THE LOST BOY an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists Read online

  She got up slowly. ‘Will you come with me, Paul?’ She held out her hand. The boy took half a minute to respond, then he put his tiny hand in hers.

  * * *

  The boy’s hand was cold, but it was warmed by the lady’s. Her hair was shiny and a bit ruffled. She had a freckle the colour and shape of a tea leaf on her right cheek. Her voice sounded like wind chimes: gentle and musical. When she wiped his nose, her hanky had smelled of mints. His experience, for the moment, was limited to the sensual. Colour and noise had been his first impression, after the numbing cold of the previous night. He had already forgotten the other lady’s house, the small red house with its smells of toast and cabbage and damp, and the sound of a slowly ticking clock, but he remembered the blue light, the wailing siren. The inside of the ambulance smelled of the doctors — metal and special soap and the cold stuff they rub on you before they give you a needle.

  Then pictures, toys, silvery fish, hanging by threads from the ceiling. Voices, voices. There may have been words, but he could make no sense of them. Colour-noise and sound-noise. Smells of something like cough sweets and camphor, but less comforting than home.

  He whimpered a little at the picture in his head. He didn’t like to think of home, so he concentrated on the sounds around him until all memory of home, even all thought, went away. The sounds here were thin metal against sharp edges: rasping, hard, clattering, unfriendly. It was cold noise, which made him think of pain, made him want to hide his hands, hide himself somewhere small and far away, where no one would find him. He felt all of this without words, for words — he knew this without anybody telling him — were dangerous.

  Chapter 4

  Jenny double-locked the front door. There was no sense in taking chances that the child might wander off again. He had sat slumped in the passenger seat beside her on the journey home, showing no interest in his surroundings, no recognition.

  It was nearly nine o’clock by the time she had filled in the necessary forms and then changed out of her uniform. The morning traffic had already belched a brownish haze of nitrous oxide over the city. It was going to be hot. Jenny glanced over at the boy from time to time. He stared ahead, his eyes level with the dashboard, eyelids slightly lowered, not so much ignoring her as oblivious to her.

  Jenny and Fraser lived in a large Victorian house on the edge of Sefton Park, which they had converted back from flats when they bought it ten years previously. The house was warm and welcoming, and judging by the light snore that was audible even from the hallway, Fraser was still in bed.

  The boy stood by her side, unmoving, seeming to lack any personal volition, but he complied with Jenny’s requests, following her to the kitchen, sitting up at the table and eating a little cereal. She gave him a glass of warm milk and a biscuit to follow and explained, despite the fact that he gave no indication of having understood, that her husband was upstairs, that he was asleep, that it was just the three of them in the house. She paused, watching him closely for a reaction, but the boy maintained the same bland, beautiful expression. She might almost think him deaf, except that Max had told her the boy’s hearing appeared to be normal. Indeed, he seemed to be unusually sensitive to noise.

  His breakfast finished, she showed him the bathroom, the playroom, the spare bedroom, and the master bedroom, which reverberated more emphatically with Fraser’s snores at this close range. The boy edged past the closed door with his back to the banister and they went on to his bedroom, which until recently had been Luke’s room. They had decorated it in pastel colours because the children who came to them often seemed to find the brighter, primary colours more typical of children’s bedrooms too stimulating.

  Jenny open and closed cupboard doors, ostensibly to show him what was in them — the toys and games they would play with when he had settled in — but her real purpose was to reassure the boy that there was nothing — no one — hidden in them, nothing to fear from them.

  ‘Before you go to bed, d’you think you could brush your teeth?’ Jenny asked.

  He went to the door and waited by it, staring up at her with those great, wounded eyes. He followed her to the bathroom. A Mickey Mouse beaker — Luke’s — the fad of the moment, with his toothbrush still propped up in it, stood on the shelf above the sink as he had left it four weeks previously. Neither of them had been able to bring themselves to throw it away.

