C.L. TAYLOR
The Missing

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2016

Copyright © C.L. Taylor 2016

Cover illustration © Henry Steadman 2016

C.L. Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008118051

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008118068

Version: 2018-06-21

Praise for The Missing

‘Black Narcissus for the Facebook generation, a clever exploration of how petty jealousies and misunderstandings can unravel even the tightest of friendships. Claustrophobic, tense and thrilling, a thrill-ride of a novel that keeps you guessing.’

Elizabeth Haynes

‘A gripping and disturbing psychological thriller: every bit as good as The Accident.’

Clare Mackintosh

‘Fast-paced, tense and atmospheric, a guaranteed bestseller.’

Mark Edwards

‘Haunting and heart-stoppingly creepy, The Lie is a gripping roller coaster of suspense.’

Sunday Express

‘5/5 stars – Spine-chilling!’

Woman magazine

‘An excellent psychological thriller.’

Heat magazine

‘Packed with twists and turns, this brilliantly tense thriller will get your blood pumping.’

Claire Frost, Fabulous magazine

‘A real page-turner, with two story lines: one of growing menace in the present, and a past narrative of a girls-only holiday that goes horrifically wrong. Creepy, horrifying and twisty. C.L. Taylor is extremely good at writing stories in which you have no idea which characters you can trust, and the result is intriguing and scary and extremely gripping.’

Julie Cohen, 2014 Richard and Judy Summer Book Club Pick

‘The Lie is absolutely brilliant – The Beach, only darker, more thrilling and more tense. It’s the story of a twisted, distorted friendship. It’s a compelling, addictive and wonderfully written tale. Can’t recommend it enough.’

Louise Douglas

‘C.L. Taylor delivers another compelling read that’ll keep you turning pages way too late into the night. Warning: may cause drowsiness the following day.’

Tamar Cohen

‘My heart was racing after I finished C.L. Taylor’s brilliant new book The Lie. Dark, creepy and full of twists. I loved it.’

Rowan Coleman

‘C.L. Taylor is fast becoming the queen of psychological suspense. Read this: you won’t be disappointed.’

Victoria Fox

Dedication

To my late grandmothers Milbrough Griffiths and Olivia Bella Taylor.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for The Missing

Dedication

Thursday 5th February 2015

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Monday 11th August 2014

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Friday 22nd August 2014

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Tuesday 26th August 2014

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Thursday 25th September 2014

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Tuesday 7th October 2014

Chapter 19

Wednesday 8th October 2014

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Friday 10th October 2014

Chapter 23

Friday 24th October 2014

Chapter 24

Monday 3rd November 2014

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Tuesday 4th November 2014

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Saturday 8th November 2014

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Tuesday 25th November 2014

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Thursday 27th November 2014

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Friday 19th December 2014

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Friday 2nd January 2015

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Saturday 3rd January 2015

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Friday 16th January 2015

Chapter 55

Tuesday 27th January 2015

Chapter 56

Tuesday 27th January 2015

Chapter 57

Wednesday 28th January 2015

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

A conversation with C.L. Taylor

Book club questions for The Missing by C.L. Taylor

Acknowledgements

Author Note

About the Author

Also by C.L. Taylor

About the Publisher

Thursday 5th February 2015

Jackdaw44: Do you want to play a game?

ICE9: No.

Jackdaw44: Not sex.

ICE9: What then?

Jackdaw44: Questions. I’m bored. It’s just a bit of fun.

ICE9: …

Jackdaw44: I take it that’s a yes. OK. First question. Would you rather go deaf or blind?

ICE9: You really are bored, aren’t you? Deaf.

Jackdaw44: Would you rather drown in a river or burn in a fire?

ICE9: Neither.

Jackdaw44: You have to choose.

ICE9: Drown in a river.

Jackdaw44: Be buried or cremated?

ICE9: I don’t like this game.

Jackdaw44: It doesn’t mean anything. I’m just trying to get to know you better.

ICE9: Weird way of doing it.

Jackdaw44: I love you. I want to know everything about you.

ICE9: Buried.

Jackdaw44: Be infamous or be forgotten?

ICE9: Forgotten.

Jackdaw44: Seriously???

ICE9: Yes.

Jackdaw44: I’d choose infamy every time.

ICE9: No surprise there.

Jackdaw44: Cry at my funeral or save your tears for private?

ICE9: WHAT?!! Stop being so morbid.

Jackdaw44: I’m not. I’m just preparing you.

ICE9: For what?

ICE9: Hello?

ICE9: HELLO?

Chapter 1
Wednesday 5th August 2015

What do you wear when you peer into the barrel of a camera and plead for someone, anyone, to please, please tell you where your child is? A blouse? A jumper? Armour?

Today is the day of the second television appeal. It’s been six months since my son disappeared. Six months? How can it be that long? The counsellor I started seeing four weeks after he was taken from us told me the pain would lessen, that I would never feel his loss as keenly as I did that first day.

She lied.

It takes me the best part of an hour before I can look at myself in the bedroom mirror without crying. My hair, cut in a short elfin style last week, doesn’t suit my wide, angular face and my eyes look dark and deep-set beneath the new fringe. The blouse I’d deemed sensible and presentable last night suddenly looks thin and cheap, the knee-length pencil skirt too tight on my hips. I select a pair of navy trousers and a soft grey jumper instead. Smart, but not too smart, serious but not sombre.

Mark is not in the bedroom with me. He got up at 5.37 a.m. and slipped silently out of the room without acknowledging my soft grunt as I peered at the time on the alarm clock. When we went to bed last night we lay in silence side by side, not touching, too tense to talk. It took a long time for sleep to come.

I didn’t say anything when Mark got up. He’s always been an early riser and enjoys a solitary hour or so, pottering around the house, before everyone else wakes up.

Our house was always so noisy in the morning, with Billy and Jake fighting over who got to use the bathroom first and then turning up their stereos full volume when they returned to their rooms to get changed. I’d pound on their bedroom doors and shout at them to turn the music down. Mark’s never been very good with noise. He spends hours each week driving from city to city as part of his job as a pharmaceutical sales rep but always in silence – no music, audiobooks or radio for him.

‘Mark?’ It’s 7.30 a.m. when I pad into the kitchen, taking care to step over the cracked tile by the fridge so I don’t snag my pop socks. Three years ago Billy opened the fridge and a bottle of wine fell out, cracking the tiles that Mark had only finished laying the day before. I told him it was my fault.

‘Mark?’

The kettle is still warm but there’s no sign of my husband. I poke my head around the living-room door but he’s not there either. I return to the kitchen, and open the back door that leads to the driveway at the side of the house. The garage door is open. The rrr-rrr-rrr splutter of the lawnmower being started drifts towards me.

‘Mark?’ I slip my feet into a pair of Jake’s size ten trainers that have been abandoned next to the mat and slip-slide across the driveway towards the garage. It’s August and the sun is already high in the sky, the park on the other side of the street is a riot of colour and our lawn is damp with dew. ‘You’re not planning on cutting the grass now, surel—’

I stop short at the garage door. My tall, fair-haired husband is bent over the lawnmower in his best navy suit, a greasy black oil stain just above the knee of his left trouser leg.

‘Mark! What the hell are you doing?’

He doesn’t look up.

‘Servicing the lawnmower.’ He gives the starting cord another yank and the machine growls in protest.

‘Now?’

‘I haven’t used it for a month. It’ll rust up if it’s not serviced.’

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘But Mark, it’s Billy’s appeal.’

‘I know what day it is.’ This time he does look up. His cheeks are flushed and there’s a sheen of sweat that stretches from his thick, unkempt eyebrows all the way up to his receding hairline. He passes a hand over his brow, then wipes it on his trouser leg, rubbing sweat into the greasy oil stain. I want to scream at him that he’s ruined his best suit and he can’t go to Billy’s appeal like that, but today isn’t the day for an argument, so I take a deep breath instead.

‘It’s seven-thirty,’ I say. ‘We need to get going in half an hour. DS Forbes said he’d meet us at eight-thirty to go through a few things.’

Mark rubs a clenched fist against his lower back as he straightens up. ‘Is Jake ready?’

‘I don’t think so. His door was shut as I came downstairs and I couldn’t hear voices.’

Jake shares his bedroom with his girlfriend Kira. They started dating at school when they were sixteen and they’ve been together three years now, sharing a room in our house for the last eighteen months. Jake begged me to let her stay. Her mum’s drinking had got worse and she’d started lashing out at Kira, physically and verbally. He told me that if I didn’t let her live with us she’d have to move up to Edinburgh to live with her grandfather and they’d never get to see each other.

‘Well, if Jake can’t be bothered to get up, then let’s go without him,’ Mark says. ‘I haven’t got the energy to deal with him. Not today.’

It was Billy who used to disappoint Mark. Billy with his ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude about school and his belief that life owed him fame and fortune. Jake was always Mark’s golden boy in comparison. He worked hard at school, gained six A- to C-grade GCSEs and passed his electrician course at college with flying colours. These days it’s phone calls about Jake’s poor attendance at work that we’re dealing with, not Billy’s.

I haven’t got the energy to deal with Jake either but I can’t just shrug my shoulders like Mark. We need to present a united front to the media. We all need to be there, sitting side by side behind the desk. A strong family, in appearance if nothing else.

‘I’m going back to the house. I’ll get your other suit out of the wardrobe,’ I say but Mark has already turned his attention back to the lawnmower.

I shuffle back to the path, Jake’s oversized shoes leaving a trail in the gravel, and reach for the handle of the back door.

I hear the scream the second I push it open.

Chapter 2

‘Jake, give me that!’ Kira’s screech carries down the stairs and there’s a loud thump from the bedroom above as something, or someone, hits the floor.

I kick off Jake’s shoes and take the stairs two at a time, cross the landing and fly into his bedroom without stopping to knock. There’s a flurry of activity as Kira and Jake jump away from each other. Barely five foot tall with blonde hair that falls past her shoulders, Kira looks tiny and doll-like in her pink knickers and a tight white T-shirt. Jake is bare-chested, naked apart from a pair of black jockey shorts that cling to his hips. His shoulders and chest are so broad and muscled he seems to fill the room. At his feet is a shattered bottle leaking pale brown liquid onto the beige carpet. There are shards of glass on the pile of weights plates beside it.

‘Mum!’ Jake leaps away from Kira, planting his right foot on the broken bottle. He howls in anguish as a shard of clear glass embeds itself in his sole.

‘Don’t!’ I shout, but he’s already yanked it out. Bright red blood gushes out, covering his fingers and dripping onto the carpet.

‘Don’t move!’ I sprint to the bathroom and grab the first towel I see. When I return to the bedroom Jake is sitting on the bed, one hand gripping his ankle, the other pressed over the wound. Blood seeps between his fingers. Kira, still standing in the centre of the room, is ashen. I pick my way carefully through the broken glass on the floor, then crouch on the carpet in front of Jake. It stinks of alcohol.

‘Let go.’

He winces as he peels his fingers away from his foot. The wound isn’t more than half a centimetre across but it’s deep and blood is still gushing out. I wrap the towel as tightly around it as I can in an attempt to stem the flow.

‘Hold it here.’ I gesture for Jake to press his hands over the towel. ‘I need to get a safety pin.’

Seconds later I’m back in the bedroom and attempting to secure the makeshift bandage around my son’s foot. There are dark circles under his eyes and the skin is pulled too tight over his cheekbones. Mark and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t sleep last night.

‘What happened, Jake?’ I ask carefully.

He looks past me to Kira who is pulling on some clothes. Her lips part and, for a second, I think she’s about to speak but then she lowers her eyes and wriggles into her jeans. Downstairs the back door opens with a thud as Mark makes his way back into the house, then there’s a click-click sound as he paces backwards and forwards on the kitchen tiles. In a minute he’ll be up the stairs, asking what the hold-up is.

I sniff at Jake. His breath smells pungent. ‘Were you drinking that rum before I came in?’

‘Mum!’

‘Well? Were you?’

‘I had a few last night, that’s all.’

‘And then some.’ I pluck a large piece of glass from the carpet. Most of the label is still affixed. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’

‘I’m stressed, okay?’

‘I haven’t got enough for a taxi,’ Kira says plaintively, reaching into her jeans pocket and proffering a palm of small change.

‘Claire?’ Mark’s voice booms up the stairs. ‘It’s eight o’clock. We have to go. Now!’

‘I need to leave,’ Kira says. ‘There’s a college trip to London today – we’re going to the National Portrait Gallery – and I’m supposed to be at the train station for half eight.’

‘Okay, okay.’ I gesture for her to stop panicking. ‘Give me a sec.’

‘Mark?’ I step out onto the landing and shout down the stairs. ‘Have you got any cash on you?’

‘About three quid,’ he shouts back. ‘Why?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Right.’ I step back into Jake’s bedroom. ‘Kira, I’ll give you a lift to the train station. And as for you, Jake …’ There’s no blood on the towel I’ve pinned around his foot but he’ll still need the wound to be cleaned and a tetanus jab. If there was time I’d drop Kira at the station and then take Jake to the doctor’s but it would mean doubling back on myself and I can’t be late for the appeal. Why did this have to happen today of all days?

‘Okay.’ I make a snap decision. ‘Jake, stay here and sober up and I’ll drive you to the GP’s when I get back. If you need anything, Liz is next door. She’s not working until later.’

‘No, I’m coming with you. I need to go to the press conference.’ Jake grimaces as he pushes himself up and off the bed and hops onto his good foot so we’re face to face. Unlike Billy who shot up when he hit twelve, Jake’s height has never crept above five foot nine. The boys couldn’t have an argument without Billy slipping in some sly jab about his older brother’s stature. Jake would retaliate and then World War III would break out.

