Authors: Elizabeth Corley
‘Until one of them is yours,’ Alison said, ‘and you just can’t believe your son would walk away from you.’
Fenwick had nothing to say. If Chris vanished he knew what he’d expect, and Alison had a son too. He could understand her reluctance to turn her back on the boys whose faces smiled out at them.
‘Best get on,’ he said eventually.
But after she left he turned and stared at the board. There were perhaps thirty boys pictured on it, aged between twelve and sixteen. Without meaning to he started to rearrange the photos: fair-haired boys on the left; redheads in the middle; brown next to them and then dark on the far right. Two of the dark-haired boys reminded him of Malcolm and Paul. He pulled their pictures off the board and took them over to a desk where he compared them. The similarity was striking, particularly between the younger lad and Paul.
He flipped the picture over and read the sketchy details on the reverse; of course it was Sam Bowyer
.
He winced as he recalled his last meeting with his father. The other photograph was new to him. He turned it over and read the details on the reverse:
‘Jack Trainer, 15. Missing since November last year.’
In black ink beneath had been written:
‘Died London, July 16th; coroner’s verdict pending, likely suicide; thought to have jumped off Blackfriars Bridge. Signs of massive drug-taking and sustained sexual abuse.
’
Fenwick looked at the smiling photograph of Jack on a beach somewhere with his family and bundled his picture with Sam’s into his briefcase. A ‘sad social statistic’; had he really said that? He was ashamed of himself.
Sarah Hill didn’t know about Maidment’s arrest until she opened her door the following morning to pick up her regular milk order: two pints, one silver and one gold, Paul’s favourite. She threw most of the milk away but it meant the fridge was always stocked for when he came home.
When she opened the door she saw a young man waiting in the shelter of the eaves and her heart leapt. When he turned to face her and she saw his eyes, her hope died as it did uncounted times every day.
‘Mrs Hill? I’m Jason MacDonald, from the
Enquirer
,’ he stuck out his hand and she took it automatically. ‘Might I come in?’
‘Why?’ Sarah hadn’t started life with abundant social graces and the ones she’d worked to acquire vanished the day Paul disappeared. MacDonald modulated his tone to solicitous and tilted his head on one side in what he imagined was a kindly manner.
‘Perhaps you haven’t heard.’ The hidden sadist in him enjoyed her blanched face and he pushed his advantage. ‘I think it’s best that I do come in – more private.’
She backed into the musty hall, clutching her two pints of milk to her chest. He followed quickly and was almost sick at the smell, but then the scent of an exclusive blotted it out.
‘Paul?’
He barely heard her but he nodded and lifted the cool bottles from her hands. Over his shoulder he saw a new Rover turn into the road; the competition was starting to arrive. He closed the front door firmly and made sure it was locked.
‘Is this your sitting room?’ He gave her back a gentle nudge and she led the way obediently.
‘Paul?’ she said again. He could hear hysteria creeping into her voice.
‘They haven’t found a body…yet.’ MacDonald placed the bottles on the dusty coffee table, unmindful of the condensation that started to drip onto the cracked mahogany veneer.
His eyes were everywhere, noting the racks of files and the shrine to Paul. He’d need to return with a photographer, assuming he gained his exclusive, but he was feeling good about that.
‘But they have arrested someone for his murder.’
‘Murder?’
‘Yes, the police seem pretty certain that Paul is dead, Mrs Hill.’
‘They only found some clothing.’
‘Soaked in blood.’
‘But not necessarily Paul’s; the family liaison officer, Julie, she told me. She’s a nice girl. She explained to me that there were traces of Paul’s blood on a shirt but it wasn’t much.’
‘Whatever,’ Jason felt the advantage of surprise slipping, ‘the police have enough evidence to arrest a man for murder and he’s in prison already.’
‘The police think Paul’s dead?’
He nodded.
‘But Julie said…’ Her voice trailed away and he pressed on.
‘Thing is, given the arrest, your life will become very difficult and I want to try and help you through that.’
‘Dead?’ She hadn’t heard a word he’d just said. He swallowed his impatience and repeated his line.
‘So the police think. That’s why I want to offer you help, not just practical but financial as well.’
