Page 30 of Five
Pushing my ill-timed thoughts aside, I address Henry instead. “She’s named after an actor who used to drive fast cars and motorbikes.”
Henry looks up, staring at me in confusion, his head tipped to one side. “Why do you call your boatsheif it’s named after a man?”
I open my mouth, then close it again, because truthfully, I don’t have an answer to that question. It’s never even occurred to me.
“Boats are always called ‘she,’” Neve tells Henry, her eyes revealing her amusement at my expense. “It’s tradition. And a queen is a girl, remember, so it sort of makes sense.”
Thankfully, Henry accepts this explanation and takes another piece of paper to start a new drawing.
“Is that you swimming towards McQueen?” I ask, looking at his stick-character rendition of a horizontal figure surrounded by blue.
Henry shakes his head. “No, that’s me flying in the sky.”
He pauses for a long moment, staring at his picture. “I really want to fly. The man said he’d take me if I went with him, and I was going to go, because flying would be fun. I would be like a bird.”
“Flying is fun,” I agree solemnly, adding a couple of ‘m’ shapes to my own picture, to mimic birds.
Henry stares at them, his chubby little fist clutching the crayon so hard that it finally snaps. He looks up at me with huge blue eyes, his bottom lip wobbling. “But then he grabbed me, and I got scared, and I screamed, so now I’ll never go flying.”
“I’ll take you flying,” his father promises in a broken voice. The man would probably promise his son the moon right now.
Henry lights up. “You will? Really?”
Mister Barlow gives a short, decisive nod. “Really.”
I paste a huge grin on my face and inject as much excitement into my voice as I can muster. “Won’t that be awesome?”
Henry smiles back, his face alight, much of his recent trauma forgotten. It gives me the opportunity to ask a few key questions. “And going with your dad will be much more fun, won’t it? Or is the man who said he’d take you a friend of yours?”
The kid chatters happily. “Going with dad will be thebest! And that other man, he might have broken his promise, ‘cos I don’t know him, but my dad will never do that.”
“So, you’ve never seen the man before today?” Henry shakes his head, but he’s distracted, carefully copying the birds I’ve drawn in my own picture. But his next words prove he’s not as preoccupied as he seems.
“And that man’s not my friend, because he tried to grab me. Bobby grabs me, and I hate it, but he’s only playing. That man squeezed too tight, even when I shouted at him not to. When I shout at Bobby, he stops.”
I throw a questioning glance at Henry’s father, who shrugs, but it’s Neve who answers my silent question.
“Bobby is one of the other children at the daycare.”
“Bobby’s my friend and he stops grabbing me when I tell him. That man, he’s not my friend and he scared me,” Henry says, anger clear in his childish voice and in his actions as he furiously scribbles some big black clouds in the sky, obliterating his carefully drawn birds.
“Well, Henry, you’re lucky to have a friend like Bobby who listens to you, and you don’t need to be scared, because you have Ms. Murray to look after you when you’re here, and your dad to love and protect you at home.”
Henry stops his angry coloring and looks at me, his forlorn expression tearing at my heart. “And you have me, too,” I tell him, meaning it. “Because I’m a policeman, and I want to put that naughty man in jail for scaring you. But you have to help us. You have to help by promising never to talk to strangers again, and by telling me what the man looked like, so I can find him.”
His face scrunches up and for a moment I think he’s going to cry. “I know I shouldn’t talk to people I don’t know,” Henry admits, his head down, even though he looks towards his dad, and cuts a glance to his teacher from the corner of his eye.
She reaches forward and strokes the back of his head, her touch soft. “It’s okay, Henry. We all mess up every now and then, right? This wasn’t your fault.”
His little shoulders slump. “But I don’t know if you can find him.” He raises his eyes to mine. “Because he had a cold, so he was wearing a scarf that covered his face from here.” Henry mimes covering his nose and mouth with his hand. “He said it was so he didn’t give me germs.”
I try to eke out a few more details but nothing useful comes of it, and I can see Henry is starting to lose interest, so I decide to call it a day.
Pushing to my feet and gritting my teeth at the shooting pain in my knee, I shake hands with Henry’s father. “Let me know if he says anything else that might be useful,” I murmur, and he gives me a nod before taking his son by the hand and walking out.
I notice he doesn’t so much as say goodbye to Neve, who’s standing by the door and holding it open, and I wonder if he’s just preoccupied, or if he blames her for the incident.
She turns to watch him go, a wrenching defeat in her posture, then moves aside to let me leave when she realizes I’m there.