Like This, for Ever

18




RIGHT, PHOTOGRAPHS OF Mum, where would they be? Barney was in his dad’s study, knowing he had an hour at most. The room was lined with bookshelves. His dad taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at King’s College and sometimes Barney thought every book printed in those two hundred years was right here in this very room. Still, finding things was what he was good at. The first set of bookshelves housed textbooks. Books about books.

He moved on around the room, wondering how his dad ever managed to find anything. Before Barney could spend one day in here he’d have to organize the shelves so that they were in alphabetic order at least. And probably by date of publication. In a locked case under the window were first editions.

Not a single photograph album in the room. If they weren’t here, they could only be in the attic. On the back of the door hung the jacket his dad had been wearing the previous evening. Barney remembered how odd his dad had seemed, how he’d been holding something in his hand that he obviously didn’t want Barney to see. Something that he’d tucked into his jacket pocket.

From downstairs came the sound of a key being turned in the front door. Barney reached out, pulled the small, soft ball of something woollen from his father’s pocket and looked at it. A child’s glove. Black, with bumps on the palm side to help the wearer grip a tennis racket or something. Not his. For one thing, it was too small. It was like a little kid’s glove. He shoved it back into the jacket pocket.

‘You home, Barney?’ called his dad from the hallway, as he always did.

‘Yeah,’ called back Barney as he slipped out on to the landing and up the next flight of stairs. First mission aborted. On to the next.

In his den, he took down the solar-system poster and swivelled his chair round to face the missing boys’ wall. When he’d first started following the investigation, he’d used both official news and social media sites to find out where the bodies of the abducted boys were being dumped.

Barney sat and looked at the map, letting his focus slip and waiting for the patterns to emerge. After a couple of minutes he knew it wasn’t going to work. Three sites just didn’t give enough data for any sort of pattern to stand out. All the locations of the sites told him was that the boys had probably been taken by someone who knew that part of the river.

On the other hand, it might be possible to learn something from the roads. The killer must have brought the boys by car, and there were only a certain number of roads he could have travelled along. So if he plotted where the boys had disappeared from, then marked the most likely route to the dump sites, if those lines crossed anywhere, wouldn’t that indicate where he might live?

Movement outside caught his attention. Lacey was leaving the shed at the bottom of her garden. As usual she was in gym clothes. Her face was red and the hair around it damp. Would he tell her that he knew the name of her stalker? That he was one of the dads at his school? Whatever she might say, it wasn’t normal behaviour, was it? To hang around outside someone’s house at night?

Then Barney forgot about Huck’s dad when his own appeared carrying the laundry basket. As Barney watched, he took a sheet and hung it up. Then another. Sheets from his bed, he’d explained that morning, which needed washing early because he’d spilled tea on them. Except, to Barney’s certain knowledge, there were no striped sheets anywhere in the house. His dad had washed sheets that didn’t belong to them.

‘Just had a text from Lloyd’s mum,’ his dad said when Barney walked through the kitchen door. Luckily, because Barney hadn’t had much practice lying to his dad, his back was turned. He was at the worktop by the sink, preparing vegetables in the food slicer.

‘What’s she want?’ said Barney, trying to sound uninterested.

His dad lifted a saucepan down and scraped the vegetables into it. ‘Inviting you to a sleepover tomorrow night. Want to go?’

As the delicious smell of frying garlic came sneaking up towards Barney’s nostrils, he told himself to be careful, not to sound too eager.

‘Suppose so.’

‘Why they call them sleepovers is beyond me. Overnight rampages might be more to the point.’

‘So can I go?’

His dad paused in the act of stirring and looked at him. ‘What’s the homework situation?’

‘French vocabulary test on Monday, two sheets of long division and a book review. I can do it all after football tomorrow.’

‘If I say yes, what are the chances of you getting any sleep?’

Barney’s eyes started to sting. That would be the ginger his dad was using, possibly chilli. He loved Friday-night dinner. ‘I can sleep on Sunday,’ he suggested.

‘Well, that’s going to be a fun weekend for me. On my own on Saturday night and you in bed all Sunday.’

‘I won’t go if you don’t want me to,’ offered Barney, surprised to find that he meant it.

His dad smiled. ‘I’m kidding, course you can go. I’ll give Lloyd’s mum a call now.’

Not good! Lloyd would have borrowed his mum’s phone to text his mates. If parents started phoning her, the game would be up. Barney picked up the morning’s newspaper and turned it round as though he were reading the heading. ‘She keeps her phone on silent when she’s in the house,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I’d text her.’

His dad glanced round. ‘You’d better do it,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’ll drop you off at five.’

Oh, this wasn’t going well.

Barney picked his dad’s phone up off the counter. ‘They’re only ten minutes away,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to take me. I’ll tell her I’ll arrive about five.’

‘No you won’t,’ said his dad. ‘I’ll drive you and I’ll pick you up.’

‘Dad!’

The two of them made eye contact. ‘Deal-breaker, Barney.’

When his dad said that, there was no point arguing. OK, all wasn’t lost. Lloyd could tell his mum, who thought they were having a sleepover at Sam’s, that Barney would be picking him up on the way. His dad would drop him off, watch him disappear inside Lloyd’s house, then five minutes later the two of them would set off, supposedly for Sam’s. He quickly tapped out the message to Lloyd’s mum’s phone, which was temporarily in Lloyd’s possession, and sent it. Then he deleted it. Finally, he tapped out the one his dad would see if he checked Sent messages. Sneaking around and covering tracks was hard work.

‘Dad, do we still have Granddad’s boat?’

His dad spun on the spot, wooden spoon still in hand. ‘What on earth made you ask about that?’ he asked.

Barney shrugged. ‘Some kids were talking about boats today. I just remembered. We haven’t been for a while, have we?’

His dad turned back to the hob. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not much fun in winter, is it?’

‘We should go and check, though,’ said Barney. ‘Just to make sure it’s alright and not leaking again or anything.’

‘I’m sure it’s fine.’

‘How do you know?’

His dad spoke slowly, as though explaining something difficult. ‘One or other of the neighbours would have let me know if there’d been any trouble.’

‘Do you keep the key safe?’

‘Yes, thank you. It’s on my keyring with my car and house keys.’

No, this was not going well at all. And since when had his dad got so blinking organized?

‘By the way,’ said his dad, over his shoulder again, ‘the kitchen knives are getting blunt again. Want to sharpen them for me?’