THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  ‘So?’ Weston demanded.

  ‘Mike Delaney.’

  ‘I gathered that much. What did he want?’

  ‘Liverpool’s found a body. Their lad’s mum.’ She looked up at Weston. ‘She’s been there a while, Jim.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ For a while, neither of them said a word, then the kettle clicked off and Weston made their drinks, going through the motions without thinking.

  ‘So,’ Calcot said, taking the coffee mug Weston offered to her. ‘What’ve we got? Two lads who look pretty much the same. One — Connor — is attacked outside his school. Attempted abduction. A few days later, he goes missing, and we’ve still not located him. The other — Alain — witnesses the murder of his mum and runs for it.’

  ‘Speculation,’ Weston said, blowing on his tea. He dragged a chair over and sat next to Calcot, took a digestive biscuit from the packet on her desk and began crunching thoughtfully.

  ‘It may well be speculation, but it’s the best guess we’ve got for now.’ Calcot took a sip of coffee, grimaced and added a couple of sweeteners from the dispenser she always carried in her pocket. ‘The same day Connor disappears Alain’s mother is killed. He runs off — escapes?’

  Weston shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And is found miles from home.’

  ‘Struck dumb,’ Weston reminded her.

  ‘Yes.’

  Weston took a second biscuit and dipped it into his tea. ‘There’s nothing to connect the two boys, bar a passing resemblance to each other. Chances are young Connor’s having a whale of a time getting spoilt rotten by his dad.’

  ‘I bloody hope so,’ Calcot said fervently. ‘But if that is the case, why hasn’t Mr Harvey got in touch?’

  ‘His wife’s told us they’re safe and well. Why should he?’

  ‘Because we’ve asked him to.’

  Weston conceded the point.

  ‘Anyway, Mrs H isn’t exactly playing straight with us.’

  Weston nodded — another point to Lisa Calcot. In fact, Weston reflected, Mrs Harvey was treading a very narrow line between guileless disorganization and culpable obstructiveness. He opened his mouth, but Lisa asked the question for him.

  ‘So where is dad?’

  Disconcerting, he thought, the way she seems to know what I’m about to say. Weston sucked the last piece of tea-soaked biscuit between his teeth with great satisfaction. ‘Come on then, if you’re coming,’ he said, heading for the door.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Weston said, enjoying Calcot’s puzzlement. ‘I was beginning to think you could read my bloody mind!’

  * * *

  The staff at Creative Plastics were very cooperative. The receptionist gave them coffee while she located Mr Preston, their senior manager. Mr Preston was charm itself. He was immaculately dressed, in the sharp, hard-edged manner of young businessmen, and his clear blue eyes betrayed no sign of caprice. He showed them to his office and instructed his secretary to hold all calls.

  ‘We last heard from Mr Harvey last Friday,’ he said. ‘He went home for lunch. We got a brief call at about half one to say he’d decided to take some time off.’

  ‘Does he do that?’ Weston asked, ‘I mean, is it usual?’

  Preston debated a moment. ‘It depends what you mean by usual.’ He flicked a speck of lint from the sleeve of his suit jacket. Calcot thought she saw a hint of a blush on his face.

  ‘When was the last time he took time off at short notice?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ He couldn’t meet her eye.

  ‘Well,’ Calcot said, ‘was it recent? Say, in the last six months.’ Preston seemed to be having trouble thinking back. ‘Mr Preston, has he ever taken time off at short notice?’

  Preston did not answer, and Weston reached over to the intercom on his desk. ‘Shall we call in your secretary and see if her memory’s any more reliable?’

  Preston’s hand darted forward to prevent him pushing the button. Weston glared at him, and Preston withdrew, thrummed the desktop for a second or two, then with a slight shrug, he said, ‘Mr Harvey always plans his time off.’

  ‘How did he seem?’ Calcot asked. Preston stared blankly at her. ‘Did he sound like a man about to go off on a well-earned break or . . . ?’ Preston clamped his mouth shut as if afraid he would let something slip.

