My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller (4 page)

Carla spent the rest of the evening feeding me pitta bread and hummus and insisting I help her alphabetise three boxes’ worth of yoga and Pilates DVDs. I made my excuses around ten and arrived home to discover Jason had gone out. He hadn’t mentioned having plans. Figuring he’d nipped to the pub for an impromptu pint, I decided to use the time alone to my advantage and went up to the spare bedroom.

Requisitioned as a kind of ‘Find Barney’ HQ, as well as housing the computer on which Jason monitored various missing persons forums, the room also contained a filing cabinet full of Barney paperwork. Carla had confirmed what I already knew to be true: I needed to find something, no matter how small, that linked the off-licence, or the man that ran it, to Barney’s disappearance. And if I couldn’t, then perhaps my conscience could rest.

I’d only gone a few steps into the room when I became distracted by the line-up of ‘future’ Barney sketches Jason had permanently tacked to the wall. Designed to help the public identify Barney as he changed and grew, each time another year passed, the forensic artist would create a new version of what they thought he might now resemble. The police readily offered up these images for consumption, while at the same time being at pains to point out how much harder it was for their experts to produce an accurate projection of a child whose last ‘real’ photo available showed them at a very young age. Until they reach five, a child’s facial features more closely resemble those of a baby; after that, their face gives much clearer indications of the adult they might one day become.

Stepping over Jason’s old bag of welding tools, I moved in close to the most recent picture, a projection of an eight-year-old Barney. The artist had styled his fair, almost yellow, hair into a crew-cut and framed his eyes with thick blond lashes. I tried to marry up the picture with my memory of the boy from the off-licence. Jason had been right when he said they didn’t match. The hair colour and eyes were the same, but the rest of his features were more doubtful.

I noticed that a corner of one of the early sketches had wilted forward onto itself, revealing a large dent in the plaster. I traced my thumb inside its hollow oval, remembering the day when, a little over a year ago, another sighting of Barney had come to nothing. On that occasion the collision of metal against wood, mirror and glass had been immediate. As soon as he’d got off the phone with the police, Jason had taken his welding tools to this and other parts of the house in a fit of rage that ended only once he’d exhausted himself.

It was always the same. Despite Jason’s years of experience at dealing with disappointment, at some later point there was always a cost. Take the last few weeks. Since the false sighting in Istanbul, life had been business as usual. Jason was eating OK, sleeping OK, working OK. But then, little by little, I knew he’d resort to the coping strategies I’d seen so many times before: rising at dawn to go for punishing ten-mile runs, skipping teaching jobs so he could binge-read the files he’d put together on Barney’s disappearance, paying heed to the internet trolls who taunted him with false claims of his son’s whereabouts. It was like watching a lit fuse. Sometimes it might burn slowly, so slowly that you were lulled into thinking it had fizzled out. But then, just when you were least expecting it, there’d be that nitrate flash.

I withdrew my thumb from the hole in the wall and some plaster dust came away with it. Jason had remained subdued since this last setback. Still, I was under no illusions. Rubbing the pale pink powder between my fingertips, I reattached the picture and took a step back. My stomach noosed tight. Jason’s disappointment would produce its normal fireworks, of that there was no doubt. It was merely a question of time.

Barney’s five-year-old face stared out at me, his dark eyes wide and questioning. I wondered, as I often did, what Lauren might look like if she were still alive. How tall would she be now? What about her hair – would she have cut and coloured it into the latest teen fashion or would she have kept it long? I thought ahead, to her birthday tomorrow, and what the day might bring. I knew that Mum and Dad would phone at some point and that Mum would probably tell me about the flowers she had taken to her grave that morning. A sharp, small reprimand that I hadn’t been there in Kent to go with her. Not that I’d ever wanted to visit Lauren’s grave. I found the tiny headstone that marked where she lay to be too solid, too real. In the past, when I still lived down south, I’d preferred spending her birthday somewhere she had loved. For the first year without her I’d gone to the swimming baths and had floated around in the shallow end, remembering her fear and delight when she managed to swim without armbands. The following year, I’d whiled away the afternoon walking the circuit from her infant school to her friends’ houses again and again, in a loop, until my feet blistered.

