Found

by Erin Kinsley

  Better by far to be sitting on this sofa than to be Mrs Keslake, weeping and desperate to know where her son is. Looking at it that way, Claire’s glad to be here, appreciating that there are far, far worse places she might be.

  The room’s the same as last time – same soft chairs, same biscuits on the table, same picture on the wall – but the woman with Rose is different, a quietly smiling woman from Social Services whose name Evan can’t recall.

  ‘Thanks for coming back, Evan,’ says Rose. ‘Sit down wherever you like. Have you been OK since we talked?’

  Evan nods. Rose thinks he looks a little pale, as if he might not have slept well.

  ‘All we want to ask you to do today is have a look at some photographs.’

  Evan stiffens, and Rose knows he’s thinking of the offender portfolio, a nightmare gallery of men who’d trouble anyone’s dreams.

  ‘They’re pictures of bridges today, Evan. We’ve tried to narrow down the town where you might have been held. With the description you gave us, we’ve come up with some possibilities. Even if you can’t tell us for sure that we’re on the right track, if you can say that some definitely aren’t the place, that’s a help in itself. What I’m saying is, a no is as useful as a yes. So will you have a look?’

  Evan nods again. He’s retreated into silence, and that troubles her, since it’s likely to be their interview that’s set him back. At the same time, she’s a realist, and knows that can’t be helped. Getting to Liam Keslake is the number one driver now.

  They’ve all done their best to find high-quality photos from every possible angle. She agreed to take Manchester, and since they’re the ones she’s most familiar with, she decides to show them first.

  She lays out six pictures of bridges, some over the canal, some over the river. Evan seems willing to co-operate and leans forward to get a good look, but she can see from his expression there’s no recognition there.

  He shakes his head.

  Next, the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle with the High Level Bridge behind. There’s actually a third bridge in between them, but from many angles you wouldn’t know. There are four photos of these bridges, and Evan studies them for a while.

  ‘Might it be these, Evan?’ asks Rose.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Evan. ‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’

  ‘We’ll leave this town in as a possibility, then.’

  She moves on to Glasgow, but he rejects the pictures out of hand.

  ‘That’s not it. The river didn’t look like that.’

  Knowing Campbell will be pleased to have both Manchester and Glasgow in the reject pile, Rose moves on.

  Sunderland. Again, he considers for a while.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘OK. This place?’

  She shows him pictures of Rochester. She has to admit, she’s finding this tricky herself. One bridge looks very much like another after a while, and the rivers they cross look almost identical.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But it could be?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks, Evan. That’s very helpful, very helpful indeed. Is there anything you’d like to ask me or tell me, anything you might have remembered since we last talked?’

  She’s expecting the standard answer – no – and so is taken aback when he says, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Great. What is it? What would you like to tell us?’

  ‘I watched a programme,’ he says hesitantly. ‘It was about kids’ TV, old-fashioned stuff from years ago. The characters on this one programme . . . I recognised the names, like they’d pinched them to use as code names or avatars or something. They thought using them was funny. I suppose they did it so we wouldn’t know who they really were, if we ever got out.’

  There’s a prickling on the back of Rose’s neck.

  ‘What was the programme, Evan?’

  ‘Something about a roundabout. It had this really annoying music.’

  She frowns, casting her mind back to childhood.

  ‘One called himself Mr Rusty, the one with red hair,’ says Evan. ‘There was Dylan and Florence.’

  ‘The Magic Roundabout,’ says Rose. ‘They called themselves characters from The Magic Roundabout.’

  ‘I didn’t get it at first,’ says Evan. ‘But they kept saying the names on this programme, and I realised what was going on.’

  ‘That’s fantastic, Evan,’ says Rose. ‘I’ll pass that on to the team. Thank you.’

  He looks down at the table.

  ‘Will it help you find Liam?’ he asks, quietly. ‘That’s why I told you.’

