Frankie flicked cigarette ash into an empty beer bottle. ‘Leave.’
‘We can’t just leave Mum,’ Robert said. ‘She’ll never forgive us.’
‘She’ll never remember.’
‘That’s harsh.’
Frankie stood. ‘So go back to her. Get done for kiddie fiddling after I tell the cops and spend some time inside. See how you like it. It isn’t easy, mate.’
‘She was fifteen,’ Robert objected.
Frankie rubbed his forehead. ‘Once we’re out of here, we’ll let the shit die down and then you can go back.’
‘And you just disappear?’ Robert said. ‘Man, this is getting more and more fucked up by the minute.’ He looked at the boys. ‘What are we supposed to do with them?’
Frankie sat his beer down, dropped his cigarette butt into the empty bottle, and paced across the room. ‘I have every right to see my son.’ He pointed a stubby finger at Robert. ‘There’s no denying it; I’m his father.’
Robert held his hands up. ‘I know, I know—’ he glanced again at the boys ‘—but what about the other one?’
Frankie ran his hand over his face, fingers through his hair. ‘Shouldn’t have brought him along in the first place.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Robert whispered. ‘But we can’t very well drop him off outside the nearest police station, can we? They’ll know where we are; they’ll pick us up in no time.’
‘Then he comes with us.’
‘How far?’
Frankie’s voice raised an octave. ‘As far as it takes. We can drop him somewhere in Dublin.’
‘And then they’ll know we’re in Ireland.’
‘Then we put him on a fucking flight to France. I don’t know. Just shut your mouth and let me think a minute.’ He paced back across the room, twitched the curtains and stared out into the night. The dark dome of a starless sky weighed heavily over the bed and breakfast. The world was getting smaller and around every turn was a nasty surprise.
He lit another cigarette, breathed smoke against the windowpane. Dark thoughts swirled in his head: knife the kid in the gut; throw him in a lake—look at him, he’d be too weak to struggle against the current. ‘I’m not a murdered,’ he mumbled.
‘What?’
He turned from the window. ‘He comes with us. We’ll find a way to drop him off somewhere. For now, we keep moving and keep out of sight.’ He popped the lid off another bottle of beer.
‘You know the old bitch downstairs will smell that smoke, don’t you?’ Robert said.
Kevin woke to the sound of Martin’s lacerated cough. Martin was sitting up in the bed, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped tightly around his legs. His face was drained of colour and his eyes were red and puffy.
Kevin let his cough subside before sitting up. The thin curtains revealed the muggy grey of a new day and in the soft light he saw the form of his father in the other bed, Robert asleep on the russet, wing-backed armchair in the corner. ‘What time’s it?’ he asked Martin.
‘Don’t know.’ Martin’s voice was as jagged as his cough.
Frankie stretched and sat up. ‘Get dressed. It’s time to go.’
‘We are dressed,’ Kevin said meekly. He was sweating in his jeans and jumper under the coarse blankets.
Martin raised a hand as though he was in class. ‘Can I have a shower? Just a quick one.’
‘There’s no time,’ Frankie said. He stood and kicked Robert’s foot. ‘Hey, Davro, get up.’
‘I smell bad,’ Martin said.
Kevin got out of the bed and flexed his legs, raised an arm and sniffed his jumper.
‘Can’t we get some new clothes?’ Martin asked. ‘The police must know what we’re wearing, anyway.’
‘I thought you were going to pipe down. Bobby! On your feet.’
Martin shifted stiffly across the bed and lifted his legs out by the knees. ‘I’ll be really quick.’
‘How can you shower if you can barely stand?’
‘Kevin can help me. It won’t take long.’
Kevin watched his father’s face closely, saw the flicker in his eyes as he decided to relent. ‘Robert, take him to the shower.’
‘No,’ Martin said. ‘I want Kevin.’
‘Robert.’
‘I’m not getting undressed in front of him.’
‘You want to shower with your clothes on?’ Frankie rolled his eyes. ‘You’ve got five minutes.’ He pointed at Kevin. ‘And no funny stuff, all right? Robert, go stand outside the shower. Keep an eye on them.’
