THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  ‘I’m not trying to shock you — this is too serious a subject for sensationalism,’ he went on. ‘But it is a fact that many people are being made ill by therapy.’

  In the audience, Shona looked at Pam. Pam reassured her with a smile, but she was angry, Shona could see that. Angry and upset. She felt an answering sting of hurt at the injustice of it — Pam was a healer, she helped people, gave far more of her time than was ever expected of her, gave emotionally — gave of herself. Pam had let down the barriers that for Shona had acted as an obstacle to the establishment of a trusting relationship with her therapists in the past. Dr Greenberg was the type who viewed his patients from the lofty heights of professional reserve. And he was saying that Pam made people ill?

  Max patted the air, trying to quiet the protestations of the audience. ‘People go for counselling, therapy, whatever, because they are unhappy. Why should they be unhappy? The majority of recovered memory sufferers are middle-class, successful career people. They have every reason to be happy. What right have they to be unhappy?’ He paused. ‘But success does not necessarily make us happy. Material comfort — even security — aren’t enough. Good food and wine, holidays abroad, delightful children, a comfortable house in a good area — a car and a mobile phone do not bring contentment.’ He spread his fingers.

  ‘Well, then, if we are unhappy, there must be a cause. It’s a rather bleak prospect to look to oneself for such a cause, but who else can we blame? Why, our parents — our upbringing. So these unhappy people go to a therapist to find permission for their misery and the therapist coaxes from them dreadful things their parents did to them. “No wonder you’re screwed up!” they tell their clients. “It’s amazing you’ve coped so well with all this inside of you.”’

  There was a murmur of dissent from the audience, but a few remained still, and he could see them thinking about what he was saying.

  ‘And then what do the recovered memory therapists do?’ he said. ‘They encourage the expression of rage, the acting out of violent feelings.’ He shook his head. ‘This is not healing, my friends.

  ‘Therapists invite their patients to channel their hatred, their vitriol, to let it flow out of them, in a variety of cathartic acts.’ He shrugged. ‘What is the point of this? There’s no reservoir of anger within us, any more than there is a finite quota of love which we are capable of bestowing, no conduit of expression — we need not empty out the reservoir of bitter gall for fear the dam will break. Rage . . .’ He balled his hand into a fist, and raised his arm, glaring out at the assembly and finishing at a roar. ‘Rage is generated by the manifestation of it!’

  He saw one or two heads nod here and took a few seconds to catch his breath before going on. ‘I ask you to consider statistical fact: first, in a survey of American clinicians, who, let’s face it, lead the field in recovered memory therapy,’ — there was an ironic cheer from the sceptics in the auditorium — ‘the modal number of professional publications read by clinical psychologists specializing in recovered memory was’ — he paused — ‘nought.’

  A few in the audience exchanged uneasy glances.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘recovered memory specialists read . . . nothing. A big . . . fat . . . zero. Which leads me to my next statistical fact: the bulk of treatment decisions are made on the basis of their intuitive appeal. Now, we all know the problems that a clinician’s personal bias can cause. We’re all victims of our own past, aren’t we?’ He smiled and felt a ripple of positive response — hardly a tidal wave, but he was making some headway.

  ‘But what if that past has been reinvented through the subtle coercion of a recovered memory therapist?’ He shook his head. ‘Recovered memory! Let’s call it by its real name — make no mistake, it’s false memory.’

  At that moment, Shona began to hate him. She hated his smugness, his sureness, the arrogance with which he dismissed the sincere hard work of hundreds — thousands — of people. And in dismissing them, he dismissed the suffering of those they tried to help as just so much hysterical ranting.

  * * *

  Max arrived home at ten thirty, having stopped to take questions from the audience at the end of the lecture. No one had threatened him, which was a refreshing change, although one woman, after telling him that she fervently hoped he would go through what she had suffered one day, tore up the reading list he had distributed and threw it in his face.

