Like This, for Ever (40 page)

Suddenly, Dana could no longer summon up the energy to put one foot in front of the other. She stopped and leaned back against the wall, almost setting off the panic alarm. She couldn’t look at Anderson. He waited, gave her time. Huck didn’t have time. No choice – she had to hold it together. She stood upright again.

‘Hold the fort upstairs for a bit?’ she asked him.

‘Going somewhere, Ma’am?’

‘I need to talk to Huck’s mum.’

‘What will you tell her?’

‘God knows. But I promised.’

Lacey saw the boy by the gates of the community centre and called to him. He turned and watched nervously as she ran towards him. She pulled her warrant card from her jacket as she struggled to get her breath back. It was only midnight but she felt as though she’d been up all night. Or been drinking heavily. Something was slowing her down and it was starting to feel a lot like despair.

‘You’re a friend of Barney’s, aren’t you?’ she said.

The boy was about her height, very slim, with fair skin and hair. A beautiful child, on the verge of turning into a man. Around fourteen years old, wearing a mud-spattered tracksuit and trainers. ‘Someone from the police phoned our house about him. Have you found him?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I wanted to ask if you could think of anywhere he might have gone,’ she said. ‘The police will have
checked the houses of all his friends. I was thinking maybe of a den or a place you like to hang out. I’m Lacey, by the way. I live next door to Barney, but I’m also a detective.’

‘I know,’ the boy said. ‘He’s mentioned you. I’m Jorge Soar.’

‘Can you think of anything, Jorge?’

‘We mainly meet here,’ said Jorge, nodding his head back towards the community centre. ‘I’ve just been in there now, checking it out.’

Lacey turned to look at the old factory building with its high perimeter wall. Through the iron bars of the gates she could see the murals glowing in the lamplight. A forest gleaming green and silver. Shadowy figures that might have been Red Indians hiding behind trees.

‘It looks closed up to me,’ said Lacey.

‘It gets locked at nine,’ Jorge told her. ‘That’s when the caretaker leaves. But there’s a way in at the back. Can you believe Barney and Huck are both missing?’

Barney and Huck. Lost boys.

‘Do you think they’re together?’ asked the boy, surprising her. She shook her head.

‘I hope they are,’ he said. ‘Barney’s sensible. He’ll look after Huck.’

‘You should go home,’ said Lacey. ‘I know you want to help, but it’s not a good idea for you to be out this late.’

‘I sneaked out,’ confessed Jorge. ‘Mum’ll kill me if she finds out. But Barney’s my brother’s best friend. He wanted to come too, I just didn’t think it would be safe for him.’

‘It isn’t. Not for you either. Do you want me to walk with you?’

He shook his head. ‘We’re only five minutes away. You’re right, though, Gran’ll freak if she looks in my room and sees I’m not there. I hope you find him, Lacey. Huck, too.’

At the corner of the street, when Jorge would have faded out of sight had it not been for his hair shining silver in the streetlights, he turned and waved. Then he was gone.

‘
OF ALL THE
bridges, over all the rivers, in all the world, she had to walk on to …’

Joesbury’s voice caught, like a jagged fingernail being dragged over silk, and he gave up the attempt at humour. He looked back down at the speeding water. Lacey approached slowly. His hair and jacket were soaking wet.

‘I’ve been looking for you all evening,’ she said. ‘The minute I stop, there you are.’

Finally accepting that she was never going to find either Huck or Barney by running around London like a headless chicken, Lacey still hadn’t been able to go indoors. There would be something so final, somehow, about closing the door of her flat for the night, knowing the boys were still out there. Telling herself she’d think more clearly in the open air, that cold stimulated the brain, that the river always soothed her, she’d ridden her bike to the closest bridge over the Thames. Vauxhall.

Traffic had quietened down for the night and the bridge was empty of pedestrians. Except one. At the apex, a tall male figure was leaning against the railings, looking downstream.

When she was close enough to touch, Joesbury raised his right arm. Lacey moved into its circle and felt it close around her. The hand dangling over her shoulder showed the marks of a fresh wound. The skin was broken and puckered, the blood already
congealed. They looked towards the dancing, shining lights of the city.

‘Have they sent you to break the bad news?’ said Joesbury.

