Humber Boy B (31 page)

“Yes, and my heart aches to think of what she’s going through. Any parent knows that we all have days where we aren’t our best selves. Jessica Watts was a good mum, but she was busy. She made a bad judgement call, asking Yvette to babysit. Noah wanted to be noticed, Ben said, that’s why he climbed onto the bridge. He’d probably seen people do likewise and get on the news, the poor kid just wanted attention. There were four kids on the bridge, and all of them took their own history to that moment. It was simply a terrible tragedy.”

She stopped, exhausted by it.

Paul put it far more starkly. “No, Cate. A murder.”

“Yes, it was. But not in the way you would imagine.”

“I think you like him too much.”

“I think someone should, if he’s going to stand a chance out here.”

83

The Day Of

Cheryl ran. As soon as Noah began to climb over the barrier, she turned and ran because she feared what was coming next, even though she willed it too.

It was as if the pain of the fall, the frustration of the day, had all exploded and Noah decided to end it the swiftest way he could, and even if he changed his mind she knew that other forces had been conjured.

The bridge is long, and as long as she is on it, she will feel more to blame for what takes place. So she runs harder, bare feet on concrete, her gymnastic body moving to its limits, the swimsuit riding up, the towel long forgotten.

It takes forever to leave the bridge, the rain is now strong and steady and relentless as she scrambles down the riverbank. But still, she can see the bridge, and this makes her panic.

She runs to where her father is stood by the water’s edge, his mobile in his hand. He sees her and looks relieved but also furious.

“I’ve been worried sick. Why didn’t you take your phone?”

They can both hear it, ringing in her bag just a few yards away.

“Where did you go, Cheryl? You should at least have put some clothes on!”

She was in trouble, she’d been gone too long. She wanted to go home, to leave this place behind.

“I asked you a question, Cheryl. Now answer me. What’s going on?”

She pointed, up to the middle of the bridge.

“The boys, Dad. Up there. I think one of them is going to jump.”

Roger began to collapse his fishing rod, zip up his coat against the rain and pack up his things. “Don’t be silly, Cheryl. Now let’s clear up and get out of this rain. We can talk about this at home, I haven’t finished with you yet.”

“Maybe I’m not happy with you.”

Roger looked up to see his daughter, standing in the rain in just a swimsuit, staring at him with a look that was on the precipice between temper and tears. He was genuinely surprised to see her this way and took a step forward, but she held up her hand, palm towards him.

“No, Dad. Nothing you say can make this better.”

“What?” he asked, perplexed. “What is it you think I’ve done?”

“We had a chance Dad, to be with Jess. But it’s going to be okay. I’ve thought of a way… she could love you again, Dad. She could love both of us. And then you can stop hating me. I think she’ll come back to us now.”

She was shaking now, crying too, and Roger didn’t know what to say or how to comfort her.

“Cheryl, what are you talking about?”

She didn’t answer, but instead jumped into the cold water, no longer thinking about the boys on the bridge but thinking only of the family she might have had. She slapped her bare feet into the gravel, not caring that it stung, and tried to wash away the blood from her thighs.

They both looked up when they heard the scream.

84

Now

FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B

Silent Friend:
No-one has posted on this page for a while, so I’m thinking I’m the only one who really cares. Or maybe you others just want to leave the dirty work to me? I have him now. See the photo if you don’t believe me. Looks different than in the other pictures, but then you haven’t seen him since he was a boy, have you Jess?

I promise you this is our man. Now what do you suggest I do with him?

85

Cate

“I don’t like doing this,” Ged said, as they stepped out of the lift. “It’s not good practice to enter a tenant’s property without permission.”

“We both know this isn’t a usual case, though,” Cate said irritably before adjusting her tone. “And I’m grateful.”

It was Leon who’d called the probation office, just after nine-thirty that morning, to say Ben hadn’t arrived at work. He’d shut up the aquarium and walked to Ben’s flat, thinking he was ill and might need help, but no-one answered the door when he rang.

