by Steve Mosby
The property had been rented to an Edward Leland a month or so previously. He had a file – minor drugs offences mostly – and the last address they had for him was one he’d shared with his partner, Angela Morris. Former partner, presumably. The coroner had sent through a cursory note – a question mark – about the cuts Groves had seen in the body’s cheekbones, but pending the results of an overnight post-mortem, that was that. The end of Edward Leland, and the end of their involvement.
After work, Groves went to pick up Caroline.
His ex-wife didn’t live in the most salubrious area of the city: most of it was rows of red-brick terraced houses running down a steep hill. As he drove there, Groves was still thinking about Leland. About how it must have been for him not just to die the way he had, but to live that way. An endless, jobless cycle of television and alcohol and sleep, all of it soundtracked by the percussion of kids banging a football against the side of your house. It wasn’t how he’d have wanted to live.
Looking around him as he turned in to Caroline’s dilapidated street, Groves wondered how far his ex-wife was slipping in that direction herself. Even as she came down the path to meet him, he could tell she’d been drinking already. Trying to dull the painful reality of Jamie’s absence.
But then, just as Sean had said earlier, there were a lot of things that people didn’t get to choose.
One summer day – several years ago now – an eight-year-old girl called Laila Buckingham was playing outside her house in the back garden. It was warm and sunny, and Laila’s mother, Amanda, was working in the kitchen, a pan of potatoes bubbling away on the hob. There was background music playing quietly on the stereo, but the patio doors were open, and Amanda was keeping a sporadic eye on her young daughter.
Laila was a happy child, but shy, with few friends, and content to play alone. She bad such a good imagination, her mother would tell the police later. She was happy with her own company. The back garden was fenced off, but not high, and it edged a road, although not a busy one. By all accounts Laila was a clever girl, and could be trusted to be careful. She often played outside. And yet that day there had come a point when Amanda Buckingham had craned her neck to check on her, and Laila was not there any more.
The search for the girl began within ten minutes of her going missing. It was extensive. As time went on, it was also increasingly fraught, because it was obvious to officers within minutes that she had been taken. Every lead was followed and exhausted, while the local community rallied around the family, with hundreds of volunteers searching recreation grounds, parks, riverbanks and outhouses. Trained rescue teams went methodically through the edges of the woods. Laila seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.
Groves had been a junior officer back then, and his role in the search was door-to-door interviews. It was painful work, in that it was monotonous and achieved nothing, but he wanted to do it anyway. If he was a tiny cog in a huge machine, he was still determined to play his part in its turning. His son, Jamie, was not quite one year old, and he could barely imagine the pain the Buckinghams must be going through. So he tried not to let the consistently empty and useless witness statements dissuade him. He prayed that Laila would be found, and tried to keep hope.
On the fourth day, he was working the Thornton estate, a few miles from where Laila had disappeared. He had a list of names to get through, and just after eleven o’clock that morning, he knocked on the door of a man called Simon Chadwick.
Chadwick was in his late twenties, and known to the police. He had problems with drugs and antisocial behaviour, and something close to a child’s IQ, and he hated the police intensely. It was a combination that made it fairly easy for the wrong elements to take advantage of him. A number of his convictions stemmed from allowing another person to sell drugs from his premises.
Groves wasn’t looking forward to the encounter, knowing that the minimum he could expect was some verbal abuse, and when Chadwick answered, the door on a chain, peering out through the gap, he seemed twitchy. Groves’ initial suspicion was that there were drugs on the premises, and he wasn’t sure what to do about that. Under normal circumstances he would have wanted to take him in. Right then, though, they were at full stretch, and he cared more about finding Laila Buckingham than wasting time and resources on a man like Chadwick.
And then he heard the noise.
It was a sound he would never forget. Muffled but distinct, and immediately obvious what it was: a little girl crying. She was somewhere behind Chadwick, deeper in the house.
They stared at each other for a second. Groves knew that Chadwick lived alone, and Chadwick knew that Groves knew it.
As the man tried to close the door on him, Groves kicked it as hard as he could. It was pure instinct. He wasn’t thinking about what would be lawful; he was just suddenly sure that Laila Buckingham was inside that property, and all that mattered to him was getting to her as quickly as possible. And perhaps because he didn’t think about it, the kick was a good one. It took the door off one of its hinges, and sent Chadwick sprawling back into the hallway.
And then ...
Perhaps it was strange, but Groves could never remember much about what happened next. The details remained in his head long enough for him to make a statement from his hospital bed, but afterwards it all faded. He knew the fight with Chadwick had been ferocious, but that he’d managed to subdue him and click the emergency button for backup, and then hang on until it arrived. But these days he had to rely on the report to remind himself, or else the coverage that filled the news over the days that followed.
Hero cop saves missing girl.
He didn’t know it at the time, but the single interview he gave contained a line that would come back to haunt him:
It wouldn’t have mattered how many of them had been in there at the time.