  The police were at his house when Max arrived. He suppressed mild irritation at being stopped on his own doorstep by a police constable and explained that he owned the place. There was a broken pane of glass in the back door, but otherwise no damage. Thanks to Miss Bembridge’s swift action, the intruder had got no further than the kitchen when the police had arrived. Max called in an emergency glazier, resigning himself to paying the extra for a night-time call-out, and resolved to have flowers delivered to his neighbour the following morning.

  It wasn’t until later, when he’d had a chance to sit and think, that he started wondering if it had been a normal burglary or if the boy in Jenny and Fraser’s care might have something to do with it. There had been a number of calls to the hospital switchboard, asking where the boy could be found. Shona had taken one of the calls and had sought him out to warn him.

  Shona. She had been at the lecture that evening, sitting in the middle section with a group of others, her face shining with something approaching reverence for the woman at the centre of the little huddle. Shona had been his patient when she had suffered a breakdown in her late teens. She had recovered and was discharged from his care, but there had remained a fragility in her which made her particularly vulnerable to the influence of others. She would come into his sessions bubbling with happiness about some new organization she had joined, only to return in a week or two, disillusioned and despondent. If she’d hooked up with a recovered memory counsellor . . .

  Max froze. He thought he had heard something. He listened. There it was again — a small, metallic squeak — a door hinge, perhaps the back gate. He set his whisky tumbler down on the table next to his chair and crept to the door of his sitting room. His heart was thudding, and he wondered for a moment if he should do the sensible thing and run like hell. He picked up the telephone receiver and heard the steady buzz of the dialling tone. There was definitely someone outside, moving cautiously around the back of the house. Perhaps the burglar had returned, thinking that the back door would be left insecure overnight.

  Max jumped as the three-tone warning sounded and a recorded voice suggested to hang up and try again.

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ he muttered. Hearing his own voice gave him courage. He replaced the handset, crossed to the doorway and, pausing only to return and pick up the whisky bottle as a weapon, went into the hall. The kitchen door stood open, and as he approached, he saw the back-door handle turn, slowly, carefully. The key was in the lock. He had meant to remove it, as the police constable had advised, but he’d been side-tracked. The window above it had been boarded, so he couldn’t see out. He tiptoed into the kitchen, his heart thudding faster. Licking his lips nervously, he adjusted his grip on the bottle, which was now slick with sweat. Quickly, he turned the key in the latch and flung the door open, the bottle raised, ready.

  A bright light shone in his eyes and he stepped back, the bottle still raised above his head. He heard a muffled cry of alarm, followed by a scuffle of footsteps. He blinked into the darkness, yelling, ‘Stay away from here! I’m onto you and so are the police!’ Neither of which were true, but he hoped he sounded convincing.

  * * *

  How much does she know? Fraser wondered. Does she suspect?

  He watched Jenny in the darkness, her face peaceful, serene, vulnerable. She had arrived home late, exhausted by her lectures and travel. Her arm rested on his chest, the pulse of her wrist a barely discernible throb against the cantle of his collarbone.

  Why does she love me? This had always been a puzzle to him, ever since that first day, when she swept down
on him, smiling, coat flapping, like a bird from the fog. How can she trust me? She had always found trust so easy, had given it so readily, only rarely being disillusioned, and he, who had been so careful, so circumspect in giving his trust, had been so catastrophically wrong. He thought how frail trust is, how easily lost. And to regain it? He feared that would prove impossible.

  Why did any of this have to happen? He raged against their childlessness, against the single, devastating event that had led them to this existence, to the constant shift of affections from one child to the next — substitutes for the children they could never have. The remorseless drift of children in and out of their lives, each loss a new bereavement. Although it hadn’t seemed this way until now. He had imagined — had persuaded himself — that they were happy. But life, it seemed, had a way of jolting him from a smooth, untroubled, anaesthetized course in quite another direction. As when he had proposed to Jenny, convinced that he would otherwise have lost her entirely to Simon. She was young, lovely — not a beauty perhaps, but Jenny had a rare glow about her. Was it goodness? Happiness? Whatever it was, it made her blindingly, compulsively attractive, then as now. She hadn’t yet noticed Simon, but Fraser had known — had recognized the signs from his own infatuation — that Simon was in love with Jenny.

