Sharon Bolton - Like This, for Ever

Barney made sure, cross-checking the dates on the webpage with his electronic calendar, but he hadn’t been wrong. Ryan had disappeared from the garden of his house at 6pm on a Thursday evening. His body had been found a week later on Thursday. Noah had been taken on a Thursday and found five days later on Tuesday. Jason and Joshua had disappeared just two days ago, a Tuesday evening, and had been found this evening – Thursday. The news pages didn’t mention days of the week, just dates, so Barney knew there was a good chance most people wouldn’t have realized. But the police would have, surely? What about the other one, the one they weren’t sure was involved? Barney found his files on Tyler King. Vanished on a Thursday.

Barney flicked away from the news page and on to Facebook. As most kids would have gone to bed, the comment stream had slowed down in the last couple of hours. Barney hovered the cursor over his status box and started typing.

Has anyone else spotted that this is all happening on Tuesday and Thursday evenings? Check it out! Do the police know they should be looking for someone who doesn’t have an alibi on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

He pressed Update without thinking about whether or not it was a good idea. Then realized it almost certainly wasn’t. Of course people would have spotted it. It had probably been picked up ages ago. He’d just made himself look a proper jerk. The piss-taking he’d get tomorrow.

Within seconds someone replied. It was that rather odd Peter Sweep character. Bracing himself, Barney started to read. After one sentence, he felt like someone had placed large, cold hands on his shoulders.

I was wondering when someone would spot that. Oh, the cleverness of you. Are you busy next Tuesday?

Barney sat for a second, looking at the comment, waiting for someone to respond. No one did. He checked back up the thread. The last comment before his own had been left at 11.30pm. Still nothing else. It was as though he and Peter were alone on Facebook. Barney logged out and closed his computer down. He’d go back to bed and tell himself very firmly that there was nothing to get uptight about. Peter was just a twat trying to freak him out. Peter had no way of knowing where he lived. He could only get to him on Facebook.

Barney closed the doors, switched off the lights and climbed into bed. As he lay in the darkness, he realized that Facebook felt quite close enough.

11

‘IT’S THE BLOOD that I remember. Out of everything that happened that day, it’s the blood that won’t go away. There was this splash – spatter, I think you’d call it – on the windows and I remember I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Bright red. Like rose petals. Or rubies. Or balloons. Little red droplets. The colour they made in the sun was just incredible.’

‘Blood is a beautiful colour,’ agreed the psychiatrist.

‘And the way it moves in water. Have you seen that? It doesn’t mix, like a water-based paint, it hangs, suspended, twisting and turning like one of those lava lamps, forming its own shapes. Sometimes I think I’ll never get it out of my head. The blood.’

12

THE COLD, SOGGY light of a winter dawn seemed to be snaking its way up the Thames and settling over the city when Barney got back from the newsagent’s the next day. Strictly, he was too young to have a job, and there was no way his dad would have allowed him to have a paper round, but Mr Kapur had never been able to find a child he trusted to sort and organize the papers in the morning until Barney came along. Barney had the neatest, most logical mind he’d ever come across, he said at least weekly.

There had been nothing from Mum in his secret email account this morning. It was getting harder, somehow, to look at that empty in-box every day. Still, he’d only just sent off the latest ads. He had to give them time.

As Barney walked along the hall towards the kitchen, he heard the sounds of Daybreak on the kitchen TV and something else that was wrong.

The washing machine was on. They never did washing on Friday. Saturday was washing day. They did four loads every Saturday. A whites wash, a coloureds wash, bed linen and then towels. The washing was Barney’s job, because he quite liked the sorting into organized piles, and the idea of putting dirty stuff in and getting clean, sweet-smelling, damp clothes out. His dad did the ironing.

‘What’s going on?’ he said, as he walked into the kitchen, his eyes going straight to the washing machine. Yep, there it was, something pale and stripy sloshing about.

‘Breakfast’s ready,’ said his dad, who was sitting at the central island, a cereal spoon in his right hand. Barney didn’t move. His dad had used too much soap. There was too much froth in the machine.

‘I spilt a mug of tea in bed this morning,’ said his dad. ‘I didn’t want it staining. That’s OK, isn’t it? For once?’

‘’Course,’ said Barney, making himself look away from the washing machine. So did that mean they’d only do three loads the next day? Odd numbers had a way of making him feel twitchy inside.

‘Barney!’ His dad was reaching out across the island towards him, putting his own large hands over Barney’s small ones. ‘You’re doing it again.’

Barney shrugged and concentrated on making his hands relax. He couldn’t remember it, but he knew they’d been tracing patterns on the granite surface, his fingers moving in repetitive squared shapes, over and over, even when his hands started to hurt, either until someone stopped him or he was distracted by something else.

‘Raisins,’ said his dad.

The raisins were by his right hand. The bran flakes had already been poured into the bowl. Barney counted four raisins into his bowl as the 8am news came on, his dad adjusted the volume and a tall man in a suit told the world what most of it already knew – that the bodies of Jason and Joshua Barlow had been found the previous evening and that the police believed they’d been killed by the same person who’d previously abducted and murdered Ryan Jackson and Noah Moore. He reminded them that a fifth boy, Tyler King, was still missing.

The tall man, a senior police officer of some kind, was sitting behind a table with three other people. As the next four raisins landed on the bran flakes, the cameras moved along the table to the parents. The bones of the father’s skull seemed to be pressing themselves out through his skin as he asked the viewers to help find their sons’ killer. The mother didn’t manage to articulate a single word. She was crying too much.

At least Jason and Joshua had had a mother.

As the last four of his sixteen raisins went into his cereal bowl, a dark-skinned, dark-haired woman appeared on the screen. The name card on the desk in front of her said that she was Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch.

‘Someone knows who this killer is,’ she was saying. ‘This killer doesn’t appear from nowhere and then vanish again. He lives among us. If you have any information that you think could be helpful, however small, however unimportant it may seem, please get in touch.’

The news moved on to the next story and Barney’s dad turned the volume down again.

‘Toast?’ he said, getting up.

‘Please,’ said Barney. ‘Can I have maple syrup and honey?’

‘No, because that would be disgusting.’

‘I mean honey on one half and maple syrup on the other.’

With a heavy sigh and a resigned shake of the head, his dad reached up into the cupboard. ‘Barney, I’m not sure I want you going out in the mornings at the moment.’

Instant panic. Barney looked from the TV over towards his dad. ‘Why not?’

His dad turned to face him. ‘It’s too dark,’ he said. ‘Maybe when it gets lighter, in the summer.’