Christ
yes
, his heart said. How he would love to meet up with Eve, listen to
her soft voice, smell her, touch her. He suddenly found himself remembering how
it felt to kiss her, the way she used to murmur his name as he nuzzled her
neck, her ear. And the memory of it made his blood quicken. But he knew he
couldn’t allow himself to follow his heart. After all, what did he have to
offer her? Nothing but memories and misery. “I don’t think that’d be good
idea.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re
right. I don’t know why I even suggested it. Take care, Harlan.”
“You too.”
Harlan hung up,
releasing a heavy breath. “Focus,” he said sharply. He focused on the street
shining wetly beneath the orange glow of the lampposts.
That life is gone
,
he told himself.
This right here, this is all the life you’ve got left, so
make it count
.
All night Harlan
searched in vain. When darkness began to give way to the blue of dawn, he
grabbed a bite to eat at a café. The breakfast news blared out of a television
on the wall. The waitress served him in silence, then quickly retreated behind
the counter, where she fell into a whispered conversation with another woman.
Both women shot him uneasy, frowning glances. He ignored them, concentrating on
eating and the news. The police were having no more luck than him, it seemed.
There had been no reported sightings of Ethan, and the police had expanded the
focus of their search beyond Sheffield into the surrounding regions,
particularly the Northwest where there’d recently been a suspected child
abduction – Jamie Sutton, an eleven-year old boy, had disappeared while out
riding his bike in Prestwich, a northern suburb of Manchester, nearly two
months ago. A massive search had been conducted, thousands of missing-person
posters had been distributed, private donors had put together a reward of
two-hundred thousand pounds for anyone who came forward with solid information
that led to the boy’s rescue. All to no avail. Jamie Sutton, it seemed, had
literally vanished into thin air.
Harlan considered
expanding the focus of his search too, but quickly decided against it. The
connection between the cases was too tenuous. For starters, it was impossible
to say with certainty that Jamie Sutton had been abducted. He might’ve been the
victim of a hit-and-run, met with some kind of accident, or maybe even be a
runaway. Secondly, if Jamie had been abducted, then the kidnapper’s MO was
significantly different, more suggestive of an opportunistic mindset. Thirdly,
Jamie was a very different boy from Ethan – whereas Ethan looked shy and timid,
Jamie had a broad face and bold, self-confident eyes. Finally, and most
importantly as far as Harlan was concerned, he saw little hope in himself
succeeding where the best efforts of the police had failed. Better to continue
the search here, where the trail was still fresh.
It was midday when the
posters started appearing on lampposts and in shop windows. They featured
close-ups of Ethan taken from different angles and with different expressions.
Above his face in big letters was the word ‘KIDNAPPED’. Below his face were the
numbers of a couple of freephone tip hotlines. There were also groups of people
on the streets – not police, but volunteers – handing out leaflets to passersby
and motorists. Harlan rolled his window down to take one from a woman. “There’s
going to be a march through the streets around Ethan’s home tonight,” she said.
“Everybody’s welcome.”
“Everybody doesn’t
include me,” said Harlan, and he drove on, working his way methodically through
the city.
New information
trickled through the radio. Police dogs had picked up Ethan’s scent, but the
trail they’d found ended several feet from the backyard gate. Detectives were
holding a local man for questioning. William Jones, a fifty-two year old
unmarried, unemployed steel worker with convictions for child sex offences, had
apparently been seen on several occasions recently hanging around outside
Ethan’s school and at a nearby play-park that the boy frequented. Jones was
well-known in the community as a sex-offender, and his home and car had been
vandalised many times in the past. In a brief statement to the press, Detective
Chief Inspector Garrett said that Jones was on the Sex Offenders’ Register and
was considered a medium risk.