  So they had married, and would have drifted gently for a few years, planning for parenthood, in no immediate hurry, but then Jenny had lost the baby they hadn’t even known she was carrying, had nearly died, and suddenly having children seemed a matter of supreme importance.

  Should he have told Jenny his wishes, his desire to adopt? Perhaps if he had told her, she might have come around to his way of thinking. It seemed she had blanked off that part of her mind, so that adoption had never entered into the discussion. Fostering was to fill the void in their lives. Fostering meant constant change, never making a permanent commitment, never having to admit that this was the closest she would get to having her own child.

  With time, they had accepted their childlessness, and had thought themselves content to help other people’s children. Now Paul had happened. He didn’t arrive, he hadn’t come into their lives. This enigmatic stranger was an event, an incident, a happening — and he had changed everything. Would you know him? Hunter had first asked the question, and he had repeated it to himself a hundred times since.

  Fraser sighed, and when he bent to kiss the nape of Jenny’s neck, she stirred and moaned, and in his heightened emotional state his kiss felt like a betrayal.

  They were late getting up on Thursday morning. Fraser and the boy were badly rested, hollow eyed. Jenny, exhausted by her lectures and late return home on Wednesday night, woke with a vague sense of resentment foolishly harboured after a dream in which Fraser had spoken unkindly to her.

  There had, as yet, been nothing conclusive from the media exposure — a word that made Jenny uneasy, for she felt that the pictures of the boy, beautiful and strangely haunting, would somehow put him at risk. The police were following up leads, checking information. Mike had told them he would let them know as soon as he had anything useful.

  Anything useful. The phrase filled Jenny with dread. She felt a gnawing apprehension that what was useful to the police might prove cataclysmic for the boy. She sensed a deep and entrenched terror in him. It was in the fearful sidelong glances he gave them, in the silence that had persisted now for the six days he had been in their care. She knew that his social worker was having no more success with Paul than she was, although Fraser said that he had heard Paul humming once or twice the previous day, behind the closed door of his room, safe behind the barrier of wood and protected by the talisman of a cardboard sign — snatches Fraser could not identify but which had the repetitive quality of nursery rhymes.

  The phone rang. Jenny pushed Fraser gently back into his chair. ‘Finish your breakfast,’ she said. She took the call in the hallway, her hand wavering over the receiver, momentarily anxious that this might be another disturbing message from Mr Hunter. Judging by Fraser’s troubled look as she left the kitchen, the same thought had crossed his mind.

  When she returned, the boy had paused from painting to listen to a bird singing on the hawthorn at the bottom of the garden, and Fraser was watching him with rapt attention.

  ‘That was Max,’ Jenny said, breaking into Fraser’s reverie.

  Fraser looked into her face, but she saw that his mind was still on the boy.

  ‘Fraser, are you listening?’ she asked.

  He shook himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Max. Is he all right?’

  Jenny frowned. ‘He’s been burgled. During his lecture last night, or shortly after.’

  ‘Did they do much damage?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘No. A neighbour heard them and called the police.’

  ‘Lucky escape,’ he murmured, his mind already drifting elsewhere again.

  ‘He should have that place alarmed.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Fraser said. ‘I might be late tonight — staff meeting — and I need to call in at the library on the way home.’

  ‘Fraser?’ Jenny stared, appalled that he had so easily dismissed the burglary.

  For a moment, it seemed that Fraser had forgotten the subject of their conversation. ‘He should be more careful.’

  ‘Careful — of what?’

  ‘Security and that.’

