Page 19 of Little Children

‘They had the police come and talk to him to straighten him out once. Scare some discipline into him. Same ones who came after the break-in.’

‘They were burgled?’ Kim asked, starting to wonder what else they didn’t know.

‘A couple of months back now. Never caught the robbers, but you don’t really now, do you?’

Joyce’s question wasn’t at all malicious, and Kim understood why she’d said it. Burglaries were not easy to solve without some kind of hard evidence, and so many of them became embarrassing statistics.

‘And they asked those officers to come talk to Lewis to straighten him out?’ Kim clarified.

Joyce nodded.

If it was Red and Roy, she could now understand Mrs Stevens’s use of their first names.

‘Well, it’s what I heard anyway,’ Joyce said with a pensive expression.

‘Joyce…’ Dennis warned.

Again, Kim waited.

‘I know, love, but he’s been gone for days now,’ Joyce said.

Kim sat up straighter.

Dennis sighed then looked at the two of them before continuing. ‘There are things we know for sure which we’ve told you, and things we’ve only heard that we haven’t mentioned to anyone,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to send you looking in the wrong direction.’

‘That’s very considerate of you, but as police officers we have to consider every option. Please continue.’

Joyce hesitated again, but Dennis nodded for her to spill whatever beans were in her mouth.

‘Well, when we first heard Lewis was missing, we thought it was some kind of punishment gone wrong.’

Kim felt the hairs on her neck prickle. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘We heard that once his brother was told to take him miles away to somewhere he didn’t know and dump him there with no food and no money to teach him a lesson.’

‘You really think he did that? Take his brother and put him in danger like that?’ Kim asked.

Joyce shrugged. ‘I don’t know them well enough. It was something I heard at the hairdresser’s. The mother of a friend of Kevin’s said her son had been involved in the punishment.’

‘Did anyone tell the police?’ Bryant asked.

Joyce shrugged. ‘By the time it came to me, it was third hand, so I didn’t do anything.’

Kim wondered if there was any truth to the story, or if it was one of those myths that grew from nowhere when a child was missing.

‘Have you heard about anything else like that?’ she asked.

Joyce shook her head.

Kim stood to leave and then remembered the question she’d come here to ask in the first place.

‘Just out of interest, do you know why there’s been no community involvement, posters, local searches, social media groups, that kind of thing?’

‘They were asked,’ Dennis told her. ‘Sarah in the end house, who does a bit of cleaning for us, she offered to set stuff up. She asked for a recent photo to print some fliers, but they wouldn’t give her one. They said they didn’t want any fuss or attention cos they were just going to look stupid when he came waltzing back with his tail between his legs.’

‘When was this?’ Kim asked.

‘The first full day he was missing. Trust me, if anyone could have mobilised the troops, it would have been Sarah.’