Lost Summer

by Stuart Harrison

  Dedication

  For Bill and Joan, with thanks

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Keep Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  A red light on the side of the phone began to blink on and off, which meant that there was a call. Adam had switched the ringer tone onto mute because sometimes when it rang it startled the hell out of him. Now as he watched the light he made no move to pick up the receiver. It was late; past ten and he knew who it was. He wondered how long she would let it ring before she gave up. He could picture her standing in their living room at home or pacing back and forth from the kitchen. Her mouth would be clamped shut, her lips an unyielding line. The colour of her eyes would be vivid blue; they were a darker shade when she was angry. These days she was angry a lot.

  He counted the flashes: seventeen, eighteen. Then the light went out. He waited to see if she would call back but the light remained off. Later, when he got home, or in the morning if she was asleep by then, she would ask where he’d been. He’d say he was working and she’d say she’d phoned, the suspicion in her voice cracking like a whip. He’d tell her he hadn’t noticed and then it would start; the familiar argument which would escalate and veer off in different directions but would ultimately come back to the same well-worn theme. He was never home. One day he’d come through the door and she would be gone and then maybe he would be sorry. Accusations flung like rocks. Work! It was always his fucking work! Well, what about her? What about them?

  The office he rented was small. A long narrow room above a photography shop in Fulham. He didn’t need a lot of space. In fact as a freelancer he could have worked at home easily enough, which he had before he and Louise had married. In those days he could keep whatever hours he wanted. Now he had this place. He even kept a camp bed there for the nights when he was so exhausted he would begin to nod off as he worked.

  The notes and pictures for the story he was working on were scattered messily along the long wooden bench that served as his desk. Transcripts of interviews with police, family, neighbours, friends, in fact almost anybody who had come into contact with Elizabeth Mount since she had vanished. Some of the photographs her parents had given him were pinned on the wall. He liked to see the faces of the people he was looking for whenever he glanced up. That way they remained real. They were people not merely names. The more he learned about them the better he felt he knew them. Often he knew more about them than their own families because he learned things from their friends that children rarely tell their parents. Usually about boys (if they were girls, and usually they were) or plans they had to go somewhere or do something their parents wouldn’t approve of.

  Elizabeth was sixteen. Her friends called her Liz. Her birthday had been in April, three weeks after she’d vanished. It was late May now. The initial inquiry and attendant publicity had tapered off. The official view from the police was that she had run away. She had joined the thousands of others like her who fled their families and home towns each year for the cities, where they melted into the anonymous underbelly of society. Sometimes their families never heard from them again. They changed their names, became involved with drugs, prostitution, criminal activities. All the usual litany of the underclass.

  It wasn’t as if Adam hadn’t heard the story before. He had files crammed full of notes about kids like Liz, mostly girls, though there were a fair percentage of boys too. Runaways. People sent him letters all the time. They used to phone as well until he made his number unlisted. He had a reputation now. Not only did he write about kids that went missing, sometimes he found them. Not always, but enough times that he had made this particular patch of expertise his speciality; he’d achieved a degree of minor fame. A couple of times he’d been interviewed on TV, and lots of times on radio. The families of the missing turned to him out of desperation, when nobody else would help. They asked him to find their children, and sometimes he did. The trouble is they were usually dead.

  Was Liz dead? He didn’t know. She had vanished one morning on the way to school and hadn’t been seen or heard of since. But it turned out she’d taken a change of clothes with her that day. A witness reported seeing her on a train to London but she wasn’t wearing her school uniform. An anonymous caller had claimed she was living on the streets near Paddington. The police had her down as a runaway, but her family were adamant that she wasn’t the type. But then that was often the case. The family sometimes didn’t know what type their children were. Or didn’t care. Or were lying to cover up abuse. But then those people weren’t the ones who normally contacted Adam.

  So far he’d spent five weeks looking for Liz, talking to everybody she had come into contact with. He knew that on the day she vanished she had got on a train to London. One of her friends had finally admitted to him in confidence that Liz had talked about doing it, though she maintained that Liz had meant to come back the same day. Adam didn’t know about the anonymous caller. Maybe that was somebody covering their tracks, trying to mislead the police.

  He stared at her picture. A smiling girl with brown hair and a few adolescent pimples. Plucked eyebrows, a bit of make-up, trying to look older and more sophisticated than she was, as girls of her age do. She had a boyfriend who swore he hadn’t seen her that day. In fact they’d argued a few days earlier. Motive to kill her? Adam didn’t think so, and anyway the boy had an alibi for that day. Adam had traced every hour of Liz’s movements for the week prior to her getting on that train. Nothing unusual, nothing at all out of the ordinary. No strangers that she’d spoken to, no behaviour that was abnormal either at home or among friends. But one Thursday morning she had boarded the nine o’clock train to Euston and after that nobody had seen or heard of her again. Apart from the anonymous caller. She had simply vanished.