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t know anything.’

Hardly true, but how could she tell him the MIT were following leads that would take them nowhere? And that it was her fault? As for the latest idea, she would just sound crazed. Peter Pan? Lost Boys? How did that help – really?

Mark was looking at the display screen of his phone. ‘Dana’s phoned a couple of times. So has Anderson,’ he went on. ‘I can’t talk to them. If it’s happened, I don’t want to hear it. I want to stay here. Not knowing.’

She reached her hand up, brushed her fingers gently over his, feeling him flinch when she touched the wound. ‘It’s not over yet,’ she said.

‘I did try to phone you,’ he said. ‘For some reason, you were someone I felt I could talk to. I got Number Unobtainable.’

‘My phone is wrapped in an evidence bag and filed away in a locker somewhere,’ Lacey told him. ‘I haven’t got round to replacing it yet.’

His hand dropped from her shoulder and he reached inside his jacket. When he brought it out again it was holding a phone that she knew wasn’t his. A different make, very new model.

‘I bought this for Huck a couple of weeks ago,’ he said, balancing it in the palm of his hand and holding it out so the nearest streetlight shone on it. ‘I’ve been having an ongoing argument with his mother about whether I can give it to him or not. She says it’ll get nicked and doesn’t want him having unrestricted access to the internet. I say that when he loses it, as he does several times a week, we’ll be able to trace it without turning two houses upside-down.’

‘He’ll love it,’ said Lacey firmly. ‘But for the record, I agree with his mum.’

For a second, Joesbury’s hand tipped, as though he were about to let the phone slip into the water below. Lacey reached out and brought it back within the confines of the bridge. She took the phone from him and slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket. If he noticed what she was doing, he didn’t comment.

‘I watched you go in here, remember?’ he said.

Remember? As if she could set foot on this bridge without having flashbacks to a night in October, nearly six months earlier. To a hand grasping her shoe, horrified turquoise eyes looking down at her, the sensation of slipping, then a sickening plummet to the river below.

‘Not the sort of occasion you forget easily,’ she admitted.

‘I’ve been thinking I might just slip over the edge myself some time between now and morning.’

He didn’t mean it. He was far too tough to take that way out.
Deal with it, but keep it light.
‘Well, then I’d have to come with you,’ she said. ‘Can’t break with tradition.’

He turned to look at her. ‘Can’t live—’ he began.

Lacey didn’t skip a beat. ‘If you don’t,’ she finished.

For a split second, she knew she’d pulled him back. She, not Huck, was at the front of his mind. He was close enough to kiss, all she had to do was stretch up on tiptoe and lean forward. She’d never wanted to more. It had never been less appropriate. Then the moment was gone.

‘I wish you could have known him,’ he said, turning back to watch the river again.

No, don’t talk about him in the past tense
. ‘I do know him,’ she said. ‘He’s you in miniature. Or rather, he’s you before you got all tough and grumpy and cynical.’

The muscle in his cheek jumped. In different circumstances, that would have made him laugh. ‘No, he’s me as I should have been. He’s the good bits of me – what few there are – with his mother’s sweet nature and common sense.’

‘He’s certainly very cute.’

A shudder, and then something between a sigh and a sob. ‘Lacey, he was the cutest little kid you can imagine,’ he said. ‘When he was a toddler, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and when I wasn’t watching him I was videoing him. Carrie used to think I was morbid because I’d sit and watch the footage with tears in my eyes, because with every month that went by it felt like we’d lost something. I used to think the hardest thing in the world was to watch your child getting older.’ He stopped, ran a hand over his face. ‘Course, that
was until I had to face the possibility that I might never watch him grow up.’

Finally, the effort was too much. He bent forward and laid his head on his arms. She could see his shoulders tensing with the effort not to give way to sobbing, and it felt as though the pain was all inside her. Just taking another breath was going to hurt too much. And then – oh!

Her eyes still fixed on the man at her side, her thoughts a thousand miles away, Lacey took a step back. Was it possible?

Mark sensed her retreat and looked up. His face was wet with tears. At any other time the sight would have melted her.

‘I have to go,’ said Lacey, as gently as she could.

His face twisted as though he didn’t believe what she was telling him. Then his eyes narrowed. He pulled himself upright.