Her past few birthdays though, I found I functioned best if I kept busy. Last year I’d volunteered to attend a sales conference in Swindon and tomorrow I’d deliberately scheduled an entire day’s worth of back-to-back client meetings.

I checked my watch. It was just after 10.15 p.m. Wherever Jason was, he’d probably be home soon. If I was going to go through his stuff I’d need to be quick. No longer sure if he used one or all of the drawers in the cabinet, I decided to start at the bottom and work my way up.

There had been a time when I’d have known exactly where to find what I was looking for. In the early days, when we’d first got together, the circumstances surrounding Barney and Lauren’s disappearances were our favourite topic of conversation. We’d spent many an evening studying his files together, combing them for clues that might help the investigation. They’d been like those long chats that all couples have when they start seeing each other that go on for hours and hours. But, instead of stories about our school days or our dreams for the future, Jason and I had talked and talked about our lost children. We’d go out for dinner and get so engrossed that our food would go cold. The restaurant would empty around us and the lights would be turned on to try and make us leave. Then, unable and unwilling to stop, we’d go out into the night, blinking and jittery and walk home instead of getting a taxi so that we could keep talking for as long as possible.

As time had gone on though, those sessions with the files had happened less and less, until finally, they stopped completely. It might have been because Jason felt the sessions were no longer necessary (I was now so familiar with the details of Barney’s case) or maybe it was something else. Either way, a kind of a Chinese wall had grown up between me and the files. It wasn’t explicit. Jason hadn’t forbidden me from reading them. However, at the same time, there was definitely the sense that to do so would be akin to looking at his private journal.

Getting down on my knees, I opened the first two drawers, only to discover they contained replacement printer cartridges and A4 paper blocks. Worried Jason might have moved the files without telling me, I gave the third drawer a tug. But it was stiff on its castors or had got stuck and, no matter how hard I yanked, it refused to budge. I needed more leverage. I got to my feet and this time I used both hands. That didn’t work either. The drawer wasn’t stuck; it was locked. Checking to see if the top one was the same I hooked my index finger around the metal handle and pulled. It slid open to reveal a row of five large lever-arch files. Relieved that Jason hadn’t moved them somewhere else after all, I considered the locked drawer. Presumably it contained important papers: maybe the mortgage or insurance documents or Barney’s birth certificate? Still, it was odd he hadn’t thought to mention it. He must have forgotten. No matter, I could get at the Barney paperwork and that was all I was here for.

Coloured grey with a white spine, each of the files was filled to bursting. I lifted them out one by one, and once they were stacked on the desk I took a seat. Of course, the police had their own mountain of official material to which only they had access, but that hadn’t stopped Jason from amassing his own records: one file for every year that Barney had been missing.

I looked at the cover of the folder sitting before me marked 2010 – the year Barney disappeared. The first thing in the file was an Ordnance Survey map folded into quarters. Jason had secured its place in the ring binder by hole-punching the sides. I’d seen it many times before but now, as I opened it out onto the desk, I tried to look upon it with fresh eyes. It contained an overview of the area in which Barney was last seen. Charting three square miles, the left side of the space was dominated by a rectangular block of council flats and adjacent car park and playground. I studied the map as best I could, not sure what I was looking for. Apart from the flats, the rest of the area was overlooked by the low peaks of the Eston Hills and grassland, bisected at one point by the A19. I thought for a moment. The A19 did lead north, towards the town in which the off-licence was situated, but, apart from that slim nugget, there was nothing else of remark.

I moved onto the next page. Printed onto shiny, bluey-coloured paper, it was an architect’s drawing of the block of flats from the Ordnance Survey map, named Ashbrook House. The text at the side of the drawing revealed the structure was ten stories high and contained sixty different dwellings. Designed so that the front doors faced out onto the same side, each flat was accessed by open, half-walled walkways that ran lengthways across the stretch of the building.