  It was past midnight when Adam arrived home. He moved about the flat quietly and when he looked in on Louise she was asleep. He watched her for a while from the doorway. He felt guilty about what was happening to them. They had been married less than eighteen mont
hs. Not very long. Her blonde hair was fanned out on the pillow, visible in the dim light that leaked from the hallway. He remembered the first time he’d seen her in a bar with some friends. She had her back to him and it was her hair he’d first noticed, long and pale yellow so that it looked almost silver. It had jolted a memory and for a brief moment he’d held his breath thinking it was her.

  Of course it hadn’t been. When Louise turned around she’d met his gaze with her cool blue eyes. There was a resemblance in her face, though only slight. She’d felt him watching her, she’d claimed later. He had pursued her. Plotting his campaign. Seven months later they’d tied the knot at the register office and spent a week in the Caribbean.

  He closed the door quietly and went to the living room where he poured a Scotch and lay down on the couch. He’d spent a lot of nights there lately. Sometimes he had dreams and they were peopled by the faces of lost children. They swam in and out of focus. Now and then he dreamed about one in particular. She had dark hair, almost black, that floated about her head in tendrils. Her features were slightly blurred though he knew who she was. She always appeared with her arm outstretched, a mute gesture of appeal, though in her eyes he glimpsed an accusation. Usually when he had that dream he woke up sweating with the bedclothes tangled in a knot.

  Beyond the window the rooftops of Islington were lit with the pale, smoky sunlight of early spring. As Adam turned away he noticed the way Paul Morris was watching him. He suddenly felt like a butterfly pinned beneath the scrutiny of an objective collector.

  ‘Sorry, where were we?’ Adam asked.

  Actually, he quite liked Morris. He didn’t look much like a psychologist in his jeans and open-neck shirt, or at least Adam’s conception of what a psychologist was supposed to look like. His consulting rooms on the third floor of a terraced Georgian house had a pleasantly casual feel. The walls were pale and the windows flooded the rooms with light and air.

  ‘Last time you were here, we talked about your work,’ Morris said. ‘Do you think what you do has had an effect on your marriage?’

  ‘Obviously Louise thinks so.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you think?’

  Adam started towards his chair and then changed his mind. He preferred to roam around the room during their sessions, looking at books and the prints on the walls, the view beyond the window. At least that way he felt less as if he was being analysed. Morris couldn’t be much older than himself. A year or two maybe, which made him what, thirty-three or -four? When he’d agreed to relationship counselling he’d expected somebody older.

  Adam paused by the bookcase as he considered how to answer Morris’s question. ‘Louise would like me to get a regular job with a magazine or something. She’d like me to leave for work at eight-thirty in the morning and be home by seven and have the weekends off.’

  ‘Has she actually said that?’

  ‘Not in so many words perhaps. But she doesn’t need to. Louise thinks I put my work before my marriage.’

  ‘And you think the way she feels is unjustified?’

  ‘Yes. No. Not exactly.’ Adam moved away from the bookcase and went back to the window. ‘Look, the thing is I don’t deny that I work long hours, or that I’m away a lot. What I do isn’t like being an accountant. The hours aren’t regular and they wouldn’t be even if I wasn’t freelance. The point is I was doing this before I even met Louise. She knew what she was getting into.’

  ‘You know, Louise said that’s what you would say.’

  ‘Well she was right,’ Adam said sharply.

  ‘I’m not taking sides here,’ Morris said. ‘I’m just trying to give each of you the other’s point of view. Sometimes it’s easier coming from an intermediary.’

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that Louise and I have been over this a hundred times before.’

  ‘You said that she wants you to give up what you do. Get a regular job. But that isn’t what she told me. Actually, she said she always knew how important your work is to you. She says she never had a problem with that before you were married.’

  ‘But now she does.’

  ‘Only because, and these are her words, since you were married you actually spend more time working than you did before. A lot more. In fact, Louise used the term obsession. She thinks your work has become an obsession.’

  ‘She doesn’t understand,’ Adam said. ‘She never has. The people I work with have almost lost hope. These are parents whose children are missing. They’re desperate but nobody will listen to them. They know something is wrong. The police tell them their kids are runaways but they know it isn’t true. They feel it inside. Here!’ He thumped his chest for emphasis. ‘Sometimes I’m the only chance they feel they have to get at the truth.’