Robert led them along the hall to the bathroom, threatened them if they tried anything stupid, and stood outside the door.
Inside, Martin pulled up his jumper and Kevin reached to help him. ‘It’s all right,’ Martin said. He pulled out the sheet of newspaper they had stolen yesterday in Bristol and handed it to Kevin. ‘Read it,’ he whispered, ‘but keep your voice down.’
Kevin grinned, turned the shower on for sound-proofing, and started reading.
An ex-convict is thought to have kidnapped his son and a friend, Cornish police say.
Francis Catchpole, 38, of London, spent 21 months in Wandsworth Prison for the systematic abuse of his wife, Sarah. He was released two weeks ago and has since gone missing—along with his son Kevin, 9, and Kevin’s disabled friend, Martin Boaden.
Martin suffers from a rare degenerative disease and without proper care and medication his condition will deteriorate and could—
Kevin lowered the newspaper. ‘It says, “Continued page five.”’
‘We don’t have page five,’ Martin said. He slumped down onto the toilet seat and hung his head.
‘It’s all right,’ Kevin whispered. ‘We don’t need it. Hey, our names are in the paper.’
Martin smiled wanly. He stood. ‘I should shower before they come in after us.’ He pulled up his jumper again. ‘Can you help me?’
Kevin folded and stuffed the newspaper page into his pocket.
Frankie sat behind the wheel of the car with Martin in the back seat. Robert and Kevin should have been out of the bed and breakfast by now. They were to put in an appearance at the breakfast table, claim they couldn’t stick around, pay the old doll for the night and get out. That was over fifteen minutes ago.
He looked in the rear view mirror. ‘So, cripple, tell me. How’re you doing?’
Martin coughed, said nothing.
‘No, seriously,’ Frankie said. ‘Pretend like I care for a minute. Are you hurting? Are you in pain?’
‘No,’ Martin said, but it was clear to Frankie that was he lying. He turned to look at him. His face was pallid and grey, his body an awkward collection of limbs held loosely together by dirty clothes.
‘We’ll get you some new clothes somewhere later today. And something for that cough, too.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you do that? You don’t even want me here.’
‘Did you not say you wanted clean clothes?’ Frankie turned in his seat and faced the front. ‘Fine, if you don’t want them, see if I care.’
‘You don’t care.’
‘Boy, you’re seriously beginning to piss me off. Where the hell are those two?’
Across the street, Robert came out of the bed and breakfast with his hand on Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin was looking pained but acquiescent. They weaved between the traffic. Robert opened the back door and pushed Kevin in, slamming it shut behind him. He got in the front passenger seat. ‘Let’s go. Sooner we get to wherever the hell we’re going the better.’
Frankie turned to look at Kevin. The boy’s face was drawn, puffy. ‘What’d you do?’
‘Can we just get moving?’ Robert asked.
‘Shut up,’ Frankie said. To Kevin, he repeated, ‘What’d you do?’
Robert said, ‘He tried to—’
‘Shut up! I want to hear it from him.’ Frankie leaned between the front seats, took Kevin’s chin and eyeballed him. ‘What did you do? Wh
at did you do?’
Kevin squirmed.
‘Let’s just get going before someone sees us here.’
‘What did you do?’
‘He couldn’t have gone anywhere, Frankie.’
Frankie’s voice rose, his grip on Kevin’s chin tightened. ‘What did you do?’
‘I tried to run out the back door,’ Kevin cried. ‘I hate you! I want my mum!’
Frankie pushed Kevin back into the seat, released his hold and faced forward. His nostrils flared. Without looking at Robert, he said, ‘I give you one job to do. You were supposed to smile at the old bitch and pay her for the room, then get the hell out of there.’
‘I couldn’t keep a hold on him while I was dealing with her. He slipped off down the hall when I had my back to him.’
‘You shouldn’t have turned your back.’
‘What was I supposed to do? Handcuff him to one hand and pay her with the other?’
‘Whatever it takes.’
