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‘Claire? Oh, thank God.’ He sinks onto the bench beside me, then glances down at my lap, where the contents of my handbag are piled beneath my hands. ‘What’s all this?’
‘I was trying to understand how I got here.’ I shovel everything back into the bag, including the arcade token and the shell, then zip it shut. Worry is etched into every line on Mark’s face.
‘We thought someone had taken you,’ Jake says, leaning heavily on the stick. I gesture for him to sit down but he shakes his head. ‘We spoke to Liz and she said you suddenly got up and ran out of her house like you were on fire. Then when we rang and you didn’t know where you were …’ He breathes heavily. ‘I thought whoever took Billy had taken you too.’
Mark’s lips part and I know he wants to contradict Jake. He wants to say that we have no proof that Billy was taken by anyone. We have no idea what happened that night.
‘I did run out,’ I say before my husband can speak. ‘I remember that much but … after that …’ I shake my head. ‘The next thing I knew I was sitting on a bed in the B&B and then the phone rang.’
‘How did you get here?’ Mark asks. ‘The car was still in the drive.’
‘By train.’
‘So you remember that much?’
I shake my head again. ‘No. I found the ticket in my bag. Mark, I don’t remember getting the train, I don’t remember checking into the hotel. I don’t remember anything other than leaving Liz’s.’
‘Did you hit your head or something?’ He gently moves my hair away from my face with his hand and my heart flutters in my chest. I can’t remember the last time he touched me so tenderly. ‘I can’t see any swellings or contusions.’
I used to joke with the kids about Mark’s ‘medical speak’ after he got a job as a medical sales rep. It was almost as though he’d become a doctor himself with all his talk of angina, stents and angioplasty. Apparently it’s very unusual for someone without a medical background or degree to get a job selling pharmaceuticals to GPs and hospitals but Mark’s never been one to let someone telling him he can’t do something get in his way.
‘We didn’t realize you were missing until tea time,’ Jake says and I have to smile. I don’t imagine they would have. They’d have returned home after work and congregated in the kitchen, sniffing the air and peering into the oven and fridge. ‘Dad said you were probably round at Liz’s, pissed off with us for screwing up Billy’s appeal.’
‘Pissed off with who—’ Mark starts but Jake interrupts.
‘And then Liz came round and told us that you’d rushed out of her house and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really upset. She thought she’d said something to upset you.’
Mark shifts away from me now his ‘examination’ of my head is complete, but his eyes don’t leave my face. ‘What did she say?’ he asks.
I shake my head. If I tell him he’ll only agree. Mark’s told me over and over again that we should assume the worst about Billy. ‘Six months is a long time, Claire.’ It’s become his mantra, his invisible shield against hope whenever I tentatively suggest that maybe, just maybe, Billy could still be alive.
‘It doesn’t matter what she said.’
‘It does if it made you run off to Weston without telling anyone.’
I slip my handbag across my body, then stand up and rub my upper arms. ‘Can we just go home? Please, I just want to go home.’
Mark stands up too. ‘I think we should get you to a doctor first. Don’t you?’
Chapter 11
It’s warm in Mum’s living room. Warm and ever so slightly musty. The top of the telly is grey with dust, the magazine rack is groaning under the weight of books and magazines piled on top of it, and there are dead flowers on the windowsill; green sludge in the base of the vase instead of water. Even the spider plant on the bureau, a plant so hardy that it could survive a nuclear attack, is wilted and yellow. Its babies, trailing on the carpet on long tendrils, look as though they’ve parachuted out in an attempt to escape. Mum would declare World War III if I offered to tidy up so I do what I can whenever she leaves the room; wipe a tissue over the surfaces when she goes to the loo or tip my glass of water in the spider plant when the postman comes.
I haven’t had a chance today. She hasn’t left my side since I arrived a little after 9 a.m. I haven’t told her about my blackout yet; she thinks I’m here to talk about Billy’s publicity campaign. Mark refused to go to work until I promised him I’d spend the day with her. He’s terrified I’ll go missing again.
He’s not the only one.
The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. She ran a series of blood tests yesterday and said I’d have to wait a week for the results. It’s terrifying, not knowing what caused me to black out. What if it’s something serious like a brain tumour? What if it happens again? When I asked Dr Evans if it might she said she didn’t know.
