Luke however had a nose for weakness and had no intention of letting such an easy target escape before he had wrung every last drop of fun he could out of him. Holding up the picture of Lucy he stuck his tongue out and waggled it suggestively just millimetres away from the paper, grinning at Ricky as he did so.
‘Reckon I’d like to have a go on her as well. What you sayin’, lads, shall we pop round and see her at lunch? Bet she could take us all on. Dirty bitch.’
He looked at Ricky with a mean triumph shining in his piggy little eyes. Ricky stood up with a resigned sigh that Luke took to mean he was making himself scarce.
‘Aw, poor baby look, he’s getting upset. Going to run home to Mummy are we? Except she’s not there is she, she’s out shagging. Bet she wishes you’d get murdered as well, snivelling little twat.’
The laughter at that last comment was more subdued and decidedly nervous. All eyes turned to Ricky, gauging his reaction. Ricky stepped towards the older, taller boy and sighed again. He knew the way school politics worked and if he didn’t stick up for himself now he would be taunted about this for weeks. Unaware of any danger, Luke continued to grin at him.
The punch nearly knocked the older boy off his feet, sending him sprawling back into his friends, who jumped out of the way and let him fall unceremoniously on his backside. There was a shocked silence.
Luke raised a hand to his face in obvious shock, that turned to rage when he saw the blood on his hand from his now bust lip. Ricky had stepped back, looking at his still clenched fist as if he didn’t quite understand what it had just done. Luke snarled up at him.
‘You little prick.’
It was only then that Ricky saw red. Only then that everything else seemed to fade into the background except the sneering boy in front of him, and his whole focus spiralled down onto Luke’s face and wiping that sneer away. Obliterating it. As he crouched over him, hitting him again and again, he could barely feel the arms and hands now grabbing and pulling at him and the screams and raised voices calling his name. It wasn’t just Luke he hit out at, it was Matt, and Terry Prince, and Ethan, and perhaps even partly himself, swinging wildly until he wasn’t even connecting with his target any more and the tears were pouring down his cheeks so that he could barely see and as he was dragged away he fought against the arms holding him, his breath coming in pants.
‘Calm down, boy, calm down.’
The teacher who had hold of him dragged him outside and Ricky took large, grateful gulps of the crisp air. A crowd of fascinated faces pressed up against the café windows and he saw Luke being led away by another teacher, pressing a wad of tissue to his bleeding face. His energy spent he slumped in the teacher’s arms, and only then did the man release him, regarding him not so much with anger as with concern.
He was led to the headmaster’s office in a daze, barely aware that he was still crying. His first thought as he was roughly pushed into a chair in front of the head was that he wanted his mum. That was quickly followed by the realisation that when she found out about this, he was probably going to be grounded for the rest of his life.
‘I’m really worried about him; I know he’s under a lot of pressure, but this is not my son.’
Matt put an arm around Lucy. She had called him as he came off shift and hearing the distress in her voice he had been round as quickly as he could manage, still in his work suit and tie. She sank into his arms gratefully but held herself a little rigidly as though she was scared to fully relax, or perhaps she was just on hyper-alert for the next catastrophe about to impact on her life.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this; but honestly, it’s quite normal. The amount of fights I got into at school, for one reason or another. Just be glad the other boy’s parents aren’t pressing charges. From what you’ve said it sounds as if he was asking for it anyway.’ Perhaps not the right opinion for an officer of the law to hold, but as far as Matt was concerned, boys were boys and bullies needed to be stood up to. Lucy just shook her head.
‘But he went too far; the teacher said it was like he just blacked out. He came in drunk last night too, and the things he said.’ She didn’t elaborate but looked embarrassed, but Matt would hazard a good guess as to the nature of the things Ricky would have said to her while drunk. He had been worried about the boy’s reaction himself. Even under normal circumstances no teenage boy wanted to consider the fact that their mother might actually have a sex life. Too often Matt had been made all too aware of his own mother’s attempts to fill the gap left by his father’s death; an endless stream of ‘uncles’ who were all only too happy to assist Maria Winston to drink herself to death.
