facebook and posted a message, telling everybody my new phone number. Usually, I was quite careful about privacy settings, but I set the post to public. If the person who sent the photograph of Jenna wanted to reach me, I was determined to make it easy for them.

  After I had posted the message, I set up my email account on the phone. Before I knew it, an hour had passed.

  I called out to Mum and asked if she wanted a cup of tea as I moved across the kitchen to put the kettle on. I made the tea and carried it through to the sitting room, setting a cup on the coffee table in front of Mum. She’d moved on to flicking through another photo album now. I thought about sitting down and joining her on her trip down memory lane, but first, I wanted to check on the plant ID forum again. I was still holding out hope that somebody might be able to tell me something about the plant in the photograph and give me a clue as to where Jenna may have been when the photograph was taken.

  I asked Mum if I could use her computer and then went to the iMac in the hall. I logged onto the plant forum and saw immediately from the red alert at the top of the screen that I had a message.

  I held my breath as I clicked on the link and waited for the page to load. Below my original message, where I had attached the photograph of the hedge, someone had replied.

  I muttered a curse as I read what they had written.

  This is common ivy.

  I shook my head. That was clearly rubbish. I was no gardener, but even I knew what Ivy looked like. Mum and Dad had always pulled it out of the garden, declaring it a weed. Why would somebody waste my time by posting this? Did people really have nothing better to do?

  I opened up a new browser window and typed in common English ivy and then clicked on the images link. As I suspected, the hedge plant I posted didn’t look anything like ivy. The leaves were a completely different shape, and in my photograph, the plant had small flowers on it.

  I scrolled down the page a bit further and saw a plant that looked exactly like the one in the picture. I clicked on it to enlarge the image. I was certain it was the same plant, yet the label beneath the picture said it was ivy. Maybe there were different types?

  I got up from the computer table and walked back to where Mum was sitting o
n the sofa. “Can you have a look at something for me?”

  Mum looked up at me, surprised. She set the album to one side. “Of course.”

  She followed me back to the computer, and I pointed at the screen. “Did you know this was a type of ivy?”

  She peered over her glasses and then nodded. “Yes, that’s the mature form.”

  “But it looks nothing like ivy. We had ivy growing up the fence at the back of the house. I remember you and dad pulling it all out, and it didn’t look anything like this.”

  Mum nodded. “Yes, it looks quite different when it’s mature. It’s the immature plant that climbs up things and sticks to them with those tiny suckers. When it’s mature, it’s quite an attractive plant and has flowers. Lots of gardeners have started to allow the plant to grow nowadays. It’s very good for birds and bees apparently. It even produces berries in the winter.”

  “So, it’s just about the most common plant in England, I suppose,” I murmured with disappointment. “Typical.”

  Mum frowned. “Why are you so interested? I didn’t think you were into plants.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not. I just didn’t realise ivy could look like that.”

  I considered telling her about my stupid idea to identify the plants in the background of Jenna’s photograph but then decided against it. Even to me, the idea sounded a little desperate and crazy, and I didn’t want to cause Mum to worry about me again.

  Mum walked back to the sitting room to pick up her mug of tea, but as she leant towards it, the doorbell rang.

  I stepped towards the front door, but she held up a hand. “I’ll get it.”

  I logged out of the forum and shut down the browser. I wasn’t getting any closer to finding Jenna. It had been a stupid idea.

  I heard voices behind me as Mum opened the front door and I recognised the visitor immediately. It was Pippa Clarkson. She carried a huge bunch of flowers, roses mixed with carnations, and held them out to my mother. Mum looked surprised as she took the flowers.

  Pippa smiled brightly, her teeth dazzlingly white against her pink lipstick. Her hair was carefully styled as usual, and I wondered if she had just been to the hairdressers. I ran my hand through my own hair, which no doubt looked as though it hadn’t seen the attention of a hairdresser for months.