Despite the growing confidence, he obeyed his mother. She hurried to the table and flipped shut the lid of the laptop. ‘You say nothing,’ she said. ‘Understand? Nothing.’
In that moment, all his previous suspicions were confirmed. He saw what she feared most and where her priorities lay. The child still in him wanted to scream at her, to beg her to stop this. Didn’t she care what she was doing to her family?
The young man in him knew that doing either would be pointless.
He swallowed the words he wanted to say and went upstairs to his room. Thoughts of revenge continued to plague him, though he fought so hard to push them to one side.
He didn’t know then that just weeks later he would find a way to put that email to good use.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The boy sitting in interview room two had a string of snot sliding from his left nostril. His face was red and his cheeks puffy from an assault of prolonged tears. Beside him, his mother sat with the back of her hand pressed firmly to her mouth. She too looked as though she’d been crying.
DC Mason had filled Alex in on what had been said by the woman when she’d come into the station with her son ten minutes earlier. With a rising sense of disheartenment, Alex closed the interview room door behind her and sat at the table opposite the mother and son.
‘It’s Jake, isn’t it?’ Alex said, tilting her head in an attempt to get the boy to make eye contact with her. Jake lowered his head further, trying to conceal the evidence of his tears. He was about eleven years old, Alex guessed – last year of primary school or maybe first of secondary – and the partly shaved scalp might have given him the misleading look of a boy who wouldn’t be seen crying anywhere, least of all in front of his mother.
‘You’re not in any trouble,’ Alex told Jake, looking to his mother. ‘I just need you to tell me what your mum told the man down at reception.’
The boy turned to his mother, managing to avoid eye contact with Alex. He elbowed her gently in the ribs, prompting her to do the talking for him.
‘I really need this to come from you, Jake,’ Alex said, stopping the boy’s mother before she could begin. Had the boy seen what he had claimed to, or had his child’s imagination and the tricks of the dark made him see things that weren’t truly there? ‘It was the night before last, is that right? Can you tell me exactly what happened, from the beginning?’
The boy looked at Alex for the first time, his dark eyes still glassy with tears. When the words came they came shakily, tripping over one another. ‘We shouldn’t have been in there,’ he stammered.
‘It’s OK, Jake, you’re not in any trouble. It doesn’t matter if you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, OK. I just need to know what you saw. Start from the beginning. Where did you meet your friend?’
‘At his house,’ Jake said, the stammer easing slightly. ‘He lives just round the corner.’
‘And you were on your bikes?’
Jake nodded. Alex raised her eyebrows slightly, gently prompting him to continue.
‘Come on, Jake,’ his mother said impatiently.
Alex kept her focus on the boy, but from the corner of her eye she could see his mother anxiously shifting in the chair beside him. Alex felt a sinking weight drop inside her. The boy’s mother had seen the news. They were both thinking the same thing.
‘Jake,’ Alex said, putting her hands on the table. She felt a sense of urgency now, an inescapable feeling that they were wasting valuable time. ‘You are not in trouble, but it is really important that you tell me what happened. Where, when, what, OK? Everything exactly as it happened.’
The boy gave a loud sniff and dragged his sleeve across his running nose. ‘We found this place a few days ago,’ he said, looking awkwardly at his mother. ‘It’s all boarded up, but we got in around the back; we found a place we could climb up and get in. We just wanted to explore. We didn’t take anything or break anything, I swear. There was a room, upstairs. We went in and there—’
The boy’s words broke on his tears. ‘He made me promise I wouldn’t tell.’
‘For God’s sake, Jacob,’ his mother snapped. ‘That doesn’t matter. The detective told you you’re not in trouble – this isn’t about you.’
The boy’s sobs grew louder.
‘Jake,’ Alex said calmly. ‘Tell me what you saw in that room.’
Between gulps of air, Jake began his account. ‘It was dark. There were things everywhere, like bits of old furniture and stuff. It was really dusty in there. We didn’t go in – we only pushed open the door and just poked our heads round to have a look. Riley had a look first. He told me to follow him.’
He stopped. What neither Jake nor his mother knew was that officers were already on their way to the building. Jake and his friend Riley might have been mistaken in what they thought they’d seen, but Alex wasn’t going to take any chances.
‘Go on, Jake.’
The boy took a deep breath. ‘There was someone in there. I think there was anyway. She was sitting in a chair. We ran when we saw her. I don’t know if she saw us. I think she might have been sleeping.’
Alex looked away from the boy and to the table, hoping that Jake’s naive assumption might have been right but knowing it probably wasn’t.
‘You didn’t tell your mum straight away?’
Jake shook his head. ‘Riley said we’d get into shit. Sorry,’ he said, his hand moving to his mouth and his young face flaring red. ‘Trouble. He said we’d get into loads of trouble and made me promise not to tell.’
‘But you did decide to tell?’
Jake’s mother caught Alex’s eye. ‘That woman on TV,’ she said. ‘The one they showed a picture of last night…’ She left the unfinished sentence dangling in the air between them.
‘Was the woman you saw the same woman in the picture on TV?’ Alex asked Jake, wondering why the boy had been allowed to stay up so late the previous evening. She was thankful that for whatever reason he had been. ‘Is that when you told your mum?’
The boy sobbed loudly and turned to his mother, hiding his face in the curve of her arm. His tears answered Alex’s question for him.
She was distracted from her thoughts by one of the DCs entering the room.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, boss. Have you got a minute?’
Alex followed him into the corridor, about to reprimand him for his abrupt intrusion.
‘We’ve just had a call in,’ he told her, before she had the chance. ‘Lola Evans. Turns out she was a stripper.’
Chapter Thirty