at the door that day, managed to lure him away to who knows where? Had he been taken, used and then killed? Or was he still alive, suffering God knows what kind of abuse?
Another possibility the police had considered was that someone who had been visiting the flats had taken Barney. The police thought it significant that he disappeared the same week the fair had been in town. The fair was based on the grassland a mile or so from Ashbrook House, and kids belonging to the fair families had been seen hanging out in the playground at the bottom of the flats on more than one occasion. The one thing no one could figure out was why, if Barney had been taken, he hadn’t screamed or put up a fight, and an explanation for this was that he had gone with the children from the fair. In awe of any kid who was older or bigger, he would have happily followed them wherever. However, intense questioning of everyone involved revealed nothing, and they were soon allowed to travel onto their next pitch.
Mrs McCallum, meanwhile, had proved to be an unreliable witness. Often confused, she couldn’t remember Barney being in her flat that day. This was not unusual. Her reality was a shifting one. As far as she was concerned, the Vicky that came to do her hair was the Vicky from five years previously, a lively young thing who had yet to have a child or a husband.
Once Mrs McCallum’s inability to corroborate Vicky’s statement got out, it added fuel to the conspiracy theory that Vicky, or Jason, had been involved in Barney’s disappearance. Some in the press, along with an army of armchair internet detectives, liked to speculate that the reason Mrs McCallum was unable to remember Barney was not because of her dementia but because he was genuinely never there. In carefully worded articles and cruel, uncensored forum posts they posited scenarios in which Vicky had done something, accidentally or intentionally, to hurt Barney before she arrived at Ashbrook House and had then conjured the whole unlikely wandering-out-of-the-flat story as a way of exempting herself from blame.
I returned the architect’s drawing to the file and flicked ahead. The next page in the folder was a plastic wallet containing four photo composites. These were the people reported as being seen in or near Ashbrook House in the days before Barney went missing. Individuals who, despite repeated appeals, the police had been unable to identify. I pulled them out and set them next to each other. The first showed a bald man with bulging cheeks and a mean line for a mouth. The other two, also men, looked to be in their forties and early twenties, respectively. The middle-aged guy had a long, thin face with a goatee beard while the younger one had a pierced eyebrow and hair shaved close to his head. The fourth photofit, meanwhile, was of a woman. Sporting a large mop of frizzy hair, she had small, round eyes that seemed to disappear into the depths of her face and a snub nose.
I tried to compare the three men against my memory of the manager from the off-licence but, apart from his sovereign rings and football shirt, he was a blur. I should have paid more attention, but at the time my focus had been on the boy.
I was about to move on to the next entry when I heard the front door click.
‘Heidi?’ panted Jason. ‘Are you home?’
My stomach clenched. Shoving everything back into the files, I heard the jingle-clunk of him putting his keys on the hall table followed by the tile-patter that meant he was in the kitchen.
‘Heidi?’ he shouted again, out of breath.
I’d almost got everything put back in what I hoped was the order I’d found it when his trainers thumped up the stairs.
I was halfway across the room, about to make my escape, when I remembered the four suspect photofits. They could be useful. I ran back to the cabinet, got out the file, removed the sketches, folded them into quarters and shoved them into my jeans pocket. Replacing the file, I slid the metal drawer shut and was ready to go.
My ear against the door, I waited for Jason to clear the landing and slipped out of the spare room. Tip-toeing into the bathroom, I flushed the toilet and appeared drying my hands.
‘There you are,’ said Jason, re-emerging from the bedroom.
I was all ready to feed him