THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  * * *

  Mrs Ligat invited detectives Sallis and Douglas into her sitting room and invited them to sit, lowering herself onto a wooden-armed cottage armchair and folding her hands calmly in her lap, before fixing Sallis with a sharp, intelligent eye. Sallis found her composure impressive.

  ‘We’re trying to locate your son, Mrs Ligat,’ he said.

  ‘In connection with?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t discuss that at present.’

  ‘If it is in connection with the disappearance of my grandson, I think I have every right to know.’ She had, it seemed, decided that Sallis was the man to talk to, and she waited for his response, fixing her gaze on his face, ignoring Douglas’s presence. The gold clock on the mantelshelf chimed the quarter hour, and Sallis was struck by the peace, the stillness of the house. It was furnished with antiques like the clock — beautiful things that glowed as she did — denoting care and, Sallis thought a little cynically, money.

  ‘Disappearance?’ Sallis repeated, deciding that he would get as much as he could out of her before explaining the purpose of their visit, but Mrs Ligat wasn’t the type to fill in the gaps with nervous burbling, she merely nodded, a graceful inclination of the head. Her hair, pure white, shone with health.

  ‘When did he disappear, Mrs Ligat?’

  ‘The tenth of April.’

  ‘That’s very precise.’

  ‘When one’s grandson disappears, one remembers the date.’

  ‘You didn’t report that he’d gone missing.’

  ‘No.’

  She wasn’t making this easy. ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because Carl asked me not to.’

  Sallis was a patient man, methodical, but Mrs Ligat’s replies were bordering on the obtuse. ‘You wouldn’t like to explain that, would you?’ he asked, half expecting a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and then for her to wait for the next question. She surprised him.

  ‘My son lived — lives — for his family, despite his wife’s excesses. She is fickle, shallow and violent, but when she disappeared, he was distraught. You see, he didn’t want to lose either of them. He was afraid that if Angeline knew that the police were looking for her, she might do something drastic. She is a very unstable woman, constable.’

  ‘All the more reason to tell the police, surely?’

  She straightened her back and looked Sallis in the eye. ‘Carl knows what he’s doing. He has his own way of going about things. He usually gets what he wants.’

  ‘What triggered it? I mean, her running off like that.’

  ‘She had been away the week before she left. Called it a business trip, but she’d been having an affair — someone she met on her trips to France. When she left, Carl thought she’d gone off with the fellow — I can’t remember his name — but when Carl went to see him, it seemed he hadn’t seen her since her return to England. He’s been looking for them ever since.’

  Douglas said, ‘He sold his house.’

  The look she gave Douglas said that the implied question was impertinent. She did not answer but turned again to Sallis. ‘Why are you here?’ she said. ‘Has something happened to Alain?’

  Sallis deliberated, decided it was time to come clean. ‘We’re not sure. He was found in the middle of the night, wandering the streets of Liverpool in his nightclothes. He won’t talk to anyone about what happened.’

  She nodded as if this was exactly as she had expected. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll keep his mother away from him,’ she said.

  ‘Where is Mr Ligat?’ Sallis noticed that she didn’t offer to come and see her grandson herself.

  ‘My son is away at the moment.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘He rings every day, without fail.’ Her satisfaction was evident. ‘He brings me flowers every week.’

  ‘So, where can we find him?’ Douglas refused to be ignored this time. ‘An address or a telephone number will do.’

  ‘Carl travels about a lot. He’s a financial consultant. He has a part-time secretary to help him with the administrative tasks. You might try her.’ When she stood, there was no hint of arthritic stiffness. She picked up her address book from its place next to the telephone and jotted the number down for them. ‘You may use my telephone, if you like.’

  * * *

  The doorbell rang as Jenny reached the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Mike?’

  The big man seemed flustered. ‘Can I come in, Jen?’

  She stood back and he walked through to the hall.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Jenny asked. He looked pale, uncertain of himself in a way she had never seen in him before. ‘Mike?’