‘He’ll come round, Lucy. Look, it’s not my area, but it might be worth thinking about counselling. For both of you.’
‘He’s had counselling, Matt. When he kept “seeing” Jack. It’s not as if I haven’t tried to help him.’ She sounded affronted that he was questioning her, but Matt shook his head.
‘I was thinking more from a Victims of Violent Crime angle. I know it was a long time ago but given recent circumstances you would still be eligible. I could have a word with Family Liaison.’
Lucy pulled out of his arms, looking annoyed.
‘I had quite enough of all that at the time; I don’t see how dragging it all up again would help either of us. If those idiots hadn’t released him, none of this would be happening now.’ She glared at Matt as if he had something to do with the Parole Board’s decision, even knowing that was blatantly unfair. Matt let it go. Hell, she needed someone to blame, why not him? After all if he hadn’t taken her to bed this wouldn’t have happened either. Funny how life did that to you; you made your choices in a certain moment, and perhaps you weighed up the likely consequences or perhaps, due to impulsiveness or intoxication or sheer self-destructiveness, you didn’t. Either way, there were always consequences you couldn’t have anticipated, couldn’t have planned for. Or perhaps people just had a tendency to become conveniently blind when it came to things they didn’t want to foresee.
‘I don’t know if sending him to my mother’s was the best idea. I feel like I’m abandoning him,’ Lucy confessed, twisting her hands in her lap. Matt caught at them, stretching them out palms up, rubbing the pads of his thumbs in small circles in the fleshy centres. It was a surprisingly sensual touch that calmed her, grounded her somehow. She let her breath out in a long sigh, willing herself to relax. The truth was, as much as it pained her to admit it, Ricky didn’t seem to want to be anywhere near her right now. Her mother’s offer to have him for a few days during his suspension from school had come at the right time, and she hoped her mother would be a stabilising influence on him. Still the guilt was there that he wasn’t here, with her.
‘Give him time to calm down,’ Danielle had advised her, and although her mother hadn’t uttered a word about the pictures of her and Matt in the paper, Lucy caught the disapproval in her opaque gaze, heard the edge of it in her voice. Even she thought Lucy had no right to be dating at a time like this and Lucy, as much as she had levelled the same accusation at herself, had felt a flare of indignation. Was she expected to be on her own forever? To spend the rest of her life locked in the prison of grief while the whole world carried on without her? The only moments of peace she had felt for years had been in those dreamy hours after making love to Matt, after she had left him and was able to bask in the memories of his body on hers. It was strange, she thought, that she seemed more able to appreciate him and the effect he had on her after the fact, as if his very presence somehow stopped her from processing what was actually happening.
They sat in silence for a while, Matt continuing to massage her palms and Lucy looking down at the movement of his hands as if detached from it, as if it were pieces of clay he was moulding rather than her own flesh. Watched the insistent, circular press of his fingers and thought about him doing the same thing to her hips, her breasts. The memory of it made her flush; she felt the heat staining her cheeks and pulled her hands gentl
y away.
‘What are we doing here, Matt?’
‘Is this a philosophical question?’ He tried to make light of it and Lucy smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
‘Every time we’ve met up, we’ve both spoken about how we shouldn’t be doing this. It’s caused so much trouble already. Yet I still called you today. And you still came.’
Matt nodded, unsure how to respond to her statement or her previous question. He went for honesty.
‘I don’t know, Lucy. All I know is I haven’t felt like this before, and I don’t mean that in some romance movie way. It just sort of feels inevitable.’
‘Because of Jack?’ Her words dropped between them like stones.
‘Dailey – my senior officer – asked me that, you know, if we would even be seeing each other like this if it wasn’t for Jack, and now Terry Prince getting parole.’
