Ben Cheetham - Blood Guilt

“Well don’t be. I’m not worth your worry.”

“That’s not true. You’re a good man.”

“Good men don’t kill.”

“You lashed out in a moment of madness and despair. Yes, a man died, but you’ve paid for-”

“You’re wasting your time,” broke in Harlan. “This is something I’ve got to do.”

“They’ll send you back to prison.”

“If they do, they do. Susan Reed’s already lost her husband. I can’t let her lose her son as well. You of all people should understand that.”

Eve was silent a moment. When she next spoke, Harlan could tell she was struggling to keep her voice from shaking, and it hurt him to hear. “But what can you do on your own?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. But I’ve got to try.”

Eve sighed. “Okay, Harlan, if I can’t change your mind then all I can say is good luck. Find that boy. Find him and return him where he belongs.”

Another silence passed between them. Harlan waited for Eve to say goodbye — he’d never been any good at goodbyes — but instead she said hesitatingly, “Maybe we could meet up sometime.”

Christ yes, his heart said. How he would love to meet up with Eve, listen to her soft voice, smell her, touch her. He suddenly found himself remembering how it felt to kiss her, the way she used to murmur his name as he nuzzled her neck, her ear. And the memory of it made his blood quicken. But he knew he couldn’t allow himself to follow his heart. After all, what did he have to offer her? Nothing but memories and misery. “I don’t think that’d be good idea.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I don’t know why I even suggested it. Take care, Harlan.”

“You too.”

Harlan hung up, releasing a heavy breath. “Focus,” he said sharply. He focused on the street shining wetly beneath the orange glow of the lampposts. That life is gone, he told himself. This right here, this is all the life you’ve got left, so make it count.

All night Harlan searched in vain. When darkness began to give way to the blue of dawn, he grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe. The breakfast news blared out of a television on the wall. The waitress served him in silence, then quickly retreated behind the counter, where she fell into a whispered conversation with another woman. Both women shot him uneasy, frowning glances. He ignored them, concentrating on eating and the news. The police were having no more luck than him, it seemed. There had been no reported sightings of Ethan, and the police had expanded the focus of their search beyond Sheffield into the surrounding regions, particularly the Northwest where there’d recently been a suspected child abduction — Jamie Sutton, an eleven-year old boy, had disappeared while out riding his bike in Prestwich, a northern suburb of Manchester, nearly two months ago. A massive search had been conducted, thousands of missing-person posters had been distributed, private donors had put together a reward of two-hundred thousand pounds for anyone who came forward with solid information that led to the boy’s rescue. All to no avail. Jamie Sutton, it seemed, had literally vanished into thin air.

Harlan considered expanding the focus of his search too, but quickly decided against it. The connection between the cases was too tenuous. For starters, it was impossible to say with certainty that Jamie Sutton had been abducted. He might’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run, met with some kind of accident, or maybe even be a runaway. Secondly, if Jamie had been abducted, then the kidnapper’s MO was significantly different, more suggestive of an opportunistic mindset. Thirdly, Jamie was a very different boy from Ethan — whereas Ethan looked shy and timid, Jamie had a broad face and bold, self-confident eyes. Finally, and most importantly as far as Harlan was concerned, he saw little hope in himself succeeding where the best efforts of the police had failed. Better to continue the search here, where the trail was still fresh.

It was midday when the posters started appearing on lampposts and in shop windows. They featured close-ups of Ethan taken from different angles and with different expressions. Above his face in big letters was the word ‘KIDNAPPED’. Below his face were the numbers of a couple of freephone tip hotlines. There were also groups of people on the streets — not police, but volunteers — handing out leaflets to passersby and motorists. Harlan rolled his window down to take one from a woman. “There’s going to be a march through the streets around Ethan’s home tonight,” she said. “Everybody’s welcome.”

“Everybody doesn’t include me,” said Harlan, and he drove on, working his way methodically through the city.

New information trickled through the radio. Police dogs had picked up Ethan’s scent, but the trail they’d found ended several feet from the backyard gate. Detectives were holding a local man for questioning. William Jones, a fifty-two year old unmarried, unemployed steel worker with convictions for child sex offences, had apparently been seen on several occasions recently hanging around outside Ethan’s school and at a nearby play-park that the boy frequented. Jones was well-known in the community as a sex-offender, and his home and car had been vandalised many times in the past. In a brief statement to the press, Detective Chief Inspector Garrett said that Jones was on the Sex Offenders’ Register and was considered a medium risk.

Harlan pulled over at a cafe with internet access, navigated to the website of a local newspaper, typed ‘William Jones’ into the search-term box, and scanned down the list of related articles until he came to the headline, ‘Man Jailed For Child Sex Offences’. He clicked the link and skim-read the article it led to. Jones had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 2005 for ten counts of making indecent images of a girl under fourteen-years old and one count of indecent assault. There was a photo of him — overweight, vein-streaked alcoholic’s cheeks, receding grey-brown hair. Although, at a stretch, Jones might fit the kidnapper’s description, Harlan dismissed him as a suspect. The guy was a relatively low-grade offender with a taste for young girls. A nasty piece of work, but not the type to snatch eight-year old boys from their bedrooms. That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth bringing him in and grilling him for a while. After all, birds of a feather flocked together — especially when no one else wanted anything to do with them — which meant that characters like Jones were often the best source of information about offenders operating under the police radar in an area.

Harlan returned to his car and the search. Afternoon wore away like a corpse in a hot country. Five o’clock, six, seven…Every time he glanced at the clock, another hour seemed to have passed. He swallowed Pro-Plus tablets with black coffee, but even so his vision began to grow blurry as if he was looking through a haze of tears. It’d been nearly forty-eight hours since he last slept. Reluctantly accepting that if he continued searching he’d be likely to miss more than he saw, he headed back to his flat.

Remembering about the march, Harlan flicked the television on and found himself confronted by Susan Reed’s haggard, almost cadaverous face. She looked like she’d aged two years for every day that’d passed since he last saw her. Her eyes, which peered out from under tear-swollen lids, had a glazed look about them. More than likely, she’d been given a mild sedative. A man had one arm cupped around her narrow shoulders as if to hold her up. He was maybe five or ten years younger than her, tall and skinny, with a pale, lumpy face, and a fine fuzz of blond hair on his skull and above his upper lip. Watery blue eyes — it was difficult to tell if they were watery with tears or just watery — peered at the cameras through cheap-looking spectacles. Harlan wondered who the man was. A friend? A relative? No, his body language spoke of a different kind of intimacy. A boyfriend, maybe. A person of interest, definitely.