Because while Groves was doing his best to shun the attentions of the media, Simon Chadwick was telling his own story to the police. He claimed not to have abducted Laila Buckingham, and it turned out he had a solid alibi for the window of time around her disappearance. He also claimed that she had simply been staying with him – that he was ‘looking after her’ – and that he hadn’t laid a hand on her. There were other people, he told the police, and it was their fault. He had just been doing them a favour. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t understood.
It was obvious, deep down, that he knew more, but there was evidence that his testimony was at least partially true. Although Laila Buckingham could remember little of her abduction and ordeal, she corroborated some of Chadwick’s story. And there had been a degree of organisation behind the abduction that Chadwick would have struggled to orchestrate by himself. The implication was that a larger paedophile gang was operating locally.
And yet Chadwick was either unwilling or unable to identify the other people he claimed were involved, and those individuals were never found. Ultimately, Simon Chadwick was the only person ever convicted for his part in the abduction and abuse of Laila Buckingham.
Hero cop saves missing girl.
The report had named David Groves, of course. Whoever the gang were, they would have known who he was. They would perhaps have wanted revenge. And two years afterwards, in almost identical circumstances to Laila’s disappearance, Jamie Groves had been taken too.
It was a warm evening, so he and Caroline sat out on the small patio at the back of his cottage. It caught the sun in the evening, although the light was already retreating, slinking back across the overgrown garden at an angle. The air was mild, but still felt heavy with the day’s heat. A fluttering globe of midges hung by the far hedge, while the birdsong was growing lazy and subdued.
They sat on two white plastic chairs, separated by a matching table on which there was a bottle of white wine, beaded with condensation. They each had a glass, and Caroline had an ashtray as well. She was drinking faster than he was, but he was used to that. On a different day, maybe he’d have said something, but not today. There were more b
ottles inside. More than they would need.
‘How was your day?’
Groves thought of Edward Leland burning to death in his half-empty home. The possible cuts on his face. Whatever had happened to him, he hoped the man was at peace now.
‘It could have been worse,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘I didn’t go in today.’
‘No, of course not.’
That was just one of the many ways they handled Jamie’s birthday differently. While Groves did his best to carry on as normal, Caroline, consumed by the loss, dedicated her every waking hour to it. She would have spent today thinking about their son: looking at photos of Jamie; turning his memory over in her head; perhaps even cursing the God that Groves still clung to. But there was no recrimination either way. It was the coping that bonded them, not their differing approaches to it.
He imagined it seemed odd to outsiders that the two of them got along better now than when they had been married. Sean, for one, couldn’t understand why Groves always spent the evening of Jamie’s birthday with Caroline. But the strange truth was that while Jamie’s murder had finally broken them apart, it had also brought them together again. In the past, they’d pecked at each other over trivialities, but after their son was taken, there had been no further arguments. It was as though a switch had been flicked and an unspoken truce called, neither of them seeing the point any more in fighting over patches of ground they both knew didn’t matter.
It had also held them in place. For a long time, Jamie had been the only thing keeping them together. Before he went missing, they’d been like planets separately circling the bright sun of his life. When that sun had winked out, it had left a centre of gravity still strong enough to hold them in its orbit. And so round and round they went, even now, unable to escape the power of the loss, the absence, the emptiness that had once held the bright light of their little boy. And despite the acrimony and bitterness that had once existed between them, there was nobody else Groves would have wanted to spend his son’s birthday with. Apart from Jamie, of course.
As the evening progressed, the two of them made small talk, or sat in comfortable stretches of silence, watching the sun as it moved lower. Both of them, Groves was sure, were thinking of Jamie, who was somehow there with them, yet not.
Jamie had never lived in this cottage, of course, but in Groves’ mind’s eye, he could easily imagine him here. Running around the garden in front of them, perhaps kicking a ball and swiping the midges away. There was a problem with that image, though, because Groves pictured his son as the same little boy he remembered: innocent and excited and delighted by everything. He could even still hear his laugh in his head: a high-pitched, unguarded squeal of joy that had always made everything better. And yet if Jamie had still been alive now, he would be very different. Older and changed. He would like different things. He would look different. He would laugh differently.
That knowledge brought a familiar flavour of sadness with it. Four years on, and Jamie was already being left behind. A small figure stopped in place, destined now to recede forever into the distance. The nearly-three-year-old boy he imagined running around the garden was frozen in time, as old as he would ever be. When Groves was old and grey, Jamie would still be small. He would never grow any bigger than their memories of him.
He had to believe that one day he would see him again, but it bothered him: when he finally died too, and father and son were reunited in Heaven, would Jamie have aged in the intervening time? If so, he would have grown into a man Groves wouldn’t know or recognise, and who in turn would not know him. But the alternative was that he would have remained the same, held in a nascent form, and would find himself running to hug a father who had long become reconciled to his loss. Both options seemed intolerable. Maybe that was why the bereaved often committed suicide soon after their loss, Groves thought. It wasn’t just the grief and the heartbreak, but a kind of existential chasing.
