The Missing Read online

  “I wanted to better myself,” Mark told me. “Everyone in our housing project thinks my family is dodgy. People cross the street when they see me out with my uncle Simon. The family thinks it’s respect but it’s not, it’s fear, and I don’t want that kind of life for me and my kids. Because I want kids, you know, Claire. I want a family.”

  Kids. His eyes shone as he said the word, just as they had when he’d talked to me about joining the police.

  “I want to be respected. I want people to look up to me because I’ve achieved something.”

  And then he told me about what he called the “boxes” in his head. It was his way of compartmentalizing his life. He couldn’t get in touch with me after he’d been rejected by the police because he was trapped in that box in his head. He had to process what had happened, then shut the box and get back on with his life. If he’d rung me he’d have taken a lot of his anger and resentment out on me and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want me to see him at his lowest.

  “If you’d seen me like that you’d have lost all respect for me. I’d have lost you.”

  “Maybe you already have?”

  He hung his head then, chin tucked into his chest, as he swirled a small puddle of lager around the base of his glass. I said nothing.

  “Fuck it!” He gripped his hair with his fingers and covered his face with the palms of his hands. “I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I?”

  There are some decisions that alter the course of your future; pivotal moments in life where you find yourself standing at a crossroads. Go left and you’re off down that path and there’s no turning back. Same if you go right.

  “Bollocks.” The wooden picnic table shook as Mark got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Claire, you’re better off without me.”

  He strode across the patio with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward.

  “Mark!” My throat was too tight and his name came out as a whisper. “Mark!”

  I had no choice but to go after him.

  “Mark!” I grabbed hold of his arm. “Don’t you dare walk away from me. Don’t you dare!”

  He stopped walking but said nothing.

  “Is that it?” I said. “You tell me you had a shit childhood, then you walk away? You’re not the only one who had a rough time, you know, but you don’t see me feeling sorry for myself and—”

  He grabbed me around the waist and pressed his lips so hard against mine that our teeth clashed and my neck cricked as he leaned his weight into me.

  “Give me another chance,” he breathed as he pulled away. “Give me another chance and I swear I’ll never let you down again, Claire. I love you. I don’t want to lose you.”

  I didn’t have to think twice. I was eighteen years old. I was in love.

  Now the back door clicks open and I catch the briefest glimpse of a baseball cap before it ducks back outside and the door slams shut.

  “Wait!” I jump up from my chair and sprint across the kitchen. “Come back!”

  Chapter 13

  “Jake! Wait! We need to talk.”

  My eldest son ignores me. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a key. He stoops to place it into the lock, wincing as he shifts his weight onto his bad foot, then turns the handle and yanks the garage door open.

  He hobbles inside, swears at the pool of oil puddled around Mark’s lawnmower, then fiddles with the dusty stereo on the shelf at the back of the garage. Pounding rock music fills the garage as he straddles the weight bench and shuffles onto his back. His fingers wrap around the silver bar and his biceps tense as he lifts the dumbbell off the bar.

  “Jake! Are you ignoring me?”

  He doesn’t reply. Instead he grunts as he dips the bar down to his chest and then presses it into the air.

  His interest in lifting weights began about six weeks after Billy disappeared. I welcomed it initially—Jake lifting weights was preferable to Jake spending every waking moment in the pub—but he became obsessed. An hour after work in the early evening became two hours and then he added another two hours in the morning. The bleep, bleep, bleep of his alarm at 5 a.m. drove Mark to distraction. Jake began spending less and less time with Kira and the family and more and more time in the garage. If he did deign to join us in the living room he’d be lost in the pages of Lifting or Power Grunt or whatever magazine he couldn’t get his nose out of. Kira would sit beside him, tap-tap-tapping into her phone, nodding politely as he’d explain how he was going to increase his deltoids by doing a certain combination of lifts.

  Kira’s always been a quiet girl but she shrank into herself during the height of Jake’s obsession. The bigger he grew the smaller and more silent she became. Shortly after she first came to live with us she told me how our home was like a breath of fresh air. We weren’t the perfect family by any means but I could see why our living situation was preferable to the one she’d escaped. But then Billy disappeared and everything fell apart. We fell apart. Poor Kira. She’d swapped one screwed-up, dysfunctional family for another.

  “Jake.” I take a step toward him. “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’d have thought”—his face contorts as he presses the bar into the air—“that was obvious.”

  I stride across the garage and switch off the stereo.

  A muscle twitches in my son’s cheek as he stares up at the corrugated roof. The barbell wobbles above him and for one horrible moment I imagine it slipping from his hands and pinning him to the bench but then he grunts and lowers it onto the rest.

  “Sorry.” He sits up and runs a hand over his face.

  “You need to talk to me,” I say softly as I crouch on the edge of the bench.