I didn’t want to leave her office. I didn’t want to step outside the doors of the surgery and risk it happening again. Mark had to physically lift me off the chair and guide me back outside to the car.
‘See that?’ Mum slides the laptop from her knees to mine and points at the screen with a bitten-down fingernail. ‘That spike in the graph?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at.’
‘They’re the stats for the website. We had a huge peak in page views the day the appeal went out. Over seven thousand people looked at it. Seven thousand, Claire.’
‘And that’s a good thing, is it?’ Dad says, appearing in the doorway to the living room.
‘Derek.’ Mum shoots him a warning look. ‘If you can’t say something good—’
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say. ‘I know what Dad’s thinking.’
‘Your dad’s not thinking anything.’ Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘Are you, Derek?’
His gaze shifts towards me and I feel the weight of sadness in his eyes. There’s indecision too, written all over his face. He wants to tell me something but Mum’s warning him not to.
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘Derek!’
‘It’s okay. You can tell me.’
Mum pulls at my hand. ‘It’s nothing you need worry about, Claire. Just a bunch of drunks in the pub speculating. We know no one in the family had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.’
I ignore her. I can’t tear my eyes away from my dad who looks as though he might burst from the stress of keeping his lip buttoned. ‘Dad?’
He shifts his weight so he’s leaning against the door frame and bows his head, ever so slightly, finally breaking eye contact with me. ‘They think Jake had something to do with it. I overheard a conversation when I was coming out of the loo in the King and Lion the other night. No smoke without fire and all that.’
‘Absolute rot!’ Mum snaps the laptop lid shut. ‘Everyone will have forgotten all about it by next week and then, when the dust has settled, we’ll ask the Bristol News to run a story about Billy and Jake as kids. If the Standard are going to shaft us we’ll get them onside instead. We’ll dig out some photos of the boys in their primary-school uniforms. The readers will see them when they were young and sweet and they’ll forget about Jake’s little outburst. It’s all about the cute factor. You’ll see.’
‘Cute factor?’
‘It’s a PR trick to gain public sympathy. I read about it in a book I got out of the library, the one by the PR guru who was arrested for sex offences. Dirty bastard but he knew his stuff.’
I can’t help but marvel at the woman sitting in front of me. Six months ago she didn’t really know what PR meant never mind the tricks ‘gurus’ use to gain public sympathy for a client. Whilst I could barely speak for grief she went part-time at the garden centre and asked a friend’s son to create the findbillywilkinson.com website so she could post a few photos of him and include the police contact details. Now there’s a Facebook page and a crowdfunding site. She’s read every book that’s been written by the parents of other missing children and she spends hours on the Internet looking for the contact details of journalists who might be interested in covering Billy’s story.
‘So can you dig some out?’ Mum asks. ‘Some photos?’
I nod my head. ‘Of course.’
‘Are you all right, love?’ Dad says. ‘You look a bit peaky.’
I can’t tell them what happened yesterday. I don’t want to worry them, not until I know what I’m dealing with.
Waiting. My life has become one long wait. I’ve never felt more impotent in my life. Mark and Jake wouldn’t let me help with the search after Billy went missing. They said I needed to stay at home. ‘Someone needs to man the hub,’ Mark said. I don’t think that was the real reason he told me to stay behind. I think he was worried I’d break down if we found anything awful. He would have been right but I can’t continue to sit and wait. I need to find Billy.
‘I’m fine, Dad.’ I force a smile. ‘But I could do with some fresh air. Are those fliers up to date?’ I point at the teetering pile of paper under the windowsill.
‘Yes.’ Mum nods.
‘Could we go somewhere and hand them out? Maybe … the train station?’
Last week I went through Billy’s things. I’ve been through them a hundred times since the police searched his room – the familiarity is comforting – and I found an exercise book at the bottom of a pile on his bookshelf. He’d only written in it twice. On the first page he’d half-heartedly attempted some maths homework and then crossed it out and written underneath, Maths is shit and Mr Banks is a wanker.
That made me smile. It was something I could imagine him saying to Mark when he’d ask how Billy was getting on with his coursework. Billy knew it would push his dad’s buttons but he’d say it anyway because he liked winding him up. I’d tell Billy off for swearing but it was always an effort not to laugh. Poor Mark.