‘Dead!’
Her legs folded and she collapsed into a chair, her skin the colour of putty. It would be inconvenient for her to faint so Jason thrust her head between her knees and darted out to the kitchen for a glass of water. When he came back she was sitting exactly as he’d left her.
‘Here, drink this, you’ve had a bit of a shock,’ he said as kindly as he could, though her behaviour was a touch indulgent given that the boy had disappeared over twenty-five years before. He watched her impatiently as she took sips from the greasy glass. Colour started to return to her face.
‘How did he die?’ She was hugging herself, trying to withdraw her extremities to protect them from the pain of contact with the outside world.
Jason suppressed another sigh.
‘I don’t know, Mrs Hill. They haven’t released that detail yet. Once they’ve finished interrogating the suspect I’m sure they will.’
‘Detail!’ The word was like a rifle shot.
‘Pardon?’
He couldn’t understand where this woman was coming from. A right nutter in his opinion. It’d be best to move fast, get her signature on the exclusivity contract he had in his pocket and come back with a photographer sharpish.
‘Now, if you could just sign this, it will stop all those bastards out there bothering you and give you some peace and quiet to get over the shock. I did mention that there’d be a financial consideration, didn’t I? No one would wish to profit from Paul’s death, you least of all, but it’s only right that you should have something to help you recover – pay for a holiday perhaps so that you can get away for a bit. We’d be paying you,’ his mind did some rapid calculations, ‘five thousand pounds. I know it sounds a lot but holidays don’t come cheap these days and you might want to take a friend.’
‘Detail,’ she repeated, ‘you called how Paul died a detail.’
Jason didn’t like the rising cadence in her voice.
‘Get out! You’re a scavenger. You don’t care about Paul or me.’
‘Now, Mrs Hill, don’t get worked up; you’re upset and of course that’s understandable…’
‘GET OUT!’
She uncurled her body and grabbed the water glass. Jason rose rapidly but hesitated enough to place the contract on the table.
‘I’ll give you a moment to think about it then, Mrs Hill,’ he said as he retreated towards the sitting room doorway.
‘OUT!’
The glass missed his head by an inch and bounced off the wall onto his shoulder, spraying him with water.
‘I’ll call you later,’ he shouted over his shoulder as he ran to the front door, cursing the deadlock that moments before he’d checked was set.
As he bent to undo it a bottle sailed over his head and crashed into the door jamb, soaking him with milk, but he managed the lock and yanked the door open in a state bordering on panic. He ran down the path and vaulted over the low wooden gate as the last of the day’s delivery smashed into the paving behind him.
The screams from the house blended with mocking laughter and he looked up to discover that he was the centre of attention in a circle of jeering faces, some of which he recognised as belonging to rivals from other nationals. Worst of all there was the lens of a news camera less than ten feet from him that must have captured the whole embarrassing incident on film.
‘Shit!’ he said before remembering that he could end up on TV and forced a smile and a laugh that would sound false even to his own ears when he watched his dismal performance later in the day.
‘The lady’s a little upset,’ he said amid guffaws and jibes that he did his best to ignore. ‘I suggest that we all give her a little space and time to recover.’
‘Just like you did, you mean.’
He recognised the voice as belonging to a youngster who’d just joined the
Sun
. He saw something of his old raw energy in the lad and hated him for it. With what he falsely imagined was great dignity he shook his jacket and trousers free of splinters of glass and walked away.
Inside the house, Sarah managed to lock the front door before crumpling to the floor. She crawled back into the lounge, closed the curtains and hugged a cushion to her chest. Throughout the morning she wept into it, paralysed by the grief that devoured her. Each year without Paul had only added to her pain. Hope, fuelled by the continued mystery of his disappearance and lack of a body, had blossomed, pushing back the devastation that acceptance of his loss would bring to every aspect of her life.
In the space of ten minutes a crass journalist’s ego had demolished decades of hope, deflating it as easily as a jealous child bursts a balloon. Into the vacuum of its destruction rushed agony that had accumulated for more than twenty-five years. For every day that she’d woken and defined Paul’s absence as temporary, for every night that Sarah had gone to bed still expecting him to make contact the following morning, there was an equal and opposite shard of bereavement that fell now onto her unprotected soul, lacerating it beyond recognition. It was a poor enough thing to start with, her soul, unsupported as it was by love or belief, but it had been resilient. Its endurance had become the foundation for the remains of her sanity and in its near destruction the tendrils of latent madness unfurled and entered her mind.