‘Claire!’ Mark shouts again, louder this time. He’ll fly off the handle if he sees the state Jake is in. ‘Claire! DS Forbes is here. We need to go!’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ I hiss at Jake as Kira pulls an apologetic face and squeezes past me. She presses herself up against the linen cupboard on the landing, pulls on her coat and then roots around in the pockets.

‘Billy was my brother,’ Jake says. His face crumples and for a split second he looks like a child again, but then a tendon in his neck pulses and he raises his chin. ‘You can’t stop me from going.’

‘You’ve been drinking,’ I say as levelly as I can. ‘If you want to help Billy, then the best thing you can do right now is stay at home and sleep it off. We’ll talk when I get back.’

‘Claire!’ Mark shouts from the top of the stairs.

‘Mum …’ Jake reaches a hand towards me but I’m already halfway out the door. I yank it shut behind me, just as Mark draws level.

‘Is Jake ready?’

‘He’s not well.’ I press my palms against the door.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Stomach upset,’ Kira says, her soft voice cutting through the awkward pause. ‘He was up all night with it. It must have been the vindaloo.’

I shoot her a grateful look. Poor girl, getting caught up in our family drama when the very reason she moved in with us was to escape from her own.

Mark glances at the closed door behind me, then his eyes meet mine. ‘Are we off then?’

‘I need to drop Kira at the train station for her college trip. You go on ahead with DS Forbes and I’ll meet you there.’

‘How’s that going to look? The two of us turning up separately?’ Mark looks at Kira. ‘Why didn’t you mention this trip last—’ He sighs. ‘Never mind. Forget it. I’ll see you there, Claire.’

He hasn’t changed his trousers. The greasy oil stain is still visible, a dark mark on his left thigh, but I haven’t got the heart to mention it.

Chapter 3

Neither of us say a word as we pile into the car and I start the engine. The silence continues past the Broadwalk shopping centre and down Wells Road. Only when I stop the car at the traffic lights by the Three Lamps junction and Kira pulls her iPod out of her jacket pocket do I speak.

‘What was that all about?’

‘Sorry?’ She looks at me in alarm, as though she’s forgotten I’m sitting next to her.

‘You and Jake, earlier.’

‘It was just …’ She stares at the red stop light as though willing it to change to green. Without her thick black eyeliner and generous dusting of bronzing powder her heart-shaped face looks pale and the sprinkle of freckles across her nose makes her look younger than she is. ‘Just … a thing … just an argument.’

‘It looked serious.’

‘It got a bit out of hand, that’s all.’

‘I’m guessing Jake didn’t go to bed last night.’

‘No. He didn’t.’

‘Oh God.’ I sigh heavily. ‘Now I’m even more worried about him.’

‘Are you?’

I feel a pang of pain at the surprise in her eyes. ‘Of course. He’s my son.’

‘He’s not Billy, though, is he?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.’

I wait for her to say more but no words come. Instead she reaches into her handbag, pulls out a black eyeliner and flips down the sun visor. Her lips part as she draws a thick black ring around each eye, then dabs concealer on the raised, discoloured patch of skin near her right temple. It looks like the beginning of a bruise.

The red light turns amber, then green and I press on the accelerator.

Neither of us speaks for several minutes. I glance across at Kira, at the lump on her temple, and my stomach lurches.

‘Did Jake hit you?’

‘What?’

‘When you were fighting over the bottle. There’s a bruise on your head. Did he hit you?’

‘God, no!’

‘So how did you get the bruise?’

‘At the club last night.’ She flips down the visor and examines the side of her head in the mirror, prodding it appraisingly with her index finger. ‘I dropped my mobile and hit my head on the corner of the table when I bent down to get it.’

‘Kira, I know I’m not your mum but you’re the nearest thing I’ve got to a daughter and if I thought anyone was hurting you—’

She slaps the visor shut. ‘Jake didn’t hit me. All right? He’d never do something like that. I can’t believe you’d say something like that about your own son.’

I tighten my grip on the steering wheel.

‘Sorry,’ she says quickly. ‘I know you’re trying to look out for me but—’

‘Forget it.’ I slow the car as we approach the roundabout. ‘Just tell me one thing. How long has he been drinking in the mornings?’

She doesn’t reply.

‘Kira, how long?’

‘Just today. I think.’

‘You think?’ I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. They spend every waking minute together. How could she be unsure about something like that?

‘Yeah.’ She zips up her make-up bag and gazes out of the window as the car swings around the roundabout and we approach Bristol Temple Meads. As I indicate left and pull into the station and park the car, I can’t help but scan the small crowd of people milling around outside the station, smoking cigarettes and queuing for taxis. I can’t go anywhere without looking for Billy.

‘Do you think he’s got a drink problem?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head as she unbuckles her seat belt and opens the door. ‘He’s not an alcoholic, if that’s what you mean. He opened the rum when we got home from the club. He was wired and couldn’t sleep.’

‘Because of Billy’s appeal?’

‘Yeah.’ She lifts one leg out of the foot well, places it on the pavement outside and gazes longingly at the entrance to the train station.

‘Kira?’ I reach across the car and touch her on the shoulder. ‘Is there anything you want to talk to me about?’

‘No,’ she says. Then she jumps out of the car, handbag and make-up bag clutched to her chest, and sprints towards the station entrance before I can say another word.

Chapter 4

It’s a small conference room, tucked away in the basement of the town hall with a strip light buzzing overhead and no natural light. It’s a quarter of the size of the one where we made our first appeal for Billy, forty-eight hours after we reported him missing. Unlike that first appeal, when every single one of the plastic-backed chairs in the rows opposite us were filled, there are only half a dozen journalists and photographers present. Most of them are fiddling with their phones. They glance up as we file in with DS Forbes, then look back down again. A couple of them begin scribbling in their notebooks.

Mrs Wilkinson looks sombre in a pale grey jumper and trouser ensemble whilst Mr Wilkinson looks surly and distracted in a dark suit, the leg of his trousers stained with what looks like dirt or oil.

I have no idea if that’s what they’ve written. I’ll find out tomorrow, I imagine. I can’t bear to read the papers, particularly not the online versions with the horrible, judgemental comments at the bottom, but I know Mark will. He’ll pore over them, growling and swearing and mumbling about ‘the bloody idiot public’.

I didn’t know what a double-edged sword media attention would be back when Billy disappeared. I was desperate for them to publish our story – we both were, the more attention Billy’s story got the better – but I couldn’t have prepared myself for the barrage of speculation and judgement that came with it. I looked pale and distraught, those were the words most of the reporters used to describe me during that first press conference. Mark was described as cold and reserved. He wasn’t reserved – he was bloody terrified, we both were. But while I quaked, twisting my fingers together under the desk, Mark sat still, straight-backed, his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed on the large ornate clock on the opposite wall. At one point I reached for his hand and wrapped my fingers around his. He didn’t so much as glance at me until he’d delivered his appeal. At the time I felt desperately hurt but later, in the privacy of our living room, he explained that, as much as he’d wanted to comfort me, he hadn’t been able to.

‘You know I compartmentalize to deal with stress,’ he said. ‘And I needed to deliver my appeal without breaking down. If I’d have touched you, if I’d so much as looked at you I would have crumbled. And I couldn’t do that, not when what I had to say was so important. You can understand that. Can’t you?’

I could and I couldn’t, but I envied his ability to shut out the thoughts and feelings he didn’t want to deal with. My emotions can’t be shut into boxes in my head. They’re as tangled and jumbled as the strands of thread in the bottom of my grandmother’s embroidery basket. And the one thought that runs through everything, the strand that is wrapped around my heart is, Where is Billy?

‘Claire?’ DS Forbes says. ‘They’re ready for your statement now.’

A television camera has appeared in the aisle that runs between the lines of plastic-backed chairs. The lens is trained on my face. We decided some weeks ago that I should be the one to make this appeal.

‘The public respond more favourably when the mother does it,’ DS Forbes said. He made no mention of the horrible comments that had appeared online when Mark made the last appeal six months ago. Comments like: You can tell the father’s behind it. He’s not showing any emotion and I bet you money it was the dad. It always is.

‘Ready?’ DS Forbes says again and this time I sit up straighter in my chair and take a deep breath in through my nose. I can smell DS Forbes’s aftershave and the faintest scent of motor oil emanating from Mark, who’s sitting on the other side of me. I can sense him watching me, but I don’t turn to look at him before I pick up the prepared statement on the desk in front of me. I can do this. I no longer need a hand on my knee.

‘Six months ago today,’ I say, looking straight into the camera lens, ‘on Thursday the fifth of February, my younger son Billy disappeared from our home in Knowle, South Bristol, in the early hours of the morning. He was only fifteen. He took his schoolbag and his mobile phone and he was probably dressed in jeans, Nike trainers, a black Superdry jacket and an NYC baseball hat …’ I falter, aware that some of the journalists are twisting round in their seats, no longer scribbling in their notebooks. Mark, beside me, makes a low noise in the base of his throat and DS Forbes leans forward and puts his elbows on the desk. ‘We all miss Billy very much. His disappearance has left a hole in our family that nothing can fill and …’ I keep my eyes trained on the camera but I’m aware of a commotion at the back of the room. One man is wrestling with another in the doorway. ‘Billy, if you’re watching, please get in touch. We love you very, very much and nothing can change that. If you don’t want to ring us directly, please just walk into the nearest police station or get in touch with one of your friends.’

The producer standing next to the cameraman taps him on the shoulder and signals towards the back of the room. The camera twists away from me and a shout emanates from the doorway.

‘Get off me! I’ve got a right to be here! I’ve got a right to speak.’

Chapter 5

‘What’s Jake doing here?’ Mark stares over the heads of the journalists and several flash bulbs fire at once, lighting up the corner of the room where Jake is remonstrating with a male police officer. ‘I thought you said he was ill.’

‘He was … is. Let me deal with this.’

‘Mrs Wilkinson, wait!’ DS Forbes shouts as I hurry across the room and shoulder my way through the circle of journalists that has formed around my son. I can just about make out the back of Jake’s head. His fair hair is wild and tousled without a liberal application of hair gel. He disappears as a policeman steps in front of him, blocking my view.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me, please.’

The TV cameraman hisses as I push past him but he’s shushed by his producer. ‘That’s the mum, get her in shot.’

I push past a couple of council officials and approach the policeman who’s shepherding Jake towards the open doorway. Tapping him on the back of his black stab vest has no effect so instead I pull on his arm.

He doesn’t so much as glance at me. Instead he keeps his eyes trained on Jake; Jake, who’s a good six inches shorter, with his hands clenched at his sides and the tendons straining in his neck.

‘Please,’ I shout. ‘Please stop, he’s my son.’

‘Mum?’ Jake says and the police officer looks at me in surprise. He lowers his arms a fraction.

‘He’s my son,’ I say again.

The policeman glances behind me, towards the poster of Billy affixed to a flipchart beside the desk.

‘No, not Billy,’ I say. ‘This is Jake, my other son.’

‘Other son? I wasn’t told to expect any other relatives …’ He looks at DS Forbes who shakes his head.

‘It’s all right, PC George. I’ve got this.’

DS Forbes has met Jake before. He interviewed him at length, the day after Billy disappeared, just as he and his team interviewed all our extended family and friends.

‘Show’s over, guys.’ He signals to the producer to cut the filming and gestures for the journalists to return to their seats. No one moves.

‘Jake!’ A female journalist with a sharp blonde bob reaches a hand over my shoulder and waves a Dictaphone in my son’s direction. ‘What was it you wanted to say?’

‘Jake?’ The producer proffers a microphone. ‘Did you have a message for Billy?’

My son takes a step forward, shoulders back, chin up. He glances at PC George and raises an eyebrow, vindicated.

‘What happened to your foot, Jake?’

A short, balding man with hairy forearms that poke out of his rolled-up shirtsleeves points at Jake’s trainers. The instep of his right shoe, normally pristine and white, is muddied with brown blood.

‘Jake?’ Mark says.

The room grows quiet as my husband and son stare at each other. They’re waiting for Jake to speak. I wait too. I can feel Mark bristling behind me. This is his worst nightmare – our respectable, measured appeal transformed into a bar-room brawl.

I hear a click and a whirr from the camera to my left and I imagine the lens zooming in on Jake’s pale, drawn face. He passes the heel of his hand over his damp brow and then, with only the briefest of glances at me, turns on the heel of his good foot and limps out of the room.

Monday 11th August 2014

Jackdaw44: Fuck my life.

ICE9: Don’t say that.

Jackdaw44: Why not. It’s true. My dad is a hypocritical wanker and my mum is fucking clueless.

ICE9: Have you talked to your dad about the weekend?

Jackdaw44: Are you fucking kidding?

ICE9: You should give him the chance to explain.

Jackdaw44: What? That he’s weak, spineless, a liar and a lecherous bastard? No, thanks.

ICE9: Maybe it’s not how it seemed.

Jackdaw44: You’re taking the piss, right? You saw me. You saw what I did.

ICE9: That was stupid.

Jackdaw44: It was sick. I wish I’d seen the look on his face when he saw his car window. When he got home he told Mum that vandals did it. Ha. Ha. Ha. I’m the fucking vandal.

Jackdaw44: You still there?

ICE9: Yeah. Sorry. Bit busy.

Jackdaw44: No worries. Just wanted to say thanks for cooling me out. I would have totally lost my shit if you hadn’t turned up.