  He reaches for the sports bottle on the floor and takes a swig, grimacing as he swallows. Jake is almost the spitting image of his dad. While Billy inherited my dark hair, Jake is fair like Mark with the same small eyes, prominent nose and thin lips. His is a masculine face; strong and angular with a wide expanse of forehead. Billy’s features are more refined. He has my large brown eyes, a smaller nose and fuller lips. Dad always used to go on about what a pretty boy he was when he was little. “Angelic,” Mum called him. I’ve always been careful never to comment on the way my boys look—they’re both beautiful in my eyes—but the world isn’t so circumspect. I lost track of the number of times old ladies would nod at Jake, then gaze at Billy in the stroller and announce, “He’s going to be a right heartbreaker that one.” The comparison wasn’t lost on Jake. “Why don’t me and Billy look the same?” he’d ask when he was nine and Billy was five. “Arrogant bastard,” he growled when Billy was twelve and the letterbox rattled with cards for Valentine’s Day; only one of them was for Jake (and that was from me).

  Jake replaces the sports bottle on the floor and his gaze flickers toward me. “I’m just stressed, that’s all.”

  “About what?”

  His pale blue eyes are unreadable. “Everything. Work, Kira, Dad, this house, Bill.”

  “Is that why you’ve started drinking again?”

  “What do you mean, again?” he says but he knows what I mean. After Billy left I lost track of the times he’d stumble into the house at night, crashing into the kitchen table, swearing at the coat hooks as his hoodie hit the floor, stumbling up the stairs and into bed with Kira. I confronted him about it but he said he wasn’t doing anything that other nineteen-year-olds didn’t do and if he went to work every day and he paid me my rent then what right did I have to hassle him about it?

  What could I do? It was obviously his way of dealing with the loss of his brother. But I can’t stick my head in the sand anymore. I can’t stand idly by as he destroys himself. We need to talk.

  “Jake, we need to discuss what happened on the day of the appeal. I know everyone’s been worried about me, but I can’t just forget about the fact that you were drinking at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  He takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair. “I just had a b
it of a session, okay? We got back from the club at three and I kept drinking because I was pissed off.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Do you have to be such a control freak?” He shifts position to stand up but the sudden movement is too much for his foot and he’s forced to sit back down again.

  The accusation stings and it takes everything I’ve got not to retaliate. Instead I take a steadying breath.

  “Sorry. That was out of order.” He puts a hand on mine, his palm sticky with sweat. “Look, if you really want to know, I was pissed off because some bloke started chatting up Kira while I was in the bathroom.”

  “He was probably just trying his luck.”

  “Yeah, I know. But she looked really happy. She was laughing and playing with her hair, like she did when we first got together.” He shrugs. “And I was shitting myself about Billy’s appeal. So I kept drinking to try and block it all out. That’s all there is to it.”

  I want to tell him that I understand, that it’s been longer than I can remember since his dad looked at me that way too, but this isn’t about me. And it certainly isn’t about Mark. This is about my son opening up to me for the first time in a long time.

  “Oh, Jake.” I wrap my arms around his broad shoulders and pull him in to me. His body feels hard and unwieldy in my arms. “I understand. Really I do. She’ll look at you like that again. I promise. You and Kira have been to hell and back, we all have. When Billy comes home everything will go back to normal. I promise you.”

  Jake stiffens and it’s as though I’m hugging rock.

  Thursday, September 25, 2014

  Jackdaw44: I saw you in town today.

  ICE9: Shouldn’t you be at school?

  Jackdaw44: Skipping.

  ICE9: I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.

  Jackdaw44: Liv was stirring shit with her mates at lunchtime. I’ve fucking had it with girls. I left before I hit her.

  ICE9: You can’t hit girls!

  Jackdaw44: Duh! That’s why I left.

  ICE9: Why do you keep texting me?

  Jackdaw44: I like talking to you. You got a problem with that?

  ICE9: Wow, so aggressive!

  Jackdaw44: Fuck this shit. You’re a piss taker like everyone else.

  ICE9: No, I’m not.

  Jackdaw44: You look down on me. You think I’m a stupid kid.

  ICE9: a) I don’t look down on you and b) You’re cleverer than you let on.

  Jackdaw44: Fucking Stephen Hawking, me.

  ICE9: You know what I mean.

  Jackdaw44: Yeah. Don’t tell anyone though.

  ICE9: Your secret is safe with me.

  Jackdaw44: If you ever need to share a secret you know where I am.

  ICE9: I’ll bear that in mind.

  Chapter 14

  “DS Forbes speaking.” For a split second his clipped tone makes me question my decision to call him. It’s Monday morning and he sounds stressed but I can’t ignore what I saw at the train station. Not if it takes us a step closer to finding Billy.

  “It’s Claire Wilkinson. Billy’s mum.” I don’t know why I added that last bit. He knows perfectly well who I am but a lifetime of introducing myself at the school gates, talking to the kids’ teachers or ringing the doctor’s surgery has drummed it into me. Claire Wilkinson, Mark’s wife. Claire Wilkinson, the boys’ mum. I can’t remember the last time I introduced myself as Claire.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Wilkinson?”

  I can hear noises in the background, keyboards clacking and snatches of conversation.

