The Lost

It was footage from Stokes’s interview. Jonah immediately recognised the man from the park. Big and raw-boned in a greasy, olive-green combat jacket. Head shaven smooth, and a mocking sneer on thin lips. When he twisted around to look behind him at the door, Jonah saw the radiating lines of a black spider web tattooed on the back of his neck.

He’d slouched in the chair, seeming bored by the questioning. The smirk never left his face, and at one point he’d even yawned.

‘You got it all wrong, pal,’ he’d drawled at the interviewing detectives, his accent heavy enough to be a parody. ‘I’m not into kiddies, ’specially little boys. Now if he’d got a sixteen-year-old sister, I might be interested.’

He’d laughed, and Jonah had wanted to reach into the screen and tear the man’s throat out. He never even heard Chrissie enter the room, or realised she was there until she spoke.

‘Is that him?’

She was standing behind them, looking at the phone screen over their shoulders. Gavin had tried to put it away, and then dissuade her from watching, but she was having none of it.

‘Theo’s mine as well. I want to see.’

She watched the footage in silence, all the way to the end. When it had finished, she’d turned to Jonah with an expression of utter contempt.

‘You let that take my son?’

She’d walked out without another word.

Late that night, the doorbell had rung. It was DCI Wells, the SIO in charge of the search. He’d already spoken to Jonah once that afternoon, when he’d confirmed that Owen Stokes was in custody and being questioned. When Jonah saw him on the doorstep with the family liaison officer, both of them grave- faced, he’d known he was about to hear what he’d dreaded.

But it wasn’t the confession from Stokes he’d been expecting. He and Chrissie had sat side by side but apart on the sofa as Wells told them about an overgrown culvert hidden in the thicket of rhododendrons by the play area. The culvert had already been checked and had been found to have a cover of iron bars. What had been overlooked was how rusted the bars were, or that the hinges had broken, leaving a narrow gap at one side. It was difficult to see and difficult to get to, Wells said, apologetically, at least for an adult.

Though not for a four-year-old boy.

Then Wells had shown them a photograph. It was of a small shoe, a miniature trainer, dirty and water-stained. The same brand, size and colour as Theo had been wearing the morning he’d disappeared.

It had been recovered from inside the culvert, Wells had told them. The search hadn’t been able to go very far in, because the dank stone tunnel quickly narrowed, descending to a network of subterranean waterways too small for an adult to fit inside. But, again, not the smaller body of a child.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jonah had said. ‘What about Stokes?’

Wells had shaken his head, as though that was already old news. He’d been released, he told them. CCTV cameras outside the park entrance had showed the man leaving on his own. Not only that, but a couple walking their dog in the park had confirmed that Stokes had approached them asking for money. It had turned out they were Salvation Army officers, not in uniform, who’d tried to persuade him to go to the hostel. He’d eventually become abusive before walking off, but by the timescale Jonah himself had provided, it wouldn’t have been possible for Stokes to have anything to do with Theo’s disappearance.

Jonah felt like he was suffocating. ‘No, that can’t be right,’ he’d said. ‘Theo wouldn’t just wander off like that. Someone must have taken him.’

‘How would you know?’ Chrissie had said in a flat voice. ‘You were asleep.’

She’d been led out by the liaison officer, leaving Jonah and the DCI alone in the living room. Jonah had stared down at the photograph of his son’s shoe, still held in his hand.

‘So what does this mean?’ he’d asked, unwilling to comprehend it even now.

Wells had looked as though he’d rather be anywhere else but there. ‘We’ll do our best to find him,’ he’d said, ‘but you have to understand the difficulties. The stream feeds into a network of underground watercourses that run for miles. Even with fibre-optic probes, we can only go so far. I’m sorry, but you have to be realistic.’

And then, with a sigh, the DCI had said the words that finally brought it home to Jonah, that stabbed home the realisation that he was never going to see his son again.