  ‘I hope so, sweetheart,’ says Rose. ‘Everything you tell us – like the bridges and the names just now – is a piece in a jigsaw. And the more pieces we have in that jigsaw, the clearer the picture becomes.’

  He nods his understanding.

  ‘There’re some other things.’

  Beside her, the woman from Social Services leans forward to speak, but Rose forbids her with her hand.

  Evan’s foot begins to tap the floor, and he starts looking around the room, doubtful if he should go on.

  ‘This place is safe, Evan,’ says Rose. ‘Whatever you say is secret between us, until you say it’s not.’

  Evan’s remembering what Jack said to him, about lion-hearted Ferrers men.

  He thinks about leaving school that day, for the last time ever, when he was in the final few minutes of normal life, unaware of the fact, so unprepared.

  He finds a blur of a memory, him and Stewie crossing the school playing field, sharing a Kit-Kat. No, that wasn’t the right day; the day he’s remembering was warm and sunny and they weren’t wearing their blazers. They were heading home for tea, chicken nuggets or whatever. Home like it used to be, a cosy, welcoming place, when he still believed in the existence of safe havens.

  The day he was taken, the memories are distorted. Sepia photographs of smiling boys, silver cups with purple ribbons, the school smells of changing rooms and the canteen. The shock of a hand over his mouth, the terror and the crying. Those memories are a giant stain, a spill of darkness which wiped out everything before.

  He closes his eyes, remembering the blackness of that first confinement. When he opens them, he focuses on the picture of the purple heather, making himself think of the peaty scent of the moors in August bloom.

  ‘They put in me in different cars,’ he says. ‘They kept changing cars and sometimes the driver. One of them had tattoos.’

  ‘What kind of tattoos?’

  ‘I couldn’t see very well. It was really dark by then. I saw them on his neck when he gave me a drink. I drank it and then they made me get back in the boot. I was really cold and shivering. Sometimes I could hear music on the radio, and sometimes I could hear them talking, but only bits.’

  The woman from Social Services looks close to tears.

  ‘Is there anything you can remember them saying from that day they took you?’ asks Rose. ‘Anything about where you were going?’

  Evan looks down at the table, thinking.

  ‘Only strange things. I think they must have given me drugs in the drink. One of them was talking about someone who’d bought a spider. I don’t like spiders. It made me think there might be spiders in the boot.’

  Rose shudders.

  ‘I don’t like spiders either. You’ve done really, really well, Evan. Shall we finish for today?’

  ‘Will you let me know when you find Liam?’ Evan asks.

  ‘I’ll let you know personally,’ Rose promises.

  As she’s gathering up her folder, she recalls something which struck her.

  ‘When you were talking about the names – Mr Rusty and Brian – you said we, Evan. So we wouldn’t know. Are you saying you weren’t alone in this place?’

  E
van doesn’t want to be misleading.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I never saw any other children. It could have been next door, or in the room above. It was just that sometimes, I thought I could hear a girl crying.’

  As they drive away from Harrogate police station, Claire represses all the questions she’d like to ask, which are essentially no more than social niceties – how did you get on, are you OK? Those are questions none of them must ask, which she, in one way, welcomes, since she certainly wants no details of the conversations in that room. And she appreciates it’s a relief to Evan to know that once he’s left the police station, the subject isn’t coming back, at least not today. Not until the phone rings again with another request for him to attend.

  She’s feeling the pressure easing off, an end-of-term lightness of no immediate obligations.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ she asks. ‘Shall we go and get something to eat? And how about some Christmas shopping? You could get something for Dad and Grandpa.’

  It’s a long shot. Evan’s still uncomfortable in public places, but to her surprise, he shrugs OK. She finds parking on Montpellier Hill, and as they walk together across the park, she notices he’s not clinging to her as much as he usually does when they’re out, maybe because he can see across the open grassy space who’s close by and make his own assessment of threats, unsurprisingly finding none in an elderly couple and a woman walking a pair of dachshunds.

