My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller

by Deborah O'Connor

  I waited until Jason got into his Golf before walking over to where I’d parked.

  Once inside my car, I looked back over to him, ready to coordinate our departure. The sun was shining directly onto his windscreen, a blinding white glare. He hadn’t shaved in days and his stubble glittered in the light. I watched as he reached his hand up, ready to flip down the visor, but then he paused. Lifting his face towards the heat, he closed his eyes. It looked like he was offering himself up to the sky.

  Chapter Three

  We reached the off-licence, parked and came together on the pavement. Jason took in the tramp asleep on a bench and the teenage boy trying to balance pushing a pram with keeping control of two unruly Staffordshire bull terriers. Swearing loudly, he was directing his curses evenly between the crying baby and the misbehaving dogs.

  ‘What were you doing in this neck of the woods?’

  ‘I had an area-manager meeting, in Gateshead.’

  I took his hand and led him over to the entrance. An illuminated blue sign protruded over the width of the shop’s scuffed façade, announcing the off-licence’s name – Wine City – in a cartoonish red font. Wires looped and dangled to the right of the sign’s edging, overspill from the electrics within.

  ‘The lighting in there isn’t great, but it’s good enough.’ I tried to sound reasonable. ‘You’ll need to direct your attention out back. There’s a corridor.’

  For a brief moment I considered the possibility that, if the boy was indeed Barney, his captor might recognise Jason. If that happened, then the man would know we were onto him. It was a risk, but one I decided was worth taking.

  Jason pushed back his shoulders and lifted his chin. He didn’t seem to harbour any real hope that the child inside was his son.

  ‘Here goes.’

  Once the door had swung shut, I took up a position to the left of the shop and waited, braced for the reaction I was sure would come.

  Alone, I began to imagine how the rescue might play out if Jason was able to make a positive ID. How the police would force their way in through the front door with a battering ram, how they would disperse inside to secure the area, how Jason would follow behind and find Barney shivering and crying in the corner and how he would scoop him up into his arms and to safety.

  But then it seemed like no sooner had Jason gone inside than the door was swinging open and he was back on the street, clutching a soft drink.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Not Barney,’ he said, holding his free palm out flat in apology.

  He went to head back to his car and I grabbed his elbow.

  ‘Wait. You don’t think there’s even a slight similarity?’

  ‘He looks nothing like the mock-ups. The bone structure, his nose. It goes against everything the forensic artists have always said.’

  ‘What about the bloke behind the counter?’ I asked, unwilling to give up quite that easily. ‘He seemed dodgy.’

  ‘There was no bloke. It was a woman. Maybe he’d finished his shift?’

  I felt a tightening at the base of my skull. The beginnings of a headache. I’d thought that once I’d had his verdict I’d be able to put my mind at rest, but now I found that wasn’t the case.

  ‘Jason, please,’ I said, ‘take another look.’

  He studied my face, as though searching for an answer. Unable to find what he was looking for, he sighed and, apparently deciding to humour me all the same, returned inside.

  Again I waited. I pictured his eyes roaming over the child’s hair, build and facial features and held my breath, certain that this time, he would see it.

  He seemed to be taking much longer. I let my heart race. Maybe he’d had a rethink. But as he exited the shop he shook his head.

  The tightness at the base of my skull began to spread across the rest of my scalp.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ I reached for him but he shrugged me away. ‘I thought it was him, truly.’

  ‘No harm done. You did the right thing.’ His voice was soft but I could tell he was upset. ‘And I know you meant well.’ He set his gaze forward, towards where our cars were parked. ‘But now I’m tired. Can we please go home?’

  Chapter Four

  ‘Heidi, what are you doing?’ shouted Jason from across the landing.

  ‘I need to finish an email,’ I said, ‘then I’ll be right there.’

  There was a splosh and I heard the squeak of the hot tap being turned on.

  ‘OK, but hurry up, the water’s getting cold.’

