The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  Erin shook her head.

  “What would we tell them? That I have a hunch? Something tells me they won’t believe me. Or take us seriously. But she lives alone…” she said. “Like Monica. We should go check on her, at least. What if she’s hurt?”

  * * *

  Erin drove. When we pulled up I didn’t have time to register where we were, the building or its tenants. Erin was out of the car before the engine had even died.

  “You don’t really think she’s in any danger, do you?” I asked, more to reassure myself than anything else. Erin didn’t answer. It was clear she hadn’t thought Monica was in any danger until it was too late.

  She marched straight for a buzzer by the door and held it down. It crackled for what seemed like forever. She let go and tried again.

  Then, finally, there was an exhaling noise.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs Bowles?” Erin blurted, relief palpable. “It’s – I’m the one who came about my car, you let me inside—”

  “Ah yes. Did you get home okay?”

  “Yes, look, can we come up? I have some questions for you.”

  “Questions? Why would you have questions? Didn’t I help you enough?”

  “It’s about your boys. I want to know about Oscar and Isaac—”

  “You didn’t have car trouble, did you?” Mrs Bowles asked. “I don’t want to talk any more. I don’t think it’s a good idea to drag up the past.”

  Erin glanced at me. It was clear she was taken aback. I gave her an ‘I told you so’ look and shrugged. This was exactly the response I’d got when I’d phoned her.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable,” Erin said. “But I really was grateful for your help. And I got the feeling you wanted to tell me something, before. Are you… Do you still—”

  “Who do you have with you? I don’t talk to the press.”

  I stepped back, scanning the building. I couldn’t see any faces at the windows, but they were dark squares against the bright day.

  “W-what?” Erin stammered.

  “I watched you. Who’s with you?”

  I glanced at the car, then back at Erin. Eventually I shrugged. She could obviously see us, but it didn’t have to mean anything.

  “A friend. She’s alright, though,” Erin fumbled. “She’s with me, I can vouch for her.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mrs Bowles said. There was a strange hiccuping sound and then she said, “I don’t talk to the newspapers so I think you need to leave.”

  “I understand. I’m really sorry, it’s just—”

  “The boys were my life. My children still are my life, ever since I stopped working for other people and started doing what I wanted to do. I used to clean houses and I never had any control. But I had to take charge. All of my children are my life. I just wanted to keep them safe. Do you understand?”

  This was forceful. I felt like we were missing something – and looking at Erin’s face it was clear she felt it, too. We were having two different conversations.

  “You said something about siblings,” Erin tried. “Last time—”

  “My children are my life,” Mrs Bowles repeated. “If anything were to happen to any of them… I can’t have that sort of hurt again. I’m not interested in being in your silly interviews. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “Hurting your children is the last thing we would ever want,” I said. I spoke louder than Erin had. More firmly.

  It didn’t work.

  “I have to go now. I’m sorry you got the wrong impression.”

  The intercom went dead.

  Erin sagged against the side of the building, the same shell-shocked look on her face that I was sure I wore. She thrust her hands into her pockets and a frown crept across her face.

  “Well that was weird,” I said.

  TWENTY THREE

  Harriet

  “SO WHAT NOW?” ERIN asked as we walked through the door to my flat. I threw my keys into the bowl in the hall.

  When I turned she was massaging the bridge of her nose. It made her eyes water – or perhaps she was crying. I wanted to step closer, but I didn’t know whether she’d want me near her. Or whether she had just wanted me to stay in the bathroom with her last night because I was the only person who knew exactly what she’d seen and she needed somebody, anybody, who’d understand.

  “We work on what Jenny gave us,” I said calmly.

  In the kitchen I put the kettle on, waiting for Erin to follow me through. She did, slowly.

  “Do you think…” she trailed off.

  “What?”

  “It just… It felt suspicious. What Jenny said, how she was with me. Before she let me into her flat, she opened up to me. But this time, the way she acted when she saw you there. It was the total opposite. Almost like she was hiding something.” Fear danced in Erin’s eyes.