After I’d read what he’d written I found a pen and wrote underneath it, No swearing, Billy. The tightness in my chest eased off, just the tiniest bit. So I kept on writing. I wrote and I wrote until I had cramp in my hand. It was so cathartic, so freeing to be able to cry, alone, without worrying that my grief might upset Jake and Mark.
I almost missed the other thing he’d written in the book. I only spotted it when the back cover lifted as I put it down. He’d graffitied the inside and scrawled Tag targets in thick black marker pen:
– Bristol T M (train?)
– The Arches
– Avonmouth
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t spotted it before, not when I’d been through Billy’s things so many times, and I immediately rang DS Forbes. He wasn’t as excited as I was. He told me they’d looked at the CCTV at the train station when Billy was first reported missing and they’d checked out Avonmouth and the Arches as they knew he hung out with his friends there. But what if they’d missed something? Something only a mother could spot?
‘Great idea.’ Mum snatches the laptop from my knees and slips it behind one of the sofa cushions.
‘Hiding it from burglars,’ she says when I give her a questioning look.
‘We’ll have to be quick,’ Mum says as she parks the car. ‘We’ve only got twenty minutes before a traffic warden slaps a ticket on the windscreen.’
I clutch the fliers to my chest as we cross the road, passing a line of blue hackney cabs and a lone smoker pressed up against the exterior wall of the station.
Inside Bristol Temple Meads there’s a crowd of people gazing up at the arrivals and departures boards and a stream of traffic in and out of WHSmith’s. It’s not as busy as it would have been if we’d got here at seven or eight o’clock but hopefully we’re less likely to be brushed off by harassed commuters.
‘We’ll get a cheap-day return to Bedminster so we can get through the barriers,’ Mum says as she heads towards the ticket machines, ‘then we’ll split up. You do platforms eight to fifteen and I’ll do one to seven. Try and get the shops in the underpass to stick a poster in their window if you have time.’
‘You okay?’ she says, looking back at me as the machine spits out two tickets. ‘You’ve gone very white.’
It’s as though the earth has just tilted on its axis. That’s the only way to explain how I feel. I was here yesterday. I bought a ticket to Weston. I crossed through the barriers. I got on a train. One of the staff, a man with fair hair and glasses, catches my eye as I glance across at the ticket counter and I look away sharply. Did he recognize me? Is that why he’s staring? Has he been told to keep an eye out for me because of something I said or did?
‘Claire?’ Mum touches my arm. ‘Do you want to go back to the car? I can do the leaflet drop if you’re not feeling well. Or we can do it another day.’
‘No.’ I press a hand over hers. There’s no reason to think I did anything strange during my blackout. Even when I’m drunk the worst I’ll do is massacre a song during karaoke or embarrass Mark by firing off the most childish jokes I know. ‘I’m fine. Honestly, Mum. Let’s get this done.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’ I let go of her hand and pass a leaflet to the man waiting patiently for us to vacate the ticket machine. ‘My son Billy is missing. Have you seen him? Do you recognize his face?’
We’ve barely passed through the ticket barriers when Mum’s phone rings.
‘Oh, bugger,’ she says under her breath as she fishes it out of her handbag. ‘It’s Ben, the journalist from the Bristol News that I was telling you about. I’m going to have to take this, Claire. You okay to go by yourself?’
‘Of course.’
Mum turns left towards the coffee shop while I continue down the stairs to the subway that gives access to the platforms. I approach a lady who’s waiting for an elderly man to use the cashpoint and show her Billy’s flier.
‘This is my son, Billy Wilkinson. He’s fifteen. Have you seen him?’
She looks down at his photo and, as her eyes dart from left to right, scanning his face, my heart flickers with hope. There are nearly half a million people in Bristol but all I need is for one person, just one, to say, ‘I saw a boy who looks like him sleeping rough, or ‘I think I was served coffee by this boy yesterday.’
‘Sorry.’ The woman shakes her head.
I rush away before she can offer me any words of sympathy and thrust a leaflet at a man in a suit.
He raises a hand. ‘No, thank you.’
‘It’s not a charity leaflet.’ I rush after him. ‘And I’m not selling anything—’
I’m cut off as he takes a sudden left and disappears into the men’s toilets.