  Luke’s adoptive parents had agreed to let him stay with Jenny and Fraser until he had celebrated his fifth birthday. They were kind, gentle people, keen to make the transition from foster care to a stable family life as easy and painless as they could. The birthday party had been a disaster: Luke had refused to blow out the candles on his birthday cake and had fled upstairs in tears as his friends sang happy birthday to him.

  Jenny swallowed hard and reached for the beaker. The boy flinched at the sudden movement and she said a few light, reassuring words, telling him what she was doing as she took a new toothbrush from the cabinet and unwrapped it.

  He brushed his teeth without help and then placed the toothbrush in the beaker himself. He offered his hand to Jenny and she took it, smiling. ‘You can sleep as late as you like, Paul.’ She felt uncomfortable with the name Max had given him for convenience and for the sake of paperwork. She felt it must confuse him, and she resolved not to use it unless she had to. Then perhaps he might offer his own name more readily.

  They stepped from the bathroom onto the landing.

  Fraser stood in the doorway of their bedroom, looking like he had just woken. ‘Who—?’ he said. The night-growth of stubble showed black against the terrible pallor of his skin.

  Oh, God, Jenny thought. Poor Fraser! Half asleep, he had seen the boy and imagined Luke had come back. She felt the boy’s grip tighten and he took a startled breath.

  ‘Paul,’ she said, calmly, aware that she had already broken her resolution. ‘This is my husband, Fraser. He’s going to help me look after you.’

  Fraser held the banister as if he needed it for support. ‘This is Paul,’ she went on. ‘It’s not his real name, but we don’t know that yet. He’s going to stay with us for a little while.’ She remembered the quick, nervous look when she had mentioned the boy’s mother and father previously and decided not to mention his parents again until he was communicating properly.

  ‘Paul is going to bed because he didn’t get any sleep last night.’ She carried on past her husband, and the boy cringed behind her. He didn’t take his eyes off Fraser all the way down the landing, but twisted round, still grasping Jenny’s hand tightly, and stared at Fraser until they reached his bedroom and Fraser was no longer in sight.

  Jenny removed his dressing gown and pulled back the duvet. The boy climbed into bed, which made two things he had done unbidden: replacing his toothbrush and getting into bed. It gave Jenny an irrational surge of optimism on the boy’s behalf.

  He was staring at the ceiling, unblinking, wide awake. Occasionally his eyes would flicker to the door.

  ‘Would you like me to close it?’ Jenny asked, smoothing the curls from his eyes. He answered her with another darting look at the door.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll put this sign on the handle outside, then nobody can come in unless you tell them to.’ It had worked for Luke when he had nightmares about a monster that lived on the landing. She unhooked the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign she had made for Luke and hung it outside, then she shut the door firmly. She thought she saw a glimmer of relief on the boy’s face.

  This room caught the morning sun and it was warming fast in the July sunshine. Jenny crossed the room to open the window and the boy uttered a guttural cry of dismay. She turned to him.

  ‘You want me to keep this closed, too?’

  The boy stared wildly. Jenny pulled the latch closed. His eyes were wide, filled with terror.

  Jenny sat beside him, holding his hand, crooning a lullaby in her sweet soprano, and within minutes the boy’s grip slackened and his head slipped to one side
. She carried on a little longer and then crept to the door and looked back at him.

  His face was slightly flushed, and his fringe, which was a little too long, had fallen in an inverted question mark onto the bridge of his nose. He moaned and turned towards the window, and warm patches of colour spilt from the curtains onto his sleeping form.

  * * *

  Flowers. The house smelled of flowers. It was silent. Even the colours were quiet. He had seen everything: the coral-coloured carpet of the hall, the bowl of roses on the kitchen table, the sparkling jars of biscuits and pasta and lentils and rice on the warm tops of the cupboards. And he had seen the pale lemon-coloured spider, its body matching the velvety petals, hiding in the folds of a yellow rose. He would not tell. The spider watched him from its hiding place. The slight movements of its long front legs trembled with tension — he had seen it once in a cat. It was on the lawn, and it sat, fat, like this spider, trembling in a half-crouch until he felt sorry for it, because it seemed so afraid to move. And then it pounced, rushing to the border and catching a bird, carrying it carelessly in its mouth, staring blankly at the window, and he realized with sickening certainty that the tremor was not caused by fear but excitement. He had seen all of this, until it hurt his eyes to look, and he wanted to shut it out.

