The Lost

Chapter 6

Ten years ago

In the weeks after Theo vanished, Jonah’s life entered a new dimension. The days were a nightmarish, sleepless blur. On that first afternoon he’d stood by, dazed and numb, as police cars and vans arrived and the park was cordoned off. Jonah felt he was trapped in a bad dream as the quiet green space began to fill with figures in yellow hi-vis jackets and white coveralls. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d related what had happened, forcing himself to answer questions when he wanted to scream with impatience. You need to check shops and CCTV around the park, he repeatedly told the officers who questioned him. They’d given him assurances, employing the same calm and measured manners he’d used in interviews himself.

Then they’d asked more questions.

The worst of it was that Jonah knew. Knew what they were thinking. Knew what went on in cases like this. But the possibility that it could relate to Theo, to his son, who’d been laughing with him only hours before, was too enormous to grasp. He’d insisted on staying in the park, as though leaving that place without Theo would somehow be an acceptance of what had happened, making it irreversible.

Calling Chrissie to break the news had been the second-worst moment of Jonah’s life. There had been times when he’d wondered if she’d actually loved their son, so cold could she seem towards him. But she’d become hysterical on the phone, screaming into it until the connection abruptly went dead. When she arrived in the park with her mother, he held out his arms, as much out of a need for comfort for himself as to offer it. She knocked them aside and begun flailing at him.

‘How could you? How could you have fucking let him go?’

He stood there mutely, making no attempt to defend himself from either her attack or her accusations until two PCs intervened, easing her away and leading her sobbing back to her mother. Jonah had almost welcomed the sting of her blows on his face.

He blamed himself as well.

When he saw Gavin crossing the cordon, he could have wept with grateful relief. Come on, let’s go somewhere private, Gavin said, steering him like a zombie to the police trailer that had been set up inside the park entrance. There were chairs, desks and a whiteboard arranged inside, but no one was using it. Gavin shut the door behind them and took a flat bottle of vodka from his jacket.

‘Here,’ he said, holding it out. Jonah shook his head but Gavin pressed it on him. ‘Go on. You’re no use to anyone like this.’

The alcohol burned a track down Jonah’s throat to his stomach. He realised he was shaking.

‘I fell asleep, Gav. I fell asleep...’

If Gavin had offered any sympathy, Jonah would have lost it. But instead he told him to get a grip, snapped that a guilt trip wouldn’t help. When Jonah raised the vodka to take another drink, Gavin had taken it away from him. We need you functioning, not pissed, he’d said.

He listened without comment as Jonah described what had happened and described the man he’d seen on the bench. He’d always been a good observer, and the image felt seared on his brain. Tall and in his thirties, the impression of a gaunt, rangy build given even while seated. Pale skin with a bony skull closely shaved but a shadow of stubble on the lantern jaw. Frayed, dirty blue jeans and a greasy olive-coloured combat jacket. Gavin listened in silence, then said something that would echo in Jonah’s mind for years to come.

‘We’ll find him,’ he’d said, looking Jonah in the eye. ‘I promise, I’ll do whatever it takes.’

Jonah had desperately wanted to believe him. But when he went back outside and saw the police tape cordoning off the play area, the CSIs in coveralls searching the bushes where he’d found Theo’s hat, the reality of it threatened to crush him.

The next two days were torture. Each minute was an eternity, a limbo of waiting for the doorbell or phone to ring. Chrissie wouldn’t speak to him, or if she did, the conversation would quickly descend into shrill accusations. They were more strangers to each other than the family liaison officer who waited with them. The televised appeal they made was a disaster, a surreal nightmare of bright lights, cameras and microphones. As they took their seats Jonah rested his hand on Chrissie’s shoulder, as much to bolster himself as her. When she’d shrugged him off, it had been caught for all to see, and things went downhill from there. Chrissie was sullen and cold, leaving him to answer most of the questions. He tried, but his mind refused to engage, leaving him tongue-tied and lost in front of the judgemental lenses. When a journalist asked if it was true he’d fallen asleep, a tsunami of guilt left him unable to speak.

‘Yes, he did,’ Chrissie hissed into the silence.

That was the sound bite that made the news.

Being in the small terrace was torture for both of them. The familiar surroundings now seemed alien, utterly changed by Theo’s absence. It seemed impossible that he wasn’t there. Each room still held his presence, echoes of his voice and laughter. When it became unbearable, Jonah would go out, walking quickly but with no destination in mind. Fantasies about finding Theo, or getting his hands on the man from the park, would play through his mind. He tried not to think what might have happened to his son. Could still be happening now. He kept checking his phone for missed calls or texts, the fear he might be missing something building up until he’d be driven back to the purgatory of the empty house.

And the waiting would go on.

Gavin was a frequent visitor. He tried to hide it, but Jonah could see the same terrible knowledge he felt himself reflected in his friend’s eyes. Although he’d never worked a missing child case himself, he was only too aware of how they unfolded. Statistics that had been cold numbers before took on a hideous new significance now he was on the other side. He was all too familiar with the ‘golden hours’ concept, that the odds of finding a missing child alive shrank vanishingly the longer it went on. He was unable to stop checking the time, agonisingly aware of how quickly it was slipping away.

Then, out of the blue, there was a suspect.

It was the early morning of the third day that Gavin turned up at the house. Chrissie was still sleeping, seeking temporary oblivion in prescription tranquillisers that left her drugged and drowsy. Gavin told him not to disturb her, but Jonah could tell by his face that something had happened.

‘We picked up the down-and-out from the park,’ Gavin told him.

