Little Boy Found: They Thought the Nightmare Was Over...It Was Only the Beginning.

by LK Fox

  ‘Oh look! He likes you,’ said Mrs Summerton, surprised. She raised her forefinger, and he grasped at it. There was the mark, a hard red circle, between his finger and thumb.

  ‘What happened to his hand?’ I asked. ‘That’s quite a scar.’

  Mrs Summerton’s face darkened. ‘His birth- mother – well, we don’t know the history, they don’t give you all the details, but we think she had mental-health problems and tried to hurt him. Can you imagine? He can’t close his little hand properly. The nerves are damaged. But that just makes him all the more dear to us.’ She looked back at him. ‘You really think Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’

  ‘What do you think?’ she said to my son. ‘Gabriel? Hmm? You like that?’ He gave a gurgle of delight.

  She was going to take my name for him. I wanted to hate her, I really did. But I could see how much she cared, and that she might become a good mother. I thought of my promise to Aunt Charlie, and how I had let Marleena down.

  Gabriel could be happy here. What was the alternative, really? The law wasn’t on my side. I had nothing going for me: no money, no power, no friends or family I could trust, apart from my errant aunt, who had taken her barge to the Midlands and wouldn’t be back for at least six months. I had no more choices left to make.

  I pulled my coat around me and headed back to the station. I decided I would leave Gabriel alone but check up on him once or twice in the future, just to be sure that he was fine.

  At least I could get here easily enough from my flat. I would be able to come down most weekends and watch Gabriel’s progress from afar. He would always be Gabriel to me, even if Kate changed her mind about his name.

  I knew I was just prolonging the torture, so I set myself a target. If after six weeks I decided he was completely comfortable with his new family and I saw that Mr and Mrs Summerton were taking good care of him, I would surrender Gabriel to their happy magnolia-coloured, Radio Heart-playing home.

  After that time had passed I would simply become his distant guardian angel. I would never go to the house again but neither would I ever be too far away, just in case he ever needed me. I could not afford to be in direct contact, for either of us. I would be alone, and remain alone. This would be my penance and my purpose. As for Gabriel, well – everyone needs a guardian angel, even if they can’t be close at hand.

  But I also made myself another promise. I decided that if anything bad did happen, anything at all, if Gabriel’s new family failed him in any way, I would exact a swift and terrible revenge upon them.

  Nick

  You were nearly hit by a train. What the hell are you doing?

  My jeans were smeared with clay from the railway embankment and I’d lost my frankly fabulous jacket to the thieving gorse bush. Reaching the battered blue Peugeot, I fell into the seat and began to shake from the adrenalin rush. Suddenly, it was impossible to think, to see, to feel any emotion other than the pain and anger of losing Buckingham. Hot nausea flooded my stomach and I was forced to throw open the door and be sick.

  But at the same time, I felt better for finally having done something. After a year of nothing but guilt and frustration, there had been a glimmer in the cosmos. Perhaps I could prove I’d been right all along. No one could bring Gabriel back, but maybe someone could be made to pay.

  Checking my phone, I found a voicemail from Ben asking if I was okay. Yeah, all good here, Ben. Nearly got myself killed but thanks for asking. All Buckingham had to do now was melt away into the city. The one clue I had left was the partial address he’d given the garage.

  Turning the Peugeot around, I headed for the river.

  I knew that Newington Street was in one of the city’s last no-go areas. It took me over forty minutes to get there. The neighbourhood was undergoing redevelopment for the fourth time in forty years, and none of it ever worked. Banks of rain-stained concrete flats stood back from the street like vast factory cages. The slush of dirty rain made it look even worse, like a film set for some future dystopia. Nothing that happened around here registered with anyone, even the police. The CCTVs picked up the drug drops and gang fights but the local officers were inefficient because they were overworked, and their arrests hardly ever resulted in prosecutions. They must have been tempted to give up altogether.

