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

by Deborah O'Connor

  Jason stopped and, although he kept his face forward, I could tell he was listening to every word. Jason had told me that, in the past, Vicky had been prescribed antidepressants.

  Mandy made eye contact with me and held it while she delivered her next line.

  ‘He said she could do with being able to talk to someone who truly understands what she’s going through. You know, someone like you, Jason.’

  I felt my gut contract.

  Vicky hid her face in her hands.

  Jason shook his head and I could tell he was trying to make out he didn’t care, that Vicky meant nothing to him, that her plight was no longer his concern.

  It was a struggle but, eventually, he managed to turn away and walked out of the restaurant into the night. He didn’t wait or hold the door.

  Mandy shot me a sly look of triumph and went back to her menu.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sunday morning, and I woke to the sight of Jason on the floor. Already in his shorts and T-shirt, he was busy putting on his trainers.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I need to clear my head,’ he said, pulling his laces so tight the skin on his hands blanched a temporary grey.

  ‘Will you be gone long?’

  ‘Not sure,’ he said, velcroing his iPod holder to his bicep.

  ‘What about later?’ I asked. ‘Maybe we could drive out to the country, have a pub lunch?’

  Making an ‘mmm’ sound, he stood up, placed his right leg on the bedside table and inched his head towards his knee. While he waited for the hamstring to capitulate, he reached down and zipped up the lightweight jacket he favoured for particularly long runs. Repeating the exercise on his left leg, he plugged in his white earbuds and, after giving me a kiss goodbye, somewhere between my cheek and mouth, he disappeared down the stairs.

  The whole time he’d been getting ready I’d kept my face normal, my voice cheery, but as soon as I heard the front door close I nested the duvet up and over my head.

  Jason didn’t want a baby. Not until Barney was found.

  I knew that, with the help of IVF, some women managed to conceive well into their forties. But I also knew there were no guarantees. The longer we waited, the older I got, the harder it would be. Maybe it had been naive to think he’d want us to have a child together, but still, until last night I’d thought, I’d hoped. I burrowed further into the quilt, trying to lose myself in sleep, and had just begun to drift when I was startled awake by the phone.

  Reluctant to leave my cocoon, I reached out my arm, patting the floor until I came upon my handbag. Plunging my hand inside, I yanked it out and hoisted myself up to sitting.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, breathless from the effort.

  ‘Have I caught you in the middle of something?’

  ‘What? No, no,’ I said, disoriented. ‘I was in bed and …’ I stopped mid-sentence, realising I had no idea to whom I was explaining myself. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Tommy.’

  ‘Tommy?’

  ‘Told you I’d be in touch.’

  My business card. He took it that day.

  ‘You’re being all shy,’ he said when I didn’t respond. ‘But I bet on the other end of that phone you’re smiling that lovely smile. Like sunshine, it is.’

  I remembered the pressure of his hand on the inside of my thigh.

  ‘I’m calling to see what you’re up to tomorrow night? I know this lovely little pub. Out in the country: Lamesley Pastures. The Ravensworth Arms. You can see the Angel of the North through the windows of the snug.’ He waited a beat. ‘It has some lovely rooms upstairs.’

  I thought about the other men I’d come across like him in the past. Men who, even as teenagers, are full of secrets and experience. Men who you sensed, just from the weight of their palm on your hip, had always known what to do.

  ‘I’m washing my hair,’ I said, trying to make it clear I wasn’t taking him or the prospect of infidelity seriously.

  ‘I’m going to be there anyway, so you don’t have to give me an answer now. Just come along on the night if you feel like it.’

  ‘Got to go,’ I said, hanging up.

  Stretching back under the duvet, I flipped onto my front, intending to sleep. My eyes closed, I became aware of how the edge of my nightie had ridden up, leaving the silk hem to rest against the curve of my bottom. I shifted slightly and the material moved higher. My thighs were warm against the sheet. Turning my head to the side, I flexed my feet and, digging my toes into the mattress, I pushed my hips forward. Slipping my hand down underneath the weight of my body, I began to move, slowly at first and then faster, greedy for the end. My breath grew shallow. As soon as I came I burst out laughing: a strange, high giggle that seemed to suggest both delight and horror in equal measure.