Harlan pulled over at a
café with internet access, navigated to the website of a local newspaper, typed
‘William Jones’ into the search-term box, and scanned down the list of related
articles until he came to the headline, ‘Man Jailed For Child Sex Offences’. He
clicked the link and skim-read the article it led to. Jones had been sentenced
to a year’s imprisonment in 2005 for ten counts of making indecent images of a
girl under fourteen-years old and one count of indecent assault. There was a
photo of him – overweight, vein-streaked alcoholic’s cheeks, receding
grey-brown hair. Although, at a stretch, Jones might fit the kidnapper’s description,
Harlan dismissed him as a suspect. The guy was a relatively low-grade offender
with a taste for young girls. A nasty piece of work, but not the type to snatch
eight-year old boys from their bedrooms. That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth
bringing him in and grilling him for a while. After all, birds of a feather
flocked together – especially when no one else wanted anything to do with them
– which meant that characters like Jones were often the best source of
information about offenders operating under the police radar in an area.
Harlan returned to his
car and the search. Afternoon wore away like a corpse in a hot country. Five
o’clock, six, seven…Every time he glanced at the clock, another hour seemed to
have passed. He swallowed Pro-Plus tablets with black coffee, but even so his
vision began to grow blurry as if he was looking through a haze of tears. It’d
been nearly forty-eight hours since he last slept. Reluctantly accepting that
if he continued searching he’d be likely to miss more than he saw, he headed
back to his flat.
Remembering about the
march, Harlan flicked the television on and found himself confronted by Susan
Reed’s haggard, almost cadaverous face. She looked like she’d aged two years
for every day that’d passed since he last saw her. Her eyes, which peered out
from under tear-swollen lids, had a glazed look about them. More than likely,
she’d been given a mild sedative. A man had one arm cupped around her narrow
shoulders as if to hold her up. He was maybe five or ten years younger than her,
tall and skinny, with a pale, lumpy face, and a fine fuzz of blond hair on his
skull and above his upper lip. Watery blue eyes – it was difficult to tell if
they were watery with tears or just watery – peered at the cameras through
cheap-looking spectacles. Harlan wondered who the man was. A friend? A
relative? No, his body language spoke of a different kind of intimacy. A
boyfriend, maybe. A person of interest, definitely.
A gang of reporters
pushed microphones closer to Susan’s trembling lips as she opened her mouth to
speak. “Ethan…” Her voice cracked and she seemed to lose her breath. She was
silent a moment, wrestling with her emotions, on the edge of being overcome
with grief. “Ethan, if you’re out there and you can hear me, we’re doing
everything we possibly can to find you.” She looked away from the cameras,
steadying herself, then she addressed the kidnapper. “Please let my beautiful
little boy go. Please! Please!” She couldn’t hold it together any longer. Tears
spilled down her face. She dropped her head, shoulders quaking, and the man at
her side gently guided her away from the microphones.
The camera panned
around to focus on a crowd about four or five hundred strong, many of them
carrying flowers and lighted candles. At the front of the crowd a line of
children held a large banner with two pictures of Ethan flanking the words
‘HELP FIND ETHAN’ and a telephone number. The crowd applauded as Susan and the
man joined them. They set off along the streets, chanting Ethan’s name. Their
voices were full of a kind of sad enthusiasm, but suddenly a discordant, angry
note came to the fore. The crowd bunched into tight knot outside a dilapidated
two-up two-down terraced house. The house’s downstairs window was boarded with
warped, rain-stained chipboard on which was graffitied in red paint ‘Pedo
Scum’. As the camera homed in on the graffiti, a voiceover explained that the
house belonged to William Jones.
Jones was lucky the
police were holding him, Harlan reflected. He knew from experience how quickly
a peaceful gathering could transform into a lynch mob. He’d once been part of a
task force set up to investigate the death of a convicted paedophile whose
house was ransacked by an angry mob, some of whom were only a couple of years
older than Ethan.
Harlan phoned Jim. This
time his ex-partner answered. “Who’s the guy with Susan Reed?” asked Harlan.
“Forget it, Harlan.
You’re not getting anything else out of me, not after the way you’ve behaved. I
thought we had a deal that you were going to keep away from this thing.”
