My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller (3 page)

‘Or, if you don’t want to go back then maybe we could call Martin and ask the police to feed it into the investigation? They could do a background check?’

He finished the last of his drink and in one movement, tossed the bottle across the room, into the bin.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked, after a long pause. ‘I know you mean well, but believe me when I tell you that that boy was not Barney.’ His eyes were bloodshot. ‘The forensic artists, they know what they’re doing. They’ve talked me through every new picture, why the bone structure develops as it does, why they think his eyes will now look like they do, why his nose will seem bigger and his mouth smaller.’ He propped his feet up on the sides. I looked at the exposed soles. Pocked with tough, yellow callouses and half-healed blisters, they charted his love affair with long-distance running. ‘That kid, his face didn’t match up to any of it. Not that I could see.’

He was right. Of course he was right.

He let out a breath and, taking my hand in his, used his thumb to start stroking the edge of my wrist.

‘It’s more than that. As soon as the midwife handed Barney to me I knew he was mine. Everything about him – his smell, the way he looked, the shape of his fingers and toes – all of it meant he was my son. He was only just born, but he knew it and I knew it.’ He reached out his other hand and, cupping his palms together, cradled my hand inside them. ‘Those stories you hear about babies being mixed up in the hospital and the parents not realising, that could never have happened to me. The connection we had, that bond, it was animal-like.’ He released my hand and it dropped back under the water. ‘It never went away, even as he got older. That’s why I’m certain the next time I lay eyes on him, I’ll know. No matter how many years have passed. There’ll be that connection. I’ve told the police – when the time comes, when they find him, I want the psychologists and social workers kept at bay. For the first while, anyway. I don’t need our reunion to be supervised. I’ll know him and he’ll know me.’

I thought about the family reunions we sometimes liked to watch together on YouTube. The kidnapping back-stories were as varied as they were international. There was the Israeli boy, now man, taken by his father in order to override what he felt was an unsatisfactory custody arrangement; the Florida woman, stolen as a baby from the hospital where she had just been born; the South African girl, abducted aged four, only to be recognised two years later as her mother passed by her on the street.

Jason’s particular favourite featured a family in Bogotá whose six-year-old son had been kidnapped and held by a drug cartel for four years. At the time the boy was taken, his father had been a government official responsible for delicate congress negotiations that, if successful, would have resulted in an extradition treaty extremely damaging to the cartel. The boy had been taken as a bargaining chip but then, confusingly, even after the legislation stalled, his captors had refused to release him.

The YouTube clip was made up of grainy, bleached-out news footage and narrated in Spanish. Shot from a distance, it showed the mother, father and three sisters waiting nervously by their car. Behind them were trees. I always thought it looked like they were standing by the edge of a forest. As the video begins, the family are holding hands, searching the horizon, watching and waiting. Then, off camera, there is the sound of a car approaching. The family stiffen. As the camera pans right, we see a tall, thin boy wearing a football strip emerge from a blacked-out people carrier. As soon as the boy is despatched, the van accelerates back the way it came. The boy stands there bewildered for a few seconds and, almost before he has time to know what is happening, his family are rushing forward to embrace him.

The first few times we’d watched it I’d felt the same as Jason. It was life-affirming. It gave hope. But then I googled the story. It turned out there was a reason the cartel had not released the child, even though he was no longer useful. After he was kidnapped, the boy had been placed in the care of one of the cartel’s captains and his wife. The couple were childless and, over time, had genuinely grown to love and care for the boy. They’d claimed that the child loved them too, and so it had been accepted that the child would stay with them for ever. But then, as is often the way in cartels, the captain and his wife were murdered over a territory disagreement. Without them around the boy was a burden and so the cartel had given him back. There had been no mention – in any of the articles I’d read – of how the boy felt about the situation. It was not clear whether he was happy to return to his family or whether he’d continued to yearn and grieve for the people he now thought of as his mother and father.

After that, whenever I watched the clip back, I noticed the split second just before his mother brings him into her arms, when he turns away, and takes a single step back, towards the disappearing people carrier. All I could see in the kid’s expression as the vehicle pulled away was loss. His family, the family coming towards him, are now strangers.

Jason scanned my face, left to right, left to right, over and over, like he was reading a book.

‘Look.’ He softened. ‘It goes without saying I’ve had a rough ride of it recently. But this is always a stressful time of year for you. You know that. It might be colouring your judgement more than you think.’