  ‘Look . . .’ He glanced past her to the stairway, then, touching her elbow lightly, he said, ‘In here . . .’

  Jenny understood. Something he didn’t want Alain to hear. ‘Sure.’ She led the way into the sitting room. The news presenter was giving an emergency number — a multiple pile-up on the M62. In the background, in an oblong frame, the drama continued: flashing blue lights and wreckage and acid yellow reflective jackets.

  Jenny picked up the remote control. Mike was staring at her. She switched the television off and the silence in the room became a roar. She looked at the remote control in her hand and then up into his face, still uncomprehending.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ Mike said.

  The remote control slipped from her fingers and bounced on the rug, falling apart with the impact. Mike saw her sway and grabbed her by both elbows, easing her into a chair.

  ‘He’s at the Royal,’ he said.

  Jenny tried to get up, but Mike held her firmly. ‘Give yourself a minute.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to him, Mike!’

  ‘I’ll take you. Just wait until you feel a bit steadier.’

  ‘How bad is it? Is he—?’

  ‘He’s unconscious,’ he said, speaking slowly. Jenny’s mind raced through the possible degrees of injury, the events that had led to Fraser taking such a rash decision, the guilt and the if-onlys and the what-ifs, unable to take in much of what Mike was saying.

  ‘. . . skull fracture,’ she heard him say.

  Fracture. The word seemed to echo, and she shook her head in a large, exaggerated sweep, left to right, to clear it, as well as to negate the awful truth. If Mike had let go of her, she would have covered her ears. She struggled half-heartedly.

  ‘He’s in Intensive Care.’

  She looked up again, tugging ineffectually against his gently restraining hands.

  ‘Jen.’

  ‘How bad is it, Mike?’ she repeated.

  He hesitated and she waited until she had eye contact.

  ‘They don’t know,’ he admitted.

  ‘No!’ She twisted, almost pulling free of him, but he held her to him and finally she yielded, resting her head against his chest and sobbing uncontrollably, giving vent to the fear and sadness, the frustrations, the sense of betrayal and loss — and yes — the bitterness of the past week.

  Chapter 33

  The bell rang. So, she had come. Given her hectic emotional state, Max had half expected her to cancel or simply to not turn up. He quelled a flutter of excitement, perhaps even of nervousness. He often felt this quiver of anxiety before a session. It denoted a new phase, occasionally the proximity of a breakthrough.

  He smoothed his hair in the hall mirror. It was in need of a trim. Leave it any longer and it’ll look like you’re trying to hide your bald patch, he told himself. Max was not a vain man, and only rarely in social situations did he wonder what sort of impression he made on others. In the consulting room the persona of psychiatric counsellor generally served him well. He adopted and adapted the usual tricks to convince his patients of their uniquely interesting stories, was careful of his body language and worded his responses with circumspection.

  During this session he would assess Shona’s state of mind and persuade her, if necessary, to accept medication or even a voluntar
y hospital admission until she felt more able to cope.

  She had scrubbed her face clean of make-up. Without it her features seemed curiously bland, like a painting with no shadows or depth, waiting for the few deft strokes that would bring it to life, give it character and perspective, the illusion of reality.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind coming here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it would be appropriate to see you at the hospital.’ It was difficult enough for her coming to see him, he was sure, without running the risk of being seen by friends or colleagues. She stared at him in silence. ‘I thought,’ he said, turning to gesture to the half-open door, ‘we might talk more informally in the sitting room.’

  She stared back at him from the threshold, a fearful yet determined look passing over her formless features, as if she were bracing herself for something daunting. Then she stepped inside the house, clutching her big, grubby holdall across her front like a shield.

  He led the way, turning to face her as he reached the centre of the room, rotating his palms upwards and outwards in the universal gesture — See, I’m harmless. He had practised this, in his mind, as he had practised what he would say. He would go to the window, as far from the door as he could get, and he would sit in the window seat. Then he would ask her where she would like to sit, so that she didn’t feel threatened or coerced, physically or mentally. He would make himself small, reducing the chances of her misinterpreting his presence as intimidating. When he had reassured her, he would coax her to speak.