If Ben had absconded, it would be an immediate recall to prison for breach of parole licence. The only other option was far worse. Silent Friend had found him.

Ged knocked on the door, “Come on, Ben! Open up.”

Silence. Cate waited, understanding that Ged needed to go through this process, though inside she was screaming at him to use the bloody key.

The key in the lock, he stopped, and said, “What if he’s killed himself? If he’s just hanging there. I don’t want an image like that in my head.”

Cate nudged him out of the way and turned the key herself. The door swung open and she stepped inside.

The flat was sparsely furnished but what there was had been knocked askew, the sofa was at the wrong angle, as if it had been pushed aside during a scuffle. Ben’s few possessions were randomly scattered on the floor. “This isn’t Ben,” said Cate. “Look.” She walked to the kitchen, where order remained, and showed Ged the line of tins, cereal boxes, bread. Obsessively straight. In the bathroom was a similar line of shower gel, shaving foam, shampoo.

But the lounge was wrong.

Ged followed behind her as she went from room to room, cautiously, as if they still might find something unpleasant.

“You think someone came in here and got him?”

“I think we shouldn’t touch anything, just in case.” She dug in her pocket for her mobile and began to dial. “I’ll let the police know.”

When she heard Olivier’s voice on the other end of the line she spoke quickly.

“I’m in Ben’s flat. It looks like a struggle may have taken place, but he’s gone.”

“Okay. I’ll be there as quick as I can. In the meantime, Cate, you should wait outside.”

“So, any sign of the girl?”

Olivier’s first words as he stepped out of the lift, as if continuing a conversation that prior to that point had taken place in his head.

“No sign of either Cheryl or Ben. Nothing in the flat.”

Olivier offered Ged a hand to shake, and gave Cate a kiss on each cheek, throwing her thought pattern askew. Olivier however, was thinking very clearly.

“We have to consider the likelihood that they have simply left. Decided to make a break for it, somewhere no-one knows either of them.”

“I thought that too, until I saw the flat.”

She would have preferred this option, but she couldn’t believe it. Not when Ben’s few belongings were still in the flat. Under his bed was the duffel bag he’d carried when he left prison, and inside she’d found letters from his mum and his dad. If Ben had left of his own volition he wouldn’t have left those behind.

“I think Silent Friend has him.”

“But you don’t know that, Cate.”

Cate felt that Olivier was once again correcting her, making her feel irrational compared to his cool logic.

“Ben absconding is more likely than him being abducted, statistically.”

Cate snorted. “There are reliable statistics for a case like this?”

“Okay, Cate. Let’s analyse this. Is there evidence of foul play?”

Cate couldn’t say a definitive yes, she simply had a gut feeling. “Well there wasn’t a note, if that’s what you mean.”

Olivier smiled, “I always enjoy your British humour. So sharp.”

But inside Cate wasn’t smiling. She was once again feeling the frustration that her perspective was not being taken seriously. Ben was in real danger, and they needed to act swiftly. He could be anywhere.

86

Ben

I’m back in the prison laundry, trying to scrub white shirts. But they are heavy to lift, sodden with water, and when I do lift them from the water they bleed red dye onto my hands, no matter how hard I rinse. I scrub with white soap that turns red in my hands. Then I see it’s my hands that are bleeding, that it’s my hands that are turning the shirts red. I am the problem.

A pressure wakes me, a hand over my face, so even when I open my eyes the world stays dark. The hand is large, covers my forehead too with a pressure, so I’m a prisoner again.

Then a voice, female and soft. “Don’t hurt him.”

Cheryl. That’s when I know I’m not in prison, it’s much worse than that. I’m free and someone is about to hurt me and no-one is coming to help.

The hand over my mouth smells of nicotine and something salty too, maybe sweat. The palm moves so it covers my eyelids.

Next, something is being pulled roughly over my head. It feels like a hat but it covers my whole face, right to my neck where the wool is itchy on my skin. A balaclava, but with the mouth and eye holes at the back. That’s when I know for sure that this is Silent Friend. The same man who hurt me, left me bleeding on the ground when the couple came by. Now returned to finish the job he started.