ICE9: You did lose your shit.

Jackdaw44: Could have been worse.

ICE9: Hmm.

Jackdaw44: Anyway. Thanx.

Chapter 6

‘What the hell were you thinking?’ Mark is standing in the centre of the living room with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s loosened his tie and popped the top button of his shirt. The skin at the base of his throat is mottled and red.

‘Sod this.’ Jake moves to get out of his armchair, wincing as he puts weight on his bad foot.

‘You’ll stay where you bloody are,’ Mark shouts and I grip the cushion I’m clutching to my chest a little tighter. ‘This is my house and as long as you live here you’ll do what I say.’

‘Yeah, because that worked out well with Billy, didn’t it?’ Jake doesn’t raise his voice but Mark stumbles backwards as though the question has been screamed in his face.

He seems to fold in on himself, then quickly recovers. ‘What did you just say?’

‘Forget it.’

‘No, say it again.’

‘Please!’ I say. ‘Please don’t do this.’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Jake says. ‘I can take Dad.’

‘Take me?’ Mark laughs. ‘Aren’t we the big man now we’ve grown a few muscles? Steroids making you brave, are they, son?’

I stare at Jake in horror. ‘You’re not taking steroids, are you?’

‘Dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

‘One more word from you,’ Mark says, ‘and you’re out.’

‘Please!’ I say. ‘Please! Please stop! Mark, he’s your son! He’s your son.’

A tense silence fills the room, punctuated only by the sound of my own raggedy breathing. I brace myself for round two. Instead Mark’s shoulders slump and he exhales heavily.

‘Always the villain,’ he says, looking from me to Jake. ‘I’m always the villain.’

I want to say something. I want to contradict him. To support him. But to do so would mean choosing between my husband and my son. It’s like the night Billy disappeared all over again. My family is disintegrating in front of my eyes and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

‘Mum,’ Jake says as the back door slams shut and Mark leaves the house. ‘I can explain.’

‘Later.’ My throat is so tight I can barely speak. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

Chapter 7

‘Here you go.’ Liz places a steaming mug of tea on the table in front of me, then pulls out a chair and sits down. A split second later she stands up again, crosses the kitchen and rummages around in the back of a cupboard bursting with tins, jars and packets of pasta and rice. It’s the day after the appeal. I was going to pop in on Liz yesterday but, after everything that happened, I didn’t have the energy.

‘Ah! Knew I had some.’ She brandishes a 100-gram bar of Galaxy at me and returns to the table. ‘Hidden from Caleb and for emergencies only,’ she says as she sets it in front of me. ‘And days when I decide to skip Slimming World.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Mind if I do then?’ She runs a nail along the gold wrapper and snaps off four pieces. She bites into the chocolate, takes a swig of tea, then smiles broadly. ‘That’s better. Caleb was in a pig of a mood this morning, whingeing about the lack of clean socks in his drawer. Hellooooo, we both work and you’re twenty. Wash your own bloody socks. I thought he’d make more of an effort with his personal hygiene now he’s met someone. Did I tell you about the new boyfriend?’

I shake my head.

‘He met him in a pub in Old Market. Eighteen, works in House of Fraser. I haven’t met him yet. Caleb said he doesn’t want to scare him off by introducing him to me. Cheeky shit. Anyway, sorry.’ She leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. ‘How are you? I meant to watch the appeal but next door’s cat got into the garden again. It was primed to take a shit on the lawn so I chucked some water at it. I thought I’d pop in after you got back but I spotted Mark storming out the back door looking really pissed off and figured it wasn’t the best time.’

That’s the thing I love about Liz; Billy’s disappearance hasn’t changed our friendship in the slightest. Whilst everyone else awkwardly avoids the subject or cross-examines me about the latest developments Liz is just Liz. You crave normality after something terrible happens. Everything reminds you of what you’ve lost – everything – and sometimes you just want to stop thinking about it. I love hearing Liz bitch about Lloyd. I enjoy her little rants about her son Caleb or Elaine, her boss at the supermarket where she works.

Mark compartmentalizes his life. He has the ‘boxes’ in his head he escapes into. I don’t. But at least I have Liz.

‘So how was it?’ she asks.

‘Awful.’

I tell her about Kira screaming, the booze, the cut foot, Jake’s interruption and the argument when we all got home.

‘I’m just so tired,’ I say as she swipes a box of tissues from the windowsill and pushes them towards me. ‘I just want Billy to come home and for this to be over. I miss him, Liz. I miss him so much.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know you do.’

I pull a tissue from the box and dab at my cheeks. I hate that my default emotional reaction is crying. I wish I could shout and scream or punch something instead.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘For what? If you can’t snot all over your best friend’s kitchen where can you?’

I try not to cry in front of Mark and Jake because I don’t want them to worry about me but it’s different with Liz. Her kitchen is a safe haven. We’ve known each other since Liz and Lloyd moved next door when the boys were little. They’d play in the back garden while Liz and I would sit on deckchairs and chat. It was a tentative friendship at first, as we sussed each other out, but it wasn’t long before we started taking it in turns to do the school run and the odd bit of babysitting. The first time we went out for drinks we got so drunk we stopped being polite and properly opened up. We were both in tears by the end of the night. Since then we’ve been there for each other through everything – Lloyd walking out on Liz last year, my father-in-law’s heart attack and now Billy.

‘What you going to do now then?’ she asks, snapping off another piece of Galaxy and popping it into her mouth.

‘I need to get Mark and Jake in the same room as each other so they can sort out their differences.’

‘Claire …’ Liz reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. ‘I’m only saying this because I love you but maybe you should let them sort it out in their own time. You’re going to make yourself poorly if you don’t let go.’

‘Let go of what?’

‘Of them. You’re not responsible for everyone else’s happiness, sweetheart.’

‘None of us are happy.’

‘Least of all you.’ She gives me a searching look. ‘Mark and Jake are going to butt heads from time to time – you need to accept that.’

‘They’ll kill each other if I don’t intervene.’

‘They won’t.’

‘Jake will move out.’

She makes a soft, sighing sound. ‘Would that be the worst thing in the world? He’s nineteen years old. He makes a good living as an electrician. He could afford a one-bedroom flat.’

‘What about Kira?’

‘There’d be enough space for her too. They pretty much spend all their time in his bedroom as it is from what you’ve said. And they’d have more space.’

‘But the house would be so empty without them. And besides, I want everything to be exactly the same as it was when Billy left. That way we can just go back to normal when he returns.’

My best friend gives me a long, searching look. She wants to comment but something is holding her back.

‘What is it?’

She shakes her head. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does. What were you going to say?’

‘I just think …’ She looks away and rubs her fingers over her lips. I’ve never seen her look this uncomfortable before. ‘I just think that maybe you’re putting your life on hold for something that might not happen. I think you should … prepare yourself for bad news. It’s been six months, Claire.’

I stand up abruptly. ‘I think I should go.’

‘Oh God.’ Liz stands up too. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you okay? You’ve gone very pale.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ll make us some more tea. Are you sure you won’t have some chocolate? You look—’

‘I’m going to be sick.’ I sprint from the room, one hand to my mouth, and only just make it up the stairs and into the bathroom before my stomach convulses and I dry retch over the toilet.

‘Claire?’ Liz says from behind me. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’ll be fine. I just need some water.’

As I twist the cold tap something in the bin by the basin catches my eye.

‘No!’ Liz shouts as I reach for the newspaper. ‘Claire, don’t! Don’t read that.’

I turn my back on her and angle myself into the corner of the room as I unfold the newspaper. Billy’s name is on the front cover.

BRAWL OVER MISSING BILLY

There’s a photo beneath the blaring headline: me, wide-eyed and frantic with Mark at my shoulder. I’m reaching across the journalists for Jake who has his head against the wall, his hands balled into fists on either side of his face.

Pandemonium broke out at the six-month appeal for missing Knowle schoolboy Billy Wilkinson yesterday when his mother, Claire Wilkinson (40), was interrupted during her message to camera as Jake Wilkinson (19), the missing boy’s older brother, burst into the council offices. Wilkinson, who was visibly intoxicated, was heard to shout that he had a right to speak. His mother Claire and father Mark (42) abandoned their appeal to intervene and Mark Wilkinson was heard to exclaim, ‘Get him out of here! Get him out of here!’ Mrs Wilkinson looked visibly upset as the family was bundled out of the room.

Bristol Standard reporter Steve James spoke to a neighbour who watched the appeal on the television. ‘We’ve never had any run-ins with the Wilkinsons. They seem like a perfectly normal family but you have to wonder whether someone knows more about Billy’s disappearance than they’re letting on.’

‘Claire!’ Liz snatches the newspaper from my hands before I can read another word. ‘It’s all crap. They make stuff up to sell copies. No one believes that shit.’

She reaches an arm around my shoulders but I twist away from her, knocking her against the basin in my desperation to get out of the bathroom. It’s unbearably hot and I can’t breathe.

I take the steps down to the hallway two at a time and wrench open the front door. The second I step outside I run.

Chapter 8

I stand at the end of the bed with my feet pressed together and my arms outstretched and I tip backwards. The bedspread makes a delicious floop sound as I hit it and the bed springs squeak in protest. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy.

‘No!’

I look to the right, in the direction of the voice, but there’s no one beside me on the bed. I’m alone in the room. There must be someone in the corridor. A woman arguing with her husband perhaps, although I can’t hear the low rumble of a male voice.

‘No!’

The voice again, quieter this time but closer, as though someone has spoken the word directly into my ear. I sit up in bed and pull my knees in to my chest.

‘NO!’

I clamp my hands to my ears but there’s no blocking out the woman’s voice as she shouts the word, machine-gun fast – NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

It’s inside my head. The voice is coming from inside my head.

‘CLAIRE!’ it shouts. ‘I AM CLAIRE. I AM CLAIRE.’

Claire? Who is Claire? I recognize the name but I don’t want to. I don’t want to know who Claire is. I just want to get back to the seafront. Back to the sunshine and wind and the café on the edge of the pier.

‘I AM CLAIRE! I AM CLAIRE!’

The voice fills my brain, screaming and buzzing, and my head is vibrating and the light, happy feeling inside me is fading.

Dark. Light. Dark. Light.

My thoughts are dark and foggy, then brighter, clearer and then, just for a second – a split second – I know who Claire is, then the darkness returns and with it a confusion so disorientating my hands instinctively clench as I try to anchor myself to something, anything solid. There is something smooth and slippery soft under my fingers. Bed linen. I am sitting on a bed. But this is not my bed, this is not my room. There is a framed art print on the wall to my right: a faded Lowry, stick people milling around a town. There is a lone boy in the centre of the scene. He has his back to me. He’s looking at the crowd of people spilling out of one of the buildings. Who is he looking for? Who has he lost?

A shrill sound makes me jump. A small black mobile phone jiggles back and forth on the orangey pine bedside table to my right. A name flashes onto the screen. A name I don’t recognize. But the noise hurts my head and I need it to stop.

I reach for the phone and press it to my ear.

‘Mum?’ says the voice on the other end of the line.

I want to reply but I can’t talk. I can’t think. I can’t … it’s as though my mind has shattered. I can’t focus … I can’t form coherent … what’s happening to me?

‘Mum?’

‘Claire.’ I say the word out loud. It sounds strange. Like a noise, a sound, an outward breath. ‘Cl-airrrrr.’

‘Mum? Why are you saying your name?’

My name?

‘Cl-airrrrrr.’

‘Mum, you’re freaking me out. Stop doing that.‘

‘Claire.’ The word crystallizes inside my mouth. It tastes familiar. As though I’ve known it for a long time. Like buttered toast. Like toothpaste. ‘Claire. Claire Wilkinson.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ. Dad, I think she’s having a stroke or something.’

My head … my head … my brain hurts … no, aches … but not a headache … foggy … and then a thought, breaking through the darkness and I grip hold of it as though it is a rock to tether my sanity to.

‘Is my name Claire Wilkinson?’

‘Yes, yes, it is. Jesus, Mum. We’ve been trying to ring you for hours. Where are you?’

Mum. I am a mum? The man on the phone sounds scared. Is he scared for me? Or of me? I don’t know. Nothing makes any sense.

‘Where are you?’ says the voice on the phone.

‘I’m … I’m …’ There are gingham curtains at the far end of the room and a full-length mirror, smeared with fingerprints. Beneath me is a bedspread. Pink, satiny, puffy. I dig my nails into it and cling to it, rigid with fear. ‘I don’t know. I don’t recognize this room.’

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ the man on the phone says. ‘Just … sorry, hang on a second …’ There’s a muffled sound like a hand being placed over the receiver but I can still make out the low rumble of his voice.

‘Mum?’ His voice is clear again. ‘Is there a door or a window you could open? Tell me what you can see.’

I don’t want to move from the bed. I don’t want to open the pine door to my right or the closed gingham curtains at the far end of the room.

‘Please, Mum. As soon as we know where you are we can come and get you.’

We? Who is we? Who is coming to get me? I’m in danger. I need to run but I can’t move.

‘Dad’s here, Mum. Do you want to speak to him?’

‘No,’ I say and I don’t know why.

‘Are you sure?’ the man says and an image appears in my mind – vivid and sharp in the gloom – of a young man with tousled fair hair, shaved at the sides, and broad shoulders, lying on a bench, pushing weights into the air.

‘Jake?’ I venture.

‘Yes, Mum. It’s Jake. I’m at home with Dad. Liz just came round, wanting to talk to you. That’s when we realized you’d gone missing.’

I search for a memory, something, anything, to still my mind, to stop this terrifying free-fall sensation. Where is my home? Why don’t I remember?