He drained his glass of wine, then poured them both a fresh one. Caroline smiled her thanks, but her expression looked far away, and he suspected she was thinking similar things.
As the evening wore on, Jamie began to flit around their snatches of conversation. At first it was difficult to acknowledge him directly, and it wasn’t until halfway down the second bottle of wine that Caroline said:
‘Have you been to the grave?’
Groves shook his head. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘I left flowers. And a toy. In case he wants something to play with.’
‘That’s nice.’
Caroline’s behaviour made no sense to him, but he could hardly begrudge her it. Every year she left flowers and a toy. The flowers usually remained, but eventually someone would always take the toy. They were always toys for a younger child, because Jamie would always be the same age. Every year his ex-wife bought a birthday present for that same frozen memory of their boy.
‘You’ll go tomorrow?’ she said.
‘Hopefully.’ He stood up, collecting his glass and the second empty bottle. ‘It’s getting cold. We should go inside.’
‘Can I ...?’
‘Yes, you can smoke inside. Today.’
Inside, the dam broke. The way other couples might leaf through a wedding album on an anniversary, they looked through all the photographs of Jamie that Caroline had collected in an album and brought with her. They drank more wine. They talked about him a little more, until finally the barrier disappeared entirely and he became all they talked about. The long, soft blond hair that they’d never had the chance to cut; his favourite books and toys; his little idiosyncrasies. How gentle and lovely he had been.
In such a way, for a while at least, they brought him back to life. But their shared memories were like a stone skipping over the sea of his absence, and no matter how hard you throw it, a stone can’t skim for ever.
‘I miss him.’
Caroline was sobbing now, clinging to Groves on the settee, and he to her. She was close to passing out by then, while he was drunk but wished he was more so.
‘I miss him too. So much. I can’t say.’
It seemed to him that Jamie had somehow become real now. So real that he might as well have been standing in front of them, fingers moving by his sides, that quizzical expression on his face.
Why are you crying, Mummy and Daddy?
‘I just want him back,’ Caroline said.
Groves hugged her tightly. ‘I do too.’
‘I’d give anything. Absolutely anything.’
‘I know.’ His neck was soaked with her tears, but he just held her, wanting her to be okay, for everything to be different, for Jamie to be here. ‘I know.’
He imagined Jamie’s ghost walking over and standing in between them, leaning into the embrace, wanting to be a part of it, the way he always had. Wanting to make things better.
Mummy and Daddy, are you happy now?
It was too much.
‘Come on.’
Groves helped Caroline up to the spare bedroom. He helped her get enough of her clothes off to collapse comfortably into the bed, then pulled the sheet over her. She was asleep in seconds, lying on her side, her breath rattling in her throat.
Then he went back downstairs and drank more wine, and thought about Jamie’s grave. It was a decent-sized plot with a large headstone, big enough for an adult. Jamie had been little for his age, and when Groves had seen him dead, he had been diminished even further. Aside from the clothes and the toy, his remains might have been those of a kitten. But while the body sealed beneath the packed, silent earth was small, the space that had been allocated to him was not, so that it always felt as though they’d buried everything Jamie might have been. All the possible men he might have grown into.
The inscription on the headstone read:
Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
The last words of the Winnie-the-Po
oh stories his son had loved so much. Words that signal that even as we move on, into adulthood and beyond, a part of us is always left behind, remaining as it was. We remember it, and perhaps it remembers us back, but however desperately we reach out to each other, our outstretched hands can never touch.
‘I love you,’ he told the empty front room. ‘I love you so much. I miss you more every day.’
And like that hardened writer allowing his bluebird out when nobody was there to see, Groves began to cry.
Mark
When you’re dead
After leaving Paul Carlisle’s house, I headed back north.
The afternoon light was beginning to dim slightly now, but it seemed warmer than ever. As I drove along the ring road, with the woods in the distance ahead, the fields to my right seemed hazy, as though the air above the grass was dozing off. The trees in the distance there were blurred by the heat rising from the land: vague watercolours, smudged on to the sky.
The road curled steadily west as I drew closer to the woods, until the countryside on the right was replaced by the dark wall of trees that marked the city’s unofficial boundary with nature. They were so thick and tall here that it was impossible to tell how far back they went, but I knew they stretched on for miles: a vast sprawl all the way to the mountains.
I grew up a long way from the city, and my childhood memories of woodland were happy, sunlit ones: playing with my friends; climbing trees; hacking paths through the undergrowth. Some woods are safe, I thought, watching the rough trunks and shadows flashing past beside me. Not these ones, though. Driving close to them, it always felt like there was something in there between the trees, watching you.
And of course, once upon a time, there had been.
My thoughts inevitably turned to my arrival in the city, a year and a half ago. After Lise’s death, I’d taken a huge, hopeful leap career-wise by applying for a post here. I’d revered Detective John Mercer, a legend in the force, for years, and been desperate to join his team. A place as his interview man had opened up, and I’d been both overjoyed and nervous when my application was accepted. And then on my first day here, I’d been drawn into the hunt for a man known as the 50/50 Killer.