  Now wide awake, I got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror. One of my nightie’s spaghetti straps had fallen away and was dangling low on my arm. I gave my other shoulder a shrug, releasing the strap that hung there, and my nightie fell to the floor with a swoosh. Stepping out from the silky pile at my feet, I moved in close to the mirror and turned on the light.

  After studying the faint purpling on the front of my hip (the last of the van bruising) I turned side-on, trying to imagine my body through Tommy’s eyes. My arms were scrawny and pale blue thread veins speckled the backs of my thighs. I poked at my breasts. They weren’t too bad: high and round, even after I’d lost all the weight. I wondered how they’d fare were I ever to have another baby.

  I pinned my hair into a bun, put on my dressing-gown and went in search of breakfast. Dousing the cornflakes in milk, I cupped the bowl in one hand, grasped a spoon in the other and began to wander around the house, slurping cereal as I went. It wasn’t long before I found myself outside the door to the spare room.

  I spooned in another mouth of cornflakes. Less than ten feet away from where I stood, sitting in the dark, were five lever-arch files’ worth of Jason’s case notes. Case notes that might contain something to connect the off-licence or the man that ran it to Barney’s disappearance.

  I felt my hand press down on the door handle.

  The filing cabinet stood in the corner, next to the desk, its polished steel dulled by the grey morning light.

  Managing to resist its pull, for the moment at least, I veered to the opposite side of the room and the world map stuck to the wall. Positioned next to the line-up of Barney age-progression photos, the map’s continents and countries were pierced with hundreds of multi-coloured drawing pins. Stepping over Jason’s old bag of welding tools, I moved closer and ran my finger over the pins he’d clustered everywhere from Thailand to Tobago. It was odd. While the police had conceded it was entirely possible Barney had been trafficked abroad, they had no definite theories either way and, as such, had continued to plough just as much manpower into domestic leads. Still, the longer Barney was missing, the more international sightings there were. Every now and then there would be a flurry of people claiming to have seen Barney in a Madrid petrol station, Moscow supermarket or at the front of the queue for Disneyland’s Thunder Mountain. And, when the fancy took them, the twenty-four-hour news channels were just as bad. Reporting on ‘a blond-haired boy seen with a group of older men at a Gibraltar ferry port’, they would go on to pick over the details with sound bites, outside broadcasts and graphic reconstructions for days on end. Sightings of Barney in the UK meanwhile, continued to dwindle.

  My eyes roamed over the map of far-flung and familiar places before eventually coming to a stop on the United Kingdom. Ours was a strange-shaped island. Like a foetus turned on its side, its too-short hands seemed to be poking out into the amniotic Irish Sea, its toe dipped down into the English Channel. Was Barney out there, somewhere in the big wide world, or was he still here, in the UK, less than fifty miles from where he was last seen?

  I stepped back into the middle of the room, my eyes once more drawn to the filing cabinet and the prospect of what lay within.

  Placi
ng my cereal bowl on the desk, I curled my fingers round the top drawer’s curved metal handle and pulled. Planning to pick up where I’d left off, I grabbed the file at the back marked 2010 and tried to lift it out. But I’d forgotten how heavy it was and, as I fumbled to get a grip, the folder tipped back into the cabinet and onto the contents of the locked drawer below. Reaching in with my right arm, I picked it up and tried to move it back out through the hole. But it wouldn’t budge. Its corner had caught on something. Stretching my other arm in to help, I grabbed the folder with both hands and gave it a tug. Finally, it came free. Breathing a small sigh of relief, I put the file on the desk and pushed the cabinet closed. But the drawer was barely halfway shut before it stopped, unable to go any further. Opening it back out, I squinted into the gloom, trying to spot the source of the problem. There was an object blocking its way. I must have dislodged something in the locked drawer below. I stretched in again and tried to free the obstruction. But, whatever it was, was just out of reach.

