THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  He turned sideways, jerking his head to indicate a smaller man behind him. ‘Can we come in, then?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ There was no room for negotiation. Jenny began closing the door and the second man stepped forward.

  ‘Hang on, love,’ he said. ‘You can’t just refuse to talk to us, you know!’

  Jenny looked past Douglas to the second man. He seemed astonished by her reaction. He dipped into his jacket pocket and produced his own warrant card.

  ‘DC Sallis.’

  Jenny glanced over her shoulder to the interior of the house. She was worried that the conversation would bring Paul out of the kitchen, and she knew that Douglas would frighten him.

  ‘Look, you’ve seen our ID,’ Sallis said.

  ‘Mike promised me he’d come himself if there was any news,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Mike who?’

  ‘I know things get busy, but he’s usually reliable on these things. He’d at least send a female officer. The boy’s scared enough as it is.’

  Jenny caught the exchanged looks of bafflement between Sallis and Douglas. ‘If you’re not here about Paul . . . Oh, Jesus.’ Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Max. Is he—?’

  Douglas rolled his eyes. ‘Max,’ he said, in his curiously monotonous voice. ‘That’d be Max Bygraves, would it? Max Headroom?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Got it! Mad Max, right?’

  All Jenny’s suspicion returned. ‘Give me your warrant card,’ she said to Douglas. ‘I’ll phone through to Canning Place and get confirmation you are who you say you are.’

  Douglas tilted his head, leaned back a little. ‘Tell you what, love. You can let us in, or we can have our little chinwag down the station.’

  ‘Try it,’ she said, a slow, smouldering heat building in her chest. ‘I dare you.’

  Sallis — the smaller one — intervened. ‘She’s got a point, Dave,’ he said. ‘She’s within her rights. Give her your card.’

  Douglas glared at Jenny but made no move to comply.

  ‘Give her the card, will you?’ Sallis growled.

  Douglas took out his warrant card with great reluctance and with very bad grace handed it over.

  ‘You might want to see if you can get through to Mike Delaney,’ Jenny said, addressing Sallis. ‘He’ll give you my background.’ She closed the door.

  Douglas blinked a couple of times. ‘Think she’s a Tom or what?’

  Sallis grinned. ‘Don’t let Mike hear you say that. Thinking the only good-looking bint he’d be on speaking terms with’d have to be a Tom. Anyway, she doesn’t look like a Tom.’ He fished in the inside pocket of his jacket for his mobile.

  Douglas was disdainful. ‘They don’t all wear fishnet tights and leather boots, you know.’

  Everyone got their name shortened down the nick, or else a ‘y’ was tacked on the end: he was Dougy, Wright was Wrighty, MacBride was Macca. But Sallis didn’t like it. Douglas had tried calling him Sally — only tried it the once, mind — and the experience had created a dark area in his subconscious, which would not admit to actually being wary of Sallis’s temper but which nevertheless caused him to avoid using his name altogether.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Sallis said, keying in the number. ‘What do Toms wear, then?’

  ‘You know. Normal clothes. Like normal girls.’

  Sallis finished punching the numbers on the keypad and frowned. ‘So, what’s normal?’

  Douglas got halfway through a careful description of what normal girls wear before he realized Sallis was taking the piss, by which time the smart-arsed little runt had got through to Sergeant Delaney and he couldn’t give him a dig to let him know he didn’t appreciate the joke.

  When Jenny Campbell opened the door, after speaking to DI Crank at police headquarters, the men had changed places. With Douglas looming behind him, Sallis, who was head and shoulders shorter, looked like a slightly shady businessman with his minder.

  Sallis was quick to apologize. ‘Didn’t know you were looking after the little lad,’ he said. ‘No wonder you were a bit jumpy, like.’

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ Jenny said, returning Douglas’s warrant card.

  He waited a moment and, no invitation forthcoming, said, ‘Any chance of a chat inside, love?’

  She opened the door wider, allowing them in. ‘Ms Campbell. Or Jenny,’ she said.