I can hear movement in the bedroom, light footed and quick, and I know that it’s Cheryl but I don’t know why she is letting this person blind me with the balaclava.

I feel his hands on my shoulders, lifting me from the bed.

“Let him put some clothes on at least.” Cheryl sounds panicked, like she’s not sure if she has any authority in this situation. She’s scared too, but something in her voice makes me think she knew this was going to happen.

“He needs his shoes,” she says, with a certainty that tells me she knows what is going to happen to me.

And that’s when I realise, this is where my story ends. It was all leading up to this moment. How could I think Cheryl had chosen to be with me, and not realise that it was part of something, a plan to get me? I strain my ears to Silent Friend’s breathing, knowing that I have heard it before. Cate said I must know who he is, if only I can remember. Someone from my past, now in my present.

“Okay, Ben,” says Cheryl. “Just do what he says.”

“Adam?” I ask, my voice coming out muffled from the fabric. “Is it you?”

But there is only silence is the room as I am manhandled towards the lift. I try to refuse, back away, but I have no choice. The world drops beneath me as I am taken downstairs, finally travelling in the lift for the first time. And also the last.

87

The Day Of

Cheryl did not think again of what she had done. How she had held the tip of Adam’s penis in her palm, her fingers were working the shaft, when she leaned into him and said, “But if I do this, you have to do what I say.”

But Adam was thinking of it, could not do anything else but remember the feel of her hand. It was a moment he had previously only fantasised about, bent over one of his dad’s mags or after catching a scene on the TV that had aroused him. But now, a real live girl had held him in her hands and he would do anything, anything at all, for her to finish what she started. To be with her again. He wanted it so much that his mouth was salivating at the thought, his fingertips felt electrified as they remembered the feel of her waist, so small and slippery, the swimsuit allowing him to canvas her hips and bottom easily.

She had wriggled her fingers, moving her hand too roughly so he gasped with a pained pleasure. He had no longer been able to hear his brother speaking and joking with Noah, he could no longer hear the cars thundering over the bridge. He could hear nothing but the pulse in his ear, see nothing but the skin of her perfect smooth shoulder, and taste nothing but its salt, his own appetite creating a drool on her skin. The world shrank to only them, the moment pixelated to not even her hand but his urge, the rising need, the power he could no longer stop, the pulse and push of his desire that she was coaxing, controlling.

“Promise me,” she had said, when it was already too late.

Adam would do anything she asked, if only he could have that feeling again. Because somewhere in his torn heart she had made him feel loved. It was water to him, it was bread. Love was the very air that was missing from his lungs.

The Devil had moved the glass on the Ouija board. He believed it now, because only the Devil would make the price so high for just a little love.

88

Now

FACEBOOK: FIND HUMBER BOY B

Silent Friend:
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Isn’t that what the bible says, Jessica? So how to deliver justice to a murderer who threw a boy from a bridge.

Where to take him? What to ask?

Noah’s mum:
If you’re telling the truth, then the person asking him questions should be me. You’re not God. You’re not even the victim.

Silent Friend:
Oh, but I am.

89

Cate

Cate sat at her desk, berating herself for being so useless. There was simply nothing she could think of that she could do, nothing that would help find Ben, now missing for six hours. She hadn’t heard from Olivier so she had no idea what the police may have discovered, if anything. Amelia would be out of class by now, being greeted at the school gate by Sally and Chloe. Friday night with her other family, playing with toys she was strictly speaking too old for but still loved, no doubt her and Chloe would spend the evening moving miniature animals dressed like humans around their perfect houses.

If only real life could be that easy, if she could peer into the doll’s house of Ben’s life and find out who he was with.

Cate tried to work, she had a pre-sentence report to write on a drunk driver and a risk assessment to complete on a burglar due out of prison next week, but her eyes couldn’t focus, her brain was too preoccupied with thoughts of Ben. And she was hungry, it was long past lunch and she’d not eaten since breakfast.