to use the time alone to my advantage and went up to the spare bedroom.
Requisitioned as a kind of ‘Find Barney’ HQ, as well as housing the computer on which Jason monitored various missing persons forums, the room also contained a filing cabinet full of Barney paperwork. Carla had confirmed what I already knew to be true: I needed to find something, no matter how small, that linked the off-licence, or the man that ran it, to Barney’s disappearance. And if I couldn’t, then perhaps my conscience could rest.
I’d only gone a few steps into the room when I became distracted by the line-up of ‘future’ Barney sketches Jason had permanently tacked to the wall. Designed to help the public identify Barney as he changed and grew, each time another year passed, the forensic artist would create a new version of what they thought he might now resemble. The police readily offered up these images for consumption, while at the same time being at pains to point out how much harder it was for their experts to produce an accurate projection of a child whose last ‘real’ photo available showed them at a very young age. Until they reach five, a child’s facial features more closely resemble those of a baby; after that, their face gives much clearer indications of the adult they might one day become.
Stepping over Jason’s old bag of welding tools, I moved in close to the most recent picture, a projection of an eight-year-old Barney. The artist had styled his fair, almost yellow, hair into a crew-cut and framed his eyes with thick blond lashes. I tried to marry up the picture with my memory of the boy from the off-licence. Jason had been right when he said they didn’t match. The hair colour and eyes were the same, but the rest of his features were more doubtful.
I noticed that a corner of one of the early sketches had wilted forward onto itself, revealing a large dent in the plaster. I traced my thumb inside its hollow oval, remembering the day when, a little over a year ago, another sighting of Barney had come to nothing. On that occasion the collision of metal against wood, mirror and glass had been immediate. As soon as he’d got off the phone with the police, Jason had taken his welding tools to this and other parts of the house in a fit of rage that ended only once he’d exhausted himself.
It was always the same. Despite Jason’s years of experience at dealing with disappointment, at some later point there was always a cost. Take the last few weeks. Since the false sighting in Istanbul, life had been business as usual. Jason was eating OK, sleeping OK, working OK. But then, little by little, I knew he’d resort to the coping strategies I’d seen so many times before: rising at dawn to go for punishing ten-mile runs, skipping teaching jobs so he could binge-read the files he’d put together on Barney’s disappearance, paying heed to the internet trolls who taunted him with false claims of his son’s whereabouts. It was like watching a lit fuse. Sometimes it might burn slowly, so slowly that you were lulled into thinking it had fizzled out. But then, just when you were least expecting it, there’d be that nitrate flash.
I withdrew my thumb from the hole in the wall and some plaster dust came away with it. Jason had remained subdued since this last setback. Still, I was under no illusions. Rubbing the pale pink powder between my fingertips, I reattached the picture and took a step back. My stomach noosed tight. Jason’s disappointment would produce its normal fireworks, of that there was no doubt. It was merely a question of time.
Barney’s five-year-old face stared out at me, his dark eyes wide and questioning. I wondered, as I often did, what Lauren might look like if she were still alive. How tall would she be now? What about her hair – would she have cut and coloured it into the latest teen fashion or would she have kept it long? I thought ahead, to her birthday tomorrow, and what the day might bring. I knew that Mum and Dad would phone at some point and that Mum would probably tell me about the flowers she had taken to her grave that morning. A sharp, small reprimand that I hadn’t been there in Kent to go with her. Not that I’d ever wanted to visit