‘He didn’t get anywhere. The back door was locked. He didn’t even scream for help or anything. That woman didn’t have a clue; he tried the back door, saw me coming down after him and came back to me. No fuss. It’s all sweet, okay?’
‘Sweet?’
‘Yeah. It’s fine, okay? Nothing happened.’
Frankie slapped the back of Robert’s head. He turned and pointed a finger right in Kevin’s face. ‘Next time you try something stupid like that I swear to God I’ll kill your friend. Got that?’
Docile and compliant, Kevin nodded.
Chapter Twenty-two
They spent the night at the Premier Travel Inn on the waterfront, but they didn’t care about the view. Neither of them slept well, preferring instead to sit in the darkened room and talk, their conversations twisting in ill-defined directions.
‘You know what I wish?’ Sarah had said. ‘I wish I’d taken more photos. I wish I’d brought more from London; I left hundreds behind. I picked up a couple of photo albums, but there were more, there were recent photos that hadn’t made it into an album yet. His last birthday. That last Christmas. They were stuffed in a kitchen drawer and forgotten.’
‘There’ll be other birthdays,’ Tessa said, ‘other Christmases.’ Her voice was low, flat. ‘There has to be.’
‘I’ve got his school photos,’ Sarah said, smiling delicately. ‘He hates them; says they always look bad, but school photos always do, don’t they? I like them, though. He always looks like a thinker in them, like he’s thinking about the laws of gravity or something.’
They had arrived in Bristol yesterday evening in a journey that took a little over four and a half hours, much longer than Graeme had forecasted it should. They had taken a wrong turn by Bridgwater and rather than continuing forward to pick up their route again, Tessa had decided to double back.
The sun was going down when they checked in and dropped their bags in their room. They went immediately back out onto the rain-soaked streets with umbrellas and photos of the boys. ‘Have you seen these boys? They’d be with a man, about this tall.’
Nobody had seen them. Nobody cared.
‘Someone,’ Sarah said at one futile moment, turning aimlessly on the spot to take in the darkening street, ‘has seen them. Someone knows where they are, damn it. They have to.’
Their first port of call had been Clifton Down Shopping Centre on Whiteladies Road, from where Sergeant Williams had said Frankie made his call. They moved up and down the travelator between the car park and the mall numerous times, showing the photos of their two smiling boys, asking if anyone recognised them, if anyone had seen them this morning by the public phone rank. But the only people around now were last-minute shoppers, cider-drinking teenagers and young couples parking up before heading up to one of the local bars on either side of the railway line.
The evening and early night had been fruitless and they had returned to their hotel room tormented and dispirited.
Now, shortly before going down for breakfast, Tessa called Graeme, put her mobile on speakerphone and told Graeme to do the same.
‘Alan stayed the night. I wasn’t going to let him go home on his own,’ Graeme said. ‘I gave him Martin’s room.’
‘I told him the couch would have been fine,’ Alan’s voice issued from the phone.
‘Nonsense,’ Tessa said. ‘You can’t sleep on the sofa when there’s an empty bed in the house.’
‘How are you both?’ Sarah said, her voice loud as though the concept of a speakerphone was novel to her.
‘We’re all right,’ Graeme said. ‘We’re more worried about you two.’
Tessa sat on the edge of her bed and held the phone out between them. ‘Nothing to worry about. Like we said last night, we’re fine—a little tired, but fine. We’ll find them.’
‘We’re going to go by that place Sergeant Williams mentioned again this morning,’ Sarah said. ‘We probably won’t find out anything, but it’s worth another look.’
‘In case we missed anything,’ Tessa added.
There was a moment of silence on the line, before Graeme said, ‘Just be careful, okay? If Frankie’s still around, you don’t want to get him angry before you have a chance to call the police. Go have breakfast and give us another call in an hour.’
Breakfast was sombre and hurried. They sat and listened to the chatter of dishes and people around them, and ate with mechanical efficiency. ‘I wouldn’t mind a cigarette right about now,’ Sarah said when they had finished eating, but she didn’t have one.