  173, Phoenix, Newington St. I hadn’t thought it sounded right at the time, and now it didn’t appear to exist. I dropped further south, twisting my phone around to try and understand where I was, but the numbers didn’t run consecutively and I couldn’t find anything called Phoenix, just the usual array of charity shops; a filthy betting office, a shop that sold dry-looking Turkish pastries, a run-down bar, a cab company, a place that mailed money orders and unlocked mobiles, a boarded-up nightclub called Cocks & Hens. There were probably a couple of unlicensed casinos and firetrap drinking dens running under the road.

  There was an Edwardian yellow-brick building on the opposite corner that had probably once been the focal point of the street, but now the lower half of it had been boarded over. As I got closer, I realised it had once been a public house. The ground floor still bore the markings of two doors, one for the old saloon bar, the other for the public bar. Searching online, I found that the Phoenix pub had lasted from 1885 until 2009. Next door, set back from the road, was a small run-down housing estate that bore the same name. It had a steel fence running around the outside and a buzzer-operated door that made it look like a prison from an old Stallone movie.

  There were no parking spaces, just painted squares where market stalls stood at the weekends. I dumped the Peugeot under a bridge on a double yellow and waited for someone to come out of the block so that I could get in. 173 was on the second floor. For some mysterious reason, the door numbers started at 155.

  There was no one home. The kitchen windows had bars over them, and net curtains, so there was nothing to be seen except a fat china piggy-chef with several wooden spatulas sticking out of his hat. To me, this was an unnervingly alien world, where men in their twenties sat on playground swings intended for five-year-olds and the elderly hardly ever dared to leave their homes.

  Heading back to the street, I stepped over a patch on the pavement that looked like dried blood. There had to be some way of gaining access. After all, I was smarter than the average junked-up teenager looking for a way in. The former public house backed on to the rear of the estate and was separated by a row of tall plane trees, the branches of which connected its second-floor fire escape right to the bathroom windows of the flats. It was a direct line of access, although the most extended of the branches didn’t look like they’d take the weight of a grown man.

  So I just had to get to the fire escape, which was down an alley at the side of the building. Of course, it didn’t come all the way to the ground. That would have been too easy.

  I looked around. Clearly, kids had climbed up there before, because a battered painter’s ladder was lying on the floor. I set it against the wall and was able to climb ont o a mean little iron-mesh balcony stacked with broken plastic furniture. I went up two floors, wading through beer cans and the remnants of drug paraphernalia. The nearest branches of the tree overlapped the third-floor railing and made for easy climbing but, even so, the drop was probably enough to kill me if I landed the wrong way.

  I had no problem with heights, but climbing around the trunk at the centre proved difficult. Dead pieces of branch bounced to the gardens below. There was a lot of cracking and rustling and dislodged dust but, luckily, there was no one around to look up and see me. The bathroom windows in the flats were high and small. I hoped I had counted them correctly; it would be embarrassing to break into the wrong flat.

  I had brought a spanner from the car – the only tool I owned, and one I had certainly never used – and I climbed out on to the thinnest branch that looked as if it might still take my weight. Reaching forward, I gave the bathroom glass an experimental thump, ready to climb back if there was any movement inside.

>   It took one blow to break the glass and another to remove enough so that I could reach in as far as the handle. That was the hardest part, trying to open it without falling from my perch, but once the window had swung wide I was able to latch my arms over the sill and lower myself into the darkened room. I listened again for any sound of occupancy, but I figured if they hadn’t heard me by now, they’d have to be out cold.

  The furniture was cheap and battered. The double bed looked as if it had not been properly made in a while. The bathroom shelf was littered with generic toiletries, mostly giveaway hotel brands.

  At first I thought the clothes in the built-in wardrobe belonged to one man, but I saw that the styles of jeans varied enough to suggest a female presence as well. A black suit jacket lay on a chair; Top Man. In one of the pockets were some business cards for something called the Foundling Charity.

  A North Face backpack contained small-sized Adidas trainers, a Primark T-shirt and a blank notebook covered in the kind of doodles you made on call-waiting, today’s date ringed in ballpoint. A girl’s handwriting. There was nothing personal lying around that gave me a clue about Buckingham. He had to be carrying everything else on his person or in his car. Or maybe this was some kind of bolthole, a safe house he used away from his real home. I didn’t see how anyone could live with so few personal belongings.