Jason had marked flat 56 with a large red circle. Situated on the eighth floor, the front door to this particular flat was located directly next to the stairwell that led to the floors below.

Flat 56. The last place Barney had been seen before he vanished, apparently into thin air.

There were many theories about what might have happened to him, some more credible than others. Theories aside, the facts as I understood them from Jason were these:

Barney James Thursby had disappeared on an idle Wednesday afternoon in July 2010. That particular morning, Jason had described how Barney had been up with the lark, bouncing on his and Vicky’s bed, blowing raspberries and begging them to come downstairs and play. Eventually, Jason said he had given in and gone down to the kitchen, where he made Barney his favourite breakfast of dippy egg and soldiers.

At the time, Jason had yet to retrain as a first-aid teacher and was still a jobbing welder, helping to construct the burners on a nearby power station. That morning, as he left for work he gave his son a kiss goodbye, got in his van and drove away without so much as a backward glance. From then on in, as per usual, Barney was in Vicky’s care. A mobile hairdresser by trade, she often took Barney with her on jobs in order to save on expensive nursery fees. This particular Wednesday, her diary was jammed with back-to-back appointments, and at around 3 p.m. she had headed for her final client. Aged seventy-eight and suffering from mild dementia, Mrs McCallum got upset if Vicky didn’t do her weekly shampoo and set on the same day at the same time every week.

As Vicky navigated Ashbrook House’s endless flights of stairs with the weight of her hairdressing bag slung on her shoulder – she would do anything to avoid the building’s urine-riddled lifts – Barney began to play up. Dawdling behind, he kept grabbing hold of the metal handrail and attempting to swing from it. Vicky would no sooner have climbed three steps than she would have to retreat four, extricate Barney’s hands from the railing and direct him back up the stairs. By the time they reached the eighth floor, her patience was starting to wear thin.

The temperature inside Mrs McCallum’s tiny flat didn’t help. The air dense with the muggy crackle that precedes a storm, there’d been a distant rumble of thunder as the old lady shuffled down the hall to make tea. Barney, meanwhile, instead of following behind, had tried to make a cheeky diversion into the living room. Ever since Vicky had started bringing him here he’d been obsessed with the tantalising collection of clown figurines that Mrs McCallum kept on the hearth, and took any chance he could to get at them. Vicky knew his game, though, and managed to grab him just before he reached the fragile ornaments. Her hands around his waist, she scooped him up onto her hip and took him through to the kitchen, where she plonked him on the floor and gave him his bag of Matchbox cars.

So far that day she’d been just about able to cope with the heat but now, as she came back up to standing, she found she had to wipe the sweat from her face. Setting her hairdryer and brushes out on the kitchen table she asked if she might open the front door so as to let some air flow through to where she worked. Mrs McCallum agreed and soon Vicky was hard at work on the old lady’s sparse curls while Barney brummed and beeped his toy cars around her feet.

Barney played nicely but, every now and again, he would whizz one of his cars a little too fast across the lino and, when it came into contact with the hall carpet, it would fly up and spiral off into the distance. The first few times this happened Vicky would stop what she was doing and watch while he went to retrieve the toy. The hall dog-legged its way to the front door and she didn’t want him wandering out onto that high walkway. Before long, though, she became absorbed in her work and her attention waned.

Afterwards, Vicky had claimed she could never be sure how long it took her to realise that Barney was gone. It could have been two minutes; it could have been ten. Whatever the timings, initially, she put his silence down to those clown figurines. Marching into the living room, she’d expected to find him, headless clown in hand. But the room was empty. Still thinking he must be up to mischief, Vicky had searched the rest of the flat, peering under beds and behind sofas. That, too, proved fruitless. Starting to panic, it was then that she ventured outside and onto the walkway.

Terrified he’d climbed the barrier, she looked over the side; she’d told the police she had braced herself for the sight of his prone body on the ground, eight floors below. But again, there was nothing. Her subsequent relief was mixed with a growing confusion. Where was he?