  “I was at the train station on Friday,” I say. “Temple Meads. I was on platform thirteen and I was . . .” I falter. How do I explain the surety I felt that the ugly building I must have passed a thousand times holds a vital clue to my son’s disappearance? “I was wondering if you’ve searched the disused sorting office. There’s a lot of graffiti on it and Billy did say in his diary that he wanted to tag the station or one of the trains. Maybe he went there instead. Maybe he’s still there.”

  DS Forbes doesn’t respond immediately. Someone in the same room shouts, “Yes!” and there’s a smattering of applause.

  “DS Forbes?” I say. “Did you—”

  “Yes, still here.”

  “Do you think it could be a lead? Do you think he might be squatting there? Sleeping rough.”

  He makes a low humming sound. “I doubt it. That place is completely open to the elements. It’s basically a couple of floors on stilts. You’d be better off sleeping in a doorway.”

  “But he could be there?”

  “Billy could be anywhere, Claire. That’s the trouble. There are a thousand places in Bristol where he could be sleeping rough. Unfortunately we don’t have the time or resources to search them all. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get a lead as a result of the appeal. It’s still early days.”

  “But you’ll look? You’ll get someone to check it out.”

  Another pause.

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  There is no way I can get into the old sorting office. Even if I was fifteen years old I still don’t think I’d be able to make it over the barbed-wire fence, even with a leg up, and the double gates are securely padlocked. I wasn’t going to come here, not after I called DS Forbes this morning, but I wanted to get a glimpse inside, just to set my mind at rest. Cattle Market Road is a busy street, with cars whizzing backward and forward, but most of the shops are boarded up, long since abandoned. There is a red sign affixed to some railings just outside the gates warning the general public that it’s private property. The sorting office is clearly visible through the gray metal bars of the gates. It looks even bleaker from here than it did from the train station opposite. DS Forbes wasn’t joking about it being open to the elements. There are no longer any walls or partitions inside, just a series of concrete columns separating one floor from the next. Even if you could get over the barbed wire why would you shelter here? I’ve spent months wondering where I’d go if I was sleeping rough. I’d want to squirrel myself away from the world so I wouldn’t worry about being robbed or attacked as I slept. I’d go to a women’s shelter if I could or, if I didn’t want to be found, I’d settle down for the night in a shed in the allotments off Talbot Road and take my belongings with me each morning to avoid discovery. We’ve already checked the allotments, and posted up signs in BS4 and BS3 asking people to check their sheds. We’ve searched everywhere and anywhere we could think of—the riverbank near Marks & Spencer at Avonmeads, the local parks, the Downs. Everywhere.

  Well, not everywhere. Or we’d have found him.

  I look down at the notebook in my hands and Billy’s thick, black scrawl:

  —Bristol T M (train?)

  —The Arches

  —Avonmouth

  The Arches. I’ll go there next. It’s a railway viaduct—ripe for tagging—on the edge of Gloucester Road. It’s on the other side of Bristol but that never stopped Billy, not if he wanted to see his friends. He’d set off on his bike and cycle the eight and a half miles it takes to get there from our house. Billy was always secretive about who he was going to see. “Just mates, Mum,” he’d say. When the kids were little and went to a local primary school I knew who all their friends were. We seemed to spend half our lives going to birthday parties and playdates and ferrying the kids to and from sleepovers. But when the boys started secondary school on the other side of town their friends, scattered all over Bristol, became a mystery to me. Jake told us that Billy’s Gloucester Road friends weren’t from school at all. He said they were older guys, in their late teens and early twenties, who lived in a squat. I was horrified. I imagined drugs and squalor and crime and I told Billy I didn’t want him to have anything to do with them. He told me I was narrow-minded and brainwashed by Mark. His friends weren’t down-and-outs, they were artists who refused to become wage monkeys to line some capitalist landlord’s pocket. Why shouldn’t they live in an abandoned building? They we
ren’t doing any harm to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t keep him locked in the house all weekend. The alternative was to ferry him into town in the car if he was going to the cinema with friends and then pick him up afterward but what was to stop him from getting a bus to Gloucester Road the second we dropped him off? Mark said we should take Billy’s bike off him for a bit, until he learned some responsibility. I suggested that Billy take me to the squat to meet his new friends but my son said he’d rather die than do that.

  “Did you introduce your parents to all your friends when you were fifteen?” he asked me and I had to admit, to myself anyway, that I hadn’t. There were countless boyfriends who I met at night after sneaking out of the house. Lots of older brothers and sisters of my mates who’d go into the Co-op to buy us bottles of White Lightning and Thunderbird to drink in the park. One of my male friends had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped after we got stupidly drunk and he was someone I’d known since childhood. I didn’t end up in A&E. I’d already puked into a flower bed.

  I was torn. Billy was fifteen years old. He was stretching his wings. He was a good boy. He was sensible at heart and I trusted him not to do anything stupid. And then he got into trouble at school for graffitiing the science block and Mark said that was that, he was grounded for two months and he was going to take away Billy’s bike. Only we couldn’t find it. And Billy refused to say where it was.