He paused, waiting for me to respond. When I refused to meet his eye, he sighed and took my hand. The ends of his fingers were smooth and nubbed. Before he was a first-aid teacher, Jason had been a welder, and the years he’d spent in the fabrication shop still showed themselves in various parts of his body.

‘I admit there have been times when I’ve recognised Barney in every lad I see. But you have to respect me when I tell you that that kid we saw in the shop wasn’t him.’

‘The boy out in Istanbul,’ I said, referring to the sighting a few weeks earlier. ‘You only saw a photo of him and yet …’

It was like I’d slapped him.

‘The police thought there was a genuine similarity,’ he murmured. ‘And so did I. The story seemed to fit.’

I looked at the part of his body that showed above the water. His loss of appetite these last few weeks was evident in the lean, drawn lines of his chest. I felt a surge of guilt.

‘You’re right, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’ I moved forward and lay myself on top of him. The warm water was slippery between our skins. ‘I won’t mention it again.’ I took his hand in mine and as we webbed our fingers together, I ran my lips over the prow of his collarbone.

He rested his head back against the edge of the bath and once he’d closed his eyes I moved up to his neck and the point at which his stubble tapered to clear, caramel skin. Then I kissed him there, softly. He smelt of sweat and lavender bath foam. Releasing my hand, I dipped it under the water and smoothed it across the neat curve of muscle that angled from his hip to his groin. He shivered. Opening his eyes, he reached for my hand and gently replaced it back onto my leg.

‘It’s been a long day.’ He shuffled out from under me and got to his feet. ‘I’m tired.’ Water cascaded from his body.

He stepped out onto the mat and the resulting current shifted me into the recline he’d just abandoned. Without him for company the water level dropped considerably. My shoulders and chest were now totally exposed, my nipples pinking the surface.

He wrapped a towel around his waist. Smoothing back his hair, he went to leave. As he reached the door he turned back to look at me.

‘Love you, wife.’

‘Love you, husband,’ I replied on cue.

He smiled. This was a favourite exchange. And with that he was gone.

I looked down at my body. The bubbles had all but disappeared. An oily grey scummed the surface. Hoisting myself to standing, I waited until the water had drained from my limbs and then, making sure to fit my feet exactly into the two damp imprints he’d left behind, I stepped onto the mat.

I arrived at my friend Carla’s new flat to find her in the middle of unpacking.

‘Perfect timing,’ she puffed, pointing at a large cardboard box stranded in the middle of the hall. ‘Give us a hand carrying that through to the kitchen.’

‘And here was me thinking you’d asked me over for the pleasure of my company.’

I bent down and placed my hands underneath the corners of the box. Carla was about to grab the opposite side when she stopped and nodded at my feet.

‘Are you going to be all right hefting this in those?’ she asked, eyeing up my red patent wedges.

‘These old things?’ I said, swivelling my ankle to better show off the height of the heel. ‘I could run marathons in these.’

‘No wonder you’ve got a dodgy back.’ She retook her position at the end of the box. ‘OK. One, two, three, go.’

As we lifted it into the air, the pots and pans inside clanked and shifted in protest. We staggered down the corridor into the kitchen and, as soon as we’d deposited it onto the floor, Carla stood up and placed her hands on her hips, triumphant.

‘Who needs men?’ I said and pulled a bottle of Moët from my bag. I hadn’t felt able to share it with Jason (too much of an unhappy prompt) and so it had been languishing in my car since that day at the off-licence. ‘Time to claim our reward.’

I popped the cork and was looking for something to pour it into when I realised Carla had a strange grin on her face.

‘Carla?’

‘Now you come to mention it,’ she blushed.

‘Carla,’ I said very quietly, so as to disguise my excitement. ‘Are you seeing someone?’

‘I don’t know if “seeing” is exactly the way I’d describe it.’ She looked to the floor, suddenly coy. ‘You can’t see much in the dark.’

‘You dirty cow,’ I said, abandoning my search for a glass in favour of drinking straight from the bottle. ‘So who is he?’ I asked, the fizz tickling the back of my throat. ‘I want to know everything.’

‘It’s early days,’ she said, unable to wipe the smile off her face, ‘and he’s …’ She hesitated. ‘He’s a fair bit younger than me. But he’s very mature,’ she reassured me, ‘and very good-looking.’

I offered her the bottle in a toast. ‘To good friends and new beginnings.’

