“Are they serious?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe they think he saw something, but it seemed… formal, like he was a suspect. Mum’s going mad. It’s so stupid, he only went down there to take some pictures of the flood. And how the hell would he keep Aiden locked away for ten years without any of us knowing?”
“Rob, try to stay calm.”
“I’m so fucking angry, Emma.”
“I know, but that isn’t going to help anything.”
“I need to go. Mum needs me.”
I slumped into the chair at the kitchen table. Of all the possible suspects, I’d never thought to distrust Aiden’s grandfather. The man was a walking bore. But… he was a birdwatcher and a carpenter. He spent quite a lot of his time outdoors in silly sheds staring at birds. If he could build a shed, what else could he build? A cage? I shook the thoughts out of my head. No. I knew Peter. He wasn’t… But then I thought about how I’d known Amy. I’d seen how her mask had slipped, and now I knew her true face. What if the same were true for Peter?
I sipped the cool water and wished for something stronger. The baby moved, reminding me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to open the bottle of brandy we had stashed somewhere. Another unwanted Christmas present we hadn’t got round to throwing out.
Instead, I put my head in my hands, and tried to work it all out in my mind. I knew that Aiden had gone missing between 1:15 and 1:20pm. That was when Amy said she got distracted by the flood and left the classroom for five minutes. Only one of Aiden’s classmates said they saw him leave, and that was Jamie, a little boy whose father worked in the GP surgery with my late mother. Apparently Jamie had asked Aiden where he was going, and Aiden hadn’t answered.
At that time, Amy had been placing buckets under streams of water leaking through the roof along the school corridor. The head-teacher and the janitor were walking around the school building assessing each classroom. Jake was with Simon from IT looking for dry classrooms to relocate their students. According to those statements, none of them had time to take a child and hide him somewhere. I highly doubted they would have had time to take him deep into Rough Valley Forest either—though I didn’t know for certain that was where Aiden had been kept captive.
If Peter had been alone for the longest amount of time out of all of them, maybe I couldn’t trust my son’s grandfather after all. I felt sick. I’d felt sick all throughout this process, but especially now. I ran my finger along the rim of the glass and tried to piece everything together. After a few minutes I called Rob, but there was no answer; then I tried Jake but was sent straight to his answering machine.
I got up from the chair and paced around the kitchen. My hands were red-raw from where I’d continued to rub them; hand lotion was doing nothing for me now.
This was all going on far too long. There’s only so much pressure the human mind can take. I was reaching breaking point. I had been ever since that woman keyed my car. I’d been walking along a razor-sharp edge, barely keeping my balance. I just needed to hold on for Aiden. It was strength he needed, not weakness.
I decided to make something. Perhaps using my hands would help. So I went to the kitchen cupboards to take out a loaf of bread and make us both some sandwiches. I highly doubted either of us were hungry, but at least I’d be doing something. That was when I noticed the stack of letters on the end of the kitchen work surface.
We had a letter organiser, but with everything going on, the mail had ended up piling on the edge. Denise and Marcus hadn’t been around as much, so Aiden’s fan mail was going neglected. There were letters from all over the world telling me how sorry they were for what had happened to Aiden—though I also got letters from all over the world telling me I was a terrible mother and that I deserved to go to hell.
What caught my eye was the card from the post office. It was one of those cards that informed you that the incorrect postage had been placed on the letter. I would have ignored it—I didn’t particularly want to pay for postage for another letter of abuse—but the card had the postcode of the sender written on the card. It was local. I put the post code into Google and it came up with the York College of Lifelong Learning. That was where Jake taught art history every Tuesday and Thursday. It was also where I’d requested a prospectus from, to check that Jake actually worked there. The woman on the phone hadn’t known the instructor’s name, only that he’d taken some leave, and the website had only listed the courses, not the names of the tutors.
I’d forgotten all about requesting the brochure, and now it seemed the incompetent woman on reception had underpaid the postage when sending it to me. I snatched up my bag and car keys and hurried through to the next room.
“Get your coat on, Aiden. We’re going to the post office.”
35