‘Yes, I know, okay. Okay, Dad.’ The man is talking to someone else again. ‘I just asked her that. Mum, can you describe what you can see?’

I look back at the Lowry painting, at the boy standing right of centre staring into the crowd, looking for someone, then I look at the shiny pale pink bedspread, the mirror, the cheap pine table and the white tea tray.

‘I think I’m in a hotel room.’

‘Is there a phone? Can you ring reception to find out which hotel you’re in? Or is there a brochure or room-service menu anywhere?’

I slide across the pink bedspread and press my toes into the worn pile of the beige carpet, then inch my way across the room, keeping one eye on the door, and approach the table near the mirror. There’s a white china teapot on a tray and two cups and saucers. There’s also a dish containing tea, coffee, sugar and tiny cartons of milk. There are no brochures, no menus, no phone. Nothing else in the room at all other than my handbag and boots, with my socks tucked into the top, on the floor by the bed.

I touch the edge of the gingham curtain and tentatively pull it back. Outside is a low railing, a balcony and a stretch of grey-brown sea with a lump of land in the distance, an island shaped like a turtle’s back.

‘Steep Holm,’ I say and the darkness in my mind fades from black to grey at the sight of the familiar lump of rock in the distance. ‘Jake, I’m in Weston-super-Mare.’

As he relays the information I feel a sudden desperate urge to throw open the window and inhale great lungfuls of sea air but when I yank at the sash it only opens a couple of inches at the bottom.

‘Do you know which hotel, Mum?’ Jake asks. ‘If you stay where you are we’ll come and get you.’

It’s a small room: shabby but warm and clean. The floral wallpaper behind the bed is peeling in one corner and when I open the door to the en suite there are no branded toiletries, just a bar of soap in a frilled wrapper and a glass, misted with age, on the shelf above the sink. There is no welcome pack on the table that holds the tea and coffee things, no branded coaster or complimentary notepad.

‘Reception,’ I say. ‘Need to find reception.’ But then I spot a fire-evacuation notice pinned next to the door. It is signed at the bottom by Steve Jenkins, Owner, Day’s Rest B&B.

‘Day’s Rest,’ I say. ‘I’m at Day’s Rest B&B.’

‘The one we used to stay in as kids,’ Jake says and I have to steady myself against the wall as a wave of grief knocks the breath from my lungs.

Billy.

I have two sons. Jake and Billy. Billy is missing. He’s missing.

‘Mum?’ The worry in Jake’s voice bounces off me like a stone skimming the sea.

I snatch up my handbag, my boots and my socks and I reach for the door handle.

‘Mum?’ he says again as I yank open the door.

‘Billy!’ I scream into the empty corridor. ‘Billy, where are you? Where are you, son?’

Friday 22nd August 2014

Jackdaw44: You there?

ICE9: Yep.

Jackdaw44: Liv is a bitch.

ICE9: Who’s Liv?

Jackdaw44: Girl I was seeing.

ICE9: I didn’t know.

Jackdaw44: You wouldn’t. I keep my shit private.

ICE9: OK …

Jackdaw44: But I’m pissed off today. Need to talk to someone. I know you can keep secrets.

ICE9: It’s up to you to tell your mum what you saw, not me.

Jackdaw44: And that’s why you’re cool.

ICE9: Ha! I’ve never been called that before. So why is Liv a bitch?

Jackdaw44: She told Jess not to go out with me. She totally slagged me. Said I’ve got a small dick.

ICE9: Have you?

Jackdaw44: Go fuck yourself.

Chapter 9

The man behind the reception desk jumps as I slam up against it.

‘Is he here?’

‘Is who here?’ He’s a tall man, over six foot with balding hair and an auburn moustache. The buttons of his shirt strain over his gut.

‘My son. Billy. He’s fifteen.’ I raise a hand above my head. ‘He’s about this tall.’

‘Did he check in with you?’

I don’t know. The last thing I remember was running out of Liz’s house. How did I get here and why don’t I remember? Am I asleep? Unconscious? Did I trip and hit my head when I was running? But this feels real. The reception area feels solid under my fingertips. I can smell the musty aroma of old furnishings beneath the pungent scent of furniture polish. ‘I’ve got no idea. Could you check to see if he’s booked in? His name’s Billy Wilkinson.’

The man runs a thumb along the length of his gingery moustache. ‘And your name is?’

‘Claire Wilkinson.’

He reaches for a clipboard on his desk. He raises it to eye level, then mutters, ‘I can’t see a thing without my glasses,’ and replaces the clipboard and begins ferreting around in a drawer. I tap the counter as he searches. It’s all I can do not to clamber over the top and snatch up the clipboard.

‘There!’ I point at a pair of glasses on top of a paperback book. ‘Your glasses are there.’

‘Ah, thank you.’ It takes an age for him to clasp his fingers around them, for ever for him to unfold them and then, as he finally places them on his nose, he removes them again and wipes the lenses on the hem of his jumper.

‘If you could hurry. Please. It’s urgent.’

‘All in good time, Mrs Wilkinson, all in good time.’

‘Hmmm.’ He hums through his nose. ‘Room eleven, is that right?’

I hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs but it’s a middle-aged man, not Billy, who steps into the reception area and raises a cheery hand at the man behind the desk. ‘I don’t know what room I’m in. I didn’t look.’

The receptionist gives me a quizzical look, then says, ‘I’ve got a Mrs Wilkinson in room eleven. Queen room. One occupant.’

I press a hand to my forehead but the fog in my brain remains. Somehow I booked myself into a B&B in Weston. I can’t remember doing it, so either I did check in and I don’t remember or … nothing. There’s a black void where my memory should be. ‘Could Billy have checked into one of the other rooms?’

The man’s lips disappear beneath the bushy arc of his moustache. ‘I can’t give out information about other guests. Guesthouse policy.’

A vision plays out in front of my eyes, of me ripping the clipboard out of his hands and smashing him around the head with it – thwack, thwack, thwack – and I have to close them tightly shut to make it disappear. When I open them again he’s still pursing his lips, still staring at me.

‘Billy is my son. He’s missing. You have to tell me if he’s here.’

‘Missing? Goodness. Have you told the police?’

‘Yes. Six months ago. Please! I need to know if he’s here or not.’ I lean over the counter and reach for the clipboard but he snatches it away, flattening it against his chest.

‘I’ve got a flier.’ I duck down and rummage around in my bag. ‘Here!’ I hold the appeal leaflet face out so he’s eye to eye with Billy’s photo.

The man gives the briefest of nods when he’s finished reading and our eyes meet as I lower the leaflet. There. He’s giving me the look. The ‘you poor bloody woman’ look I’ve come to know so well.

‘I wouldn’t normally do this but …’ He presses his glasses slowly onto his nose, lowers the clipboard and dips his head. He trails a bitten-down fingernail along the list and my heart stills when his finger stops.

Has he …

Is it …

He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no Billy Wilkinson on this list.’

‘Maybe he’s using a different name?’

He places the clipboard on the desk and presses down on it with his palms. ‘It’s a small hotel, Mrs Wilkinson, just thirteen rooms. We’ve got a couple in with a teenage girl and half a dozen families with young children. I’d remember your son’s face if I’d booked him in.’

‘Does no one else take the bookings?’

There’s sadness in his eyes now. Sadness and pity. ‘No. I’m really very sorry.’

The tension that’s been holding me upright for the length of the conversation vanishes and I slump against the desk, eviscerated. It’s all I can do not to lay the side of my face on the cool wood and close my eyes.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says again.

I look up. ‘Did you check me in?’

He nods. ‘Yes. One night, paid upfront. Don’t you remember?’

‘No. I don’t remember walking in, or even how I got to Weston. One minute I was talking to a friend in Bristol and the next …’ I can’t explain what happened because I don’t understand it myself. I came to but not in the way you do when you wake up after a nap or a long sleep. And it wasn’t like the hazy slip into consciousness after a general anaesthetic either. I was awake but my mind was muddled, tangled in a jumble of sounds, images and thoughts that gradually faded away. And then everything was sharp, in focus, as I became aware of my surroundings. And it was terrifying. Utterly terrifying.

‘Boozy lunch, was it?’ the man asks, the sympathy in his eyes dulling.

‘No,’ I say. ‘We were drinking tea.’

‘Sounds like you should get yourself to a doctor.’

‘I will. Just as soon as I get home.’ I crouch down and pull on my boots and socks. A drop of sweat rolls down my lower back as I haul the strap of my handbag over my shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ I say as I head for the door.

‘No problem.’

I wrench the door open and then, as the sea air hits me, I turn back. The receptionist looks up, Billy’s flier still in his hands.

‘Can I just ask one more thing? Was I alone when I checked in?’

‘You were, yes.’

‘And did I seem frightened? Scared? Confused?’

‘No. You seemed …’ He searches for the right word. ‘Normal.’

Chapter 10

The wind whips my hair across my face as I pull my handbag onto my knee and unzip it. There are five messages on my phone from Jake, each one more frantic than the last.

‘Mum. Stay where you are. We’re coming to get you.’

‘We’re half an hour away. I just tried to ring you. Could you pick up, please?’

‘Mum, where are you?’

‘Mum? We’re in Weston. WHERE ARE YOU?’

‘MUM, PICK UP OR WE’RE CALLING THE POLICE!’

I press the button to call him. Jake answers on the first ring.

‘Mum?’ I can hear the relief in his voice. ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘I’m on the seafront. On a bench just to the right of the pier.’

‘Okay. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right there.’ He stops talking and I wait for him to hang up, but then he speaks again. ‘Promise me you won’t go anywhere.’

‘I’m not going anywhere, Jake. I promise.’

‘Good. She’s on a bench, on the right of the pier …’ I listen as he relays my whereabouts to Mark and then the line goes dead.

It’s the middle of summer but the wind cuts through the thin material of my top and I wrap my arms around my body, tucking my hands under my armpits. We used to sit on this bench with the boys when they were little. They’d eat ice creams and Mark and I would drink scalding-hot tea from thin paper cups. Both boys loved our visits to Weston-super-Mare. They adored the bright flashing lights and the bleep-bleep-bleep, ching-ching-ching of the amusement arcade; Mark standing beside them, pressing two-pence pieces into their reaching palms. I’d slip outside, ears ringing, and stand on the pier, breathing in deep lungfuls of sea air, relishing the sense of freedom and space that opened within me as I looked out at the horizon.

I was eighteen when I met Mark, nineteen when we got married, twenty-one when I had Jake, twenty-five when I had Billy. I slipped effortlessly from the family I grew up in, to the one I created with Mark. I never regretted that decision, not once, but there were moments when I envied my single friends. Especially when Mark was away on a training course and whatever activity I’d dreamed up to try and entertain the boys had descended into chaos, fights and tears, and I couldn’t even escape to the toilet without small fists pounding on the door, voices begging to be let in. What would it feel like to read a book without interruption, to nurse a hangover on the sofa with a film and a mountain of chocolate, or book a holiday and just go? What would it be like to have a career where people respected you instead of taking you for granted and to have a bedroom, all of your own, where you could retreat when you’d had enough of the world? Those thoughts were always fleeting and I would dismiss them guiltily, tucking them away deep in my mind where they wouldn’t bother me. I knew how lucky I was to have a husband who loved me and two healthy children.

I press my lips together and run my sandpaper tongue against the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty. God knows when I last had something to drink. There’s a kiosk on the edge of the pier that sells soft drinks and tanniny tea but I can’t risk moving from my bench in case Jake and Mark miss me. I unclip my handbag and rummage around inside. Gum will help with my dry mouth. I sift through papers, tissues, receipts and oddments of make-up. Long gone are the days when I’d find a small car in the base of my handbag or a half-empty packet of wet wipes scrunched up in a pocket, but my bag is still a mess. I clear it out every couple of weeks but, no matter how hard I try to be tidy, random crap still accumulates inside.

I shove a flier for a music event I’ll never attend to one side and something small and yellow catches my eye. It’s a bundle of paper tokens from the arcade, five of them in a row, folded over each other. The machines spit them out when you successfully throw a basketball into a hoop, bash a mole or shoot a target. Billy was obsessed with these tokens. You need to accumulate dozens just to buy a small lollipop but he had his eye on a shiny red remote-control car and he vowed, aged eight, not to trade in a single token until he had enough to buy that car. Mark tried to explain to him that it would take years to collect enough, and cost us more than the price of the car just to play the games, but Billy was resolute. The car would be his. He never did collect enough and a year later, worn down by his dad’s constant assertion that it was ‘all a big con’, he gave up. I bought him a similar car that Christmas but he barely looked at it, declaring that remote-controlled toys were ‘for kids’. I hated that he’d become so disillusioned so young.

For a long time after Billy gave up on his quest I’d find tokens secreted under his bed, in his pockets, in the depths of his bag and squirrelled away in his sock drawer. I kept them in one of the cupboards in the kitchen, just in case Billy had a change of heart but one day, when I was looking for something else, I realized they’d gone. When I asked Mark if he’d seen them he barely looked up from his newspaper.

‘I was looking for something and there was so much crap in that drawer I couldn’t find it. I threw them away.’

That was four or five years ago. We haven’t been to Weston as a family since. Jake and Kira have been a couple of times since they started dating but that doesn’t explain why there are tokens in my bag now. I take a closer look, examining them for a date or time stamp but they’re generic arcade tokens with the words Grand Pier printed in the centre. They’re exactly the same as the ones Billy collected all those years ago. I found some more recently, a few months before he disappeared, stuffed into the pocket of his jeans when I was doing the washing. There was a receipt too, for a room in a hotel. A few days earlier the school had rung me to say he hadn’t turned up for registration and, when I called him on his mobile, he wouldn’t say where he was, just that he was fine and he was hanging out with some mates. It was a lie. He’d obviously skived school to come to Weston with a girl. He wouldn’t say who and we grounded him for two weeks.