  As he turned towards her, smiling, he was already bending his knees, lowering himself onto the broad wooden bench-seat.

  He didn’t even see it coming — only felt the pain, like a flash of light — then searing, livid heat in his shoulder. His momentum carried him forwards and he crashed to the floor, rucking the corner of the rug and dropping two circular gobs of blood that splashed and then coalesced on the newly waxed floorboards.

  Shona took a step back, splaying her hands, flicking them away from her body, as if to rid herself of something clinging and disgusting. She screamed.

  * * *

  ‘The news said a multiple pile-up,’ Jenny said.

  Mike glanced into his rear-view mirror. She was sitting on the back seat, her arm around Alain, who was holding the big white polar bear close to his chest.

  ‘Mike?’

  He sighed. ‘Twenty injured. Mostly minor.’

  ‘What the hell was he doing?’ Jenny asked, tears muffling her voice.

  ‘We aren’t sure, Jen.’ Mike felt the need to apologize, to find some way of conveying his sympathy for her, but an apology would be absurd, and what he did know of the background was unsubstantiated, as yet, so he said nothing. Vi Harvey had been injured in the pile-up. The motorway police had received reports of her sports car following Fraser’s Volvo at speed in the outside lane. Fortunately, a number of drivers had dropped back, seeing a potential disaster looming, otherwise there might have been more casualties. There was no point in troubling Jenny with speculation. Until they could speak to Vi or Fraser, they couldn’t be sure of anything.

  He drove around to the car park at the back of the hospital. He didn’t want to risk being wheel-clamped for parking outside the ambulance bay at the other side of the building, and he didn’t like Jenny going in alone. He flashed his warrant card at the barrier and parked close to the concrete steps down to the rear entrance.

  Inside the building, the lifts seemed to take an age to arrive and he could see that Jenny was barely managing to keep control. He reached out and took her free hand and she squeezed it with a gasp of anguish and gratitude.

  They were met at the doors of the Intensive Care Unit by a young SHO who looked close to exhaustion. He offered Jenny his hand, and as she let go of Mike’s he saw her sway a little and steadied her with a touch to her elbow. The SHO launched in with a description of Fraser’s injuries.

  ‘We don’t think the head trauma is serious,’ he continued, then shook his head as if incredulous of his own words. ‘Of course it’s serious,’ he went on, ‘But we don’t think it’s erm . . .’

  He’s trying to think of an alternative to ‘fatal’, Mike thought.

  ‘It’s not—His condition is serious, but it’s not . . . not grave,’ he said at last. ‘Preliminary scans are . . .’ — he wavered — ‘promising. We’ll send him for another scan when we’re sure he’s stable. The pelvic fracture may account for the . . .’ He seemed to lose the thread again for a moment and stood staring down at Alain, with a slight frown drawing a line between his eyebrows, then he shook his head again and continued. ‘He’s in shock, you see. That’s as much part of the problem as anything. Do you . . . Would you like to . . .’ He turned, gesturing towards the glass-fronted cubicle.

  Mike nodded. Jenny looked up at him, uncharacteristically unsure of herself, then down at the boy. He seemed almost to have shrunk, and he buried his face in the white fur of the polar bear. Mike crouched down beside him.

  ‘Alain,’ he said, making an effort to get the pronunciation right, ‘Jenny wants to go and see Fraser. How’s about you and me go and get something to eat at the restaurant?’ He held out his hand and Alain shrank back as if he had raised his fist. Mike glanced up quickly at the SHO. ‘Or maybe we could sit in the waiting room?’

  The SHO stared for a moment as if trying to decipher a foreign language, then he realized that Mike was waiting for a response from him and made an extra effort. ‘Oh, yes! Of course.’ He pushed open the wooden door leading to the private waiting room. Alain did not move.