“You thought wrong.
Look, Jim, all I’m doing is searching the streets. I owe Susan Reed that much
at least. Besides, the guy went on the national news with her. His name’s going
to come out soon enough anyway.”
“I’ll tell you this
much. He’s clean, no warrants, no record, and he’s got an airtight alibi.”
“He could have an
accomplice.”
Jim sighed and tried to
change the subject. “Have you spoken to Eve?”
“Yes. She asked if I
wanted to meet up.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said no.”
“You want a piece of
advice, Harlan. Call her back, tell her you’ve changed your mind.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why? She still loves
you, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I
can’t see her.”
Jim huffed his breath
into the receiver. “Christ, I’ve never heard such a load of bollocks. If you
think you’re doing Eve a favour by staying away from her, you’re wrong. All
you’re doing is making both of you miserable. But then again, maybe that’s what
you want. Maybe prison’s turned you into the kind of guy who enjoys misery,
wallows in it like a pig in muck.”
“Maybe so.” Harlan’s
eyes were drawn to the television by the sound of smashing glass. Someone had
hurled a bottle at Jones’s house. The police quickly moved in to usher the
crowd onwards. The camera homed in on Susan Reed, milking every ounce of agony
and despair. Her boyfriend, or whatever he was, looked pale and uncomfortable,
like he wanted to be somewhere else. “So what’s the guy’s alibi?”
“Jesus, Harlan,”
snapped Jim, and he hung up.
Harlan switched off the
television and headed for bed. He set the alarm clock for two hours hence and
shut his eyes. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought about what Jim had said.
Jim was wrong, prison hadn’t changed him – at least, not in the way he meant.
He’d always needed a bit of misery in his life. As a detective, he’d needed it
the way an oyster needs sand to form pearls. It’d provided him with the edge
and insight required to do the job. The difference was that back then he’d used
his misery, controlled it. Now it was the other way around.
Chapter
5
All that night and the
following day and night, Harlan relentlessly scoured the streets. He saw dozens
of silver VW Golfs, but none of their number plates came close to being a
match. As the hands of time ticked mercilessly towards the four day mark, his
searching became ever more frantic. One time, after glimpsing a silver car in
his rearview mirror, he did a high-speed U-turn and gave chase. A mile or so
later, leaving a trail of blaring horns in his wake, he caught up with the car
only to find it wasn’t even a VW.
There was little new to
be heard on the news. For some undisclosed reason, a pond was dragged, but
turned up nothing. William Jones was released without charge. The police issued
warnings that vigilantism wouldn’t be tolerated. They also put up a ten
thousand pound reward for information that would lead them to Ethan. Their
search was building to a fever-pitch too – over a third of the regional force’s
manpower was now involved. An army of volunteers wallpapered the city with
Ethan’s face and handed out reams of leaflets. Susan Reed spoke to dozens of
journalists, making a series of increasingly desperate appeals. But answers
seemed non-existent and fear swelled like waves of fire, ready to consume the
city. Parents kept their children indoors. Home security companies couldn’t
keep up with demand. Police were inundated with reports of suspected prowlers.
On the evening of the
third day, Garrett gave another press conference at which he admitted that the
police had few clues to go on and called on people not to lose hope. Don’t lose
hope! In the past, Harlan had spoken those same words to the families of
missing and kidnapped persons, and they’d rung as hollow on his lips as they
did on Garrett’s. He glanced at the clock. Half-past seven. There were
approximately eight or nine hours of hope left. After that, anyone who knew
anything about child abductions knew that Ethan would almost certainly be dead.
Time wore on. Ten PM,
eleven…one AM, two… Harlan didn’t stop for food, didn’t stop for red lights,
barely stopped to breathe, until the clock hit four AM. Then he pulled over and
sat for a long moment with his head pressed against the steering-wheel, eyes
closed. “It’s over,” he murmured to himself, and he turned the car to head back
to his flat.