  The dachshunds make him smile. As they cross the road to Bettys Tea Rooms, she feels Evan draw closer, seeking protection from the strangers they’re passing on the pavement. But still, Harrogate’s not like down south with its overcrowded supermarkets, its bustling high streets and dense traffic. There’s no need here to get too close to anyone he might want to avoid, and there’s plenty of space to step away from anyone who might remind him of people he’s trying to forget.

  As Claire’s hoped, the tea room is an oasis of gentility, like opening a door into another time, a time she can’t herself remember of good manners and polite hospitality. Above all, it feels confidently, unthreateningly safe, a storybook place where nothing worse could possibly happen than that you might spill tea on one of the starched tablecloths. The air is sweet with chocolate and mince pie spices, and she senses Evan relax and dare to take a step away from her, putting an almost normal distance between them.

  A waitress dressed in a high-necked blouse and white apron leads them to a table. Evan orders hot chocolate and – loving the name – a Fat Rascal scone. Claire chooses Ceylon Blue Sapphire tea and a slice of lemon curd torte. Their table has a view of the road along the edge of the park, and as they eat and drink, the woman with the dachshunds passes by.

  ‘I’d like a dog like that,’ says Evan, and it strikes Claire that in that throw-away remark there’s an aspiration, an imagining of a future for himself she wouldn’t have seen in him six months ago. She sees, too, that he’s relishing his food, spooning up whipped cream and chocolate flakes from his tall glass of chocolate, carefully buttering each piece of his giant scone, rather than shovelling it in unaware as he did when he first came back. Food then was no more than fuel to him, a matter of survival, something to be consumed as fast as possible in case there was no more where it came from, with the thought surely constantly hanging over him that any meal might be his last.

  Suddenly, she feels the magnitude of her gratitude for being here with him. If she dared, she’d reach across the table and touch his adolescent, long-fingered hand, which she notices is starting to resemble Jack’s hands, a little reddened from all weathers, a little calloused from hefting feed-sacks and forking hay and straw. A country boy’s hand. But she daren’t touch him; there’s something still about him – and maybe always will be – of wariness, of distance. Any contact is on his terms, to be instigated by him. It’s a privilege that he sometimes feels safe enough to touch her shoulder or her arm.

  As she’s paying the bill, Evan beckons her to the counter display of glorious confection, and points to the Fat Rascals.

  ‘Grandpa,’ he says.

  The counter assistant bags one up, and gives it to Evan to take home.

  They wander companionably along wide streets with the open space of the park to one side, looking into shop windows which are marvels of seasonal magic: twinkling lights, gold baubles and glitzy tinsels, ribbon-wrapped parcels, fairies, reindeer and elves.

  Evan stops at the window of a gentlemen’s outfitters, where there’s a display of ties in bold and interesting patterns. Claire lets him take his time to choose one for Matt, and offers him money so he can pay. He’s reluctant to go alone to the till, and she doesn’t force him but leaves him by the door while she goes herself, turning round two or three times to make sure he’s still there. When she does so, she finds him looking back at her for reassurance, holding his bag from Bettys, a picture of innocence whose innocence is lost.

  Along the street, there’s a toy shop. Evan wants to go in, and wanders for a while among the displays, picking up toy cars and wooden puzzles, scanning the shelves of games, checking out the latest Lego, pulling out books whose titles intrigue him. Maybe he’s moving on here, too; Claire notices the books he’s looking at are young adult, more zombie and science fiction than Biggles, but when she offers to buy him one, he declines.

  Instead, he leads the way upstairs, to a room filled with jigsaws.

  ‘Grandpa might like one of these,’ he says, and Claire agrees. A jigsaw might be good for all of them – companionable, quiet, absorbing. Healing.

  ‘Which one do you think?’