  “What are you saying?” I flicked the kettle off so I could listen properly. “Do you think she’s involved—”

  Erin shook her head quickly. “I don’t know, I didn’t mean that. I don’t…” She stopped speaking and flicked the kettle back on. “I’m just wound up,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know what to think.”

  We made the tea in silence, my mind going a mile a minute.

  “Jenny mentioned her kids,” I said eventually. “Her other kids. If she won’t talk, maybe one of them remembers the night Oscar and Isaac disappeared?”

  “I can’t imagine they’d be able to forget it,” Erin said. A haunted look passed over her face.

  “Right. Even if they thought their brothers ran away, maybe they can help us plot out a timeline for before it happened. We know that everybody else – you and your brother included – didn’t have much in common beyond their abductions. We have the windows and the time of year, both of which we don’t have for Oscar and Isaac. But you and Alex weren’t taken in the summer either, so maybe it’s not the time of year exactly that’s important. Maybe it’s more – I don’t know, temperature-related or something. If it’s warm there’s a higher chance of finding open windows. So, maybe it’s opportunity? Except – well, it can’t be purely opportunity, otherwise you wouldn’t all have shared bedrooms with your siblings.” This was making my brain hurt. “There’s more in common with the cases after bodies were found. Pyjamas that don’t belong to the child, insulin overdose as cause of death. Before you were abducted none of you went to the same places, shopped in the same places. You were all cities, counties, apart. But if you throw Oscar and Isaac into the mix, in Derby – well, they’re basically at the centre of it all, geographically speaking. So maybe…”

  “Maybe he was reckless?” Erin frowned. “Maybe the first victims were close to home. So, Derbyshire? And that’s why he went further afield when he did it again. Jeremy and Michael were from, uh, Lincoln, right?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Then you’ve got kids as far as Sheffield, and as close as Burton. All over county borders, no real pattern, except that they’re within a few hours’ drive of each other and near motorways. But if you take Derbyshire as the central point, that would make Sheffield and Lincoln sort of outliers.”

  Erin’s expression was a mask of sadness. I knew she was thinking about Monica, because I was too.

  “Where do we start though?” she asked. “We don’t know if the locations mean anything, we don’t know if the age or the gender of the children really matter. The boys started off looking sort of alike, but in the end, we – all of us – were just… us.” She sighed. “Did the pattern evolve accidentally, or was it tailored? We don’t even know anything about Jenny’s children. They might have different last names, like Oscar and Isaac did.”

  “She fostered some, but some of the children were officially adopted by her,” I said. There was a brief line about them in the very first article I’d found about Oscar and Isaac’s disappearance, the one I’d found under my mum’s lino. “Hang on.”

  In my office I rooted through two of my scrapbooks before
I recovered the piece. I’d found it just weeks ago, but it must have been under the lino for years, probably since around the time it was printed. The paper was yellowed, shiny with glue. I wouldn’t have noticed it, except that day I’d been thinking about Jem and Mikey. With Thomas being gone that was happening more and more. And there it was, laid amongst other old bits of newspaper which had been used to make the concrete more even. I looked at it, at the date – just over a year before Jem and Michael were taken – and thought, what are the odds?

  I took the scrapbook back into the kitchen. Erin was staring intently at her phone.

  “I’m on the Facebook page again,” she said. “It’s where I found Jenny’s address. There are quite a few followers but I’m trying to scroll back to the beginning to see if any of them match the family photo on the page.”

  I slid the scrapbook across the table. From Erin’s face I realised she hadn’t looked at it when she was going through my notes. Gently, I held down the pages so she could read.

  “No Sign of Runaway Boys.” She read the title of the article, her voice leaden. “They were both under ten years old. How on earth did everybody think they’d actually run away?”

  “They had a history of it, I guess,” I said. “And it changed things, even though they were high risk.”