  Mike understood. ‘We can move one of the chairs and prop it against the door to keep it open,’ he said.

  Alain lowered the polar bear to watch him perform this operation, then he walked silently past Mike and the puzzled SHO, into the waiting room.

  * * *

  The room smelled of cigarettes and stale coffee. Alain did not mind this, because Maman sometimes smoked cigarettes when she was worried about something. It reassured and unsettled him simultaneously, for he had learned to be sensitive to his mother’s moods. Her worries became his.

  There were four chairs in the room and a shiny coffee table with a gold rim around the edge and black, splayed legs. It had coffee rings and spills and a couple of polystyrene cups, half empty, a skin of greyish scum filming the surface.

  Alain wanted to sit on the chair holding the door open, but then he would have had to sit with his back to the big dangerous emptiness beyond, so instead, he chose the chair next to it — the green one with the patches where it had worn thin and foam bulged out, yellow and grubby.

  He sat on the edge of the chair and hugged the polar bear — he hadn’t given it a name — with his left hand and picked at the foam with his right and worried about what the doctor said.

  When he had come towards them, with his white coat billowing behind him like the sail of a boat, Alain had wanted to run away.

  ‘Head trauma,’ the doctor had said. Maman didn’t like him to watch Casualty, but sometimes, on the rare occasions when she got a babysitter, he would hear the music from his bedroom and creep down to watch it from behind the sofa. ‘Head trauma’ was something they said on Casualty.

  Trauma was a word he knew from before, when he had been in hospital that time. They would talk over and across him, as if he was deaf or an imbecile. Alain knew what trauma meant.

  The doctor had had red spots on his jeans. Alain had a niggling anxiety that doctors weren’t supposed to wear jeans and thought he might get into trouble. Also, the red spots brought flashes of—

  ‘Run, Alain!’

  —something he had been trying to shut out.

  The doctor had stared and stared, as though he knew what Alain had done, that he had hit Fraser, and now Fraser had a head trauma.

  Alain made an involuntary noise at the back of his throat, drawing the attention of the policeman. He had blue eyes, empty and clear, like a swimming pool, but also hard, like the powder-blue stones in Maman’s earrings.
He knows, too, Alain thinks. He knows that I hit Fraser with a cricket bat and now Fraser is going to die.

  Alain jumped from the chair and dodged past the policeman, running into the dark room where Jenny is.

  ‘Fraser, please don’t die!’ he begged. ‘I didn’t mean it!’

  * * *

  Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Longer? Max groaned — he felt it in his throat but could not hear it above Shona’s screams. Seconds, then, or minutes at most, for surely she could not have continued screaming for longer. The calm logic of his thoughts struck him as incongruous: he should be terrified, and yet he was not. He was able to think rationally, to reason that if Shona had continued screaming for more than a matter of seconds, the neighbours would have come to see what was the matter, or at least they would have telephoned for the police. This, he told himself, is the rationality of the dying — the drowning man, too exhausted to fight death.

  This realization galvanized him, and he tried to push himself up from the undignified forward slump in which he had awakened, feeling a mixture of indignation and surprise that he was unable to move. The pain had receded now, and he felt nothing so much as cold: a chill that penetrated to his core and made him shiver violently. A second attempt to rise to his knees failed and, giving in to the inevitable, he rolled instead onto his back.

  Shona gagged and choked, but mercifully it stopped her screams. Max struggled with a wave of nausea. God, what did she hit me with? He lifted one shaking hand to his shoulder. It was wet, and, from the corner of his eye, he could see the dark outline of the hilt of a knife. Shona leaned over him. He brought a hand up to protect himself. A shaft of sharp, cruel pain shot through him, and then he felt nothing.

  * * *

  A candle flame, unsteady in the humid heat, first called her back. The water was at body temperature, warm as the womb. A thick froth of bubble bath covered the water’s surface, and on the rim of the bath, the bottle stood open, next to the candle. Geranium and rose petal — pink, the colour and scent of restfulness.