Avenger

Chapter Four

Only a few houses had any CCTV, and none of them had picked up anything unusual or remotely helpful to the investigation. My husband and I took time off work to just walk around and look, trying to put ourselves in the heads of our son, and what he may have been thinking. If someone tricked him into leaving with them, at what point did he realise he had been kidnapped? What if he had wandered off alone for some reason, and was now lost? What would he do if he found himself to be lost?

A month passed with absolutely no clues and no leads. All the local TV, radio and newspaper appeals had achieved no results, other than revealing to me what a wonderful community of people we had as neighbours. We had so many offers of help, as well as people appearing on the doorstep with meals and warm wishes. The children at our son's school made and wrote cards to us. The outpouring of sympathy warmed my heart. But it couldn’t return my appetite to me, or my ability to sleep, or any tangible sense that there could ever be joy in my world again.

It was the last evening of the month my son was taken from me, when I was sat alone under a blanket on the sofa with the TV on. I say with it on, because I wasn’t watching it, or listening. It was happening around me, but I couldn’t take any notice of it. My husband was in my daughter’s bedroom, putting her back to bed after she awoke from a nightmare. Like me, she had been having nightmares almost every night since my son went missing.

The clock ticked over to 00:00, to the new month, and I burst into tears, as though leaving the month my son went missing in was as good as saying a true goodbye to any hope.

As I sat bathed in the blue light, crying and wanting something nearby I could smash up, a text came through to my phone and it buzzed and bleeped. I seized it off the coffee table with all the intention to throw it across the room, when I noticed the screen read, “Mum.”

I wiped my eyes and unlocked my phone.

Mum: Not far from here. Similar time of day? Thought it worth mentioning x

There was a picture attached to her text. I opened it and saw she had, in spectacular old person Facebook style, sent me a screenshot of a Facebook post.

Six year old James Hyson went missing from outside the front of his home on Desson Lane when playing with his brothers, at 21:14 yesterday evening, in Farstow. Have you seen James or know someone who has? If so please get in touch with police, his family are extremely worried about him.

I closed the image, navigated to Facebook, searched the boy’s name and found the post. I wrote a sympathetic message and then shared the appeal for help. Then I just stared at the face of the lost boy for a minute. Curly hair and dimples, a little smaller than my son but very much like him otherwise. I wondered how many families were going through what I was going through right at this moment. How many more had had a child born to them taken away? Who takes them and doesn't care about the pain they inflict? And even if they can't emphasize with the pain, surely the reality of taking a child from its home and family is so obviously wrong that they must have conceived of it before committing the act.

Or maybe my son really had just wandered off. Me and my husband had been saying right from the start that that wasn’t like him. On foreign holidays to resorts in Spain or Greece or the canary islands, our son had never even wanted to participate in the kid’s clubs, because he didn't want to be apart from us. When he came out of school, it was my parents who looked after him and my daughter until I got home from work. He was always around his family and had never shown any desire for that to change, quite the opposite in fact.
But the police always told us it’s important to keep an open mind, because by blocking off a perfectly reasonable line of thought, we might actually hinder the chances of finding him. Yes it would be unlike him to wander off like this, but this is an extreme situation and we have to treat it like that. Even the people you’re most sure of can behave in unexpected ways in the right environment.

So for a moment, staring at the face of James Hyson, I started to believe it was possible that my son had believed, for what ever reason, he needed to leave the house alone. Why, I wouldn’t know until I could ask him, but it was possible, and I had to be open to that.

And then I noticed the time of day that James Hyson had gone missing.
My son went missing at 21:17. Lucy Wellis went missing at 21:16. James Hyson went missing at 21:14. I sat up straight and re-read the appeal for James. He had gone missing on a Saturday, just like my son and Lucy. All three children had gone missing from the front of their homes. All three had been playing with their siblings at the time.

The dark room shifted out of focus and then back in. I pulled my phone closer to me and started to search frantically for other missing children. James Hyson was from a town over, so I searched for our town and any surrounding.

Makayla Black, missing from outside her home after playing with her sister. Disappeared on a Saturday at 21:21.

Josh Lightfoot, missing from outside his home after playing with his brother and sister. Disappeared on a Saturday at 21:19.

Evelyn Driver, missing from outside her home after playing with her sisters. Disappeared on a Saturday at 21:15.

Rosie Chester, Michael Trent, Preston Greene...I saved every damn newspaper article and Facebook post I could find, my heart racing, my body warm and invigorated again. My cheeks were hot to the touch.

My husband entered the living room. “You should try to get some r-"

“Look at this!” I half-shouted. He paced over, visibly exhausted, and sat next to me. He read the text and attached image from my mother, and then looked at me. He didn’t say anything, he just looked sad.

“Look,” I said, opening one of the links to the other missing children I’d found. “Look, look at the time of day.”
He read it and looked at me again. “What of it?”

“There’s loads of these,” I said passionately, loading up another one. “I’ve saved them all in one place. All these kids went missing at the same time of day, all after they’d been playing with their siblings, all on a Saturday.”

He looked at me blankly and vaguely annoyed. “So?”

“So what does that tell you?” I cried.

“That kidnappers wait until dark to do their kidnapping?” he said in a monotone, his voice contained of contempt for me. His eyes, though tired, flickered with the unmistakable fire of hatred.

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said.
He scoffed.

“Okay then,” I said, rounding on him. “How do you explain that all of them went missing on a Saturday?”

“More kids are out and about on the weekends because there’s no school?” he said. “It’s not hard. I bet you if you find all the missing children’s cases in the country that most went missing on the weekends. After dark.”

“This. Is. A. Pattern.” I said each word with a controlled anger no one could miss. “The first pattern, the first lead, and you’re really going to ignore it?”
He shook his head and stood up. “It’s not a pattern, Ada. It’s a desperate parent seeing things that aren’t there because they’re trying to stay in control of a situation that can’t be controlled.”

“It has to be HIM!” I shouted. My husband ignored me and walked away.

He went into our bedroom, leaving the door open. I slammed my phone down on the coffee table and furiously began wrapping myself in my blanket in a way that probably would have looked hilariously tragic to anyone watching. Lying down on the sofa with a cushion as a pillow, I resolved to sleep here tonight to make a point at how furious I was with him.
After 30 minutes of discomfort, fear, and crying, I got up and went into our bedroom. When I got into our bed, he wordlessly wrapped his arms around me and kissed my forehead. As I fell asleep, I thought about what he had said, and how he had said it in as non-confrontational and non-accusatory way as possible, and only I had gotten angry. And maybe, just maybe, he was right. Then the face of James Hyson swam before me, as did the faces of the other children, and the last thought I had before the ineffable takeover of sleep swept over my senses, was that all the children had been six years old when they went missing.