The man’s name was Owen Stokes, a thirty-four-year-old Liverpudlian with a criminal record ranging from burglary to aggravated assault. Many of the offences were alcohol- and drug-related, and he’d only been released from prison two months before. But he’d skipped his last appointment with the probation officer, disappearing from the halfway house where he’d been staying after robbing two of the other residents. He’d been arrested the night before, drunkenly urinating in a shop doorway, and fitted Jonah’s description so perfectly that the connection was made straight away. Still drunk, he’d brazenly admitted being in the park on the morning Theo disappeared, Gavin had said, taking out his phone. He’d hesitated.

‘You shouldn’t be seeing this. I shouldn’t even have it myself.’

‘Just show me,’ Jonah said.

It was footage from Stokes’s interview. Jonah immediately recognised the man from the park. Big and raw-boned in a greasy, olive-green combat jacket. Head shaven smooth, and a mocking sneer on thin lips. When he twisted around to look behind him at the door, Jonah saw the radiating lines of a black spider web tattooed on the back of his neck.

He’d slouched in the chair, seeming bored by the questioning. The smirk never left his face, and at one point he’d even yawned.

‘You got it all wrong, pal,’ he’d drawled at the interviewing detectives, his accent heavy enough to be a parody. ‘I’m not into kiddies, ’specially little boys. Now if he’d got a sixteen-year-old sister, I might be interested.’

He’d laughed, and Jonah had wanted to reach into the screen and tear the man’s throat out. He never even heard Chrissie enter the room, or realised she was there until she spoke.

‘Is that him?’

She was standing behind them, looking at the phone screen over their shoulders. Gavin had tried to put it away, and then dissuade her from watching, but she was having none of it.

‘Theo’s mine as well. I want to see.’

She watched the footage in silence, all the way to the end. When it had finished, she’d turned to Jonah with an expression of utter contempt.

‘You let that take my son?’

She’d walked out without another word.

Late that night, the doorbell had rung. It was DCI Wells, the SIO in charge of the search. He’d already spoken to Jonah once that afternoon, when he’d confirmed that Owen Stokes was in custody and being questioned. When Jonah saw him on the doorstep with the family liaison officer, both of them grave- faced, he’d known he was about to hear what he’d dreaded.

But it wasn’t the confession from Stokes he’d been expecting. He and Chrissie had sat side by side but apart on the sofa as Wells told them about an overgrown culvert hidden in the thicket of rhododendrons by the play area. The culvert had already been checked and had been found to have a cover of iron bars. What had been overlooked was how rusted the bars were, or that the hinges had broken, leaving a narrow gap at one side. It was difficult to see and difficult to get to, Wells said, apologetically, at least for an adult.

Though not for a four-year-old boy.

Then Wells had shown them a photograph. It was of a small shoe, a miniature trainer, dirty and water-stained. The same brand, size and colour as Theo had been wearing the morning he’d disappeared.

It had been recovered from inside the culvert, Wells had told them. The search hadn’t been able to go very far in, because the dank stone tunnel quickly narrowed, descending to a network of subterranean waterways too small for an adult to fit inside. But, again, not the smaller body of a child.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jonah had said. ‘What about Stokes?’

Wells had shaken his head, as though that was already old news. He’d been released, he told them. CCTV cameras outside the park entrance had showed the man leaving on his own. Not only that, but a couple walking their dog in the park had confirmed that Stokes had approached them asking for money. It had turned out they were Salvation Army officers, not in uniform, who’d tried to persuade him to go to the hostel. He’d eventually become abusive before walking off, but by the timescale Jonah himself had provided, it wouldn’t have been possible for Stokes to have anything to do with Theo’s disappearance.

Jonah felt like he was suffocating. ‘No, that can’t be right,’ he’d said. ‘Theo wouldn’t just wander off like that. Someone must have taken him.’

‘How would you know?’ Chrissie had said in a flat voice. ‘You were asleep.’

She’d been led out by the liaison officer, leaving Jonah and the DCI alone in the living room. Jonah had stared down at the photograph of his son’s shoe, still held in his hand.

‘So what does this mean?’ he’d asked, unwilling to comprehend it even now.

Wells had looked as though he’d rather be anywhere else but there. ‘We’ll do our best to find him,’ he’d said, ‘but you have to understand the difficulties. The stream feeds into a network of underground watercourses that run for miles. Even with fibre-optic probes, we can only go so far. I’m sorry, but you have to be realistic.’

And then, with a sigh, the DCI had said the words that finally brought it home to Jonah, that stabbed home the realisation that he was never going to see his son again.

‘I’m sorry...’

Next day, Jonah had gone back to the park for the first time. At the play area, high-pitched voices and laughter rang from the children who played there, watched over by bored-looking parents. Seeing them, Jonah felt an envy so sharp it hurt. The crime scene tape had been taken away, except for a small area cordoned off within the rhododendrons. Here the leathery-leaved bushes had been cut back, exposing a low archway whose stone blocks were wet and green with algae. It straddled the same stream where he and Theo had played Poohsticks, a dark cave into which the fast-flowing water dis-appeared. Rusted iron stumps protruded from the stonework, but a new gate of galvanised steel had been fixed over its mouth like the bars of a cage.

Jonah’s eyes blurred as he stared into the darkness beyond, with a sense of bleakness and loss so great it had neither beginning nor end.

On his way out, he stopped by the bench where Owen Stokes had sat. Ordinary slats of weathered wood, stained white with bird droppings. A pressure built up in him at the sight of it. He wanted to lash out, to stamp it into splinters, and it took all his willpower for him to turn and walk away. DCI Wells had got it wrong. Something like this, something so monumental, couldn’t just happen. Theo, his laughing boy, couldn’t have just ceased to be. Something had to be to blame.

Someone.