Undeterred, I approach a gang of foreign students, gabbling away to each other in Spanish outside the juice bar. ‘Have you seen this boy? He’s my son. He’s missing.’
They exchange glances, then an attractive girl, with glossy black hair that reaches almost to her waist, steps forward and peers at the leaflet in my hands.
‘Nice,’ she says, looking back up at me. ‘Nice boy. Handsome.’
‘Have you seen him? You or any of your friends?’
She takes the leaflet from my hand, shows it to her friends and says something in Spanish. I can’t understand a word they say in reply but I know what a head shake, a shrug and a pouting mouth signify.
‘Could you put it up where you’re studying?’ I ask the black-haired girl. ‘In your school? There’s a contact telephone number and an email address at the bottom if anyone has seen him.’
She nods enthusiastically but I’m not sure she understands me. I don’t have time to double-check. I need to move on. I need to get Billy’s face in front of as many people as possible.
The barista behind the counter of the coffee shop in the middle of the subway tells me she can’t put up Billy’s poster without consulting her manager, and he’s not in until 5 p.m. The queue at the sit-down coffee shop just yards away is too long to even contemplate talking to a member of staff, so I drop a pile of leaflets on the table nearest the door instead. As I hurry through the subway towards platforms thirteen and fifteen I scan everything I see – posters, free newspaper racks, walls, doors – but they’re graffiti-free. If Billy did tag the train station he didn’t do it down here.
I stop short when I reach the top of the stairs to the platforms. There’s a wreck of a building on the opposite side of the tracks. It’s the derelict sorting office, now little more than a rectangular slab of concrete with gaping holes where the windows used to be. As I watch, pigeons flutter in and out but it’s not the birds that catch my eye. It’s the graffiti daubed all over the building. There are high walls, topped with barbed wire, surrounding it but that wouldn’t stop Billy, not if he was determined to put his mark on it.
‘Excuse me, madam.’ A hand grips my shoulder and I spin round to find myself face to face with a tall man in a luminous yellow waistcoat and a black peaked cap.
‘British Transport Police,’ he says, glancing at the bundle of paper in my hands. ‘It’s been reported that you’ve been distributing material to members of the public. Can I see your licence or badge, please?’
‘Licence?’ I step away from the yellow line on the platform edge as a train pulls into the station and the overhead announcer reports that the 11.30 a.m. train to Paddington is standing at platform thirteen. ‘What licence?’
‘You need a licence from the council to distribute leaflets at this station. There’s a fixed penality of eighty pounds or a court-imposed fine of up to two thousand five hundred if you haven’t got one.’
‘But … I … I don’t know. I came with my mum. She’s the one who got the leaflets printed and I’m sure she’s got permission for us to—’
The doors to the carriages open and, as the passengers disembark, I’m distracted by a fracas further up the platform. There’s a small crowd of people around one of the doors and a man is shouting at someone to stop pushing in.
And then I see him. Tall, slim, in a baseball cap and a black Superdry jacket, shoving his way to the front of the queue.
‘Billy!’ I fling the leaflets away from me and sprint up the platform. ‘Billy! Billy, wait!’
The policeman shouts. A pigeon, pecking at crumbs beneath a bench, is startled and flies into the air. A woman gasps, the crowd parts and my lungs burn as I launch myself through the open door and sprint down the carriage.
‘Billy!’ I shout as he reaches an empty seat at the end and pauses. ‘Billy, it’s—’
The words dry in my mouth as he turns and I see his profile.
It’s not Billy. It’s not him.
Tuesday 26th August 2014
Jackdaw44: Sorry.
ICE9: What for?
Jackdaw44: Telling you to go fuck yourself last week.
ICE9: No, you’re not. You want something.
Jackdaw44: Ha. Ha. Spot on.
ICE9: So?
Jackdaw44: Just wanted to talk to you.
ICE9: You know where I live.
Jackdaw44: Ha. Ha. Am at school. Need advice.
ICE9: What about?
Jackdaw44: Girls. Why are they such bitches?
ICE9: What makes you think I know?
Jackdaw44: I fucking hate Liv. She dumped me so why is she trying to put Jess off me?
ICE9: Jealous? Maybe she still fancies you.
