THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists
THE
LOST BOY
An unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists
Please note this book was first published as Past Reason
Margaret Murphy
Revised edition 2020
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
© Margaret Murphy
First published as Past Reason in Great Britain 1999
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Margaret Murphy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978-1-78931-621-6
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Part I
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
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In affectionate memory of my father, Harry Wright
Acknowledgements
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I would like to thank Joe and Gill Murphy for their advice on social services and foster care; Rinty Rogers, Trish Bates and Mike Mannion for background information on children’s nursing; and Derek Bradshaw for insights into police procedure.
My research into false memory was greatly facilitated by Nicholas P. Spanos’s text Multiple Identities and False Memories; his work was — and is — inspirational. I would also like to pay tribute to Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager’s exhaustive and informative text, Return of the Furies: An Investigation into Recovered Memory Therapy.
When I first read about ‘recovered memory’, I was convinced that people could not have invented such terrible scenarios of abuse and suffering, but careful scientific study has shown that in our eagerness to explain our unhappiness we can become victims of our own imagination.
Part I
Prologue
The boy stood uncertainly next to the car. He sucked in his lower lip — a habit only recently acquired — and chewed on it.
Never get into a strange car. How many times had he been told? At home, at school, at Beavers and more recently at Cubs.
‘Come on, for heaven’s sake!’
But it wasn’t like he was getting into a stranger’s car. He wasn’t daft.
‘I can’t wait all day.’
The boy darted a look over his shoulder, unconsciously twisting one foot behind the other.
‘I’m getting cross now . . .’
He didn’t like to be naughty, but if he didn’t get in the car, he was being disobedient, and if he did—
‘Stop pratting about and get in!’
The boy jumped, nearly fell over, just disentangling one leg from the other in time to save himself. ‘Mummy said—’ he ventured.
‘Mummy said. Mummy said. Where’s Mummy now?’
The boy frowned. He loved his mummy, and he wanted his mummy to love him, but she shouted at him all the time and made fun of him when he cried. He looked back towards the house again, hoping she would magically appear and take the decision out of his hands, but she didn’t come. She never did.
‘Come on! . . . Look, if you’re so worried, we’ll telephone your mother from—We’ll telephone your mother later, so she doesn’t worry. All right?’
The boy edged forward, scraping the toes of his shoes on the gravel.
* * *
The kitchen was pristine — its surfaces wiped and disinfected and its stainless steel buffed to a dull gleam. A tap dripped with measured solemnity into a solitary cup, steadily filling with water. A bumble bee passed through the open door, explored with absent-minded disinterest, butting into the glass fronts of the display cupboards, moving on to the brightly coloured picture tiles dotted about the walls, and bumbling out the way it came, ignoring the still form of a woman lying on the floor.
For a while — perhaps an hour — after she had first fallen, bleeding, to the floor, she had heard the tick-tick-tick of the tap and had mistaken it for her own blood pulsing in her throat, pooling on the floor beneath her. As the dripping of the tap slowed, she had felt her pulse diminish and falter, fluttering as if her heart had forgotten the rhythm, but she could not find the strength to save herself: she had used it all in saving him.
A sudden rapid, shallow clamour of systolic contractions, quickening as if to finish the job, to end her suffering. It ceased. Death came easily, after the pain, the initial shock of violence, her futile struggle against his fury. She had not known herself to be near death, had felt only a depletion, a weariness. She was not aware of the slow darkening from the edges of her vision, did not even have to summon the courage to face her fear. It was a quiet surrender, a gentle going. No celestial choir, no blinding light, no warmth of welcome, no one to greet her and guide the way. Only darkness, a void.
The pool around her head and neck stopped growing and began to congeal, and the tick-tick of dripping of water gradually changed tone, becoming a deeper, viscous splosh.
Chapter 1
They ran, laughing like lunatics, screaming through the night, their shoes echoing in the empty streets like the clamouring footsteps of killers in a forties film. A few muffled barks went up — half-hearted yelps mostly — the dogs’ fury tempered by the physical barriers of locked doors and the high garden walls of the wealthy.
Lobo saw a light go on and yelled up at the window, ‘What’re you lookin’ at, nosy ’ole?’
Lee-Anne grabbed his arm, still laughing, gasping for air. ‘You’ll get us done, you mad-arsed bastard!’ She bent, both hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. Which gave Lobo an idea. He pulled at his trouser belt and dropped his pants, mooning at the alarmed house-owner. They ran all the way down to Aigburth Road and flagged a taxi. Fell into it, still giggling.