  Douglas prodded Sallis in the back to let him know what he thought of tarts who called themselves Miz. They followed her through to the front sitting room, Sallis unconsciously taking in extraneous information on the way. The house was big, by his standards — high ceilings and big, square rooms. Hell to heat in winter, he thought. They’d looked after it well — recent decoration, stripped wood floors. Seemed like Ms Campbell had looked after herself pretty well, too. Shaggy blond hair that moved very nicely when she walked, likewise her hips, which had just the right amount of flare to stimulate interest. Her jeans fitted in all the right places. She wore a pale blue cotton shirt and was delicately tanned — golden, rather than brown.

  Sallis shook his head. His wife had told him he had become a drooling old codger when he’d hit thirty. He was beginning to think she could be right. She did have nice skin, though, Ms Campbell — Jenny — and she was wearing some light, citrusy perfume that made him think of summer, gardens and fresh, clean air. The sitting room was sort of golden as well: yellows and shades of orange and parchment. Rugs on the floor, rather than a carpet, which Sallis disapproved of as impractical: dusty in the summer and cold in the winter. The settees were a bit plain as well, just white linen. Seemed to him she’d want a dark colour to hide the sticky paw prints of the kids she fostered.

  ‘They’re washable,’ Jenny said, clearly amused by Sallis’s open appraisal of her decor. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

  Sallis sat on the sofa, tapped the arm and said, ‘Nice,’ not very convincingly. Douglas wedged himself into one of the armchairs without a word. DS Delaney had asked to speak to him on the phone, and he’d been subdued ever since.

  ‘Is he about, like? The lad?’ Sallis asked. ‘We’ve had loads of calls from the Granada thing.’

  ‘I’ve taken Paul to his room. He’s nervous of men.’ Douglas shot her a look that said, Not the only one, is he? and Sallis gave him a hard stare that said, Behave.

  ‘So,’ Jenny said, ‘if you could keep it down, I’d be grateful.’

  ‘Doesn’t he want to play out, like?’ Sallis asked. He had a lad of his own, about the same age. He was probably tear-arsing around the school playground at this time of the morning. Seemed a shame for the kid to be indoors when he could be out in the fresh air.

  ‘He doesn’t want to do much of anything.’

  Sallis nodded, digesting the full meaning of that remark.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘Oh yeah, right,’ Sallis said, pulling himself together. ‘Failing to report an accident.’ He watched her reaction. It was incredulous, faintly amused.

  ‘Accident? As in car accident?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not me.’

  ‘Sorry, lu—Jenny. Your car. Has to be. We got it on video.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tuesday. At around six p.m.’ He consulted his notebook. ‘Seven minutes past, to be precise.’

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. ‘That is precise.’

  ‘Security video. They log the time.’

  Jenny shrugged, told Sallis the time her train had left Lime Street, and approximately where she would have been when she was supposed to have crashed her car.

  ‘You say you were going to give a lecture?’ Sallis said. ‘I thought you were a nurse.’

  ‘I am, part-time. Part-time lecturer and academic writer.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He turned down the corners of his mouth, jotted a few points in his notebook. ‘What kind of books d’you write, then?’ he asked, curiosity getting the better of cool insouciance.

  She d
idn’t answer straight away. Sallis looked up from his notes. Was she wondering whether to make an issue of the irrelevance of the question?

  But after a moment, she said, ‘Articles, mostly, rather than books. Child care, fostering, that sort of thing.’

  Sallis nodded. ‘Fits in, like, with what you do.’

  ‘I hate to interrupt,’ Douglas butted in and Sallis shot him a withering look. The man had no subtlety.

  He dragged his eyes away from Douglas and addressed Jenny again: ‘Where did you park the car?’

  ‘At the multi-storey car park next to the station.’ Jenny thought for a moment. ‘I can’t remember exactly where, but I wrote the level on the ticket. The car was where I’d left it.’

  ‘Was the petrol down, when you got back?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jenny said, ‘I didn’t notice.’

  Sallis grunted, making more notes. ‘What time did you get home?’ Sallis asked, looking up from his writing into iridescent eyes, and feeling slightly disconcerted to find her scrutinizing him.