  I looked around for something to help. A collection of pens, a ruler and a pair of scissors filled the desk tidy. All useless. Scanning the rest of the room, my eyes soon fell on Jason’s old bag of welding tools. Made out of thick burgundy canvas, its sides had been covered in oil and grime when Jason had first dumped it in here. Now though, having collected a few years’ worth of dust, the bag had a grey, furred coating. Crouching down on my knees, I tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy and so I tipped it forward instead. A blowtorch, drill, metal clamp, oversized screwdriver and a few other tools I couldn’t identify tumbled out onto the carpet. I considered the C-shaped clamp. That might work.

  Holding on to the clamp’s screw, I pushed the hook deep inside and swatted around in the dark. The cabinet’s metal frame had just begun to cut into my shoulder when I felt the end of the clamp brush against something. After a few more goes, I managed to get a purchase on it and pulled the obstruction up and forward to the point where I could grab hold of it with my other hand.

  Rubbing at my shoulder, I inspected my haul. I had expected to see something you wouldn’t want a potential burglar to have easy access to. Instead, I was faced with a thin, black, A4-size folder, the front cover of which was plain except for a single white sticker. Written on the sticker, in red block capitals that I recognised as Jason’s handwriting, was one word. I stared at it, trying to understand what it was I was seeing. VICKY. The one word written on the folder said VICKY.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I backed away from the desk, as though what was inside the folder might do me harm. I scrambled for an explanation – Jason kept it under lock and key, but maybe it contained important paperwork relating to his and Vicky’s divorce and subsequent financial arrangements? I thought back to last night, in the curry house. The way he hadn’t been able to meet her eye. On the other hand, maybe the folder was more personal. Full of old love letters and ticket stubs he’d been unable to part with. Evidence of their relationship, of his old feelings for her, that he didn’t want me to see.

  Placing my finger under the folder’s bottom corner, I shuffled the contents out onto the desk and took a seat.

  Starting with the piece of paper on the top of the pile, I saw that it was a mobile phone bill addressed to a Mrs Vicky Thursby and was dated June 2010 – the month before Barney went missing. Studying it in more detail, I saw the bill listed every number she had phoned over a twenty-eight-day period as well as the duration and cost of each call, and that two numbers in particular had been highlighted wherever they appeared on the sheet in fluorescent yellow marker.

  I put the phone bill to one side and did a quick inventory of the remaining documents. As well as a map showing the location of Jason and Vicky’s old house, I found Vicky’s bank statements for the period January–June 2010, a photocopy of a crumpled petrol receipt for a garage situated twenty miles away in Thirsk and a list of names and times in unfamiliar handwriting.

  Why had Jason collected these things together? Surely he didn’t think Vicky had anything to do with Barney going missing? He’d always told me that, like the police, he believed everything she’d said happened that day and was angry at the way she’d been vilified in the press.

  And how the press had gone for her.

  Although Vicky had never strayed from her story, certain sections of the media had made sure that there was always a question mark over her involvement in Barney’s disappearance. Ultimately, as far as they were concerned, it all came down to Mrs McCallum’s witness statement and the fact she couldn’t recall Barney ever having been in her flat that day.

  They had ignored the old lady’s deteriorating memory and instead developed a series of increasingly fantastical theories about what might or might not have happened. Through underhand sources they had discovered that, although Barney’s fingerprints and hair had been found in Mrs McCallum’s flat, as per Vicky’s story, the police had not been able to establish whether the traces were from that day or previous weeks’ visits. On top of all that, they had revealed how Vicky had suffered with postnatal depression in the months after Barney was born. Putting the two together, they’d concocted a scenario in which, somewhere between Vicky’s last appointment and her journey to Mrs McCallum’s flat, she had accidentally or intentionally hurt Barney and, after disposing of his body, had made up the whole disappearing-into-thin-air story in order to protect herself.

  Looking back, I thought that the press and internet forums latched on to Vicky in the way they did because they were otherwise at a loss as to what might have happened. To have had a child vanish defied all rational logic and spoke to our greatest, darkest fears: specifically, the fear that, no matter how hard you tried to protect your babies, someone or something could take them and there was nothing you could do about it. By casting Vicky as a potential suspect, flimsy evidence aside, they had been able to explain away something that otherwise terrified them and their readers.