  I smiled and turned back to the laptop, relieved things were returning to normal. As soon as we’d got home from the off-licence, he’d suggested an early bath together. His way of letting me know that he’d already drawn a line under today. But while I’d been grateful for the gesture, in truth, when it came to the boy, I wasn’t done.

  While I knew that Jason must be right – if he couldn’t recognise the kid as his son then no one could – I was unable to forget him. The way I’d reacted to the child continued to niggle. And so, before joining Jason in the tub, I’d decided to see what I could find on the man who ran the off-licence.

  The company I worked for was called Bullingdon’s. It supplied alcohol and soft drinks to pubs and restaurants. Bullingdon’s had a sister company called Yellow Arrow that did business with smaller-scale retail outlets – vending machines, newsagents, off-licences. Every employee in both companies was required to register any meetings or sales calls in a huge shared database. This meant that if anyone from our sister company had ever had anything to do with the shop we’d been in today it would be recorded on the system. It was a long shot, but I figured that a little research on the bloke behind the counter wouldn’t do any harm. If anything, it might serve to put my mind at rest.

  Clicking on the client database icon, I typed in the name and location of the off-licence and pressed search. Nothing. Maybe I hadn’t put the address in right. The database was notoriously sensitive. I cross-checked the details with Google Maps. Wine City, 119 Coatesworth Road, Gateshead. I’d spelt it correctly, but it was easy to see how someone might get the name of the road slightly wrong. I tweaked the address, this time making sure to drop the ‘e’ from Coatesworth, and once more pressed search. Before long, the database yielded a potential hit. It was a match. Filed by a rep named Sharon Hannah, it detailed a sales call she’d made back in June. I opened it up. Wine City traded mostly in super lagers, white ciders, tonic wine and other fortified beverages. Sharon reported that although she had left a variety of product samples on-site, there had been no take-up or further correspondence. Moving down to client details I saw that she’d recorded the leasehold of the shop as having been taken over in January of this year by a Mr Keith Veitch.

  Veitch. That was a fairly unusual surname.

  Opening a fresh window, I typed in his name and hit search. He’d only been at the shop for nine months. Where did he work before then? If I could trace this man back more than five years, I might be able to see where he was working around the time Barney was taken, and if he was based somewhere nearby then maybe I could connect him to his disappearance.

  The computer finished its search. I looked at the screen, but there was nothing. It seemed that, prior to taking over the leasehold of the Wine City off-licence, the history of Mr Keith Veitch was a blank – for my company’s sales records, anyway.

  I went back to the name of the rep who had written the report: Sharon Hannah.

  Scrolling through the company-wide address book, it didn’t take long to find her email. ‘Hi Sharon,’ I typed. ‘Wondering if you can assist me with a client query?’ My fingers hovered over the keyboard while I worked out what to say. It would be too odd for me to ask her about the boy outright, but I needed to make sure that if she had noticed anything strange about the man running the off-licence, or the child in his care, she thought fit to mention it.

  It was a stretch, but I decided my best bet would be to say I’d been in the shop on non-work-related business and had notic
ed one or two products for sale that looked like they might be fake. Head Office had recently sent out a series of memos urging us to be vigilant for signs of profit-damaging bootleg vodka and had promised mini-bonuses for anything that led to a successful prosecution. Explaining I didn’t want to get the manager into unnecessary trouble, I told her that before I made out an official report I wanted to see if she had noticed anything during her last visit to set alarm bells ringing.

  The message sent, I was about to close the laptop when a new email envelope popped up in the bottom right of the screen. I felt a tiny ripple of excitement. It was from Sharon Hannah. That was quick – maybe she had noticed something weird about the place and wanted to get back to me right away. But any hopes I had were dashed as soon as I opened the email. Nothing more than an automated out-of-office reply written in turquoise copperplate font, it informed me she was going on extended leave to get married and would respond to my query on her return from honeymoon at the end of October. I checked today’s date – that was over a month from now. Shit. I closed the laptop. Enough. Jason would be wondering where I was.