  ‘And you believe that Louise doesn’t appreciate any of this?’

  ‘I don’t think she understands that when I’m working on a story, I can’t just drop it because I have to be home for dinner.’

  Morris was reflective for a moment. ‘The other day Louise said something else that I found interesting.’

  Adam stared out of the window. ‘What was that?’

  ‘That she felt after you were married it was almost as if you had changed deliberately. As if you spent more time working in order to shut her out.’

  ‘That isn’t true. Look, I’m the way I am because . . .’ Adam faltered.

  ‘Because of what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You were going to say something then.’

  ‘I was going to say what I do is a part of me. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Morris said. ‘Can you explain what you mean?’

  Christ, he had walked right into that, Adam thought. He moved away from the window and eventually took the chair opposite Morris. He had a choice here. He could back off or he could try to answer Morris’s question. He’d never talked about any of it before, not to anyone. But a part of him recognized that he’d been leading up to this for some time. He knew he had to try and explain. Perhaps to himself as much as anyone, and Morris was the first person he’d ever come close to opening up to. He supposed it was because there was an element of the impersonal about a professional relationship. Or maybe it was because then Morris could try to explain it all to Louise. Something he couldn’t do himself. Or wouldn’t. The result was the same.

  ‘I just meant that isn’t our behaviour, the way we are, supposed to be determined by the things that happen when we’re young?’

  ‘Much of our personalities is shaped by our early influences, certainly. That and our genes.’

  ‘Nurture over nature?’

  ‘Broadly, though most people perceive that to mean that it’s our parents who have the greatest influence over us.’

  ‘You don’t agree?’ Adam asked, suddenly interested.

  Morris shrugged. ‘Not directly. As children once we start school our peers become the dominant influencing factor. The attitudes and behaviour of our friends and how we relate to them shape us. More so than our parents.’

  Well, he wouldn’t argue with that, Adam thought. There was a short silence.

  ‘You were going to say something before. Was it to do with your work? Why you chose your particular field?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it was,’ Adam admitted.

  Morris laced his fingers and assumed a practised expression that mixed mild interest and nonjudgemental detachment.

  Adam remembered the day they had moved; the changing landscape outside the car window. The sky was overcast, a solid grey mass hanging heavy and leadenly ominous just above the level of the rooftops. Beyond the valley loomed the stark hills that marked the northern edge of the Pennines shrouded in cloud. It seemed about a million miles away from Hampstead.

  His mother had smiled encouragingly from the front seat. ‘You’re going to love it here, Adam. All this beautiful countryside and fresh air.’

  He’d wondered which one of them she was trying to convince. He
noticed she and Kyle exchange glances.

  Castleton turned out to be more of a large village than a town. The main road crossed a stone bridge over the River Gelt before winding past the square, around which were clustered a few shops, a church and a small branch of Barclays bank. The estate was a few miles further on and was approached through wrought-iron gates guarding a road flanked by twin columns of sweet chestnuts. At the end stood a massive sandstone manor. The estate manager’s house was out of sight, itself a substantial Edwardian building with a walled garden.

  ‘How old were you?’ Morris asked.

  ‘Thirteen. Kyle was my stepfather. My dad died when I was six. Kyle had worked for some international corporation managing Third World projects until he met my mother, and then he decided to settle down and announced he had this job managing an estate in Cumbria.’

  ‘I take it you weren’t thrilled with the move.’

  ‘You could say that. I had to leave everything I knew. Friends, school.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  Adam smiled wryly. ‘I didn’t think you people really said that.’ Morris smiled, but didn’t respond. ‘Lonely,’ Adam said eventually.

  A week after they’d moved Adam rode his bike into Castleton along lanes bordered by hedges and stone walls, past fields full of docile cows. When he reached the town it was mid-morning and people were beginning to emerge from the church.

  At the newsagent he picked up The Sunday Times for Kyle and the Observer for his mother. The girl behind the counter had pale blonde hair and was about his age.

  ‘You must be from the estate,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Adam,’ he answered, surprised. ‘How did you know I live on the estate?’

  ‘My friend’s dad works there. She said there was a new lad who talks posh.’

  He wasn’t sure if he ought to be insulted. His cheeks burned. As he left, the old-fashioned bell above the door rang with a silvery note and glancing back he saw the girl watching him with an amused look.

  ‘Bye, Adam.’

  He mumbled something in reply.

  He came across the boys half a mile from the town. There were three of them sitting on a stone wall, their bikes lying down in the grass. As he drew nearer one of them walked out onto the road. He was tall and solidly built with thick brown hair. He stood with his hands on his hips and waited for Adam to come to a stop.