  ‘I was in Nottingham all day Wednesday. I got the last train home. Arrived back in Liverpool at about eleven thirty, I think. Wouldn’t your video tape tell you all this?’

  He glanced over at Douglas, embarrassed to have been caught out. ‘Thing is,’ Sallis said, ‘the bloke whose car was dented didn’t get back from his business trip till this morning. He reported the damage to the car park’s security, and they went through the tapes till they got your car backing out.’

  Jenny sat forward, resting her forearms on her knees. ‘Well, can’t you see it isn’t me driving out of the car park?’ Jenny asked. ‘I really didn’t crash my car.’

  He dipped his head apologetically. ‘The video camera was filming another area of the car park when — whoever — got into the car. All we got was the crash and the car driving away.’

  Jenny nodded, thoughtfully. ‘If you play your tape on, you might see whoever bringing it back. I found the car exactly where I’d parked it on Tuesday.’

  ‘We’ll do that,’ Sallis said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Douglas said. ‘But it doesn’t change the evidence, does it? We’ve still got your car backing into the Laguna and then buggering off.’

  ‘Is the car here?’ Sallis asked.

  Jenny led them out through the front door. The garage had been built into the basement of the house. ‘I’m sure I’d’ve noticed if the car had been damaged,’ Jenny said, opening the garage door. The garage took up the whole of the floor area of the house, with brick-built pillars to support the weight of the building above. The place smelled faintly of engine oil but more pungently of apples, and Sallis noticed there were boxes of fruit and vegetables stacked in one corner. The whole of the far wall was given over to shelving and a series of hooks for storing larger tools. They were in pristine condition and everything was neatly stowed. He wondered whether it was Jenny or her husband who was the DIYer.

  He turned his attention to the car, walking around it and squinting along the edge of the paintwork, looking for scratches or dents. It did, indeed, seem to be untouched. He crouched down at the rear of the car and examined the tow bar. ‘Here y’are,’ he said, inviting Jenny to hunker down beside him. ‘See that?’ He pointed with a pen. There were a few scratches on the metal.

  ‘We have a caravan. Those could be . . .’

  ‘And this.’ He took out a small plastic bag and scraped a few flakes of pale blue paint into it from the tow bar.

  ‘I take it that’s—’

  ‘The same colour as the car that was damaged. Right.’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘I can’t explain it. The car was there on Wednesday night when I got back. Exactly where I’d left it.’

  ‘Who else uses it?’ Sallis asked, sealing the bag before standing up.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Husband? Children?’

  ‘We have no children.’ No matter how often she said that, it always sounded like an admission, the acknowledgement of a guilty secret. ‘My husband hates cars,’ she went on, quickly. ‘He doesn’t drive. Comes out in a cold sweat just sitting in the driver’s seat.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  This was from Douglas.

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny answered, meeting his aggression with a cool stare.

  * * *

  Paul was at the window, watching them leave. He heard the clunk of their car doors and the engine starting up.

  He had left the door open as a sign she could come in, but she knocked anyway, and asked for permission. He didn’t answer, but waited until they had disappeared from sight, even pressing his cheek to the pane. Perplexed momentarily by the paradox of cold glass and hot sun, he watched his breath steam and then vanish on the windowpane.

  She came and stood next to him.

  ‘They were policemen,’ Jenny said.

  He slid past her, avoiding contact.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and hummed a few bars of something but shut up when he realized she was listening. He sat looking at his watch, waiting for her to leave. The sun streamed into the room and bounced off the watch, making a green doughnut at the back of his eyes. He screwed them up tightly, then opened them again. A circle of gold danced on the ceiling above him and to the left. He watched the disk of light, entranced, and noticed that as he moved, it moved.

  Guardian angel, he thought. When you were all alone, your guardian angel looked after you. They stood just behind your shoulder, just out of sight, but sometimes, if you turned really fast, you saw a faint glitter of light, or heard the rustle of feathers as they flew up to heaven. He sighed.

  Guardian angels were unreliable, he had found.

  Gradually, he became aware that the light was coming from his watch face. It used to make him laugh, the idea that a watch had a face: happy face was ten past ten or ten to two, sad face at twenty past eight or twenty to four. His watch had a happy face, just now.