  Evan is drawn to a cartoon picture of a summery farm, with chickens sitting on a broken-down tractor, a sheepdog that looks like Millie failing to round up a fluffy flock of escaping sheep, a red-faced farmer being chased by a snorting bull.

  He points to the farmer.

  ‘That looks like Grandpa,’ he says, and Claire laughs.

  ‘It does a bit,’ she says, ‘but don’t tell him so.’

  From the toy shop they go on to buy wrapping paper, mince pies and some toffee for Matt.

  As they wander back to the car, Claire’s all but forgotten the reason they came to Harrogate, but she suspects that, despite his good humour, Evan has not.

  FORTY-ONE

  18 December

  ‘So,’ says Campbell to the team gathered in front of him. ‘Let’s put our heads together and see what we’ve got. Rose, can you update us on what Evan said about the bridges and let’s take it from there?’

  Rose stands up.

  ‘Cautiously good news,’ she says. ‘Evan ruled out two of the most troublesome possible locations, Manchester and Glasgow.’

  ‘That’s a great relief,’ says Campbell. ‘Trying to nail down a riverside flat in Manchester or Glasgow would have been a logistical nightmare. So where does that leave us?’

  Rose glances down at her notes. ‘We’ve still got Newcastle, Sunderland and Rochester. There were a couple of other things. He remembers being given a drink and feeling confused afterwards, so that may be how any narcotics were administered. On the original snatch, he recalls a man with tattoos, and overhearing a conversation about spiders.’

  ‘Spiders?’ Naylor frowns. ‘Sounds like the drugs kicking in.’

  ‘There’s one very troubling thing he said, I’m afraid. Evan believes there was another child being held alongside him.’

  ‘Oh crap,’ says Hagen.

  ‘He thought he could hear a child crying,’ Rose goes on. ‘Probably a girl. It could, as he says, have been in another flat, but we can’t rule out the possibility that we have other victims in the location.’

  ‘Wherever it turns out to be,’ says Dallabrida.

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Rose. ‘And one last thing I think you’ll find interesting. He had his memory jogged by something on TV the other day – which is a good thing in itself, because it suggests he’s
letting his memories come back. I don’t know how useful this might be at this stage, but he says the men in the flat used nicknames for themselves. Characters from The Magic Roundabout.’

  There’s laughter as those old enough to remember recall the programme and do impressions.

  ‘You know what,’ says Dallabrida, ‘there’s an actual Magic Roundabout in Swindon. That’s what they call it. I’ve been round it, and it’s a soddin’ nightmare, traffic coming at you from all sides.’

  ‘Is that true, Leon?’ asks Naylor.

  Dallabrida winks.

  ‘Would I lie to you?’ he says.

  But Campbell is frowning.

  ‘Just a thought,’ he says. ‘Bit of a wild card. If there’s a Magic Roundabout in Swindon, might there be one in Newcastle, or Rochester or Sunderland?’

  Hagen picks up his phone and opens a browser.

  ‘I think that would be too good to be true,’ says Naylor. ‘Found anything, Brad?’

  There’s a look of surprise on Hagen’s face. He holds up the search results.

  ‘A bus route,’ he says. ‘Sunderland used to have a Magic Roundabout bus route.’

  There’s silence.

  ‘Sunderland?’ asks Naylor. ‘A Magic Roundabout bus route in Sunderland?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Hagen, reading from the screen. ‘It went all round the town and along the river, apparently, for the shoppers.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ says Campbell. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know that, Bradley, coming as you do from that part of the world.’

  ‘I’m from Gateshead, Sir,’ says Hagen evenly. ‘It’s a different place, like Windsor is different from Reading.’

  But Campbell isn’t listening.

  ‘Let’s get to it, people,’ he says. ‘I think we just got our next lead.’

  As Naylor puts the key in her door after her visit to the hairdresser’s, her phone begins to ring. Laden down with shopping, she hurries to open the door, drops her bags on the hall floor and digs her phone out of her coat pocket.

  ‘Hello, Ron.’