  After taking off my blouse I unzipped my skirt and rolled down my tights. Unhooking my bra, I stepped out of my knickers and was reaching for my dressing-gown when I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. I startled, shocked even after all these years, at the sight of my de-robed body. Once upon a time my bra had rested against skin dense with fat. I’d been a size eighteen. All rolls and pudge. Now, instead, there was a neat pear of a ribcage, a flat expanse of muscle in place of the belly that used to stodge low over my knickers.

  I pinched at the meagre layer of fat around my hips.

  Everyone sees weight loss as a signal you’ve finally taken control of your desires and appetites. They assume you prefer this smaller, lean version of yourself. They never consider the opposite. That you might be thinner because you lost control, that you prefer your old self. That, if you could, you’d like to go back to how you were. Before.

  I cleared the smudged mascara from under my eyes and pinned my fringe up off my face. I’d had my hair coloured its usual dark brown only a few weeks ago, but there was already a smattering of silver roots at the scalp. Twisting the rest of my hair up into a high bun, I reached across to my underwear drawer. Rifling beneath the knickers for the packet of folic acid I kept at the back, I popped a tablet out of the foil, chucked it to the back of my throat and dry swallowed as best I could. Although we had yet to discuss trying for a baby, I’d been taking the supplements for a while. I’d read an article saying new research had shown it was beneficial for women to take folic acid in the months prior to conception so that the body could build up the reserves it needed to create a healthy foetus. I’d seen no harm in starting the course of tablets immediately – I figured I needed all the help I could get.

  As I crossed the threshold of the bathroom, I took off my dressing-gown and Jason wolf-whistled. I gave my bum a wiggle and he laughed.

  ‘I thought you were going to leave me alone in here all night.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m starting to prune.’

  Caramel-skinned and with eyelashes so long they should have belonged to a girl, he had this tendency to dip his chin ever so slightly whenever he looked at me, as though he was shy and this was the first time we had met. A small movement, it was a mannerism reserved for me and me only, a physical tic that harked right back to when we first got together.

  I stepped into the tub, my slender frame allowing me to position myself at the opposite end to Jason with room to spare. He’d added too much bubble bath and thick white foam covered the surface of the water.

  ‘I’m worth the wait,’ I said, scooping some of the foam onto my palm and blowing it at him. It disintegrated into a snowstorm of sausage and marble shapes and, as they lazed their way back down to earth, some of the shapes descended onto Jason’s face and hair. Once they’d settled, he directed his lips at each of the blobs, dislodging them with exaggerated puffs of air.

  I moved towards him and closed my eyes, ready for the kiss. As his mouth met mine I heard water slopping over the sides of the bath and onto the floor.

  He pulled away, leant back and ducked his head. The moisture turned his blond hair an immediate sheeny black. Resurfacing, he smoothed it from his forehead and blinked the droplets from his lashes. He reached for a bottle of beer balanced on the linen basket. Taking a gulp, he wiped away the sweat on his forehead. I swivelled round so that I could lie back onto his chest. Following my lead, Jason slotted his thighs around my hips.

  ‘A few weeks and it’ll be our wedding anniversary.’ Steam sheeted off his shins and up to the open window. ‘Shall we have some people round? To celebrate.’

  ‘We could have a barbecue? Make the most of this Indian summer.’

  ‘Done.’

  He paused, thinking.

  ‘But then we should do something with just us. A meal?’

  I imagined the evening to come. The awkward silences, the search for conversation.

  ‘Sounds good.’

  I loved being married to Jason. I loved our everyday life together. I did not love our anniversary.

  Ask any couple what happens when they celebrate their special day and they tell the same story: at some point in the evening one or both of you will take great pleasure in reliving how you got together in minute detail. You will dwell, misty-eyed, on the first flirtation; retell the moment of your meeting to each other over and over again, with lots of ‘and remember when’s and ‘then you said to me’s and finishing of each other’s sentences as you marvel at the Sliding Doors twist of fate that helped two become one.