  The boy drowsed, alert to every sound, waking frequently, always afraid, disoriented by his strange surroundings. The lady with the shiny hair smelled of hand cream. He didn’t like the man. The pillow slips were cool against the back of his head and he turned, to let them take the heat from his face. They smelled of ironing and linen chests. He saw in his mind the man’s face, strange, sick-looking, and it made him afraid. I don’t like him! This thought had no clarity, nor distinct form, rather he felt it as a visceral fear. He closed his eyes tightly, conjuring up a picture in his head of the lady making the man go away.

  * * *

  Fraser was in bed, sitting up, waiting for her. She undressed and slipped on a baggy T-shirt. He stared at her, unblinking.

  ‘All right?’ she asked, sliding under the duvet and moving one hand to his chest. He felt clammy and she propped herself onto one elbow to look at him. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We agreed. No more children until the autumn.’ She shrugged apologetically. ‘Max ambushed me — virtually twisted my arm up my back. I’m sorry, Fraser.’

  Later, while they shared toast and tea at the kitchen table, he broached the subject. ‘A week’s preparation, then off on your lecture tour, you said. I was supposed to use the time to sort myself out for next term, then get a bit of decorating done.’

  ‘Leaving two weeks for a trip away together, I know.’ Sun streamed in through the open window, and with it, truncated bursts of bird song.

  ‘You’re not playing by the rules, hen,’ he reproached.

  When she had first met him, before seventeen years of living in England had softened it to no more than a burr, Fraser’s Glaswegian accent had been virtually incomprehensible to her. She had been in the second year of a nursing degree and had returned to university after six weeks working in America over the summer with the kind of swagger that owed more to relief than self-confidence. She had never before been so far from home, even choosing her local university so that she could be near friends and family, and although she had enjoyed her time away, it was good to be back on familiar territory.

  The term had started with a fog that had brought public transport to a standstill, but Jenny and a group of friends had decided to walk, rather than miss their first day back. It wasn’t far from their rented terrace in Wavertree to the university, and they had laughed and chatted all the way, feeling cocooned and mysterious in the all-enveloping gloom.

  Jenny had split up from the main group after the lecture, having decided to look up a few references at the Harold Cohen library before going to lunch. The route to the library was a short walk from the biological sciences building, past the quad and through an archway — easy on a clear day, if you were familiar with the layout of the buildings, their alleyways and dead ends. But this section of the university was a jumble of Victorian, 1940s Art Deco, and 1960s functional glass-and-concrete buildings — constructed, it seems, with no unifying theme in mind, and the resulting collection of railed and un-railed sections, basements, blind alleys and cul-de-sacs had been particularly confusing in the murk rolling in from the Mersey.

  On her right, Jenny could hear the traffic on Brownlow Hill as a long, steady drone, rather than the usual high-note, low-note Doppler effect of speeding midday motorists.

  From the brownish fug to her left Jenny heard a distinct and passionately articulated ‘Fuck!’ Then a dark and decidedly handsome figure stumbled from an alley on her left.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked, eyeing him up with unabashed interest. The stranger muttered something that sounded like:

  ‘Am looken ferra bluedy staesh’n.’

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Ah’m sicka this rrathole awrreddy an’ it’s owny ma firrst dae!’

  Her ear was beginning to attune to the accent, and she was able to decipher this without asking him to repeat himself.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I’m a native of the rathole.’

  ‘Ach, sorry, luv, it’s just—’ He looked about him at the dirty mist.

  She laughed. ‘It’s not always like this. And my name’s Jenny.’

  Fraser, it seemed, had arrived late for his first lecture of his first term at Liverpool University, after getting hopelessly lost trying to walk it from the halls of residence in Mossley Hill with only an A to Z as a guide.