  He made it beam off the walls and ceiling onto the teddy bears and polar bears and donkeys and penguins (he had hidden the pigs in the wardrobe). Then something wonderful happened. A second disk of gold joined his, darting like a fairy, a sprite, following his, playing tag. Once, he laughed out loud, because he had foxed it, sent it entirely the wrong way.

  She laughed as well. Her watch must have its happy face on, too. He looked up at her, into her eyes and, for the first time, consciously acknowledged her presence, her status as a person, as another human being.

  * * *

  He watched as Jenny and the boy walked toward the main entrance of the hospital, weaving between the parked cars, Jenny talking all the time, encouraging the child, no doubt trying to keep his mind off the therapy session. They passed right in front of his car, but neither looked into it.

  ‘Do you know this boy?’ What a question! The TV presenter couldn’t know how crass he was in asking it.

  I know every scratch and scar on his eight-year-old body. He has a purple birth mark, small, hidden by his hair, just above his left ear, and a chickenpox scar on his back, between his shoulder blades. I know him, all right. I know every thought, every hope, every wish, dream and desire of his lying, selfish little heart.

  ‘Despite daily therapy, the boy has not been able to tell the police what happened to him . . .’

  Well, that’s something, I suppose. And the reference to therapy was enough to bring me here. Now that I’ve found him, we’ll soon have him back to his old self.

  As she stepped through the door, Jenny glanced over her shoulder, and her face changed from calm and smiling to an expression of sudden shock. Had she felt his presence? The boy looked up at her, his eyes widening with fear.

  Yes, I’m here — you feel it, too, don’t you? I’m coming for you, child, and you will know my displeasure.

  Chapter 11

  ‘You have to work on your feelings,’ Pam had told them. ‘You have been out of touch with yourself for such a long time, you’ve forgotten what it is to allow your feelings free rein.’

  S
hona knew she was right. It reminded her of that time she had put off phoning her mother. ‘Time . . .’ she told herself. ‘I’ve never got the time.’ So, time went by and her guilty feelings turned to resentment. ‘There’s two ends to a phone,’ she would mutter, eyeing the handset as if her mother’s face was staring reproachfully up at her from the telephone table. But she could never quite convince herself. Her mother had loaded her with the burden of responsibility since childhood. It was Shona’s job to do the phoning, to visit and cheer up and shop and make sure that her mother was happy. Except she never was. Never happy — never satisfied.

  The truth was, she didn’t want to phone her mother. She was depressed even by the sound of her mother’s voice. Her loneliness, her obsession with TV soaps and Oprah and Esther and all the other chat shows that proved to her that her own life was dull, boring and empty reproved Shona for failing as a daughter. Shona despised her mother, a woman who couldn’t tell drama from real life, while hiding from life herself in the drama of those same soaps.

  When, finally, the burden of guilt became too heavy and she did make the call, her mother would spend half of it moaning how Shona never phoned, never came to see her — adding to her guilt and depressing her further. She often demanded to know, as if Shona had planned it, why she hadn’t found herself a nice young man, why she hadn’t given her any grandchildren, making Shona hate herself to the point of angry tears and her mother to point of murderous fantasy. Then, suddenly, the fury would abandon her and she would feel bereft, aching for acknowledgement, and she would find herself weeping.

  ‘What’re you crying for?’ Like it was a surprise. Not to be outdone, her mother would start snuffling and blubbing down the line like some maudlin drunk. ‘You know I love you, girl . . .’

  Shona wanted to say, How? How do I know? You tell me, but you never show it. You criticize and you whine and complain, and then, once in a while you say you love me, and that’s supposed to make everything all right. But she didn’t say it. She never confronted her mother with her hypocrisy, because she knew that her mother wouldn’t have anything to say that really meant anything. Shona just became more careful, telephoning once a week, remembering her mother’s birthday, sending flowers on Mother’s Day, visiting at Christmas, maintaining a polite, formal distance. Conversations were kept to safe topics and tears were forbidden. It was easier this way, less demanding on the emotions.