  ‘Your reluctance does you credit, Mr Preston,’ Calcot said, soothingly. ‘You don’t want to appear disloyal. But we’re here because we’re concerned about Mr Harvey.’

  He dipped his head in a defensive gesture. ‘It’s really none of my business.’

  ‘You know his son’s missing?’ Calcot asked.

  ‘They found him — I mean, didn’t they? With Mr Harvey.’ He broke off, and Calcot gave him a moment to consider the illogicality of what he had said.

  After a suitable pause, she spoke his thoughts for him. ‘Since we don’t know where Mr Harvey is, how could we have found his son?’

  Preston grew decidedly red around the eyes. ‘It’s just — I mean Mrs Harvey—’

  ‘What about Mrs Harvey?’ Weston demanded.

  ‘She said there’d been a mistake — Connor was with his father — we weren’t to keep troubling him.’

  ‘Troubling him how?’

  He shook his head, all trace of slick businessman gone.

  ‘We just want to be sure they’re both safe,’ Calcot said, kindly.

  She waited, and at last Preston said, ‘We’ve been trying his mobile, but it’s switched off. He’s not answering his home phone, and he doesn’t reply to his emails. I even went to his home address.’

  ‘Is there anything that might have triggered his sudden disappearance?’

  Preston picked up his pen and clicked it agitatedly.

  ‘Mr Preston?’ she said sharply.

  He twitched, then with a sigh put down the pen. ‘I think there may have been some trouble at home.’

  Chapter 17

  ‘Shona!’

  She had virtually run into Max at the main entrance. She was looking over her shoulder as if in terror of some pursuing evil. She gave a yelp of surprise and dismay and glanced around the foyer, searching for an escape route.

  ‘Shona?’ He reached to touch her arm, but she shrank back, and he let his hand fall. She looked terrible. He hadn’t seen her like this since he had treated her as an in-patient over two years previously. He looked into her face, trying to establish eye contact, but she looked at the floor, the murals decorating the walls, the reception desk, anywhere but at him.

  He had seen her at the lecture, with the recovered memory lobbyists, gazing adoringly at the woman at the centre of her group. Shona was impressionable, emotionally vulnerable, and she would believe whatever was suggested to her, whatever they wanted her to believe.

  ‘They can’t help you,’ he said.

  She gave a little cry and covered her mouth.

  ‘I saw you,’ he said, gently. ‘On Wednesday.’

  She looked up at him, fleetingly, her eyes wide with alarm.

  ‘Why don’t you come and see me? We’ll sort something out.’ He was busy, and strictly speaking, at nineteen years of age, Shona was no longer within his remit: he was paediatric psychiatry. But since he had already blurred the boundaries by taking an interest in recovered memory, why not take it a step further? Anyway, Shona was an ex-patient. He couldn’t very well abandon her simply because she had passed an arbitrary line.

  ‘I’m late!’ she said, still refusing to look at him.

  ‘All right, but I won’t take no for an answer.’

  She darted past him into the building, and he sighed as he stepped out.

  Max had an afternoon appointment in Manchester. He sauntered out to his car in his shirt sleeves, deep in thought. The next few days would be crucial for Alain. He was confident Jenny could cope, but the discovery that the child’s mother had been murdered confirmed the feeling that had returned a
gain and again since he had first been found. There was a horrible tragedy at the centre of this particular mystery. While the boy remained mute, it would be impossible to broach the subject of his mother’s murder with him. While he had nobody to correct his feelings of guilt, Alain might be taking the responsibility for his mother’s death upon himself, and until he identified the killer, Alain must still be at risk of further attack.

  The brickwork and the tarmac of the hospital car park had already begun to absorb the heat of the day and the buildings seemed almost to glow peach and gold, reflecting the accumulated warmth. Max fumbled in his jacket pocket for his keys, wondering how to advise Jenny to proceed.