  I checked the desk drawers and the bathroom cabinet. Lipstick, tights, a sports bra, panties, a pair of lace-up Doc Martens, some unisex T-shirts and sundries. A few well-thumbed, time-killing magazines, the kind I saw all the time in the care homes and hospices we visited. Presumably, they were hers. A safe in the wardrobe like the ones they had in hotels. It was unlocked and empty except for a clear plastic coin bag with ‘A&M Markets’ printed on the side.

  As I wandered around the deserted apartment I started thinking, What the hell am I doing? I design flowerbeds, I sit with old men who have months left to live, I’m not a private detective. Even so, looking at Buckingham’s things gave me a pretty clear idea of what he was like. An outsider driving an out-of-date drug dealer’s car, hanging around in a really bad area with his girlfriend. They were both broke; almost everything they owned was cheap and serviceable. From the way he lived, I felt sure he was an enabler, the kind of person who made bad decisions and forced them on others. I wondered about his girlfriend, and whether he was preying on someone damaged and vulnerable.

  There was something else; they hadn’t been here long, or weren’t here much – the place didn’t feel properly lived in. I was still poking about, moving stuff around, not caring about them finding out, when I turned over a page from a notebook.

  I found myself looking at a fanciful pencil drawing of my son. It was unmistakeably Gabriel. I was going to take it, but I didn’t want to touch it or have anything to do with it.

  This was all wrong. The place suddenly had a very bad feeling about it. I wanted to get out, run away, return to a time before any of this had happened.

  My workmates at Datachase were prone to airing conspiracy theories in the pub. It was a mentality that came with the job. They were always trying to connect the dots. When a company placed an insurance claim with us they often tried to disguise the fact that human error or poor security was at fault. They’d usually lost something and were looking for a way of claiming compensation. Sometimes, they told their employees to lie. When it came to Gabriel’s abduction, I wanted to lay a neat grid over the event, to think of it as a Venn diagram of cause and effect, removing any doubt or hesitation. But I could never clear away the fog. If there was something I failed to see, it was because I was too close, like staring at a corner of a painting and trying to divine the shape of the entire image.

  I was going to leave when I heard someone walking along the balcony. Stepping into the shadowed corner behind the front door, I held my breath and waited. The footsteps stopped outside, then continued further along to another flat.

  I went outside and looked along the balcony; nothing. Well, Buckingham would know I’d been here when he returned and found the broken glass all over his bathroom, so the cat was out of the bag now. I could have swept up all the pieces, but part of me wanted him to know that I was on to him.

  When I reached the bottom of the building’s stairwell, I hit a problem. A hippopotamus-sized security guard was standing there. He was one of those guys whose job skills centred around the ability to stay upright in one place for long periods of time.

  I thought getting in had been too easy. He was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, and asked me what I was doing. Conversationally, I could have danced a Viennese waltz around him, but something shifted inside my head. I saw Gabriel running across the school playground in the rain. I saw him trusting a stranger who meant nothing but harm. I saw my path being blocked again, just as I was finally getting somewhere. A year’s frustration and anger welled up inside me as the hippo-guard reached tentatively for my forearm.

  ‘I didn’t see you go up there – where you been? How’d you get up there?’

  I tried to push past, thinking that if I made a run for it he’d never be able to keep up with me, but he slapped a hand hard in the middle of my chest.

  I shoved back with the heel of my hand, knocking his arm aside, pushing around him. I was off the premises and outside on the street before he could get his act together. I could feel my heart racing. The most violent act I ever committed in all my time with Ben was throwing a slice of bread at him, and even then I aimed to miss. I was a planner, not an action man, but at what point do you stop watching and start participating?

  I glanced back through the entrance to the apartment block and saw the guard on his phone, and wondered who he was calling. The street was deserted. I walked quickly to the corner and turned, heading up the narrow lane that ran behind the Phoenix hotel. I was out of ideas. The apartment hadn’t revealed any new information beyond the fact that I was dealing with low-lifes who might possibly be dangerous. I couldn’t imagine what Buckingham was up to or where I should go from there. I could feel my bad leg growing heavier with each step.

