Page 45 of Little Children (Detective Kim Stone #22)

Forty-Four

Gornal Wood was one of the three small villages, along with Upper and Lower Gornal, forming the larger Gornal area.

The area also housed the Straits Estate, a housing conurbation built in the early sixties.

Kim still found it amusing that all the streets within the Straits were named after famous poets and writers. She smiled as they took a left on Chaucer Avenue to turn into Kipling Road.

Her smile disappeared as she remembered what they were here to do.

The vast majority of the houses they’d passed were semi-detached and well kept.

‘I think this is it,’ Penn said, parking at the bottom of a sloping red-brick drive that ended at a single-car garage to the right of the house.

Kim squeezed between the two small cars on the drive to reach the front door. She took a deep breath and readied herself before knocking on it. Informing family members of a death didn’t get any easier with practice, especially in the case of a child.

The door opened and for a second her heart stopped.

She did a double take. Any doubt she’d had about being in the right place evaporated.

Standing before her was Josh Lucas’s double. Well, Josh Lucas if he’d been alive, fit, healthy, well nourished and not covered in a hundred bruises.

‘Hi, is your mum home?’ Kim asked.

‘Well, one of them is,’ the teenage boy offered with a smile.

Kim smiled back in response. There was something engaging about this kid.

She was reaching for her identification when a casually dressed woman appeared behind him.

The smile instantly froze on her face.

Kim left her identification where it was. She didn’t need it. The woman knew exactly who they were.

‘May we come in?’ Kim asked gently as the colour began to drain from the woman’s face.

The boy looked from one to the other. ‘Is this about Josh?’ he asked.

Kim said nothing.

‘Harry, go to your room,’ the woman said without looking at him.

‘I’d rather stay,’ he said, stepping back and taking his mother’s hand.

She regarded him for just a second before squeezing his fingers and motioning for them to enter.

‘Clare Lucas?’ Kim asked as they followed through to the lounge. Clare Lucas was the person who had reported her son missing.

The woman nodded and waved towards one of the sofas as she and her son took the other chairs.

‘Is there anyone you’d like to call?’ Kim asked, taking a glance at the photos that graced the walls.

Although randomly placed, Kim could see a timeline that appeared to start when the boys were six or seven years old. There were photos of the four of them until the twins were eleven or twelve. After that, Harry was the only child in the photos.

Sadness for the story represented in the images washed over her, hitting her right in the stomach. Josh would never return to complete this family again.

Clare shook her head in answer to Kim’s question. ‘My wife is in hospital – kidney removal.’ She paused. ‘Have you found him?’

Her expression said that every word in that sentence travelled up her throat with razor blades. She didn’t want to utter the words, and yet it was the only question she wanted to ask. Once the question was answered there would be no return to the place of limbo, the place of hope.

Kim nodded as Harry scooted closer to his mum and took her hand again.

‘Mrs Lucas, it’s?—’

‘Clare, please call me Clare,’ she said.

Kim understood. She didn’t want to hear the inevitable words, the news she’d been dreading for years, from someone formally addressing her by her full name.

‘Clare, it’s not good news,’ Kim warned her.

The woman swallowed and nodded for her to continue.

‘Josh’s body was found earlier today at?—’

Clare cried out as Harry buried his head against his mother’s arm.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Kim offered, knowing that every sorry in the world wasn’t going to lessen her pain.

Kim waited while mother and son absorbed the news, holding on tightly to each other.

Her gaze swept over Harry, a boy with whom she had more in common than any other person in the room and whose pain she understood better than anyone.

Clare had lost a son and there was no refuting the depth of that pain, but Harry had lost the other half of himself, and she knew from experience that loss would affect him for his whole life.

Finally, Clare raised red eyes to meet her gaze. Kim could see many questions forming there. The answers to which were going to help no one’s grieving process, but least of all Harry’s.

She began to turn to her colleague, but he was one step ahead of her.

‘Hey, bud, mind showing me to the kitchen?’ Penn asked.

Harry looked to his mother, who patted his arm and nodded.

‘Lovely photos of the boys,’ Kim said, casting her gaze around the room.

The time would come soon enough for the details she would need to reveal.

Clare fixed her gaze on a photo of the two boys dressed in matching outfits. Kim noticed that was the only one where the boys were wearing the same clothes.

‘We never did that again,’ Clare said as a pain-filled smile passed over her face. ‘Josh made it clear he didn’t like it.’

Looking closer, Kim could see a frown on one of the boys’ faces.

‘He told me in no uncertain terms that he liked blue and his brother liked green.’ She shook her head. ‘He was always the most outspoken one. The one who liked to fill in the details of what they liked and didn’t like. Harry didn’t talk very much at first.’