Lucy looked at him, at the strong lines of his face and the full lips that made her want to nibble them. ‘Do you think,’ she asked slowly, ‘that we may be looking at this all wrong?’
Matt frowned.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Instead of bemoaning the fact that you were the officer on Jack’s case, and wondering if it’s right we should be together or if we’re only attracted to each other for the wrong reasons, what if, like you said, it’s all inevitable?’
‘You mean like fate?’
Lucy nodded. They stared at each other, both aware that a line had been crossed more surely than when they had had sex. They were talking in terms of ‘we’ now. A ‘we’ that, even though both of them would have professed not to believe in such things, was somehow already destined, an unforeseen consequence of the tragic events that had led them both here. For a moment Lucy felt a chill, a sudden icy breath that left raised skin on her forearms, then it was chased away by the hot crush of Matt’s mouth on hers.
They were kissing. Ricky stepped back into the shadows of the alleyway, his heart like a stone in his chest.
It hadn’t been easy to convince his nan to let him out for a couple of hours, given that he was suspended from school, grounded until his mum said otherwise and pretty much in everyone’s bad books, not least his own. But he had managed to persuade her that he needed to tell Mitzi what had happened and why he wouldn’t be able to see her for a while. ‘She’s all I’ve got, Nan,’ he had said, making more of his fledgling relationship than was really there. Nan, as he had expected, had agreed. Not only did she feel sorry for him but he had detected the note of disapproval in her voice when she spoke to her daughter and even though his nan wouldn’t say it, he knew that she agreed with him on the subject of his mum and Matt. Although not perhaps in the words he had used.
Even though he had exaggerated about Mitzi’s importance in his life, he had surprised himself by how much he really did want to see her. For all that she was pretty annoying, not to mention way too nosey about his family, he liked both the status that came with having a girlfriend and the feeling he got when she kissed him. It wasn’t just about ‘getting into’ her, as Tyler would put it, but about the way she made him feel, looking at him as if he was both important and special. Once she had stopped going on about Jack and that stupid Facebook page that was.
With his relationship with his mum changing in ways he didn’t want to think about, it felt natural to seek Mitzi out as a source of comfort. That was one of the things girlfriends were supposed to do wasn’t it? Be there for you. He even felt like he had gone one step further than Tyler. For all that Tyler bragged about how many girls he had done and the precise things he had indeed done with him, Ricky didn’t see any girl wanting to be on Tyler’s arm permanently. All the girls he went with were slags. Not like Mitzi.
So when he saw her, illuminated in the street lights that were just coming on as the spring evening faded into cold and dark, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He had spotted Tyler first, kissing one of his aforementioned girls, one hand down the back pocket of her jeans and the other hanging at his side holding what looked like a joint. The hair was too dark to be Shauna’s and Ricky had smirked, wondering who Tyler was with now; a smirk that had frozen on his face midway, becoming a grimace as his brain tried to make sense of the information his eyes were relaying. That Tyler’s latest ‘slag’ was, in fact, Mitzi herself.
He didn’t know what to do. Instead of rage he felt only a numb shock, and then a scattering of images as he replayed his recent meetings with both Mitzi and Tyler, looking for clues, hints that this was going to happen. He went to step forward, not really knowing what he was going to say to either of them, but then they broke apart as Tyler took a drag of his spliff and he heard Mitzi’s voice, high and girlish and loud in the quiet street.
‘You’re a great kisser. Much better than Ricky. He gropes at me like uurggh. You can tell he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’
Ricky felt physically sick, almost wounded, a literal reaction to words that were like a punch to the gut. Then a flush of shame came over him, washed over him much like the rage that had come over him when confronting Luke, except that had been a hot, fuzzy feeling and this was like worms crawling all over skin.
Tyler just grinned down at her, his face taking on the almost lop-sided look that he got when he was stoned, his voice thick like he had a mouthful of treacle.