So where did I get these from? Could I have won them? In the six hours between leaving Liz’s house and finding myself in a bedroom in Day’s Rest B&B did I visit the arcade and play a game? Why?

I delve back into my handbag, pulling out wodges of paper, tissue packets, empty paracetamol blister packs and several red lipsticks. I remove my phone, my house keys and my make-up compact. In the bottom of the bag is a shell. It is tiny, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, pale pink with darker pigment along its scalloped edges. I went down to the beach then? Another memory comes flooding back, of me walking hand in hand with Jake and Billy along the beach when they were very little – two and six years old. The tide was out and we had our shoes off, our toes squelching into the sludgy sand. Every couple of seconds one of the boys would dip down, dig around in the sand and then jubilantly offer me a shell, stone or bottle top. Anything they spotted would immediately become the most precious of spoils, thrust upon me until my pockets were full.

Now I turn the bag upside down, attracting the attention of strutting seagulls as I litter the ground with crumbs. There is nothing else inside, no clue as to where I have spent the last six hours or what I have done. Unless … I lift my purse from my lap and peer inside: £25 in notes, a little over £3.50 in change, various bank, store and credit cards, and a tiny laminated photo of the boys one Christmas. Nothing unfamiliar, nothing unexpected, apart from a train ticket tucked between my Tesco card and my credit card. It’s dated today, with 13.11 as the time of purchase. Bristol Temple Meads to Weston-super-Mare, an open return.

‘Mum?’ Jake appears beside me, his hair flattened to his forehead, a sheen of sweat along the bridge of his nose. He’s clutching my granddad’s walking stick in his right hand. Mark is beside him. It’s only been a few hours since I last saw him but I’m shocked by how drawn his face is, how dark the circles under his eyes.

‘Claire? Oh, thank God.’ He sinks onto the bench beside me, then glances down at my lap, where the contents of my handbag are piled beneath my hands. ‘What’s all this?’

‘I was trying to understand how I got here.’ I shovel everything back into the bag, including the arcade token and the shell, then zip it shut. Worry is etched into every line on Mark’s face.

‘We thought someone had taken you,’ Jake says, leaning heavily on the stick. I gesture for him to sit down but he shakes his head. ‘We spoke to Liz and she said you suddenly got up and ran out of her house like you were on fire. Then when we rang and you didn’t know where you were …’ He breathes heavily. ‘I thought whoever took Billy had taken you too.’

Mark’s lips part and I know he wants to contradict Jake. He wants to say that we have no proof that Billy was taken by anyone. We have no idea what happened that night.

‘I did run out,’ I say before my husband can speak. ‘I remember that much but … after that …’ I shake my head. ‘The next thing I knew I was sitting on a bed in the B&B and then the phone rang.’

‘How did you get here?’ Mark asks. ‘The car was still in the drive.’

‘By train.’

‘So you remember that much?’

I shake my head again. ‘No. I found the ticket in my bag. Mark, I don’t remember getting the train, I don’t remember checking into the hotel. I don’t remember anything other than leaving Liz’s.’

‘Did you hit your head or something?’ He gently moves my hair away from my face with his hand and my heart flutters in my chest. I can’t remember the last time he touched me so tenderly. ‘I can’t see any swellings or contusions.’

I used to joke with the kids about Mark’s ‘medical speak’ after he got a job as a medical sales rep. It was almost as though he’d become a doctor himself with all his talk of angina, stents and angioplasty. Apparently it’s very unusual for someone without a medical background or degree to get a job selling pharmaceuticals to GPs and hospitals but Mark’s never been one to let someone telling him he can’t do something get in his way.

‘We didn’t realize you were missing until tea time,’ Jake says and I have to smile. I don’t imagine they would have. They’d have returned home after work and congregated in the kitchen, sniffing the air and peering into the oven and fridge. ‘Dad said you were probably round at Liz’s, pissed off with us for screwing up Billy’s appeal.’

‘Pissed off with who—’ Mark starts but Jake interrupts.

‘And then Liz came round and told us that you’d rushed out of her house and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really upset. She thought she’d said something to upset you.’

Mark shifts away from me now his ‘examination’ of my head is complete, but his eyes don’t leave my face. ‘What did she say?’ he asks.

I shake my head. If I tell him he’ll only agree. Mark’s told me over and over again that we should assume the worst about Billy. ‘Six months is a long time, Claire.’ It’s become his mantra, his invisible shield against hope whenever I tentatively suggest that maybe, just maybe, Billy could still be alive.

‘It doesn’t matter what she said.’

‘It does if it made you run off to Weston without telling anyone.’

I slip my handbag across my body, then stand up and rub my upper arms. ‘Can we just go home? Please, I just want to go home.’

Mark stands up too. ‘I think we should get you to a doctor first. Don’t you?’

Chapter 11

It’s warm in Mum’s living room. Warm and ever so slightly musty. The top of the telly is grey with dust, the magazine rack is groaning under the weight of books and magazines piled on top of it, and there are dead flowers on the windowsill; green sludge in the base of the vase instead of water. Even the spider plant on the bureau, a plant so hardy that it could survive a nuclear attack, is wilted and yellow. Its babies, trailing on the carpet on long tendrils, look as though they’ve parachuted out in an attempt to escape. Mum would declare World War III if I offered to tidy up so I do what I can whenever she leaves the room; wipe a tissue over the surfaces when she goes to the loo or tip my glass of water in the spider plant when the postman comes.

I haven’t had a chance today. She hasn’t left my side since I arrived a little after 9 a.m. I haven’t told her about my blackout yet; she thinks I’m here to talk about Billy’s publicity campaign. Mark refused to go to work until I promised him I’d spend the day with her. He’s terrified I’ll go missing again.

He’s not the only one.

The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. She ran a series of blood tests yesterday and said I’d have to wait a week for the results. It’s terrifying, not knowing what caused me to black out. What if it’s something serious like a brain tumour? What if it happens again? When I asked Dr Evans if it might she said she didn’t know.

I didn’t want to leave her office. I didn’t want to step outside the doors of the surgery and risk it happening again. Mark had to physically lift me off the chair and guide me back outside to the car.

‘See that?’ Mum slides the laptop from her knees to mine and points at the screen with a bitten-down fingernail. ‘That spike in the graph?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at.’

‘They’re the stats for the website. We had a huge peak in page views the day the appeal went out. Over seven thousand people looked at it. Seven thousand, Claire.’

‘And that’s a good thing, is it?’ Dad says, appearing in the doorway to the living room.

‘Derek.’ Mum shoots him a warning look. ‘If you can’t say something good—’

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say. ‘I know what Dad’s thinking.’

‘Your dad’s not thinking anything.’ Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘Are you, Derek?’

His gaze shifts towards me and I feel the weight of sadness in his eyes. There’s indecision too, written all over his face. He wants to tell me something but Mum’s warning him not to.

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘Derek!’

‘It’s okay. You can tell me.’

Mum pulls at my hand. ‘It’s nothing you need worry about, Claire. Just a bunch of drunks in the pub speculating. We know no one in the family had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.’

I ignore her. I can’t tear my eyes away from my dad who looks as though he might burst from the stress of keeping his lip buttoned. ‘Dad?’

He shifts his weight so he’s leaning against the door frame and bows his head, ever so slightly, finally breaking eye contact with me. ‘They think Jake had something to do with it. I overheard a conversation when I was coming out of the loo in the King and Lion the other night. No smoke without fire and all that.’

‘Absolute rot!’ Mum snaps the laptop lid shut. ‘Everyone will have forgotten all about it by next week and then, when the dust has settled, we’ll ask the Bristol News to run a story about Billy and Jake as kids. If the Standard are going to shaft us we’ll get them onside instead. We’ll dig out some photos of the boys in their primary-school uniforms. The readers will see them when they were young and sweet and they’ll forget about Jake’s little outburst. It’s all about the cute factor. You’ll see.’

‘Cute factor?’

‘It’s a PR trick to gain public sympathy. I read about it in a book I got out of the library, the one by the PR guru who was arrested for sex offences. Dirty bastard but he knew his stuff.’

I can’t help but marvel at the woman sitting in front of me. Six months ago she didn’t really know what PR meant never mind the tricks ‘gurus’ use to gain public sympathy for a client. Whilst I could barely speak for grief she went part-time at the garden centre and asked a friend’s son to create the findbillywilkinson.com website so she could post a few photos of him and include the police contact details. Now there’s a Facebook page and a crowdfunding site. She’s read every book that’s been written by the parents of other missing children and she spends hours on the Internet looking for the contact details of journalists who might be interested in covering Billy’s story.

‘So can you dig some out?’ Mum asks. ‘Some photos?’

I nod my head. ‘Of course.’

‘Are you all right, love?’ Dad says. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

I can’t tell them what happened yesterday. I don’t want to worry them, not until I know what I’m dealing with.

Waiting. My life has become one long wait. I’ve never felt more impotent in my life. Mark and Jake wouldn’t let me help with the search after Billy went missing. They said I needed to stay at home. ‘Someone needs to man the hub,’ Mark said. I don’t think that was the real reason he told me to stay behind. I think he was worried I’d break down if we found anything awful. He would have been right but I can’t continue to sit and wait. I need to find Billy.

‘I’m fine, Dad.’ I force a smile. ‘But I could do with some fresh air. Are those fliers up to date?’ I point at the teetering pile of paper under the windowsill.

‘Yes.’ Mum nods.

‘Could we go somewhere and hand them out? Maybe … the train station?’

Last week I went through Billy’s things. I’ve been through them a hundred times since the police searched his room – the familiarity is comforting – and I found an exercise book at the bottom of a pile on his bookshelf. He’d only written in it twice. On the first page he’d half-heartedly attempted some maths homework and then crossed it out and written underneath, Maths is shit and Mr Banks is a wanker.

That made me smile. It was something I could imagine him saying to Mark when he’d ask how Billy was getting on with his coursework. Billy knew it would push his dad’s buttons but he’d say it anyway because he liked winding him up. I’d tell Billy off for swearing but it was always an effort not to laugh. Poor Mark.

After I’d read what he’d written I found a pen and wrote underneath it, No swearing, Billy. The tightness in my chest eased off, just the tiniest bit. So I kept on writing. I wrote and I wrote until I had cramp in my hand. It was so cathartic, so freeing to be able to cry, alone, without worrying that my grief might upset Jake and Mark.

I almost missed the other thing he’d written in the book. I only spotted it when the back cover lifted as I put it down. He’d graffitied the inside and scrawled Tag targets in thick black marker pen:

– Bristol T M (train?)

– The Arches

– Avonmouth

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t spotted it before, not when I’d been through Billy’s things so many times, and I immediately rang DS Forbes. He wasn’t as excited as I was. He told me they’d looked at the CCTV at the train station when Billy was first reported missing and they’d checked out Avonmouth and the Arches as they knew he hung out with his friends there. But what if they’d missed something? Something only a mother could spot?

‘Great idea.’ Mum snatches the laptop from my knees and slips it behind one of the sofa cushions.

‘Hiding it from burglars,’ she says when I give her a questioning look.

‘We’ll have to be quick,’ Mum says as she parks the car. ‘We’ve only got twenty minutes before a traffic warden slaps a ticket on the windscreen.’

I clutch the fliers to my chest as we cross the road, passing a line of blue hackney cabs and a lone smoker pressed up against the exterior wall of the station.

Inside Bristol Temple Meads there’s a crowd of people gazing up at the arrivals and departures boards and a stream of traffic in and out of WHSmith’s. It’s not as busy as it would have been if we’d got here at seven or eight o’clock but hopefully we’re less likely to be brushed off by harassed commuters.

‘We’ll get a cheap-day return to Bedminster so we can get through the barriers,’ Mum says as she heads towards the ticket machines, ‘then we’ll split up. You do platforms eight to fifteen and I’ll do one to seven. Try and get the shops in the underpass to stick a poster in their window if you have time.’

‘You okay?’ she says, looking back at me as the machine spits out two tickets. ‘You’ve gone very white.’

It’s as though the earth has just tilted on its axis. That’s the only way to explain how I feel. I was here yesterday. I bought a ticket to Weston. I crossed through the barriers. I got on a train. One of the staff, a man with fair hair and glasses, catches my eye as I glance across at the ticket counter and I look away sharply. Did he recognize me? Is that why he’s staring? Has he been told to keep an eye out for me because of something I said or did?

‘Claire?’ Mum touches my arm. ‘Do you want to go back to the car? I can do the leaflet drop if you’re not feeling well. Or we can do it another day.’

‘No.’ I press a hand over hers. There’s no reason to think I did anything strange during my blackout. Even when I’m drunk the worst I’ll do is massacre a song during karaoke or embarrass Mark by firing off the most childish jokes I know. ‘I’m fine. Honestly, Mum. Let’s get this done.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’ I let go of her hand and pass a leaflet to the man waiting patiently for us to vacate the ticket machine. ‘My son Billy is missing. Have you seen him? Do you recognize his face?’

We’ve barely passed through the ticket barriers when Mum’s phone rings.

‘Oh, bugger,’ she says under her breath as she fishes it out of her handbag. ‘It’s Ben, the journalist from the Bristol News that I was telling you about. I’m going to have to take this, Claire. You okay to go by yourself?’