They left the hotel and drove the ten minute journey back to Clifton Down, all the while keeping a watch on the streets and passing cars for signs of Frankie or the boys. Sarah had begun to entertain serious doubts about their rash plan to scour the length and breadth of Bristol. Frankie wasn’t foolish. Arrogant, ignorant and brash, maybe, but he was never foolish.
She had studied an atlas yesterday evening, trailing her finger over the suburbs of Bristol, following routes out in all directions. Would he head east towards Bath and all the way to London? Would he return home? She doubted it. She figured north, through The Cotswolds, maybe towards Birmingham or Manchester. She would continue her search, no matter how far it took her, or how long. Frankie was not going to get away with this; she had put up with enough of his blows—mental as well as physical—and wouldn’t take it any longer. She would see him rot in prison for what he had done.
She worried constantly for Kevin’s safety. When Frankie had broken their son’s arm when he was six, she vowed never to let it happen again. But it wasn’t long before she was submissive again, keeping on Frankie’s good side, but ever vigilant for a violent outburst in front of Kevin. Whenever he came home drunk, she’d send Kevin to his room out of sight.
That afternoon, nearly four years ago now, they had been picnicking in St James’ Park. It never ceased to amaze Sarah that you could step off a busy road into a quiet London park and feel as though you were in the middle of the countryside, far from noise and traffic and pollution. She had been showing Kevin the swans, throwing breadcrumbs at them. Frankie had been dozing on the grass under a tree after numerous beers when Kevin ran towards him, dropped to his knees and prodded Frankie’s chest. ‘Look, Daddy, look!’
Daddy looked. He took Kevin’s arm, growled something about peace and quiet, and threw their son against the tree. Sarah heard what she thought had been the snap of a branch, but when she looked and saw Kevin, her little Kevin, come limping towards her, his arm twisted at an impossible angle, his nose busted and bleeding, she knew what had happened.
The memory of it now, as they circled Clifton Down shopping centre, was as raw and vivid as if it had only been yesterday.
‘Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. Have you seen this boy?’ The woman she spoke to glanced at the photo with little regard and shook her head. ‘He’s only nine years old,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s my boy. He’s been kidnapped. We think they’re in Bristol, somewhere. Have you seen him?’
‘No, sorry,’ the w
oman said. She took a tighter grip on her handbag strap and walked away.
‘But you haven’t had a proper look,’ Sarah called after her. ‘Just look at it. If you do see him, call me. Let me give you my number, okay?’
The woman ignored her, continued walking.
Sarah turned to another woman, an older lady. ‘Have you seen my son?’ She held the photo out. ‘He’s only nine years old,’ she said.
The older woman took the photo, studied it. ‘What’s his name, love?’
‘Kevin. Kevin Catchpole. Did you see him? He’s with another boy. Martin. He’s disabled. And a man. Did you see them?’
The woman’s gaze was intent on the photo. Finally, she handed it back. ‘No, sorry, love. Bless him, he looks like an angel.’
‘He’s my angel,’ Sarah said. ‘Have another look. Are you sure you haven’t seen them?’
‘Positive,’ the woman said. ‘Sorry. I hope you find him.’
‘So do I,’ Sarah said, her voice cracking. ‘So do I.’
She turned, looked for Tessa and saw her speaking with a young couple who were shaking their heads negatively. Sarah wanted to cry, wanted to scream. She saw a shadow on the ground, felt someone walking towards her from behind, and she spun on her heels. ‘Have you seen—?’
A wiry-framed policeman and a tall WPC smiled at her. ‘What can we do for you, madam?’ the officer asked. His smile never faltered and she realised instantly that he assumed she was insane. In that same revelation, she considered the fact that perhaps she was. She must have appeared to the passersby as a woman possessed.
‘My son,’ she said. ‘He’s been taken. We’re trying to find them. They were here in Bristol.’ She offered him the photo of Kevin, a close-up taken last Christmas. He was wearing a yellow paper crown from a cheap Christmas cracker. She spent all night trying to remember the cheesy joke that came along with it, the plastic trinket that would have fallen out, but she couldn’t. ‘Maybe you saw them,’ she said. ‘The other boy—that’s his mother—he’s disabled, needs his medication. Have you seen them?’
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