‘Give her somethin’ to look at, didn’t I? Nosy bitch!’
Lee-Anne hiccupped. ‘God, Lobo, I think I’m gonna spew.’
‘’Ey! ’Ey!’ The taxi driver had been watching them in his lower mirror but hadn’t spoken till now. ‘Don’t go pukin’ in my cab.’
‘Why?’ Lobo said. ‘Isn’t her puke good enough for yer?’ He’d seen that on Harry Enfield — The Scousers. He was boss, him.
Lee-Anne made retching sounds and the driver went ‘’Ey, ’ey,’ again. They imitated him, then cracked up. It was ace how they had the same sense of humour.
Lee-Anne looked up, tears running down her face with laughing. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ she said. ‘I’m not gonna spew any more. I think I’m gonna piss meself instead!’
Pure comic genius, that. She should be on the telly, Lobo thought. Suddenly, he wanted her. ‘’Ey, come on, mate,’ he said. ‘Stop arsing about. We want to get home tonight, you know.’
‘It might help if you told me where you wanna go,’ the driver said.
Lobo gave an address a quarter of a mile from their flat and fumbled at the door of someone else’s house until the cab driver disappeared — they didn’t want the pigs tracing them to the right place, did they? And Lobo was easily remembered: dark, almost black hair that spiked aggressively, uncontrollably in all directions from his scalp, a wide, red mouth and a mad-eyed stare that he had been working on since his school days. Lee-Anne was small, red haired — hard looking but still easy on the eye. Put the two of them together and people were bound to recall the mad, bad lad and the skinny girl.
As the taxi clattered around the corner, Lobo stuck his hands in his pockets and started the trudge home, then stopped when he realized Lee-Anne wasn’t following. She was leaning on the wall of the house the taxi had dropped them at.
‘I really am gonna spew,’ she said, miserably.
She did look green. Lobo tugged at her shirt and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s done now.’
‘The state of her, Lobo. You should’ve never took me there. I wish we never — I never wanna see nothin’ like that again. Never.’ Instead of throwing up, she surprised him by bursting into tears.
‘Come ’ead,’ he said. ‘We’ll go the cash till. See if any of them numbers work. That’ll cheer you up.’
She kept on bawling and he started getting rattled: anyone who saw her like that would make connections when they saw it on the news. He could see that talking would do no good, so he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her down the street, crying. The barking in this part of town had a sharper edge, like the dogs really could get out of their back yards, given a plank of rotten timber and a bit of luck, and this gave Lobo an acid tingle of excitement in the pit of his stomach.
Chapter 2
‘He’s probably just wandered off,’ DC Lisa Calcot said. It was meant to reassure, but Mrs Harvey was in no mood for reassurances.
‘He’s been gone bloody hours! He would never stay out this late.’ Mrs Harvey paced the sitting room, rearranging ornaments, then stopped abruptly to light a cigarette. ‘He’s bussed twenty-odd miles to school every day. Most of his school friends live in Chester. Where the hell d’you think he could go?’
DC Lisa Calcot saw her point. There was half a street’s length between each of the picturesque thatched houses of Hale village and nothing but busy roadway to the unassuming semis on the estate up the road. DC Calcot couldn’t see Mrs Harvey allowing her son to associate with the occupants of such inferior dwellings.
She glanced at DC Olly Weston but could see she’d get no help there.
‘Maybe he went to see a friend?’
Vi Harvey looked at her as if the concept of her son having friends was entirely alien. ‘He’s taken him. That man. The one outside his school. He must have come back. He must have followed the school bus — found out where we live—’
‘Mrs Harvey,’ Weston interrupted, ‘you’re going to have to explain.’
Vi looked from one officer to the other. ‘Don’t you people communicate with each other? He’s tried it before!’
‘Who’s tried what?’ Calcot demanded.
‘The kidnapper! Oh, God, he’ll kill me when he finds out! You’ve got to find him!’
Calcot took Mrs Harvey by the elbows and eased her into a chair. ‘You have to take it from the beginning or we won’t be able to help you,’ she said.
Vi looked up at the detective, opened and closed her mouth a couple of times and then burst into tears. Calcot fetched a tissue from a polished brass holder on the coffee table, taking her cigarette and stubbing it out for her. They waited for her to calm down.
