by LK Fox
Little Boy Found
LK Fox
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Dedication
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
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Ella
Nick
Ella
Nick
Ella
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Ella
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Ella
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Ella
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Epilogue
This ebook edition first published in 2017 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2017 LK Fox
The moral right of LK Fox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78648 834 3
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design © Henry Steadman
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
LK Fox is the first pen name of multiple award-winning novelist Christopher Fowler. Although Christopher is best known for the Bryant & May novels, a crime series featuring the adventures of a pair of elderly detectives in London, he writes in many other genres, including non-fiction, comic noir and the supernatural. He has also published more than two hundred short stories, many of which have been filmed. Christopher is based in London and Barcelona.
For Sue
Nick
I saw his hand pressed against the glass.
I saw my boy. Dressed in blue, his eyes huge, his laughter infectious, his nature too open. So innocent and vulnerable that it stung your heart.
Then his hand was replaced by the face of the alarm clock: 8.17 a.m. It was Tuesday, the temperature a mean-spirited 9°C. My head was cotton, my mouth sand. I thought, 8.17 a.m. At least I don’t have to be anywhere. This was followed by Shit, it’s a school day.
The room looked as if it had been tipped on its side, then righted. In the mirror, I saw a pillow-creased face and matted, mousey hair. It was like The Selfie of Dorian Gray.
‘Gabe – get up!’ I shouted at the bedroom wall. ‘Mrs Arnold is going to slaughter us.’ I glanced back at the clock, thinking, Can I get away without showering? Hammering on the wall produced no answer. ‘Gabriel, you have to get out of bed twenty minutes ago.’
Pushing open the door to Gabriel’s room, I thought for a moment he’d disappeared, but then, as if I had willed him back into existence, one red sock poked out from his Weapons of Mass Destruction fighter-jet duvet.
‘Come on, if we don’t get this together we’re both so dead.’ There was no answer. Gabriel wasn’t a morning person either. I never understood how one kid could sleep so much. He sat up, a tiny, blinking phantom, not awake enough to speak. His fine brown hair winged away from his ears where he had slept on it. Small mouth, big yawn. The best I’m Not Awake look you could ever see on a child, or even on a cat.
Pulling him out of bed by one thin ankle, I shoved him into the bathroom. ‘Here’s the drill. Brush teeth, flannel over face, wet hair – make it look like you’re not totally neglected. I found the snake-belt you said you couldn’t find anywhere in your drawer, exactly where I said it was. You’ve got five minutes to get to the kitchen for inspection. It’s a breakfast chewie today. We’re really up against it, so move.’
‘But I don’t have to go to school today, Dad.’
‘Of course you do. Monday to Friday, right through your best years, that’s the deal. I know it sucks but—’
‘No, I don’t. It’s my birthday. I’m seven today.’
‘I know that: seven going on seventeen,’ I said. ‘What, you think I forgot? You’re not the queen, you still have to put in some hours, and then tonight you get your present, and anything you want to eat.’ I handed him a card. ‘Open it later, we’re motoring.’
Getting a kid ready for school is like testing an aircraft’s avionics. You go through the routine on autopilot: check, check, check. I grabbed as many floor-clothes as I could find and hurled them into the laundry basket. ‘Come on, pal, don’t just stand there looking like you’ve been shot, help me out. If Mrs Arnold checks you in as late, I’ll have to lie and say it was your fault because you broke my alarm clock.’
‘That’s not fair, Dad.’
‘Life isn’t fair. Put your trainers on.’ I didn’t want the corpse-faced guy from social services creeping around to the flat again, leaving more leaflets on how to cope as a single parent. He’d been fine about Gabriel having two daddies, but I didn’t want to be here when he found out that one of them had left the family home for good. I could imagine him telling his wife, ‘Well, there you are, two men raising a little boy. It wasn’t ever going to work out, was it?’
Gabriel leaned in and sniffed me. ‘You smell of beer.’
‘Well done, Sherlock. Daddy had a few drinks last night.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, to be sociable, to meet people.’ I hadn’t wanted to meet people. That’s not the way to do it anyway, I know that. If you wanted to meet someone socially you did the proper thing and went on Grindr. I chucked his jeans at him. ‘How was your evening? What did you eat?’
‘Mac-cheese ready-meal. Phoebe can’t cook. I incredibly didn’t like it.’ Lately, Gabriel had taken to inserting the word ‘incredibly’ into a great many sentences.
‘For some unearthly reason, Phoebe adores you, and we should be thankful she lives upstairs.’
Phoebe earned a paltry living selling quilts to a local craft shop. She hardly ever went out and loved minding Gabriel, but she had a tendency to leave her coffee pot on the gas, so I didn’t want to make a habit of leaving Gabriel there. She used to drive Ben crazy; he couldn’t handle even being in the same room with her. I had a sudden thought: maybe that was why Ben left us? It wasn’t anything I’d done, it was the crazy neighbour.