‘Yeah, babe. You gonna give me a blowjob then?’
In answer Mitzi just giggled, then giggled some more when Tyler took one of her hands and pressed it to the crotch of his sweatpants. But she didn’t pull it away, instead left it there while Tyler placed the spliff in her mouth and she inhaled. He watched her glossed mouth make a small ‘oh’ around the end of it before Tyler took it back off her.
‘I suppose. If you want,’ she agreed. As if it was a normal, everyday thing.
Ricky turned away, not wanting to see or hear any more. He wanted to disappear, to forget that he had seen them, but he knew he wouldn’t forget. He moved back down the alleyway as quietly as he could, praying that they wouldn’t see him. He should be confronting them, doing to Tyler what he had done to Luke earlier but instead he wanted to just run away. It wasn’t just that he was physically more intimidated by Tyler than the other boy, but the shame of it. Of Mitzi and Tyler knowing he had heard her words, had heard them mocking him. He felt small, and stupid. That he had thought she really did like him. That Tyler was really his friend. Hearing Mitzi’s laughter winging its way through the night, further away now, he picked up his pace and when he reached the end of the alleyway started running.
He was halfway home before he remembered he was staying at his nan’s and had to turn and retrace his steps, wishing he had the balls to go and apologise to his mum. Mitzi was right, he was stupid. It was no wonder she liked Tyler more than him. Just as he had always known that Lucy, even if she would never admit it, had liked Jack more than him.
Lucy snuggled into Matt’s chest, half wishing he didn’t have to wake up and they would have to get up and go about their day, so that she could savour the feel and scent of having a man in her bed again. After they had made love the night before – and it had been making love this time, a tender exploration of each other’s bodies rather than the frenzied passion of their first coupling – it had seemed natural for him to stay over. She knew when he was gone the house would seem achingly empty, even more so because Ricky was away.
It was a strange feeling, this new neediness she felt in her for Matt. His presence was a buffer from the outside world and, perhaps, from her own demons. When the shrill ringing of his phone cut through the morning silence, she knew the respite was over. Matt had to go, and the demons would be back.
Matt sat bolt upright, the phone to his ear before he had even opened his eyes.
‘DI Winston.’
He was silent, listening, and Lucy reached up and trailed her nails across his back, tracing the hard lines of his body, committing them to memory. Recalling how well their bodies fitted together.
T
hen he turned round and the look on his face froze her thoughts in place.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Work? What’s happened?’
She felt almost resentful that someone had to have a crisis just as he was here in her bed. Then his words chased away any thoughts except a dawning horror.
‘A child has gone missing.’
Lucy felt a rushing in her ears, a familiar nausea.
‘Taken?’
Matt was up and pulling on his clothes, his face grim. He paused, and there was a haunted look on his face. Lucy felt cold and wrapped her arms around her nakedness.
‘We can’t say for certain. Response have gone out to the parents; the mother said he was playing in the garden and she only took her eyes off him for a minute.’
He stopped as if he had only just realised what he had said. Lucy felt a cold hand twist her guts from the inside.
‘How old?’
‘Scott didn’t say; but pre-school I think.’
Just like Jack. Lucy was shaking.
‘It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him?’
Matt couldn’t answer her.
Part Two
When the child is born, the mother is also born – Rajneesh
There’s an innocence contained in you, but also an innocence in the process of being lost – Bruce Springsteen
Chapter Nine
Wednesday Morning
Once he was at the station, Matt quickly took charge as the investigating officer on the case. In the case of a missing child – particularly one so young – the first five hours were crucial. As soon as Response officers had been sent out to the parents and ascertained that the child was indeed missing, notification was sent to the Missing Person’s Bureau and Children Services, a national Child Rescue Alert issued, a Family Liaison Officer assigned and a press strategy put together. If the child didn’t materialise within the next few hours, a press conference would be held and a televised appeal made by the parents.
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