Jackdaw44: Yeah, right. She’s fucking Ethan Thomas.
ICE9: Revenge?
Jackdaw44: What for?
ICE9: Did you cheat on her?
Jackdaw44: [confused face}
ICE9: That’s a yes then.
Jackdaw44: I was drunk.
ICE9: Dick.
Jackdaw44: That’s Mr Big Dick to you.
ICE9: Not according to Liv.
Jackdaw44: Fuck off. (Not sorry.)
Chapter 12
‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ Mum says as I turn the key in the lock. ‘I don’t feel right leaving you here alone. Not after what happened. He was decent though, wasn’t he, that policeman? In the end. I knew he wouldn’t fine us, not when we told him about Billy. You saw the look on his face when he told us he had a son of about the same age. Kind of him to say he’d keep an eye out and help spread the word.’
She follows me into the kitchen, hovering in the middle of the room as I drop my handbag onto a chair and open the fridge.
‘Are you okay?’ Mum asks. ‘I know you feel embarrassed about what happened on the train but you mustn’t let it get to you. Imagine if it had been Billy and you hadn’t gone after him. You’d never have forgiven yourself.’
‘I thought I’d do a casserole for tea,’ I say. ‘I know it’s the summer but everyone likes a sausage casserole, don’t they? I drop two onions, five carrots and two packs of sausages onto the counter. ‘Twelve sausages – that’ll be enough, won’t it, although God only knows Jake could probably finish off the lot himself.’
‘Claire, talk to me, sweetheart. You haven’t said a word since we left the station.’
I take a knife from the block on the counter. ‘The onions haven’t had long enough in the fridge to chill the juices. I always cry if they’re too fresh.’
‘Claire.’
‘I’m going to need swimming goggles. I think Billy’s got some in his room. I’ll just go up and—’
‘CLAIRE!’
Mum slips around me, blocking my exit from the kitchen.
‘Claire, sit down.’
‘I can’t. I need to put the dinner on. I need to—’
‘Claire, please. Please sit down, love.’ She gazes up at me, pain etched into her soft, lined skin. ‘Talk to me.’
‘I can’t. If I do I’ll cry.’
‘And?’ Mum rubs her hand up and down my upper arm.
‘And I don’t know if I’ll ever stop.’
‘Oh, sweetheart.’
‘I thought I’d found Billy,’ I say as she wraps me in her arms and I slump against her. ‘I thought the nightmare was over. But it’s not. It just carries on.
She squeezes me tightly. ‘We’ll find him, Claire. We’ll bring him back home.’
Mum left an hour ago. She was going to stay until Mark or one of the kids got back but then Dad rang to say that his car battery had died and he was stuck at B&Q and could she collect him. She told him to get a taxi and they’d sort out the car later but I insisted she go to his rescue. I reassured her that I could go over to Liz’s if I was feeling wobbly. She left, begrudgingly, and gave me an extra-long squeeze at the door.
My phone bleeps. It’s a text message from Mark.
Are you still at your mum’s? How are you feeling? I’m going to try and get home a bit earlier than normal. Text me if you feel unwell.
I text back.
Just got home. I went to the train station to hand out some fliers.
My phone bleeps almost immediately.
With your mum?
Yes.
Who’s with you now?
No one. I’m fine though.
Don’t go anywhere. Jake or Kira should be back soon and I’m on my way.
There’s no need to hurry, I type back. The last thing we need is for him to put his foot down and end up having an accident. Honestly. I’ll be fine.
I met Mark in a nightclub in town. I was eighteen, he was nineteen and he crossed the dance floor to talk to me, shoulders back, all South Bristol swagger with an attitude to match. He told me he was going to become a policeman. ‘I’ve passed the competency tests, the fitness test and the medical. I’ve just got the second interview to go and I’m in.’
For months, joining the police was all he could talk about. He’d turn up the radio whenever there was talk of an assault outside a nightclub or a drugs bust out in a disused barn in the countryside. He read true-crime book after true-crime book, piling them up on his bedside table like badges of honour. And then he had his second interview and I didn’t hear from him for a week. My calls went unanswered. When I went to Halfords where he’d been working while he completed the application process he took one look at me, then turned on his heel and headed straight for the nearest staff-only door.