Gabriel was reading my mind, and I willed him not to say it, but he did. ‘Dad, is Ben going to come back?’
‘I don’t know, Gabe. You can’t make people do what they don’t want to do.’
‘
So he doesn’t want to be with us.’
‘It’s not that, it’s just—’
It’s just that Ben discovered he didn’t like children after all, I thought uncharitably. He liked the idea of them but not the reality of dealing with their needs ‒ especially having to deal with a kid like Gabriel.
I found a crumpled check shirt in the landing cupboard and dragged it on. ‘We have seventeen minutes before they ring last bell, so can you move it? You really want to wear that?’
Gabriel stood in the doorway, awaiting inspection. He had put on a blue NFL Bears sweatshirt two sizes too large for him, a gift from a friend in Chicago. He looked like a giant blue glove. ‘You haven’t ironed your shirt.’
‘No,’ I confirmed. ‘It’s a look.’
Gabriel inserted his foot into one trainer, froze and stared at the other.
I threw myself into a theatrical stance. ‘Now what?’
‘Unexpected item in bagging area.’ Gabriel pointed to a rolled-up sock still in the other trainer. With a sigh, I snatched it out and threw him the shoe. Gabriel was low-spectrum autistic; he couldn’t always recognise things for what they were, and when he did, he attached the wrong level of significance to them. He found densely populated areas like stations and schoolyards confusing because he couldn’t completely prioritise what he saw. We dealt with it so instinctively that sometimes I forgot it could be a problem. The paediatrician was holding off further evaluation until he was older. We’d been told that his differences could become more pronounced when he reached puberty.
I watched Gabe struggling with his knotted-up laces, then realized I should be helping. ‘Come on, you’re seven now, that means you can fix your own trainers.’
‘The ends are too long. I can’t touch them after they’ve been on the floor.’
‘Oh my God, they’ve been on the floor, call Health & Safety!’ I knelt and double-tied them around the backs of Gabriel’s heels. ‘Now it’s your turn. Help me find my car keys.’
‘Dad, you haven’t got any shoes on.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’m not getting out of the car.’ I pulled my trainers on to bare feet anyway, leaving the laces undone, much to Gabriel’s horror. ‘Packed your bag?’
‘I did it last night.’ He looked out of the kitchen window and shuddered. ‘Raining.’
‘So what? You’re not going to melt.’ Peering out, I ducked back as a great gout of dirty water sluiced down the glass from a blocked drainpipe. House repairs were on my list.
‘Wait,’ said Gabriel, pulling back. ‘I want my dragoon.’
‘I told you I didn’t want you taking it out of the house.’
‘It’s my birthday. I want to show it to Jamie.’
I picked the red-and-white King’s Dragoon Guard from its little wooden box on the kitchen shelf and handed it to him. The soldier on horseback was charging with his sword raised. It was a commemorative souvenir produced the year after the Battle of Waterloo. Ben had been against letting him carry it around, but it wasn’t sharp and Gabriel had been hanging on to it for so long that I let him keep it. He always got upset if you tried to take it away from him.
‘Couldn’t you take your skateboard instead?’ Gabriel had a red retro Santa Cruz Reaper Deck that was almost longer than he was, now propped against the hall table. The brand-names come easily when you’ve heard the words ‘Why can’t I have a . . .’ attached to them a zillion times. He could hardly lift the thing.
‘Because it’s raining?’
‘Always a smart-mouth.’ Grabbing my black Schott jacket, I dragged the protesting boy outside, setting him on the step while I locked up.
The terraced house on Croftdown Avenue looked like it had been subdivided by Dr Frankenstein. Gabriel and I had the ground floor, the basement and the front garden, which was supposed to be kept in good condition. I had always taken care of the trimming and planting, but in the last year I had let things go. We had a weekend place in the country, and I liked to tend the plants down there.
Shirley next door ran the local Neighbourhood Watch group. She really wasn’t down with the gays. We were okay on TV as camp sidekicks, but she didn’t want them living next door, with their thumpy house music and clothes-lines full of fashionable underwear. I’d laboriously explained to her that Ben and I were legally married, which had given us permission to be as boring as everyone else. I wasn’t about to tell her that we were now also legally divorced.
‘Dad, you didn’t shave,’ Gabriel complained.
‘What are you, my stylist? No one will see me, I promise. I’ll get in, do the job and get out, like the SAS.’
‘What do you know about the SAS?’
‘The Sewing Association Superstars? Quite a lot, as it happens.’
‘There’s such a thing as too smart.’