‘And getting laid for the first time in two years,’ added Carla, taking a glug. Wiping the overspill from her chin, she laughed, her black corkscrew curls bouncing around her face. I laughed, too, enjoying the blood tingle of the drink as it made its way down to my feet.

‘Who lived here before you?’ I asked, gesturing at the orangey pine cupboards. ‘This place looks more like a sauna than a kitchen.’

‘Grim, aren’t they?’ she said, ruffling some vegetable crisps onto a plate for us to snack on. ‘Soon as I can afford it I’m going to rip them all out.’

I noticed that her ginger tom, Jasper, was snoozing on the sideboard, his tail scarfed snug around his body.

‘The cat seems really traumatised by the move,’ I said, rubbing his chin. Immediately, he started to purr.

‘As you can see. Which reminds me.’ She motioned to the kitchen counter and two shiny silver keys. ‘I got you a set cut. That is, if you don’t mind looking after him every now and again?’

‘Course not, you know that.’ I’d often gone over to her last place to feed and check on Jasper whenever she went away for weekends or conferences. Carla was an osteopath and often attended research seminars that might benefit her practice.

I stroked the cat’s ears, smoothing them down against his head, and soon he was squinting in pleasure. I realised Carla was watching me carefully.

‘How’s Jason?’ she broached. ‘Sounds like he’s had a pretty rough month?’

‘He has,’ I said, fixing my gaze on Jasper. ‘But if anything it seems to have made him even more determined to carry on with the search. It’s like the disappointment has given him this whole new injection of energy.’

I wanted to go on and tell her about the boy in the off-licence, but I’d promised Jason I’d leave the subject alone. Still, I hadn’t been able to forget the effect he’d had on me. It would be a relief to get someone else’s perspective, someone neutral.

‘And,’ – she came closer and placed her hand on my arm – ‘how are you? I was looking at the calendar before you arrived and I couldn’t help but notice the date.’

‘Oh, you know,’ I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice.

‘Lauren would have been twelve?’

I felt my chest constrict and tried to breathe through it.

‘That’s right, almost a teenager.’

She scanned my face, trying to gauge how I was coping with the topic of conversation before she carried on.

‘You’re not going into work, are you? Tomorrow, I mean?’

‘I am, actually. I want the distraction.’ I kept my tone light. ‘It’ll be easier than moping around the house all day.’

Carla nodded. As always, she understood.

September 21st. My daughter Lauren’s twelfth birthday.

The last birthday she had lived to celebrate was her fifth. I’d hired the soft-play at the leisure centre and Lauren and twenty of her friends had spent the afternoon jumping up and down on the giant, plastic-covered foam shapes and bouncy castle until their party dresses were dirty and ripped. During those two hours I’d sat back and watched the fickle world of the five-year-old in action. Allegiances had been won and lost, leaders of different soft-play fiefdoms had been created and usurped, jealousies nurtured and petty grievances cried over. I’d put Lauren’s hair into a French plait and tied the bottom of it with a blue velvet ribbon, but after just half an hour in the soft-play, the plait had come loose and her fine brown curls had wisped in the clammy air.

I took another glug of champagne, my throat bulging uncomfortably in its bid to deal with such a large amount of liquid all at once.

‘Steady on,’ said Carla, taking the bottle from me. ‘We’ve got all night.’

Carla. She was my closest friend in the North-East and, until I’d met her, I had to admit that I’d found forming bonds here to be a tricky business.

Back in Kent, my friends had all been people that I’d grown up and gone to school with. They’d been there when I’d become a single mum at an age when I should have known better and they’d been there when Lauren had first gone missing, staying by my side throughout all the days, weeks and months that followed. With them, there had never been any need to explain or recount or tell, they just knew. But then I met Jason. Everyone had encouraged me to move north to be with him, away from everything that had happened. So I did what they said. I moved. I started again. However, it didn’t take me long to realise that adding friends to this new life was going to be more difficult than I’d bargained for.

What happened to my daughter now defines who I am. I’m not sorry about that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. She was everything. But, because of this, whenever I meet someone who could be a potential friend, it’s impossible to answer even the simplest questions about myself – what I do, who I’m married to, whether I have any kids – without also having to tell them my whole story at the same time.