Her bladder returned her briefly to reality and she cursed it, just as she had the weakness of her body in the days immediately following Paul’s disappearance when it dropped her into snatches of sleep despite her determination to stay awake until he came home. It had seemed a betrayal then to escape into an oblivion from which she would wake with a momentary absence of pain because she’d forgotten that he was gone.
As she sat on the loo, her head bowed, she pinched and scratched herself as she had then. When she flushed she was overcome with thirst and sucked water noisily from her palm as she bent over the sink. She became aware of noises around her. The baby was crying next door; a dog yapped somewhere and another barked in reply; there was banging and an incessant ringing that drilled into her brain, adding to a headache she realised she must have had for a while because her bones ached from her spine through her jaw and into the pits of her eyes.
The ringing was from her phone, the banging was at her front door. The curtains were still drawn from the morning but she could see shadows beyond them. At the sight memory rushed back to engulf her and she moaned.
Paul…Paul…
The man said he was dead. No, that wasn’t it, not exactly. He said that the police had arrested somebody for his murder. The thought made her physically sick. Water and bile swilled around the basin as she gripped the porcelain for strength.
She managed to crawl into the sitting room and turn on the television. On the hour, every hour, Paul’s murder was headline news. She watched as his school picture appeared on the screen, then there was an interview with a handsome man in police uniform.
‘We never gave up on Paul, we never give up on anybody,
’ she heard him say, then stared in astonishment as Major Maidment’s photograph filled the screen.
They’d arrested the major! He was Paul’s killer. She’d trusted him, begged him to find her boy, and all the time he’d known he was dead. The thought made her ill again but when she’d finished retching her head felt better.
In the kitchen, she drank the remainder of yesterday’s silver top, leaving the gold for Paul as always…except that there was no point now, was there? A man was in prison, charged with his murder. The police were so sure of themselves that it had to be true. Why hope any more? She went upstairs, still in her housecoat, and lay down on top of her unmade bed. The noises from outside her house drifted away and she slept.
It was a remarkable dream. Paul walked into her bedroom and stood beside the bed. But he wasn’t the Paul of fourteen, this was a grown man with a scar on his face, though still handsome. He laid a hand on her forehead and it felt cool, reassuring.
‘You’re not to worry anymore, Mum, I’m fine,’
he said.
‘What’s the matter with your face, Paul? That’s a nasty scar. Did the major do it to you when he killed you?
’
The grown-up Paul shook his head slowly. She could see tears on his cheeks and she raised a hand to wipe them away. His face was cold, as if he’d just stepped inside from a winter’s day, but then he was dead so what did she expect?
‘Let it go, Mum. You deserve some peace. It’s been too long – you must bury your grief now.
’
Sarah shook her head angrily and brushed his hand away. Who was he to lecture her about grief? He was dead, beyond caring. What she did with her life was her business. But he was right about one thing, she did deserve peace. Hope had made that impossible. Now that it too had died she had room for other emotions and perhaps peace would take root and grow. In her dream she imagined gossamer-light seeds of peace floating through the air to drop onto her but when she tried to catch at them they blew away. She became angry, swiping at them, punching out with such force that her body twitched in its sleep. She began to feel stronger. Emotions other than grief and hopelessness bloomed inside her: hate, fury, terrible jealousy against anyone who had children, and a desire for revenge.
When she woke up she found the bedding and pillows on the floor. Her bedside light lay smashed beside them. Outside it had grown dark. In the glow from the street lamps she could see three reporters and a photographer waiting, the rest had gone. Without switching on a light she made her way to the kitchen at the back of the house, where she risked turning on the lamp in the extractor fan. She was ravenous and cooked last month’s eggs, some dried-out bacon, tomatoes and toast from the previous day’s bread and washed it down with strong tea into which she poured more than a splash of ancient whisky that she found at the back of a cupboard.