  “There,” she said, then. She was gesturing to the piece of the article I’d remembered. “Ms. Bowles had one other foster child living with her at the time of the boys’ disappearance, and she has two adopted sons (family pictured).”

  The picture was missing, but the caption beneath it was still there. It listed their names, and ages. Isaac, Oscar, Adam, Jonah and Danielle.

  “Jonah and Adam must be the adopted sons, and Danielle the foster,” Erin said. “I’ll see if I can find anybody with those names on the Facebook page. Danielle will probably be harder to find.”

  I booted up my laptop and started a Google search. Adam Bowles and Jonah Bowles got me a whole lot of nothing. Or too many somethings. So many Facebook pages but none of them local, several links that didn’t even seem related. I found one reference to a Bowles Cleaning Service on a blog about old local businesses that had since folded, which we could link to Jenny at a push, but it told us little besides the fact that it had been a Derbyshire mobile business with a focus on friendly and efficient customer service.

  We worked in silence for the most part, breaking away only for a small lunch which both of us picked at. I kept the tea coming as we each followed rabbit hole after rabbit hole and came up empty-handed.

  Later on we tried the TV while looking for a distraction, but it was short-lived. We’d caught the tail end of the local news, and there was Monica’s face. The sound was muted but we both saw it. Erin turned it off like she’d been scalded as I turned my face away.

  “It’s no use,” Erin said after another long while of searching. We’d been at it for hours, now, comparing profile pictures to the newspaper photo in my scrapbook, trying to narrow down by age, but all we’d found were two Adams who hadn’t listed their surnames as Bowles or their location. We couldn’t rule them out, but we couldn’t contact them easily either, unless we fired random messages into the void. We hadn’t found a single Jonah that looked even vaguely the right age. “Either they don’t want to be found or they’re not there at all.”

  “We could try the Danielles again,” I said. We’d found at least thirty who lived in the UK and could be the right sort of age, but without a surname or updated photo it was almost impossible to figure out who the right one was. “Send them all a message.”

  “Saying what?” Erin blew out a big breath, then rooted around for a cigarette. “Can I smoke in here?” I didn’t normally smoke inside but these weren’t normal circumstances. I shrugged and got up to open a window. Erin continued, “We can’t exactly message thirty people and say, ‘Hey, were you ever in foster care in Derby?’”

  “Why not?”

  “We just can’t,” she said. Exasperation made her clumsy, and she knocked her mostly empty mug. We both scuttled back, grabbing phones and laptops and papers. “Shit, sorry!” Erin swiped at the mess furiously with a paper towel. “How will this get us anywhere? It’s hopeless. It just feels like it’ll never ever be over.”

  She scrubbed frantically, her neck corded with tension. I reached out – slowly, so she could stop me. She didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Why don’t we take a break?”

  Erin sniffed, her frown easing. “Okay. God I’m such a mess. Can we get out of here for a while? I’m getting myself all twisted up.”

  I waited until Erin got up to change before sending private messages to all of the Adams and the Danielles we had found. I could see Erin’s point about it seeming endless, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t try.

  * * *

  The bar was dark and the drinks were cold. More importantly the place I’d chosen didn’t have a TV which would be showing the local news. Erin was happy when I chose somewhere small and dimly lit. It felt good to be out of my flat, away from ghosts and grief. We were both content to sit quietly and take stock.

  I found us a corner booth. At the bar I ordered myself a triple gin and tonic, searching for the kind of abandonment only clear spirits could give me, and two equally strong rum and Cokes for Erin. I wasn’t sure if she wanted two, but she probably needed them.

  She was just finishing on the phone when I made it back to the table.

  “Sorry, that was my mum.” The look on her face was tired, but warm. “She just found out about Monica. I didn’t tell her. I… I don’t know why I didn’t. I guess I didn’t want her to worry? Which is stupid, because now she’s even more worried. Maybe I was in shock. I did think about it, but I never called her. Anyway, she wants to come home, which is exactly what I’d thought she’d want.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her she should stay where she is. Apparently Wendy said the same thing. I mean, what can she do if she’s here? I’d rather her stay out of harm’s way.” A shadow passed over her face. She reached for one of the rum and Cokes. “You remembered my drink order,” she said, a little surprised.