  He had left the driver’s window partly open — foolish, perhaps, with opportunistic thieves always on the prowl, but Max was inclined to think that anyone who took a fancy to his ageing Rover V8 would have to be eccentric, if not stupid. And they would be more than welcome to the repair bills that had become a monthly feature over the past half year. Someone had told him the car was a modern classic, but Max himself could not see the attraction of a faded, mud-brown rust bucket, with its cracked vinyl seats, broken clock and temperamental gearbox, an engine that could burn a couple of pints of oil in as many weeks, and did twenty-seven miles to the gallon on a good day, with a following wind. He would get around to buying a new car when he found time, but there never seemed to be enough time for the simplest organizational tasks of living.

  He got the door open and slid gingerly behind the wheel, concentrating too hard on the extreme discomfort of hot black vinyl against thinly covered skin to notice, at first, that the dashboard was tidy. His Liverpool, Manchester and Southport copies of the A to Z were stacked neatly on the passenger seat, together with a tape of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, discarded when his tape recorder had finally died two months previously, the tape disgorging its contents like some animal grossly parasitized by worms.

  It was only when Max reached automatically for his bag of mint imperials that he noticed their absence. In their place was a small bottle in the shape of the Virgin Mary. He picked it up and turned it in his hands, making her perform a stately pirouette. The bottle was hot and soft and, as he turned the figure, he noticed that the crown, which also formed the lid of the bottle, had been put on askew, giving her a jaunty, less than dignified look. He glanced up and round, but, apart from a mother who had just arrived with her little girl, the car park seemed deserted.

  He tipped the bottle. The line of water came to about waist height of the garments, about level with her sky-blue sash, and he wondered, with a slightly queasy sense of unease, if his car had been exorcized. An image of a crazed woman flicking holy water around the interior of his car, trying to dispel the evil pervading it, filled his mind’s eye and he felt a chill of realization: Jenny was right, whoever had broken into his house — whoever was watching him — had nothing to do with the boy. It was his interest in recovered memory that had made him a target.

  He glanced uneasily around the car park. It was now empty of people — the brief hiatus between morning and afternoon clinics creating a lull that allowed the constant tuneless chirrup of a sparrow to break into his consciousness. He stared at the metallic reflections of light and colour from the cars, aware of an unseen menace, watching, waiting to strike.

  Chapter 18

  ‘Memory isn’t static, Fraser,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s affected by our present state of mind, our present beliefs, by what’s happened to us since the event.’ She drove out of the hospital car park and headed for Queens Drive.

  ‘So, the longer young Alain refuses to talk, the more likely his memory of what happened will become confused?’

  She nodded. ‘D’you remember what you were doing when you heard the news of Princess Diana’s death?’

  ‘Yeah, I was coming home from Sefton Park with that wee lad that was afraid of ducks — remember him? — Billy, that was it. Gordon Paget stopped me and told me what’d happened.’

  ‘You’re sure about that, are you?’

  ‘Well, of course I’m sure. It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to forget, is it?’

  ‘You’d think not.’

  ‘Okay, smart arse, tell me why I’m wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re wrong. I was at work that day, so how would I know?’

  ‘But . . . ?’

  Traffic was light, and Jenny eased the car into the outside lane and accelerated, heading towards Penny Lane. ‘In 1986, an American academic team did a survey — about a hundred students. Asked them to fill in a questionnaire the day after the Challenger disaster. What they were doing when they heard the news that the space shuttle had blown up: details of their lives, how they found out — that kind of thing. Then eighteen months later they asked the same people to fill in exactly the same questionnaire.’

  ‘And they couldn’t remember?’

  ‘Oh, they remembered all right,’ Jenny said. ‘A totally different set of facts. The interviewing researchers were then instructed to check the new questionnaire against the old and give them clues as to what they had originally written. That didn’t jog their memories. Then they showed them the questionnaires, written in their own hand eighteen months previously, and guess what?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.’