  I looked again at the collection of documents Jason had decided were so important he’d kept them locked away. Had he realised something about Vicky’s story that the police had missed? If so, how long had he thought this? He would almost certainly have told Martin about any possible new leads, whether they involved her or not. But then, maybe he had gone to the police with his theories and maybe they had been dismissed?

  I didn’t hear the door open.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  It was Jason, back from his run.

  I jumped. Trying to stand up and turn to face him all at the same time, in my haste I knocked the cereal bowl flying. Milk and soggy bits of cornflake splatted onto the documents spread out on the desk and began dripping onto the carpet below.

  I looked around for something to mop up the mess, but Jason was already pushing me out of the way. He slipped off his T-shirt in one easy movement and began dabbing at the pages.

  ‘Why are you going through my stuff?’

  I went to answer but my head was so crammed with the implications of what I’d just found that I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Heidi, I asked you a question,’ he said, trying to salvage the damp sheets of paper.

  ‘I wanted to refresh my memory,’ I said. ‘To look through your files and see if there’s anything that might have been overlooked.’

  ‘Why the sudden interest?’

  He’d cleaned up as much of the milk as he could and, for the first time, he took in exactly what it was I’d been looking at. He froze. I held my tongue, waiting for him to explain. But he said nothing. Coming back up to standing, he screwed his soiled T-shirt into a ball and went to leave.

  ‘Why have you got a file on Vicky?’ I asked in the strongest voice I could muster. ‘And why are you keeping it in a locked drawer?’

  He paused for a second and then, trying to make out like he hadn’t heard me, kept going, headed for the stairs. I followed behind.

  ‘What does it all mean?’ I shouted after him.

  But still, he ignored me. A cocktail of worry
and anger began to form in my stomach. Trailing him into the kitchen, I tried again.

  ‘What’s going on, Jason?’

  I watched as he filled a pint glass with water from the tap and then drank it down without stopping. Once the glass was empty he wiped his mouth on the back of his arm.

  ‘Do you think Vicky had something to do with Barney’s disappearance?’ I asked, trying to goad him into conversation. Still he acted as though I wasn’t there.

  Retreating to the opposite side of the kitchen, he placed his forehead against a cupboard and after taking some deep breaths in and out through his nose, he thumped the worktop with both hands and set off towards the hall.

  ‘I feel like I’m going to say or do something that I’ll regret.’ He lifted his Adidas hoodie off the coat rack. ‘I need to go out for a bit.’ He fed the top over his head and reached his arms up through the sleeves.

  ‘What? Jason, no,’ I said, following behind. ‘Look, I’m sorry, OK? I was just trying to help.’ I tried to grab hold of him but he took a step back and my hands fluttered around his sweatshirt. I moved towards him and tried again, pinching and pulling at the fabric until finally, he gave one of my hands a hard slap.

  The sound shocked us both.

  ‘I don’t want your help,’ he said. ‘Don’t you get it? I don’t fucking want it.’

  He didn’t bother to slam the front door. As he jogged away down the hill it swung back and forth on its hinges in the wind before a big gust caught it, making it fly shut with such force it made the whole house shudder.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It took me a few minutes to realise why I’d woken up. I’d been having a dream in which I was in the off-licence with the boy. I was thirsty. Somehow, I’d managed to get round to the other side of the cage where the boy was being kept, and there I’d discovered an enormous bottle of water. It was the boy’s water, but I was so thirsty that I took it from him. I’d only planned on having a sip and then giving it back. But, when I drank, I discovered it was the coolest, sweetest water I’d ever tasted and so then I took another sip and another. It seemed that, no matter how much of the water I consumed, I couldn’t quench my thirst. At first, I thought the dream was my body’s way of telling me I was dehydrated, the way it sometimes does if you’ve eaten too much salty food. But then I felt the spit rushing in my mouth and I knew I had woken because I was going to be sick.