Mrs Harvey had dialled emergency services on Friday afternoon and told the operator that someone had snatched her little boy. When they had arrived, twenty minutes later, she had modified the story, telling them that he had ‘disappeared’. A search of the area had turned up nothing.
Vi Harvey dabbed at her eyes, trying to salvage her hopelessly smudged mascara. The bangles on her wrist jingled in tune with her agitation. She positively glistened with metal — gold mostly. Her belt buckle gleamed with it, her black mules were piped with it, and the cuffs of her jacket were embroidered with it. It dangled in expensive twists from her ears and lay in a matching rope against the tanned skin of her neck. Even her hair seemed to glow with gold highlights — it covered her in a faint sheen, as if she secreted precious metal from her pores.
She finished her make-up repairs and stared dolefully at the two officers. ‘The nanny called in sick. I had to cancel a lunch appointment.’ This was said in a tone of exclamation. ‘He was playing upstairs.’
‘Your son?’
She frowned irritated. ‘Who else? He was in his room—’
‘His name is?’
‘Who?’
‘Your son,’ Weston said, swapping a tired glance with Calcot. ‘What’s his name?’
‘I’ve been through all this,’ she said, frowning with irritation. ‘Connor.’ Then again, as if dictating to a slow and rather dim secretary. ‘His name . . . is Connor. I turn my back for five minutes — five minutes!’
‘Turned your back?’ Weston said.
Calcot saw guilty colour creeping into Vi’s face. Turned her back! Topping up her tan, more like. Snoozing in the garden.
‘He was gone before I knew it,’ Vi went on. ‘Bill will never forgive me. He said he might try again.’ Sensing that she had pushed the officers’ patience to the limit she made an effort to give some form of coherent explanation. ‘Someone tried to abduct Connor last week. From his school. Connor got away, but . . . Oh, God!’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘What am I going to tell Bill?’
‘Bill is your husband?’ Weston asked. Vi nodded. ‘Where is he now?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ she snarled, swinging from distraught to aggressive in an instant. ‘In some dreary meeting, no doubt, discussing the wonders of shrink-wrap or something equally scintillating.’
Calcot made an automatic appraisal of the bitterness as the accumulated gall of years. ‘Where can we reach him?’ she asked.
‘He travels about a lot.’
‘Do you have his mobile number?’
‘Here.’ Vi scrawled the number on a piece of paper retrieved from a box (gold again) of notelets next to the phone. The bangles on her wrist clashed excitedly. ‘You won’t get him. His phone’s switched off.’ She seemed suddenly to realize that she didn’t have a cigarette in her hands and went to the coffee table to fetch one. As she lit up, she said, ‘Now will you please stop pissing about and find my son!’
Calcot stared at the woman and wondered if Connor hadn’t simply put some distance between himself and that high-pitched, scratchy voice. ‘A photograph would be useful,’ she said. ‘Of your son . . . Connor.’
For a moment she looked ready to
fly at him, then she placed her cigarette with exaggerated care in an ashtray and walked to the bookcase on the far side of the room. She took a picture from a matching set of albums, elaborately disguised as leather-bound books, and handed it to Calcot.
‘Now get out of my house.’
* * *
‘What d’you reckon?’ Weston asked. Calcot punched in the number for Mr Harvey’s mobile for the fourth time.
‘She’s right about one thing — he has got it switched off.’
They had already tried his factory, but the management of Creative Plastics hadn’t seen their boss since earlier that day.
‘She seemed more worried about him finding out she was caught napping than the kid being in danger.’
Weston slid her a sideways glance. ‘Think it’s a domestic?’
Calcot smiled. She had a way of turning up one corner of her mouth, making a dimple that said, Nothing would surprise me.
‘Doesn’t square with the previous attempt, does it, though?’ Weston said. Castle Esplanade had dealt with the initial incident — Connor’s school being near Chester city centre — headquarters had confirmed that he hadn’t recognized his assailant, and neither had anyone else who had seen the attempted abduction.
Calcot shrugged. ‘I hate women like her. Big money, big hair, big ego.’
Weston laughed. ‘Thank you, Professor Cantor.’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know who Cantor is?’
‘Should I?’
‘You want to read up on your profiling, Lisa.’
They were on their way to the nanny’s flat. Calcot was out of the car ahead of him, and Weston watched appreciatively. Her face might be a bit square — her shoulders were certainly chunky from overenthusiastic training at the weights bench — but Lisa Calcot had a lovely pair of legs, and she didn’t hide them in trousers.