  She shot him an amused glance. ‘They insisted the original answers were wrong. That their new responses were what really happened. They discounted responses written in their own hand at the time of the disaster.’

  Fraser was silent for some time. At last, he said, ‘You’re saying that people forget what actually happened to them, and unless they’ve written contemporaneous notes, you can’t rely on anything they say.’

  ‘Not quite. People don’t forget what’s important. I mean, it doesn’t really matter that you were walking Billy home from the park when you heard. What matters is that Diana died. That fact is immutable.’

  He shifted in his seat. ‘Are you telling me it’s impossible to forget that you were abused?’

  ‘No. It is possible to forget abuse. Something like forty percent of victims can’t remember documented abuse later in life. But the majority of abuse is not violent. And controversial though it sounds, not all abuse is traumatic. If it isn’t traumatic, it’s more likely to be forgotten.’

  ‘Aren’t you more likely to want to forget the more traumatic kind?’ Fraser asked, thinking about the boy.

  ‘God, yes,’ she sighed. ‘But forgetting is a passive process. You can’t make yourself forget, you just . . . do, because you haven’t thought about it for some time. Traumatic events are much harder to forget. Memories of fires, car crashes, violent events — including violent sexual assault — remain, even when we try to suppress them. They can get fragmented or muddled — and different people will remember the event in a different way, depending on their personal perspective — but the memory is not obliterated entirely.’

  She felt his gaze on her.

  ‘What does that mean for Alain?’ he said at last.

  ‘That’s what worries me. He’s so withdrawn. I mean, what if he witnessed the murder?’

  ‘Why can’t you just ask him straight out?’

  ‘Because without the words to express how he feels, we would be asking him to relive a terrible thing all on his own. And even if he didn’t see his mother murdered, there’s a risk he might tell us what he thinks we want to hear.’

  ‘No — surely . . . ?’

  ‘There are dozens of documented cases,’ she said. ‘They had to rewrite the book on interviewing suspected victims after the Orkney child sexual abuse scandal in the early nineties. Four families torn apart, nine children traumatized, an entire community riven by spurious accusations of satanic sexual abuse. Children coerced into giving accounts of abuse that never happened.’

  ‘I remember it,’ Fraser said, nodding. ‘Aye, it was horrible . . .’

  ‘And that’s why we can’t ask Alain if he saw his mother murdered. When he�
�s able to communicate, we can ask him what happened — why he was wandering the street in his nightclothes — but we have to be very, very careful not to put ideas in his head.’

  * * *

  They stopped off at the supermarket. Jenny would need to be around as much as possible over the next few days, and since Fraser couldn’t drive, it made sense to stock up while they had the chance.

  ‘I’ll need to get back to work this afternoon,’ Fraser said, reaching into a refrigerator cabinet for a packet of cheddar cheese. He placed it carefully in the trolley, avoiding her gaze.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘What?’ He straightened up, hands slightly spread, a picture of affronted innocence.

  ‘Alain’s mother is dead. I can’t tell him that in his present state, but I’m going to go home and call him by name. I don’t know what his reaction will be, maybe he’ll carry on locking me out, but he’s got to deal with it some time, I don’t know when, but it might be today. I need you with me, love, please!’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff to do,’ Fraser said, when they reached the car.

  ‘You’ve got the entire holiday for work, Fraser.’

  ‘This won’t wait.’

  ‘What — taking down your “Farming around the world” posters and tidying your stockroom won’t wait?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She took a breath. ‘I’m sorry. But look at it from my perspective: you’re telling me this in Tesco’s, between the cheeses and the cooked meats, an hour after we’ve been told the boy’s mother has been murdered.’

  ‘For pity’s sake!’ he whispered. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘QED.’ Jenny slapped a packet of boiled ham into the trolley.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means you’re bloody transparent. You wait until we’re in a public place, where you imagine I won’t make a scene and then tell me you’re leaving me to do the hard bit.’