  I stared at the tarmac under my mud-covered trainers and concentrated on putting distance between myself and the council estate. When I finally looked up, standing in the middle of the road right in front of me beside the Phoenix hotel’s steel laundry bins was a small figure in a bright blue sweatshirt.

  I stared at the boy in shock, and he stared back with blank eyes. I found myself walking towards him with my hand outstretched.

  Of course, it was just another feral, skinny street kid in a Man-U football top. He stayed motionless as I approached, then glanced past me. Turning, I saw a pack of four skinny, shadow-faced teenaged boys. I looked for the leader. Imagine the kind of guy you’d expect to meet in the stairwell of a run-down council block in a borough you’d never had reason to visit – this would have been his useless sidekick. He was texting, and the others were standing around waiting for him.

  I wasn’t used to seeing honest-to-God street gangs. I lived in a nice area with neighbours who kept the local council’s litter squad on speed-dial. As I tried to get the measure of these kids, they suddenly ran at me. It was as if someone had fired a starting pistol. I didn’t look like the kind of person who should be skulking about on their turf but even so – a fight? In these shoes? Really?

  The first one reached me and threw a loose punch that missed by a mile, but as I stepped out of range the one behind knocked me on my back with a kick to my weak leg. If I hadn’t been so shaken, I might have at least tried to block the move. The second stepped forward and balled a fist, cutting the skin below my right ear. It was just a scratch from a ring, but it bled.

  The others crowded in, hammering at me with a series of absurd kicks copied from bad TV shows, showy but lacking any force. Even so, they managed to knock the breath from me. There were no knives being drawn, but then I decided that this was just a bit of mild payback for trespassing on their turf.

  I had once enrolled
in a martial arts course, mainly because the instructor was hot, but I’d given it up because I was saving for a holiday in Mykonos and I quickly forgot everything I’d learned. As I regained my balance and muscle control, I was able to protect myself from the blows. I pushed upright and swung back, connecting with a couple of punches that I recalled from the days when I used to see the trainer twice a week. Even so, it was a humiliating brawl, the slapping scuffle of street drunks, all bravado and name-calling.

  The lads finally retreated, piling into a ten-year-old red Toyota with a grey front wing parked beside the overflowing bins at the side of the hotel.

  I shook out my bad leg and started to walk, smearing a thin streak of blood from my eyes, knowing that it probably looked worse than it was. I tried not to think of anything except reaching my car.

  When I felt inside my jacket, I found that my wallet and phone had been lifted.

  Ella

  For six weeks, I planned to stay in the area and keep an eye on Gabriel but, just before they were up, I ran out of money.

  Harry’s credit card stopped working. I didn’t have a car, and the train fares to Ashton were ridiculous. I couldn’t go to Harry or Karen. I thought about tapping my sister Lesley for cash, but I knew she was always broke. I needed to get a job locally and find a cheap place to stay, just temporarily. There were plenty of long-let AirB&Bs, so I figured getting a room wouldn’t be a problem, but the jobs came down to a choice between shelf-stacking at Marks & Spencer and working in a charity shop that sold floral cake-stands and ancient audio-cassettes of Roy Orbison and Jim Reeves. I was seriously considering the latter option when I saw the show flyer on their counter.

  Ashton had two theatres: the Stag, which was full of senior citizens singing along to touring productions of South Pacific, and a fringier place called the People’s Space, which was a concrete box attached to the rear of a phone warehouse, right beside a railway line. It put on plays that the local liberals could feel good about seeing, because after sitting through two hours of ranting polemic about the plight of Romanian sex workers they could never point out that the show was boring. It was run by a crazy woman who wore floral bandannas and collected subscriptions from local businesses because they were anxious to stop her from hanging around in their reception areas. I figured it would be a waste of time ringing them up to plead for a job so I called in person, and it turned out my timing was good because their ASM had just taken maternity leave.