  “I always remember what a lady likes to drink.”

  I had never felt this way about anybody before. Especially not a woman. But there was something about Erin that drew me in; she was vulnerable but strong, smart and beautiful, but also so much more than any of those things. At first I hadn’t known what to expect; I’d been almost envious of the way she’d shucked off her old self, changed her name and moved on from her tragedy, but now I realised she hadn’t really managed to move on at all. She’d only hidden from the past, not escaped it.

  Erin sipped her drink. Her eyes were darker tonight, smudged with their familiar kohl, but also a touch of uncharacteristic blue.

  “Mum said she had a ‘friend’ staying with her. They were going on a date tonight. That’s why she called. She said she wanted to come right home.”

  “Is that – unusual?”

  “Well. Yes. My mum doesn’t date. But apparently it’s some guy she’s been seeing for ages and ages and it’s quite serious. I mean, he’s staying there with her at the cottage, I think. I guess that’s more reason for her to stay there. I think if he wasn’t there she’d have just turned up tonight wanting to make sure I’m okay. I’ve got to check in with her as it is. This guy, though… I wonder if she wanted me to meet him. If that’s why she kept asking me to go with her.” Erin paused, thoughtful. “I’ve been avoiding her a lot. Turns out I don’t have a clue what she does with her free time.”

  I thought of my own mum. Her persistent nagging for me to join her hikes. And Thomas, so far away. I knew I should make more of an effort with her, and I didn’t even have an excuse not to.

  “Perhaps you ought to talk to her more,” I said.

  “About my brother?” Erin raised an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you thought it loudly enough.” She
gave a small laugh, a huffing sound. “I know what you think of me. I saw it the first time I met you. You think I should talk about Alex, like you talk about your cousins, right? Well, you have somebody to talk to – your brother. He understands what you’re going through, from the same perspective as you. I don’t have that.”

  “I…” I felt this like a punch to the gut. How I’d been frustrated with Thomas for not emailing me often enough, and here was Erin, never able to talk to her brother again. I felt tears prickle at my eyes and I blinked.

  Erin’s face softened.

  “What’s your brother like?” she asked.

  “Thomas is, uh, seven years older than me. He’s an engineer. He moved to Australia a couple of months ago with his fiancée.” I paused. “He’s – really funny. Makes a lot of stupid jokes. But he puts up with me pestering him, looks out for me. I can’t wait until he comes back to visit. I miss him.”

  Erin was silent, sipping her rum. Processing.

  “I used to talk to him about Jem and Mikey a lot. He was the only safe person who I could tell, when it got too much. I used to feel like we would never be as good as them? God, that sounds so fucked up. But, like, when we were kids my mum was really overbearing. She got better as we got older, once we were out of the house and she sort of had to accept it, but when we were kids it was all of these rules. No open windows, no walking to school; we weren’t even allowed to play outside unless somebody could watch us. I think she would have always been very protective, but it was worse because of what happened to them.

  “I didn’t realise how much we talked about them as adults, either. Until he moved. And now… I’ve come to realise that most people don’t want to talk about them outside of my family. Because it’s too sad, or they don’t know what to say. So, they focus on what they think is safe. They talk about him. All those stupid true crime roundups, journalists, whatever, they never seem to care about the victims – or the rest of us. Like it’s too unbearably sad for them.”

  Erin finished her second drink.

  “It wasn’t like that with me,” she said quietly. “They wouldn’t leave me alone. They followed me everywhere, badgering and poking, wanting to know my story. It was like they didn’t understand why I couldn’t tell them. Alex was my older brother. He protected me. I think I left him to die, and the worst part is I don’t even remember any of it.”