‘Of course.’

Mum turns left towards the coffee shop while I continue down the stairs to the subway that gives access to the platforms. I approach a lady who’s waiting for an elderly man to use the cashpoint and show her Billy’s flier.

‘This is my son, Billy Wilkinson. He’s fifteen. Have you seen him?’

She looks down at his photo and, as her eyes dart from left to right, scanning his face, my heart flickers with hope. There are nearly half a million people in Bristol but all I need is for one person, just one, to say, ‘I saw a boy who looks like him sleeping rough, or ‘I think I was served coffee by this boy yesterday.’

‘Sorry.’ The woman shakes her head.

I rush away before she can offer me any words of sympathy and thrust a leaflet at a man in a suit.

He raises a hand. ‘No, thank you.’

‘It’s not a charity leaflet.’ I rush after him. ‘And I’m not selling anything—’

I’m cut off as he takes a sudden left and disappears into the men’s toilets.

Undeterred, I approach a gang of foreign students, gabbling away to each other in Spanish outside the juice bar. ‘Have you seen this boy? He’s my son. He’s missing.’

They exchange glances, then an attractive girl, with glossy black hair that reaches almost to her waist, steps forward and peers at the leaflet in my hands.

‘Nice,’ she says, looking back up at me. ‘Nice boy. Handsome.’

‘Have you seen him? You or any of your friends?’

She takes the leaflet from my hand, shows it to her friends and says something in Spanish. I can’t understand a word they say in reply but I know what a head shake, a shrug and a pouting mouth signify.

‘Could you put it up where you’re studying?’ I ask the black-haired girl. ‘In your school? There’s a contact telephone number and an email address at the bottom if anyone has seen him.’

She nods enthusiastically but I’m not sure she understands me. I don’t have time to double-check. I need to move on. I need to get Billy’s face in front of as many people as possible.

The barista behind the counter of the coffee shop in the middle of the subway tells me she can’t put up Billy’s poster without consulting her manager, and he’s not in until 5 p.m. The queue at the sit-down coffee shop just yards away is too long to even contemplate talking to a member of staff, so I drop a pile of leaflets on the table nearest the door instead. As I hurry through the subway towards platforms thirteen and fifteen I scan everything I see – posters, free newspaper racks, walls, doors – but they’re graffiti-free. If Billy did tag the train station he didn’t do it down here.

I stop short when I reach the top of the stairs to the platforms. There’s a wreck of a building on the opposite side of the tracks. It’s the derelict sorting office, now little more than a rectangular slab of concrete with gaping holes where the windows used to be. As I watch, pigeons flutter in and out but it’s not the birds that catch my eye. It’s the graffiti daubed all over the building. There are high walls, topped with barbed wire, surrounding it but that wouldn’t stop Billy, not if he was determined to put his mark on it.

‘Excuse me, madam.’ A hand grips my shoulder and I spin round to find myself face to face with a tall man in a luminous yellow waistcoat and a black peaked cap.

‘British Transport Police,’ he says, glancing at the bundle of paper in my hands. ‘It’s been reported that you’ve been distributing material to members of the public. Can I see your licence or badge, please?’

‘Licence?’ I step away from the yellow line on the platform edge as a train pulls into the station and the overhead announcer reports that the 11.30 a.m. train to Paddington is standing at platform thirteen. ‘What licence?’

‘You need a licence from the council to distribute leaflets at this station. There’s a fixed penality of eighty pounds or a court-imposed fine of up to two thousand five hundred if you haven’t got one.’

‘But … I … I don’t know. I came with my mum. She’s the one who got the leaflets printed and I’m sure she’s got permission for us to—’

The doors to the carriages open and, as the passengers disembark, I’m distracted by a fracas further up the platform. There’s a small crowd of people around one of the doors and a man is shouting at someone to stop pushing in.

And then I see him. Tall, slim, in a baseball cap and a black Superdry jacket, shoving his way to the front of the queue.

‘Billy!’ I fling the leaflets away from me and sprint up the platform. ‘Billy! Billy, wait!’

The policeman shouts. A pigeon, pecking at crumbs beneath a bench, is startled and flies into the air. A woman gasps, the crowd parts and my lungs burn as I launch myself through the open door and sprint down the carriage.

‘Billy!’ I shout as he reaches an empty seat at the end and pauses. ‘Billy, it’s—’

The words dry in my mouth as he turns and I see his profile.

It’s not Billy. It’s not him.

Tuesday 26th August 2014

Jackdaw44: Sorry.

ICE9: What for?

Jackdaw44: Telling you to go fuck yourself last week.

ICE9: No, you’re not. You want something.

Jackdaw44: Ha. Ha. Spot on.

ICE9: So?

Jackdaw44: Just wanted to talk to you.

ICE9: You know where I live.

Jackdaw44: Ha. Ha. Am at school. Need advice.

ICE9: What about?

Jackdaw44: Girls. Why are they such bitches?

ICE9: What makes you think I know?

Jackdaw44: I fucking hate Liv. She dumped me so why is she trying to put Jess off me?

ICE9: Jealous? Maybe she still fancies you.

Jackdaw44: Yeah, right. She’s fucking Ethan Thomas.

ICE9: Revenge?

Jackdaw44: What for?

ICE9: Did you cheat on her?

Jackdaw44: [confused face}

ICE9: That’s a yes then.

Jackdaw44: I was drunk.

ICE9: Dick.

Jackdaw44: That’s Mr Big Dick to you.

ICE9: Not according to Liv.

Jackdaw44: Fuck off. (Not sorry.)

Chapter 12

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ Mum says as I turn the key in the lock. ‘I don’t feel right leaving you here alone. Not after what happened. He was decent though, wasn’t he, that policeman? In the end. I knew he wouldn’t fine us, not when we told him about Billy. You saw the look on his face when he told us he had a son of about the same age. Kind of him to say he’d keep an eye out and help spread the word.’

She follows me into the kitchen, hovering in the middle of the room as I drop my handbag onto a chair and open the fridge.

‘Are you okay?’ Mum asks. ‘I know you feel embarrassed about what happened on the train but you mustn’t let it get to you. Imagine if it had been Billy and you hadn’t gone after him. You’d never have forgiven yourself.’

‘I thought I’d do a casserole for tea,’ I say. ‘I know it’s the summer but everyone likes a sausage casserole, don’t they? I drop two onions, five carrots and two packs of sausages onto the counter. ‘Twelve sausages – that’ll be enough, won’t it, although God only knows Jake could probably finish off the lot himself.’

‘Claire, talk to me, sweetheart. You haven’t said a word since we left the station.’

I take a knife from the block on the counter. ‘The onions haven’t had long enough in the fridge to chill the juices. I always cry if they’re too fresh.’

‘Claire.’

‘I’m going to need swimming goggles. I think Billy’s got some in his room. I’ll just go up and—’

‘CLAIRE!’

Mum slips around me, blocking my exit from the kitchen.

‘Claire, sit down.’

‘I can’t. I need to put the dinner on. I need to—’

‘Claire, please. Please sit down, love.’ She gazes up at me, pain etched into her soft, lined skin. ‘Talk to me.’

‘I can’t. If I do I’ll cry.’

‘And?’ Mum rubs her hand up and down my upper arm.

‘And I don’t know if I’ll ever stop.’

‘Oh, sweetheart.’

‘I thought I’d found Billy,’ I say as she wraps me in her arms and I slump against her. ‘I thought the nightmare was over. But it’s not. It just carries on.

She squeezes me tightly. ‘We’ll find him, Claire. We’ll bring him back home.’

Mum left an hour ago. She was going to stay until Mark or one of the kids got back but then Dad rang to say that his car battery had died and he was stuck at B&Q and could she collect him. She told him to get a taxi and they’d sort out the car later but I insisted she go to his rescue. I reassured her that I could go over to Liz’s if I was feeling wobbly. She left, begrudgingly, and gave me an extra-long squeeze at the door.

My phone bleeps. It’s a text message from Mark.

Are you still at your mum’s? How are you feeling? I’m going to try and get home a bit earlier than normal. Text me if you feel unwell.

I text back.

Just got home. I went to the train station to hand out some fliers.

My phone bleeps almost immediately.

With your mum?

Yes.

Who’s with you now?

No one. I’m fine though.

Don’t go anywhere. Jake or Kira should be back soon and I’m on my way.

There’s no need to hurry, I type back. The last thing we need is for him to put his foot down and end up having an accident. Honestly. I’ll be fine.

I met Mark in a nightclub in town. I was eighteen, he was nineteen and he crossed the dance floor to talk to me, shoulders back, all South Bristol swagger with an attitude to match. He told me he was going to become a policeman. ‘I’ve passed the competency tests, the fitness test and the medical. I’ve just got the second interview to go and I’m in.’

For months, joining the police was all he could talk about. He’d turn up the radio whenever there was talk of an assault outside a nightclub or a drugs bust out in a disused barn in the countryside. He read true-crime book after true-crime book, piling them up on his bedside table like badges of honour. And then he had his second interview and I didn’t hear from him for a week. My calls went unanswered. When I went to Halfords where he’d been working while he completed the application process he took one look at me, then turned on his heel and headed straight for the nearest staff-only door.

I thought it was me. I thought that now he was a big-shot policeman he didn’t want anything more to do with me. He was going places whilst I was a receptionist at the Holiday Inn. He’d probably met some fit, ambitious policewoman during celebration drinks and didn’t have the guts to tell me we were over. I went to his house. Twice. The lights were on both times and I could see the TV flickering through the thin curtains but Mark didn’t come to the door, even when I kept my finger glued to the doorbell and screamed at him through the letterbox.

The truth came out three weeks later when I ran into one of his mates in a pub in town.

‘Mark not with you?’ I said, two large glasses of wine and the encouragement of a friend giving me the nerve to approach him. ‘Teetotal now he’s a copper, is he?’

‘Mark’s not a copper.’ He raised his hand and waved at a group of lads over by the bar.

‘What?’ I grabbed his arm as he turned to go. ‘What did you say?’

‘He didn’t get in, did he? He wouldn’t say why, secretive little bastard. I reckon it’s because his uncles have done time. Anyway, Mark’s at home sulking.’ He shrugged me off. ‘Why don’t you go and give him a blow job? Cheer him up a bit.’

I swore at him under my breath as he made his way through the crowded bar but relief flooded through me. Mark hadn’t dumped me for someone else. He was hiding and licking his wounds. All the plans he’d made, all the hopes he had. Gone. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him but I was angry too. How dare he cut off all contact with me just because he’d failed to get into the police? I deserved more than that.

Two weeks later I found a note on the doormat when I got home from work.

I’ve been a twat and I’m sorry. Meet me for a drink so I can explain. Please.

I didn’t reply. Six weeks he’d kept me hanging. Let’s see how he liked it.

I told Mum to tell Mark I was out if he rang, which he did – the next day. He didn’t leave a message.

Ignoring his calls was torture. I nearly caved in several times but I ripped up the letters I’d spent for ever composing before I could send them. Then he turned up at my door.

‘I thought about bringing flowers or wine or something but you’re worth more than that, Claire. Please,’ he added before I could respond, ‘just hear me out. You can tell me to fuck off after I’ve said what I need to say. Can we go to the pub? We can sit outside if you want.’

I listened for an hour as he explained how he’d struggled academically at school after his mum died, going in during the holidays for extra help with his coursework and scraping five low-grade GCSEs. He told me how his dad had said he’d never amount to anything and his best bet was to join him in the family’s building-supplies firm so he could learn about running a business. His dad had laughed when he’d told him he didn’t want to do that – he wanted to be a policeman – and had called him a grass. Two of Mark’s uncles were in prison, one for aggravated assault and one for fraud, and he knew his own dad wasn’t beyond taking a few backhanders and passing on stolen goods.

‘I wanted to better myself,’ Mark told me. ‘Everyone on our estate thinks my family is dodgy. People cross the street when they see me out with my uncle Simon. The family thinks it’s respect but it’s not, it’s fear, and I don’t want that kind of life for me and my kids. Because I want kids, you know, Claire. I want a family.’

Kids. His eyes shone as he said the word, just as they had when he’d talked to me about joining the police.

‘I want to be respected. I want people to look up to me because I’ve achieved something.’

And then he told me about what he called the ‘boxes’ in his head. It was his way of compartmentalizing his life. He couldn’t get in touch with me after he’d been rejected by the police because he was trapped in that box in his head. He had to process what had happened, then shut the box and get back on with his life. If he’d rung me he’d have taken a lot of his anger and resentment out on me and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want me to see him at his lowest.

‘If you’d seen me like that you’d have lost all respect for me. I’d have lost you.’

‘Maybe you already have?’

He hung his head then, chin tucked into his chest, as he swirled a small puddle of lager around the base of his glass. I said nothing.

‘Fuck it!’ He gripped his hair with his fingers and covered his face with the palms of his hands. ‘I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I?’

There are some decisions that alter the course of your future; pivotal moments in life where you find yourself standing at a crossroads. Go left and you’re off down that path and there’s no turning back. Same if you go right.

‘Bollocks.’ The wooden picnic table shook as Mark got to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Claire, you’re better off without me.’

He strode across the patio with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward.

‘Mark!’ My throat was too tight and his name came out as a whisper. ‘Mark!’

I had no choice but to go after him.

‘Mark!’ I grabbed hold of his arm. ‘Don’t you dare walk away from me. Don’t you dare!’

He stopped walking but said nothing.

‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘You tell me you had a shit childhood, then you walk away? You’re not the only one who had a rough time, you know, but you don’t see me feeling sorry for myself and—’

He grabbed me around the waist and pressed his lips so hard against mine that our teeth clashed and my neck cricked as he leaned his weight into me.

‘Give me another chance,’ he breathed as he pulled away. ‘Give me another chance and I swear I’ll never let you down again, Claire. I love you. I don’t want to lose you.’

I didn’t have to think twice. I was eighteen years old. I was in love.

Now the back door clicks open and I catch the briefest glimpse of a baseball cap before it ducks back outside and the door slams shut.

‘Wait!’ I jump up from my chair and sprint across the kitchen. ‘Come back!’

Chapter 13

‘Jake! Wait! We need to talk.’

My eldest son ignores me. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a key. He stoops to place it into the lock, wincing as he shifts his weight onto his bad foot, then turns the handle and yanks the garage door open.

He hobbles inside, swears at the pool of oil puddled around Mark’s lawnmower, then fiddles with the dusty stereo on the shelf at the back of the garage. Pounding rock music fills the room as he straddles the weights bench and shuffles onto his back. His fingers wrap around the silver bar and his biceps tense as he lifts the dumbbell off the bar.

‘Jake! Are you ignoring me?’

He doesn’t reply. Instead he grunts as he dips the bar down to his chest and then presses it into the air.

His interest in lifting weights began about six weeks after Billy disappeared. I welcomed it initially – Jake lifting weights was preferable to Jake spending every waking moment in the pub – but he became obsessed. An hour after work in the early evening became two hours and then he added another two hours in the morning. The bleep, bleep, bleep of his alarm at 5 a.m. drove Mark to distraction. Jake began spending less and less time with Kira and the family and more and more time in the garage. If he did deign to join us in the living room he’d be lost in the pages of Lifting or Power Grunt or whatever magazine he couldn’t get his nose out of. Kira would sit beside him, tap-tap-tapping into her phone, nodding politely as he’d explain how he was going to increase his deltoids by doing a certain combination of lifts.

Kira’s always been a quiet girl but she shrank into herself during the height of Jake’s obsession. The bigger he grew the smaller and more silent she became. Shortly after she first came to live with us she told me how our home was like a breath of fresh air. We weren’t the perfect family by any means but I could see why our living situation was preferable to the one she’d escaped. But then Billy disappeared and everything fell apart. We fell apart. Poor Kira. She’d swapped one screwed-up, dysfunctional family for another.

‘Jake.’ I take a step towards him. ‘You need to tell me what’s going on.’

‘I’d have thought –’ his face contorts as he presses the bar into the air – ‘that was obvious.’

I stride across the room and switch off the stereo.

A muscle twitches in my son’s cheek as he stares up at the corrugated roof. The barbell wobbles above him and for one horrible moment I imagine it slipping from his hands and pinning him to the bench but then he grunts and lowers it onto the rest.

‘Sorry.’ He sits up and runs a hand over his face.

‘You need to talk to me,’ I say softly as I crouch on the edge of the bench.

He reaches for the sports bottle on the floor and takes a swig, grimacing as he swallows. Jake is almost the spitting image of his dad. Whilst Billy inherited my dark hair, Jake is fair like Mark with the same small eyes, prominent nose and thin lips. His is a masculine face; strong and angular with a wide expanse of forehead. Billy’s features are more refined. He has my large brown eyes, a smaller nose and fuller lips. Dad always used to go on about what a pretty boy he was when he was little. ‘Angelic,’ Mum called him. I’ve always been careful never to comment on the way my boys look – they’re both beautiful in my eyes – but the world isn’t so circumspect. I lost track of the number of times old ladies would nod at Jake, then gaze at Billy in the buggy and announce, ‘He’s going to be a right heartbreaker that one.’ The comparison wasn’t lost on Jake. ‘Why don’t me and Billy look the same?’ he’d ask when he was nine and Billy was five. ‘Arrogant bastard,’ he growled when Billy was twelve and the letterbox rattled with cards for Valentine’s Day; only one of them was for Jake (and that was from me).

Jake replaces the sports bottle on the floor and his gaze flickers towards me. ‘I’m just stressed, that’s all.’

‘About what?’

His pale blue eyes are unreadable. ‘Everything. Work, Kira, Dad, this house, Bill.’

‘Is that why you’ve started drinking again?’

‘What do you mean, again?’ he says but he knows what I mean. After Billy left I lost track of the times he’d stumble into the house at night, crashing into the kitchen table, swearing at the coat hooks as his hoody hit the floor, stumbling up the stairs and into bed with Kira. I confronted him about it but he said he wasn’t doing anything that other nineteen-year-olds didn’t do and if he went to work every day and he paid me my rent then what right did I have to hassle him about it?

What could I do? It was obviously his way of dealing with the loss of his brother. But I can’t stick my head in the sand any more. I can’t stand idly by as he destroys himself. We need to talk.

‘Jake, we need to discuss what happened on the day of the appeal. I know everyone’s been worried about me, but I can’t just forget about the fact that you were drinking at seven o’clock in the morning.’

He takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair. ‘I just had a bit of a session, okay? We got back from the club at three and I kept drinking because I was pissed off.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Do you have to be such a control freak?’ He shifts position to stand up but the sudden movement is too much for his foot and he’s forced to sit back down again.

The accusation stings and it takes everything I’ve got not to retaliate. Instead I take a steadying breath.

‘Sorry. That was out of order.’ He puts a hand on mine, his palm sticky with sweat. ‘Look, if you really want to know, I was pissed off because some bloke started chatting up Kira while I was in the loo.’

‘He was probably just trying his luck.’

‘Yeah, I know. But she looked really happy. She was laughing and playing with her hair, like she did when we first got together.’ He shrugs. ‘And I was shitting myself about Billy’s appeal. So I kept drinking to try and block it all out. That’s all there is to it.’

I want to tell him that I understand, that it’s been longer than I can remember since his dad looked at me that way too, but this isn’t about me. And it certainly isn’t about Mark. This is about my son opening up to me for the first time in a long time.

‘Oh, Jake.’ I wrap my arms around his broad shoulders and pull him in to me. His body feels hard and unwieldy in my arms. ‘I understand. Really I do. She’ll look at you like that again. I promise. You and Kira have been to hell and back, we all have. When Billy comes home everything will go back to normal. I promise you.’

Jake stiffens and it’s as though I’m hugging rock.

Thursday 25th September 2014

Jackdaw44: I saw you in town today.

ICE9: Shouldn’t you be at school?

Jackdaw44: Skiving.

ICE9: I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.

Jackdaw44: Liv was stirring shit with her mates at lunchtime. I’ve fucking had it with girls. I left before I hit her.

ICE9: You can’t hit girls!

Jackdaw44: Duh! That’s why I left.

ICE9: Why do you keep texting me?

Jackdaw44: I like talking to you. You got a problem with that?

ICE9: Wow, so aggressive!

Jackdaw44: Fuck this shit. You’re a piss taker like everyone else.

ICE9: No, I’m not.

Jackdaw44: You look down on me. You think I’m a stupid kid.

ICE9: a) I don’t look down on you and b) You’re cleverer than you let on.

Jackdaw44: Fucking Stephen Hawkins, me.

ICE9: You know what I mean.

Jackdaw44: Yeah. Don’t tell anyone though.

ICE9: Your secret is safe with me.

Jackdaw44: If you ever need to share a secret you know where I am.

ICE9: I’ll bear that in mind.

Chapter 14

‘DS Forbes speaking.’ For a split second his clipped tones make me question my decision to call him. It’s Monday morning and he sounds stressed but I can’t ignore what I saw at the train station. Not if it takes us a step closer to finding Billy.

‘It’s Claire Wilkinson. Billy’s mum.’ I don’t know why I added that last bit. He knows perfectly well who I am but a lifetime of introducing myself at the school gates, talking to the kids’ teachers or ringing the doctor’s surgery has drummed it into me. Claire Wilkinson, Mark’s wife. Claire Wilkinson, the boy’s mum. I can’t remember the last time I introduced myself as Claire.

‘What can I do for you, Mrs Wilkinson?’

I can hear noises in the background, keyboards clacking and snatches of conversation.

‘I was at the train station on Friday,’ I say. ‘Temple Meads. I was on platform thirteen and I was …’ I falter. How do I explain the surety I felt that the ugly building I must have passed a thousand times holds a vital clue to my son’s disappearance? ‘I was wondering if you’ve searched the disused sorting office. There’s a lot of graffiti on it and Billy did say in his diary that he wanted to tag the station or one of the trains. Maybe he went there instead. Maybe he’s still there.’

DS Forbes doesn’t respond immediately. Someone in the same room shouts, ‘Yes!’ and there’s a smattering of applause.

‘DS Forbes?’ I say. ‘Did you—’

‘Yes, still here.’

‘Do you think it could be a lead? Do you think he might be squatting there? Sleeping rough.’

He makes a low humming sound. ‘I doubt it. That place is completely open to the elements. It’s basically a couple of floors on stilts. You’d be better off sleeping in a doorway.’

‘But he could be there?’

‘Billy could be anywhere, Claire. That’s the trouble. There are a thousand places in Bristol where he could be sleeping rough. Unfortunately we don’t have the time or resources to search them all. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get a lead as a result of the appeal. It’s still early days.’

‘But you’ll look? You’ll get someone to check it out.’

Another pause.

‘I’ll see what we can do.’

There is no way I can get into the old sorting office. Even if I was fifteen years old I still don’t think I’d be able to make it over the barbed-wire fence, even with a leg-up, and the double gates are securely padlocked. I wasn’t going to come here, not after I called DS Forbes this morning, but I wanted to get a glimpse inside, just to set my mind at rest. Cattle Market Road is a busy street, with cars whizzing backwards and forwards, but most of the shops are boarded up, long since abandoned. There is a red sign affixed to some railings just outside the gates warning the general public that it’s private property. The sorting office is clearly visible through the grey metal bars of the gates. It looks even bleaker from here than it did from the train station opposite. DS Forbes wasn’t joking about it being open to the elements. There are no longer any walls or partitions inside, just a series of concrete columns separating one floor from the next. Even if you could get over the barbed wire why would you shelter here? I’ve spent months wondering where I’d go if I was sleeping rough. I’d want to squirrel myself away from the world so I wouldn’t worry about being robbed or attacked as I slept. I’d go to a women’s shelter if I could or, if I didn’t want to be found, I’d settle down for the night in a shed in the allotments off Talbot Road and take my belongings with me each morning to avoid discovery. We’ve already checked the allotments, and posted up signs in BS4 and BS3 asking people to check their sheds. We’ve searched everywhere and anywhere we could think of – the river-bank near Marks & Spencer at Avonmeads, the local parks, the Downs. Everywhere.

Well, not everywhere. Or we’d have found him.

I look down at the notebook in my hands and Billy’s thick, black scrawl:

– Bristol T M (train?)

– The Arches

– Avonmouth

The Arches. I’ll go there next. It’s a railway viaduct – ripe for tagging – on the edge of Gloucester Road. It’s on the other side of Bristol but that never stopped Billy, not if he wanted to see his friends. He’d set off on his bike and cycle the eight and a half miles it takes to get there from our house. Billy was always secretive about who he was going to see. ‘Just mates, Mum,’ he’d say. When the kids were little and went to a local primary school I knew who all their friends were. We seemed to spend half our lives going to birthday parties and playdates and ferrying the kids to and from sleepovers. But when the boys started secondary school on the other side of town their friends, scattered all over Bristol, became a mystery to me. Jake told us that Billy’s Gloucester Road friends weren’t from school at all. He said they were older guys, in their late teens and early twenties, who lived in a squat. I was horrified. I imagined drugs and squalor and crime and I told Billy I didn’t want him to have anything to do with them. He told me I was narrow-minded and brainwashed by Mark. His friends weren’t down-and-outs, they were artists who refused to become wage monkeys to line some capitalist landlord’s pocket. Why shouldn’t they live in an abandoned building? They weren’t doing any harm to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t keep him locked in the house all weekend. The alternative was to ferry him into town in the car if he was going to the cinema with friends and then pick him up afterwards but what was to stop him from getting a bus to Gloucester Road the second we dropped him off? Mark said we should take Billy’s bike off him for a bit, until he learned some responsibility. I suggested that Billy take me to the squat to meet his new friends but my son said he’d rather die than do that.

‘Did you introduce your parents to all your friends when you were fifteen?’ he asked me and I had to admit, to myself anyway, that I hadn’t. There were countless boyfriends who I met at night after sneaking out of the house. Lots of older brothers and sisters of my mates who’d go into the Co-op to buy us bottles of White Lightning and Thunderbird to drink in the park. One of my male friends had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped after we got stupidly drunk and he was someone I’d known since childhood. I didn’t end up in A&E. I’d already puked into a flower bed.

I was torn. Billy was fifteen years old. He was stretching his wings. He was a good boy. He was sensible at heart and I trusted him not to do anything stupid. And then he got into trouble at school for graffitiing the science block and Mark said that was that, he was grounded for two months and he was going to take away Billy’s bike. Only we couldn’t find it. And Billy refused to say where it was.

Now I jump as the gate clangs open and a man and woman in neon yellow vests with lanyards around their necks step through the gap.

‘Excuse me,’ I say as the man closes the padlock. ‘My name is Claire Wilkinson. My son is missing. He’s called Billy, he’s fifteen. I’m worried that he might be sleeping rough and—’

‘Not here he’s not,’ the woman says. She’s mid-forties with a half-inch of grey roots showing through her curly red hair. ‘Bristol Council.’ She gestures towards her lanyard. ‘We’re redeveloping the place. Waterside offices and homes. There’s twenty-four-hour security in place.’