  But that never happened with us, and it never would.

  Neither of us had ever spoken it out loud, but the only reason our paths crossed was because we had both attended the same conference. And the only reason we were at that conference was because we’d both lost our children. Coordinated by the NSPCC, its theme was child safety and its aim was to improve the communication and procedures between everyone from Interpol to the Scouts. It was held over three days at one of those hotels that are all stale pastries at breakfast, patterned carpets and overheated rooms. Jason and I had been invited, along with members of the police and social services – and other parents who, like us, had had their children stolen from them.

  I’d seen Jason on the first morning. I’d just finished a seminar in which I and key personnel from the worlds of teaching and healthcare had spent an hour discussing the inadequacy of DBS criminal record and sex-offenders’ register checks as a vetting tool for staff who work or come into contact with children. Afterwards, I’d wanted nothing more than a cup of tea and a seat in a quiet corner, but instead I’d been corralled into coming along to the next scheduled session by our seminar’s moderator.

  The session was on Megan’s Law and Jason was part of a panel there to discuss its various pros and cons. He, along with the other speakers, was given a formal introduction at the start and I remember thinking how unnecessary that was in his case. Jason, along with his then wife Vicky, had endured so much press coverage in the months after Barney was taken that it had driven their relationship to its very public end. I and everyone else in the room had known who he was as soon as we set eyes on him.

  Wearing an oversized suit borrowed from a friend, he’d kept rubbing at the shortest part of his buzz-cut hair, near the base of his scalp. With dark brown eyes, a gap-toothed smile and weathered, wind-burnt skin, he looked both older and younger than his twenty-seven years.

  I spoke to him that afternoon. There’d been a coffee break and the only remaining free seats had been right next to each other. That night he came back to my hotel room and we’d talked until the early hours. The conversation was erratic. We flitted between funny potty-training anecdotes (it turned out both Barney and Lauren had had a thing for leaving stealth poos behind the living-room curtains) and shy confessionals (Jason revealed he had once been so desperate to talk to his son agai
n that he had resorted to the services of mediums and psychics). Then, as dawn was breaking, we had talked about our new love-hate relationship with sleep. We admitted that we both now struggled with the lottery of what each night may bring. Sometimes we hoped to see our children in our dreams and sometimes we recoiled from the acute cruelty of our own unlimited imaginations. Jason understood that, which no one else could. Our dreams had the power to sustain us just as much as they had the power to destroy us.

  Obsessing over our stories was like finally being allowed to pick at a scab on your knee you’ve wanted to attack for ages, a scab that everyone else has told you to leave alone.

  Six months of a long-distance relationship later and Jason had asked me to come and live with him. I didn’t hesitate. I packed up the flat in Rochester and moved north within the month.

  Our anniversary plans dispensed with, Jason ran his finger through the bubbles and began to talk about a new qualification he wanted to go in for. Were he to pass, it would take him to the next level of first-aid instructor. I nodded enthusiastically, trying to show my support, but all the while my thoughts kept straying back to the boy in the shop.

  I didn’t want to raise the subject again, but I couldn’t get his face out of my head.

  ‘About that boy today –’ I ventured, once he was done.

  ‘We’ve talked about this,’ he jumped in. ‘You were only trying to help.’

  I took a breath, steeling myself for what I was about to say.

  ‘Maybe we should go back and take another look?’

  There was a pause in which I was grateful not to be able to see his expression. If I couldn’t see him then, for a few seconds, I could kid myself that he’d changed his mind.

  ‘Heidi, no,’ he said quietly. ‘I asked you to leave it alone.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, twisting round to face him. ‘What with that mesh cage and the awful lighting, maybe you didn’t get a proper view? What harm could it do?’

  He took another sip of beer. I decided to keep going.