The Missing: The gripping psychological thriller that’s got everyone talking... (5 page)

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?’

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—’