‘What?’ he said. ‘What have you thought of?’

The one man in the world she could never hide anything from.

‘Maybe nothing.’ She took another step back. Her bike was just yards away. Another step, watching him nervously as though he might spring at her any second. ‘I need to go.’

A step forward; he was following her. ‘Not without me, you don’t.’

She shook her head, continued to back away.

‘Jesus, Lacey, this is my son we’re talking about.’

She held out both hands. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I need to think now. I need to think really, really hard and I can’t do that when you’re around.’

‘Of course you can. We can work it out together. I’ll help.’

‘Stay safe, please. As soon as I know anything I’ll call you, I promise.’

He was following her along the bridge. ‘Lacey, don’t you dare leave me like this.’

‘Please. I need to be on my own. Just for a while, just to think.’

He was close. He grabbed her, held her tightly by the shoulders. He opened his mouth, but the yell came out of hers.

‘OK, this is it, Joesbury. Do you trust me or not? Because if you do, then you have to let me go.’

He stared at her for a second. His hands fell away.

‘I’ll call you,’ she said, reaching for her bike. ‘Don’t go far and answer your phone.’

He threw up his hands in exasperation. Or despair. ‘How?’ he demanded. ‘You haven’t got a frigging phone any more!’

Shit, he was right. While she was thinking what to do, he pulled Huck’s new phone out of his pocket once more and held it out. ‘I’m saved in Favourites,’ he said. ‘You’ve got an hour. Then I’m coming after you.’

Lacey turned her bike, pulled it on to the road and set off. She’d be home in under ten minutes. A couple of phone calls to make and one last piece of the jigsaw to put in place.

… until I had to face the possibility that I might never watch him grow up.

The boys who wouldn’t grow up. The Lost Boys. Spirited away to Neverland by Peter Sweep, aka Peter Pan. Peter Pan wouldn’t let his friends grow up. He wanted to keep them young for ever, like him. Peter Pan was a child.

The killer they were looking for was a child.

‘HELLO.’

The voice was sleepy, with just a hint of concern, the classic response to an unexpected late-night phone call.

‘Evi? This is Lacey Flint, from the Metropolitan Police.’

Silence on the line. Just beyond the conservatory windows, rain was falling steadily. Already it was the wettest March on record and still it came: relentless, unforgiving rain – that might run scarlet with a small child’s blood before the night was out.

‘You called me Laura. Laura Farrow, remember? In Cambridge.’

‘Good lord, of course.’ A second’s pause, while Lacey imagined Evi looking at the clock, giving herself a little shake, telling herself to wake up. She’d met Dr Evi Oliver, a psychiatrist specializing in problems affecting young people and families, just weeks earlier in Cambridge, when Evi’s concern over an unprecedented number of student deaths had led to an undercover police operation. In only a few days, Lacey had come to trust Evi in a way she rarely trusted anyone. When they’d said goodbye, neither woman had expected to be in contact with the other again. Undercover police officers did the job and then disappeared. It had to be that way.

‘How are you?’ asked Evi, sounding wary but not unfriendly.

‘Not good at all. And I’ve no time to chat. Evi, I’m really sorry to do this to you, but I need advice. Can you help me?’

No hesitation this time. ‘What do you need?’

‘So we’re no longer looking for Dracula, we’re looking for Peter Frigging Pan!’ Dana stopped pacing when the wall got in her way and turned to face the group, who were almost cowering before her. Mizon, Stenning, Richmond, Anderson and Barrett, the only members of the team she hadn’t been able to bully into going home. ‘Can I have a volunteer to explain that to the world’s media tomorrow morning, after my godson’s body has been washed up by the tide, because I really don’t think I’m—’

‘Dana!’

Anderson was on his feet. ‘I am very close to going to the Super and requesting that you be removed from this case too,’ he said.

As they stared at each other, Dana could almost hear the sharp gasps going on around them. She wasn’t the only one who didn’t believe what she was hearing.

‘Like DI Joesbury, you are just too close,’ Anderson went on. ‘The only reason I’m not doing so is that when you’re on form you’re the brightest police officer I’ve ever worked with. I happen to think the young lad needs you.’

This wasn’t happening. Neil gave her unquestioning back-up. Always.