‘You’re quite sure there’s no one sleeping rough inside?’

The man pulls on the padlock. ‘Not unless he’s a pigeon. And we’ll be getting them out ASAP too.’

I glance through the gates and try to imagine the building coming back to life – with glass in the windows and families sitting on sofas in front of their tellies and office workers wheeling back and forth in front of computer screens – but I can’t see it.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you know of any squats in Gloucester Road, do you?’

But they’ve already wandered off.

I am a couple of hundred feet away from the Arches and stuck in traffic when I see him, a heavyset man with a bushy beard. He’s riding a yellow-and-black BMX bike with distinctive blue-and-white tyres. He slips into the bus lane and undertakes me, his white trainers pumping the pedals as he speeds down Cheltenham Road. He looks almost comical with his large body balanced on top of the small bike and his thick knees spread wide. I remember how Jake laughed and said Billy looked like a circus monkey when he rode his Mafia BMX. It was a kid’s bike, he said. And he looked like an idiot.

Just like the man in the hoody.

It’s Billy’s bike. It has to be. I’ve never seen one like it, not with the same combination of colours.

I don’t think twice. I indicate left and pull into the bus lane. A horn sounds behind me and the driver of the 3A bus shakes his head at me in my rear-view mirror. Startled by the sound, the man on the bike glances back. I wave frantically but he either doesn’t see me or he doesn’t want to stop because his head drops and he begins to pedal even faster. He turns left onto Zetland Road just as the lights change and I’m forced to stop.

I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as he zips across the road and jumps off the bike outside a kitchen-and-bathroom shop and then hammers on the panelled wooden door of the building next to it, on the corner of the street. There are curtains at the window and a large piece of white card or wood – at least twelve feet by six feet – propped up inside, obscuring the view. As the traffic light turns green the door opens and the man disappears inside, taking the bike with him. It has to be the squat Jake told me about.

There’s a space outside a tile shop on the opposite side of the road so I park quickly, half mounting the pavement in my desperation to get out of the car.

I have to wait for one, two, three cars to go past before there’s a gap in the traffic and I can sprint across the road.

‘Hello!’ I knock on the door and then wait.

A young mother walks past, pushing a red-faced, squalling baby in a pram. Her eyes are fixed on a spot in the distance, as though she’s willing herself to … just … get … home. She doesn’t so much as glance at me.

I knock again and walk around the corner and tap on the window.

Nothing happens. No one comes to the door and the curtains don’t twitch.

‘Hello?’ I lift the letterbox and peer inside but it’s lined with nylon bristles and I can’t see a thing. ‘Hello! I know you’re in there. I just saw you go in with the bike.’

‘They’re all drug addicts, you know.’ An elderly man, with a walking stick in one hand and a blue plastic bag in the other, pauses beside me. ‘If they’ve stolen something of yours you need to call the police.’

I instinctively touch my handbag, slung across my body. I should call the police. Or at least Mark. But adrenalin’s coursing through me and I can’t stop myself from shouting through the letterbox again as the man continues his amble up the road.

‘My name’s Claire Wilkinson. My son Billy is missing. I think you might know him.’

I reach into my handbag and pull out a flier, then shove it and go round the corner to the window again. The curtain twitches, just at the edge of the frame, and I catch a flash of pale pink flesh before it vanishes again.

There’s a creaking sound and I rush back to the door. It opens an inch or two and a male voice hisses, ‘Keep your voice down would you? The neighbours hate us as it is.’

The door opens wider. ‘Well, are you coming in or not?’

Chapter 15

I’d expected syringes and drug paraphernalia on the floor, or at least the stench of weed, mixed with urine and shit. I’d also imagined piles of rubbish, fast-food boxes, split bin bags, dirty walls and stained mattresses. Instead the walls are white – grubby but not soiled – and decorated with posters and murals. Mark would call it graffiti. There’s a frayed sofa too, an armchair and a low table holding what looks like some kind of screen-printing equipment. A guitar is propped up in the corner of the room along with several piles of books and half a dozen blank art canvases. Two men are sitting on the sofa. One’s reading a book about Andy Warhol; the other’s asleep, his head tipped back and his mouth wide open. I should be terrified, shut in a room with three men I don’t know, but I’m too shocked to feel fear. I thought I was about to walk into a drugs den and instead it’s as though I’ve walked into a student flat.

‘He was up late working,’ says the large man in the red hoody who hissed at me to come in. ‘He’s off to a festival soon. T-shirts,’ he adds, gesturing towards the screen-printing equipment. ‘He does them all by hand.’

I feel myself gawp. ‘Squatters work?’

‘We all work,’ says the man with the book, looking up, and my cheeks burn. Did I just say that aloud? ‘Jay busks and—’

‘You don’t work,’ says Red Hoody who must be Jay. ‘You’re a student.’

‘I use my brain,’ says the man on the sofa. ‘It’s work, believe you me.’

‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ says Jay, ‘but the council shut off the electric last week. We’ve still got water though, if you want some?’

‘No, thank you.’

He’s holding Billy’s flier, crumpled up in his hand, but no one has mentioned my son since I walked in. And there’s no sign of the bike.

‘Have any of you seen Billy?’ I gesture at the flier.

Jay shakes his head. The art student shrugs. Sleeping man snorts in his sleep and wakes with a start. He stares at me through glassy eyes, then seems to jolt into himself. ‘Who are you?’

‘Claire Wilkinson. Billy’s mum. I think you might know him.’

‘Billy?’ He scratches his head. ‘I know a Will Turner. Is that him?’

‘No. His name’s Billy Wilkinson. He’s fifteen. He disappeared over six months ago. I know he had friends near Gloucester Road.’

‘Never heard of him, sorry.’

‘You must know him then.’ I turn back to Jay. ‘You let me in.’

He runs a hand over his ginger beard, finds the end and tugs on it. ‘You were shouting through the letterbox. What else was I supposed to do?’

I feel myself grow hot under the scrutiny of three pairs of eyes.

‘But the bike …’ The door is open on the other side of the living room revealing a dark hall or passageway.

‘What bike?’

‘I saw you on a bike. A BMX. Distinctive. Yellow and black.’

‘And?’ Jay crosses his arms over his broad chest and takes a step back, as though to get a better look at me.

‘Could I …’ I take a step towards the hallway. ‘Could I have a look at it?’

‘It’s not for sale.’

The atmosphere in the room has changed. When I entered the house they were amused and curious. Now they want me to leave.

I hear a sound from beyond the open door, the squeak-squeak-squeak of rusty bed springs and a low groan. Jay and the art student exchange a look. The student hides a smile behind his book. Why are they looking at each other like that? Is Billy here? Are they hiding him?

‘All right, lady.’ Jay puts a hand on my arm. ‘I think it’s time for you to go now, don’t you?’

There’s another sound from beyond the hallway. A moan of pain. The art student sniggers.

I snatch my arm away from Jay and, before he can react, I dart round him and run across the living room towards the open door. It’s dark in the hallway but I can just make out a bike, propped up against the wall. There are several rooms along the length of the corridor. All the doors are open apart from the one at the far end of the hallway. As I sprint towards it a hand grabs my shoulder and I’m yanked backwards, but not before I’ve kicked out a leg and made contact with the door with the heel of my boot.

It swings open.

There’s a gasp and a grunt and my breath catches in my throat as two men, naked and flushed, spring away from each other. The thinner and paler of the two men, standing at the base of the bed, grabs an item of clothing from the floor and presses it to his crotch. The other man, still on the mattress, shouts, ‘What the fuck?’ and picks up a shoe. He stares at me as though deciding whether or not I’m a threat, then launches himself off the bed and slams the door shut. ‘You can fuck off too, Jay,’ he shouts as his flatmate, still standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder, roars with laughter.

‘Come on, mad bird. Time for you to leave.’ Jay moves his hand to the small of my back and manoeuvres me out of the hallway, back into the living room and across to the front door.

‘Please.’ I twist away from him as he reaches for the door handle. ‘Please just tell me where you got the bike from. Is it stolen? I won’t tell the police. If it is Billy’s bike it could be a clue, it could help us—’

‘It’s not stolen.’ Jay glances back at his friends but they aren’t on the sofa any more. They’ve moved to the other doorway, where they’re nudging each other and laughing as they peer into the hallway. ‘It’s Rich’s bike, the guy in the bedroom. He hates us using his stuff, particularly me. Says I’ll buckle the frame.’ He laughs drily.

‘But you saw me, in my car, and you sped up.’

‘What car?’ He looks genuinely confused. ‘I was trying to get the bike back before Rich got up. Look –’ his expression softens as he opens the door – ‘I’m sorry your son’s missing. We’ll stick the leaflet up in the window, okay?’

‘Thank you,’ I say, even though it is no longer in his hand. It’s in a crumpled ball under the table.

‘All right then. You take it easy.’

‘Wait! Are there any other squats around here? My son—’

The question hangs in the air as the door is shut in my face.

Chapter 16

‘Oh, crapping hell, missus.’ Liz squeezes me tightly, then holds me at arm’s length so she can look me up and down. ‘I’ve been so worried about you. Where the hell have you been?’

I open my mouth to reply but my best friend gets there first. ‘Come in and tell me everything. Do I need to lock the front door this time? Because if you do a runner again I swear I’ll rugby-tackle you to the ground. I’ve eaten a metric fucking tonne of chocolate in the last few days so I’m packing a few pounds!’

We’ve been sitting at Liz’s kitchen table for ten minutes. I’ve been talking non-stop since I stepped into her house. When I finally pause to take a breath Liz stares at me, her eyes large and round. ‘And all this has happened in the last few days?’

I nod.

‘Why didn’t you come round? I mean, I appreciated the text you sent saying you were okay but Jesus, woman, you only live next door. You could have popped in. When Mark and Jake came round to say you’d disappeared I totally freaked. I thought it was my fault. That bloody newspaper.’

‘I know.’ I reach across the kitchen table for her hands. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have come round earlier but it’s … it’s all been so … I feel like I’m going mad. That’s the only way I can explain it. I’m literally losing my mind.’

‘Of course you are, babe. Anyone in your situation would be. But I’ll tell you something for nothing – don’t you be going to any more places on your own. You need to let the police do their job. Anything could have happened to you in that squat. They could have robbed you or worse.’

‘They weren’t like that.’

‘And you know that for sure, do you? People turn, Claire. You need to be a bit less trusting.’

‘I’m not too trusting.’

‘You bloody are.’

‘But I need to find Billy. If Caleb went missing you’d do everything you could to get him back. I’ve waited six months for the police to find him but I can’t keep doing that. I need to find him. I can’t just sit at home doing nothing. But I’ve started to see him everywhere I go. Everywhere …’

I snatch my hands back from Liz’s and rest my forehead on my curled fists, suddenly exhausted. I don’t know what to think any more. Or what to do. Each time I think I’m one step closer to finding Billy I get my hopes up. Only for them to come crashing back down again.

‘Deep breaths.’ I hear the squeak of Liz’s chair on the kitchen tiles and then her hand on my back. She rubs circles over my shoulders with the palms of her hands, just the way I’d do to the kids when they were little and upset. ‘Take deep breaths, Claire.’

I close my eyes as she continues to rub my back but the darkness behind my eyelids is too dense, too deathless, and I open them again.

‘Maybe what you need,’ Liz says softly, ‘is a bit of normality. Let me finish,’ she adds quickly. ‘I know there’s no normal – I know life can’t be normal until you get Billy back – but what I mean is maybe you need a routine. You’ve got too much time on your hands, Claire. Too much time to think and brood. Have you thought about going back to work?’

‘Oh God, no.’

‘I thought Stephen was a good boss?’ Her voice softens as she says my brother-in-law’s name. I think she’s always had a bit of a soft spot for him, not that she’d ever admit it. ‘He let you take six months off after Billy disappeared. I’m sure he’d be glad to have you back.’

‘I know, but it’s complicated.’

‘How is it complicated? You loved your job at Wilkinson & Son. You were always telling me about the banter you had with the customers on the phone and how you and Stephen had a laugh.’

‘Loved is a bit strong and anyway, what about Mark?’

‘What about him? You went back to work after the argument, didn’t you? And he didn’t give you any grief.’

Mark and his stepbrother Stephen fell out a year ago. It was my birthday and we were having Sunday lunch in a local pub when Billy and Jake came to blows in the garden. They never revealed what started it but there was a lot of name-calling and insults thrown about before Jake landed the first punch. Mark intervened, heavy-handedly, and Stephen made a comment about Mark’s parenting skills.

He said it jokily but Mark bit back, asking what the fuck Stephen knew about bringing up children. It was a low blow. Stephen and his wife Caroline can’t have kids. They’ve tried everything, all the tests you can get. ‘Unknown fertility issues,’ the consultant said. Caroline got pregnant once, after ten years of trying, but she lost the baby in the second trimester. They never discovered why. She was broken by it and so was Stephen. I thought Mark was completely out of order for what he’d said to him and I let him know as much. I went back to Wilkinson & Son the next day, as though nothing had happened. Mark didn’t give me grief about it but I could tell by the offhand way he greeted me that evening that he was secretly smarting. Where was my loyalty? Why hadn’t I sided with him and told Stephen to stick his job? Because I was angry with him, that was why. Between him and the boys they’d completely ruined my birthday.

Mark and Stephen haven’t spoken since their argument, other than a few brusque words during the search for Billy, but I know Mark misses his stepbrother. He’s just too proud to admit it.

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