He’d stolen my catchphrase. The boy was super-super-smart and had my wit and his other father’s sensitivity; he was fastidious and thorough, just like Ben. But it was hard convincing teachers I had a genius on my hands when they turned to him for evidence and found him staring dreamily out of the window.
I briefly entertained the fantasy that we were biological father and son, telling myself that Gabriel had my hazel eyes, my smile, my chin. He called me Dad, but Ben was his real father.
‘Can we go back to the museum at the weekend? I want to see—’
‘The Battle of Waterloo, I know. Why can’t you play on the PS4, like a normal little boy?’
‘I do, Dad, honest.’
‘Not convincing.’
‘Oh, cool! Incredibly videogames!’
‘It still needs work.’
Because we were in a hurry, the traffic was awful. The school wasn’t far, but we had to cross a major bottleneck to reach it. Finally, I lost my temper and overtook a line of stalled vehicles on the inside.
‘Dad, you’re not allowed to do that!’ Gabriel yelled.
I thumped the Peugeot back on the tarmac as a truck blared. The lights ahead were red. I distractedly tapped out a cigarette and went to light it.
‘Dad, no.’
‘Is there anything else you don’t want me to do this morning?’ I said, but I pushed the unlit cigarette back into the pack, secretly horrified at myself.
‘You gave up, remember?’
‘Sorry, my brain’s in the wrong time zone. I don’t even know why I have these. They must be a year old. Take them away from me.’
‘I don’t want to touch them.’ I noticed that Gabriel’s eyes had begun to shine with rising tears. ‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’
Gabriel huffed and pushed back in his seat. ‘I don’t want to go today.’
‘Why not?’
He gave no answer but sank further down, vanishing into his sweatshirt.
‘The McBride kid again? If you don’t want to have a fight with him, stay out of his way.’
‘He comes looking for me. I have to hide until he’s gone.’
‘You can’t go through life burying your head in the sand, Gabe. If he has a go at you, have a go back. Have you seen his arms? They’re like pieces of wet string. I bet you could snap them if you tried. I can’t always be there to protect you.’
I made a turn with correct indication, driving-school perfect, just for him. We’d always been very careful about the two-dads thing, to make sure that Gabriel didn’t get any trouble, but kids have a sixth sense. ‘Okay, we’re coming up, get ready to do a stunt roll.’
The high fence around the playground made it look like a prison. Long Lane Elementary was a typical suburban London school. It occupied the end of a narrow backstreet lined on both sides with idling vehicles. Too many over-protective parents dropping off their little darlings in SUVs.
Checking the street as I turned into it, I counted a blue Renault, a silver Nissan, a white Toyota, an old gun-metal-grey BMW, a silver Mercedes . . . no spare spaces anywhere. A couple of mothers were talking in front of the main gate, but the rest of the children had already gone in. There was a
Chinese woman in a yellow plastic raincoat, a morbidly obese man trying to light a damp cigarette, a belligerent-looking teenage mum ‒ the usual parental mix. We only just made it. The teacher on duty kept a strict eye on everyone who stepped inside the school perimeter, but by the time we arrived she’d already gone in with the kids.
Overhead, a charcoal-coloured storm cloud had sunk so low that the spire of the school hall seemed about to puncture it. I pulled to a stop, reached across and pushed open the passenger door. Gabriel looked back from the door, then hesitated.
‘Do the thing for me.’ He stared back, implacable, eyes like saucers. That was what he always did, and it was when you started to realise that there was a problem.
‘Which one? There’s no time.’
‘You know. The one your dad taught you.’
I looked into those wide hazel eyes and time stopped. Attempting to clear my throat, I got ready to adopt my ‘haughty’ voice but felt choked up. ‘“There’s been an accident!” they said. “Your servant’s cut in half; he’s dead!” “Indeed!” said Mr Jones, “and please, send me the half that’s got my keys!”’
‘Excellent.’ Gabriel hammered his fist; he had recently decided that he liked the poetry of Harry Graham. I had to virtually shove him out of the door. ‘Go, go. Happy birthday! Do something today to make me proud.’
‘Only if you do, too.’
‘There’s such a thing as too smart.’ I pulled the door shut, threw an arm over the passenger seat, twisted around and went to reverse.
A woman with bright red dreadlocks fidgeting around in a green off-road jeep the size of a small passenger bus was doing the worst three-point turn I had ever seen. I could do nothing but sit there and wait. Everyone was watching her, terrified that she was going to randomly bash their cars. She glared at us all, as if it was everyone else’s fault, then backed up the street.
Angrily swinging the wheel hard and stamping my foot down, I drove straight into the wing of the old grey BMW that had pulled out from the kerb without indicating.
I hurled myself out of the car, then remembered that I might still test positive for alcohol. Walking carefully around the BMW in my sockless, squeaking trainers, I assessed the damage.