  ‘Have you had another call?’ Jenny asked, immediately suspicious as to the cause of his distraction.

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed. Then, more softly, ‘No . . .’

  ‘Because if you have, we should tell Mike.’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ he said. ‘End of term addles the brain. It’s pretty fast and furious just now: exams, reports, getting up to date with coursework you’ve not managed to cover earlier in the term. And the kids don’t make it any easier — they’re getting bolshier by the day.’

  ‘I expect they’re tired, too.’ She looked at him, wondering if she would regret bringing Paul to their home. She knew that Fraser was missing Luke. Maybe Paul was reminding him just how much he was missing: the very difference between the boys recalled how easy their relationship with Luke had been, how affectionate he was, how lively and open. Fraser could do without that kind of reminder, just now.

  ‘If you want to go and see Max, I’ll look after the boy,’ Fraser said.

  Paul looked over at Jenny. She had thought he wasn’t listening, but the sheer terror in his face convinced her otherwise. ‘I think it’ll wait until tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you’re already late for work, and I’d like to see Paul’s picture, when it’s finished.’

  The boy looked sharply away and for some minutes he simply sat, staring at the painting. Then he carefully folded it into four, climbed down from the chair and threw the paper into the bin.

  Breathe softly. Look ahead, close your mind. Make it safe, make it safe. They're watching! But if you don’t look, they won’t see you. Won’t harm you.

  Jenny put out a hand to the boy, but he shrank from her, clasping both hands to his chest, avoiding eye contact. So much of his behaviour was contradictory in this way. He would use the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign whenever he went to his room, but once or twice when Jenny had gone upstairs his door had been open, as if he was listening, or perhaps he wanted the reassurance that they were still there, even though he refused even basic contact with them.

  * * *

  ‘Max seemed worried, Fraser,’ Jenny said. She had coaxed the boy to eat a little breakfast and had persuaded him into the garden, so their discussion had continued with less restraint.

  ‘It’s more likely one of his recovered memory folk, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t approve of Max’s methods, do you?’ she said.

  She could see Paul through the open door. He was staring at the swing and the other toys as if he had forgotten what they were for. Or had he never learned, Jenny wondered, distracted for a moment from their conversation.

  ‘He asked if we’d had any more phone calls—’
>
  ‘Now don’t start that again, Jenny!’

  ‘I’m not starting anything. He said the hospital switchboard has had a few funny calls. He thinks they could be linked to ours.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Fraser started clearing away dishes and Jenny automatically picked up a tea towel.

  ‘I just don’t. Can we leave it now?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Hell! I’ll be late for work.’

  ‘Go,’ Jenny said. ‘You might as well.’

  * * *

  ‘I told you I’d be there, didn’t I?’ Vi Harvey chain-lit her fourth cigarette. This had been a long, difficult call. ‘I said I’d agree to your terms. You can have whatever the bloody hell you want. But you go back on your word and I swear I’ll fucking kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.’

  She meant it. The heat of her rage and frustration, even with the fire-break of distance and telephone cable between them, was fierce.

  ‘I’ll keep my word,’ he said. ‘If you keep yours.’

  Chapter 10

  Jenny saw an outline: a blurred, fuzzy hulking shape beyond the frosted glass of the front door. She felt a momentary stab of alarm and turned to check that Paul hadn’t followed her from the kitchen. He was painting one of his house pictures, but this one was all in red. The walls, door, windows, even the bars were painted in livid crimson.

  The doorbell rang. Fraser had gone to work. She wondered if she should simply ignore the bell, but then dismissed the idea as a nervy response to her disturbed sleep. She opened the door and almost took a step back from the aggressive stare of the man on the step.

  ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’ He was big. He carried the sort of muscle that makes a man look fat in a suit.

  Her first impulse was to slam the front door and run for the boy. Then the man produced a warrant card. Jenny stared at it stupidly. DC Douglas. How could this shaven-headed thug be a policeman?