be a concrete patch of ground with a few benches and red velvet-covered stools that had been brought out from inside. I clocked Keith and Tommy straightaway. They were sitting at a table near the smoking shelter, Tommy with his back to me, Keith’s head bent over a newspaper.
I thought of the boy playing on the floor of the back room of the off-licence. Had Keith left him locked in there alone while he went out to the pub?
As I got nearer, Keith looked up. When he saw me he did a double take, as if trying to place me, and said something to Tommy I couldn’t quite hear. Tommy twisted round, smiled and beckoned me over.
‘Thought I’d join you after all,’ I said as flippantly as I could and sat myself on the bench next to Tommy. ‘Mine’s a glass of white wine.’
Winking the same way as the boys at school when they knew you’d snogged one of their mates at the disco, Keith signalled to Tommy, asking him if he was ready for another. Tommy nodded and, with that, Keith hoisted himself off the bench and went inside.
He’d left his newspaper on the table. Folded in two, it showed the top half of an advert for Center Parcs. It featured a family: a mother, father, boy and girl, splashing together in a bright blue swimming pool. Enlarged to fill the page, the oversized dimensions of the family’s smiling eyes made them look unreal, other-worldly almost. I started to feel dizzy and, as I looked away, I caught Tommy’s eye. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod, as though he’d realised something I had yet to understand.
‘So,’ I said, acting as if we hadn’t just seen each other in the back alley. ‘How was your day?’
I caught myself. There was a flirtation to my voice I didn’t realise until I heard it out loud. When had I decided to play it like this?
‘Hot,’ he replied and then paused, letting the word settle, ‘and busy.’ He smiled, his beard creasing up around his acne scars.
I felt myself smiling back.
Tommy reached towards my head and, for a moment, I thought he was going to cup my cheek so that he could kiss me, but instead he fished something out of my hair and held it up for me to see. It was a sweet wrapper. It must have got stuck when I fell off the wheelie bin. We stared at it like it was a rare butterfly, our faces close. But then I saw Keith returning with our drinks and directed my eyes to the left, indicating we had company. Quickly, we drew apart.
Keith retook his seat, the bench creaking and listing so far to his side that Tommy and I were raised a few inches in the air.
‘You’ve got some size on you,’ laughed Tommy, and I was surprised to see Keith’s cheeks pink a little at the allusion to his weight.
‘It’s all right,’ he joked, posturing that way men do when they want to hide their embarrassment. ‘You can’t help being jealous I’m such a magnificent hulk of a man.’
Sitting across from him like this, I took my chance to compare Keith’s face with the three suspect photofits from Jason’s file. I went through each of his features in turn, trying to find points of similarity, but there were none. He had almond eyes and long, saggy cheeks, but I decided any witness would almost certainly have remembered his nose. A protuberance so tiny it looked more like an afterthought than an intended, coherent part of his face, it was dead straight, his nostrils lizard-thin.
No matter. The fact remained. He was the one person in charge of or in close contact with a child I had recognised as Barney. And so I decided that, as I’d made the effort to come here, I might as well see if he could shed any light on my suspicions.
‘So Keith,’ I asked, ‘how do you know Tommy?’
‘The caff,’ he said, patting his tummy. ‘Someone has to keep me in bacon butties.’
Tommy laughed.
I figured my best tactic would be to try and catch him off guard. To ask a question about the boy out of the blue. If the question spooked him in any way, then it might be a sign something was up.
‘How’s the little lad?’ I tried to sound as small-talky as I could.
I scrutinised his face, ready for any change of expression that might betray his guilt or fear. But,