‘They were adopted?’ Kim asked.

Clare nodded. ‘We always knew we wanted to adopt, and we didn’t want babies.

We wanted kids that were hard to place. We knew we had the love and strength to do it.

We heard about the boys. Their father had died in a hit-and-run, and their mother had taken her own life a week after the funeral.

Not surprisingly, they were difficult kids.

They were confused, grieving and terrified.

After the third foster home returned them, we stepped in. They were six and a half years old.’

Kim admired the woman immediately. Taking on two young boys full of grief and anger was not a task for the faint-hearted.

She raised an eyebrow, and Clare understood.

‘Not even for a second did we regret it. The harder they fought, the more determined we were to give them the love and stability they needed. The adoption agreement was for life, and they are our children.’

Kim said nothing, allowing the woman to just talk.

‘Harry warmed to us first. It was joyful watching him come out of his shell and learn to trust us. It gave us the confidence that we were doing something right. Josh was a tougher nut to crack,’ she said as a tear slid unnoticed over her cheek.

‘It was Jacks – Jaqueline, my wife – who cracked him in the end. Ever the pragmatist, she called a family meeting, right before their seventh birthday, and asked him directly why he couldn’t accept our love.

I’ll never forget it.’ She wiped at her cheek.

‘Go on,’ Kim urged as though trying to give her a buffer of good memories before she had to break her heart.

‘He said we were only linked by a piece of paper, not blood, and so we could give them back any time. He said he wasn’t going to get comfortable because it was only temporary.’

Kim’s heart ached for the little boy full of doubt and fear.

‘Jacks immediately knew what to do. She fetched a needle and pricked everyone’s thumbs.

Once we’d all pressed our thumbs together, she said, “See, now your blood runs in our veins and ours runs in yours. We will never give you up.”’ A fresh wave of tears escaped.

‘So simple a gesture, but it worked. From that day on, he allowed himself to trust in our love and our family.’

Kim choked back the emotion. She had very nearly had that family herself.

‘I want to know everything,’ Clare said, wringing her hands together. ‘And yet I don’t. Once I know the details, I’ll have to accept it’s real.’

Kim understood. The words of finality hadn’t yet been spoken. They were not out there yet. He was still a missing child.

‘Can you just run me through that last day again?’ Kim asked. It had been four years, but she guessed the memory of it had never faded.

‘It was a Tuesday, changeover day.’

Kim frowned.

‘I work Saturday to Tuesday; Jacks works Tuesday to Friday. Tuesdays were always a bit of a juggle, not least because it was Josh’s night playing badminton.

I was running late to pick him up but still had plenty of time.

There was a small fire in a bin at the gym, everybody was evacuated and Josh disappeared.

The guys at the gym assumed he’d decided to head home early, since it’s less than a mile away, and I assumed the same when I pulled up and was told about the fire.

I drove home the way he’d walk, but he was nowhere in sight.

Not one soul saw him walking home that night.

It’s like he just vanished.’ She met Kim’s gaze. ‘But he didn’t, did he?’

The question meant she was ready for some answers.

Kim shook her head.

‘Are you absolutely sure it’s Josh?’ Clare asked.

‘I was the moment I saw Harry.’

The penny dropped quickly, and horror filled her face. ‘He’s been alive all this time?’

Kim nodded.

‘Oh God, no,’ she said, covering her face as though trying to keep that knowledge from reaching her.

‘Oh God, no,’ she repeated, putting her hand over her heart.

‘I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that any suffering was over quickly, that he wasn’t having to miss us as much as we were missing him, that he was at peace.

It was how I was able to pick myself up and carry on. ’

The tears continued to fall down her cheeks as the realisation hit. ‘We continued living. We had to. There were times we laughed, adventures we went on thinking that Josh was at peace. We grieved but we also lived, and the guilt of that will never…’

Kim said nothing, unable to give her that comfort.

‘When did he…?’ she asked, struggling to say that final word.

‘Recently. Days,’ Kim confirmed.

‘Can I see him?’ she asked hopefully, as though the act would bring him back to life.

‘We will need you to confirm that it’s Josh,’ Kim said. ‘But you need to be ready. He hasn’t been taken care of by the people that abducted him.’

Clare closed her eyes against the pain of that knowledge. ‘He’s suffered, hasn’t he?’

Kim nodded. How much wouldn’t be clear until Keats had had a better chat with him.

‘If only I hadn’t been late. If only the gym hadn’t had that fire,’ Clare said, again burying her head in her hands.

Kim wished she could offer some kind of comfort to the grieving mother, but all she could do was try and find the people responsible for her son’s death.

And one of the ‘if onlys’ that Clare had mentioned definitely needed a closer look.