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for the bus?’

  ‘Radio said the’ werren’t runnin’’

  ‘That’s just the Mersey buses. The halls of residence have their own special fleet to carry the delicate darlings from A to B without their having to rub shoulders with the Great Unwashed.’

  ‘How d’ye know sae much about it?’ he demanded, when they were seated comfortably in the Augustus John pub with a pint and a packet of crisps each.

  Jenny tugged at her scarf. ‘Don’t you recognize the university colours?’ she asked.

  ‘Like ah sae—’

  ‘You only arrived last night, and you haven’t got your bearings yet.’ He grinned and Jenny had to grit her teeth to keep from sighing. He really was gorgeous. ‘You weren’t really going to get on the first train home, were you?’

  He looked a bit sheepish.

  ‘Look, they may seem like a load of snobs and public-school haw-haws at first, but that’s because you missed freshers’ week, so you haven’t had the chance to sort out the worthies from the wankers. They aren’t all bad.’ He looked at her doubtfully and she added, ‘Most of it’s just a front. They’re as terrified as you or me.’

  He sipped his lager, still doubtful. ‘D’ye reckon?’

  She crossed her heart, kissed her two fingers and gave the scout salute. ‘What are you studying?’ she asked.

  He blushed and took a long pull on his pint.

  ‘I’m doing a combined honours in psychology and nursing,’ she told him. ‘Second year,’ she added, grimacing at the unworthy smugness she felt at the status conferred by a whole year’s extra experience. ‘So?’

  He shifted uncomfortably. ‘A’hm dae’n combined honours, as well,’ he said.

  ‘In what?’ His evasiveness was beginning to irritate.

  ‘Sociology and’ — he shrugged, colouring a little more deeply — ‘geography.’

  Jenny grinned, then raised her hands at his answering scowl. ‘I promise I won’t tell a soul,’ she said.

  She had persuaded him to stay and they had remained, somewhat disappointingly for Jenny, friends throughout university, but they had kept in touch after graduation, occasionally meeting with some of their university friends, but more and more frequently on their own and, without the distractions of the usual crowd they hung round with, they began to realize that their delight in each other’s c
ompany was more than platonic. Fraser proposed to her the day he was appointed to his first teaching job, and Jenny had accepted without hesitation.

  * * *

  ‘We’ll get a week away, I promise.’ She took his hand. ‘At least a week — two, if I can wangle the time off,’ she went on, when she saw that he wasn’t thawing. ‘Max thinks it’ll only take a couple of weeks to find the boy’s parents. He thinks they might be Romanies — moved on and left him behind by accident.’

  A fleeting shadow of the horror she had read in Fraser’s face earlier returned and Jenny was reminded of something Max had once told her: ‘It’s easy to dispel the monsters of childhood — all it takes is a little magic and a lot of faith. But the devils of adulthood are much more tenacious.’

  ‘Fraser,’ she said, ‘is everything okay? Before, on the landing — you looked terrible.’

  ‘It was shock, that’s all. I thought—’ He bit his lower lip.

  ‘You thought Luke had come home.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She stood and, leaning across the table, kissed him. He responded, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand, then stroking the nape of her neck and pulling her to him.

  Jenny broke away gently. ‘Bed?’ she said. He nodded, and she saw that he had forgiven her.

  ‘You look like you could do with a few hours’ sleep.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Who said anything about sleep?’

  She did get some sleep — about two hours, resting comfortably against the warmth of Fraser’s shoulder and dreaming of the boy who was, for reasons that seemed perfectly obvious in the dream, a concert pianist. She woke as somebody rushed on stage and slammed the piano lid down on his fingers.

  * * *

  His heart pounding, he stared at the door.

  I promised to be a good boy. I promised. But the shape at the door — behind the door — pulled him. No . . . please, don’t make me.

  * * *

  Fraser woke with a start. The boy was standing in the bedroom doorway. His eyes were wide open, and he was mumbling something she couldn’t hear properly.