At first, I would just blurt it all out. Be matter-of-fact about it right from the off. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this was too much to expect someone to take in all at once. It was as though my situation required such an initial rush of intimacy – a bit like having an emotional one-night stand – that it was then impossible for the friendship to grow from there in the way that it normally would. And so, after a few unsuccessful attempts at making friends, I tried a different tack, deliberately not mentioning anything about Lauren until I’d got to know the person better. It felt like I was carrying a ticking bomb, but it seemed to work. Until I finally came clean, that is. Then, they would always try to be sympathetic and nice, but it was obvious they felt like they’d been misled and, after a polite few weeks, they would stop returning my calls and emails.

With Carla though, it had been different.

I’d landed my job with Bullingdon’s a month after I’d moved in with Jason and, although I’d done a lot of work in sales before, this was the first gig that had required me to spend most of my day at the wheel. A few weeks in and my shoulders had locked up so badly that I was unable to turn my head from side to side without whimpering in pain. I booked to see an osteopath and that osteopath turned out to be Carla. Divorced and in her early fifties, she was spindle-thin, six feet tall and had spiral black hair shot through with hot pink streaks (she changed the colour of her streaks on an almost monthly basis). With an uncanny ability to read people’s bodies (her fingers could feel out the injury, strain or trauma stored deep within your muscle and sinew, no matter how well it might be hidden), she’d heard everything in that very first appointment and it hadn’t phased her one bit. It was as though the whole doctor–patient thing somehow legitimised my telling her my entire medical and personal history straight off the bat, as though it had demanded it. And so, what began as a series of professional questions on an assessment form was able to develop into something more, something real. After six sessions on her table, I had a fixed back and a good friend.

I thought again about the boy from the off-licence. If there was anyone I could confide in about this whole crazy situation, it was Carla. I could trust her. She would tell me what I should do.

I pushed myself up onto the kitchen counter and let my legs dangle against the cupboards below.

‘If you really want to know, the last week has been stressful in more ways than one.’

‘Go on.’

I cleared my throat.

‘What would you say if I told you that I thought I’d seen Barney?’

‘What now?’ She cocked her head. ‘Seriously?’

I nodded.

She blinked hard and backed away from me slightly.

‘I’d say you should call the police.’

‘But what if it wasn’t as simple as that?’

As I recounted what had happened and how Jason had been unable to recognise the child in the shop as his son, Carla’s face grew serious.

‘How did he seem? I mean, who was the boy with? If you think he’s being hurt then, whoever this kid is, you need to do something.’

‘He seemed OK. I couldn’t really tell – it was all so quick.’

She absorbed this for a moment.

‘How long ago was it that you saw him?’

‘A little over a week.’

‘And you still feel the same?’

‘The way I reacted to this kid, Carla, honestly, I’m finding it hard to ignore.’

She went to interject, but I held out my hand, stopping her.

‘I realise that when I saw him it was under very bizarre circumstances. We were still reeling from the Istanbul sighting. Maybe I saw what I wanted to see?’

Frustrated at being cut off, Carla had puffed out her cheeks, but now, as I acknowledged my doubts, she let them deflate.

‘On top of all that,’ I went on, ‘how likely is it Barney would turn up less than fifty miles from where he first went missing?’ I put my head in my hands. ‘I keep going round in circles. I think I’m losing it.’

‘And you can’t ask the police for help? On the quiet, I mean.’

‘Jason would be furious. I gave him my word.’

Taking the end of a purple curl between her fingers she pulled it away from her head until it was stretched to twice its usual length. Holding it taut for a few seconds, she let it spring back to shape and clapped her hands, her cheeks the high rouge they turned whenever she drank.

‘This is the way I see it. Hearing you talk,’ she gestured at how worked up I’d become, ‘you simply trying to forget this kid is not going to happen. But I also get where Jason’s coming from. Barney is his son and so even now you’d expect him to spot him in a crowd.’ She went to reach for the bottle but thought better of it. ‘That means the only thing you can do is go back to him with something concrete, something he can’t ignore.’

I thought of the database search I’d carried out on the man and the off-licence. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe there’s some connection between this man or this shop and Barney’s disappearance. Jason created his own case files, didn’t he?’

I nodded. I’d pored over them with him many times when we first got together.

‘Why not go through his files again and see if there’s anything in there, some detail that was overlooked at the time because it seemed meaningless.’

I could tell she was sceptical, but then so was I. I appreciated her advice all the more for it.

‘You’re right,’ I said, tipping the last of the champagne down my throat. ‘Something concrete. That’s what I need.’