invited, along with members of the police and social services – and other parents who, like us, had had their children stolen from them.
I’d seen Jason on the first morning. I’d just finished a seminar in which I and key personnel from the worlds of teaching and healthcare had spent an hour discussing the inadequacy of DBS criminal record and sex-offenders’ register checks as a vetting tool for staff who work or come into contact with children. Afterwards, I’d wanted nothing more than a cup of tea and a seat in a quiet corner, but instead I’d been corralled into coming along to the next scheduled session by our seminar’s moderator.
The session was on Megan’s Law and Jason was part of a panel there to discuss its various pros and cons. He, along with the other speakers, was given a formal introduction at the start and I remember thinking how unnecessary that was in his case. Jason, along with his then wife Vicky, had endured so much press coverage in the months after Barney was taken that it had driven their relationship to its very public end. I and everyone else in the room had known who he was as soon as we set eyes on him.
Wearing an oversized suit borrowed from a friend, he’d kept rubbing at the shortest part of his buzz-cut hair, near the base of his scalp. With dark brown eyes, a gap-toothed smile and weathered, wind-burnt skin, he looked both older and younger than his twenty-seven years.
I spoke to him that afternoon. There’d been a coffee break and the only remaining free seats had been right next to each other. That night he came back to my hotel room and we’d talked until the early hours. The conversation was erratic. We flitted between funny potty-training anecdotes (it turned out both Barney and Lauren had had a thing for leaving stealth poos behind the living-room curtains) and shy confessionals (Jason revealed he had once been so desperate to talk to his son again that he had resorted to the services of mediums and psychics). Then, as dawn was breaking, we had talked about our new love-hate relationship with sleep. We admitted that we both now struggled with the lottery of what each night may bring. Sometimes we hoped to see our children in our dreams and sometimes we recoiled from the acute cruelty of our own unlimited imaginations. Jason understood that, which no one else could. Our dreams had the power to sustain us just as much as they had the power to destroy us.
Obsessing over our stories was like finally being allowed to pick at a scab on your knee you’ve wanted to attack for ages, a scab that everyone else has told you to leave alone.
Six months of a long-distance relationship later and Jason had asked me to come and live with him. I didn’t hesitate. I packed up the flat in Rochester and moved north within the month.
Our anniversary plans dispensed with, Jason ran his finger through the bubbles and began to talk about a new qualification he wanted to go in for. Were he to pass, it would take him to the next level of first-aid instructor. I nodded enthusiastically, trying to show my support, but all the while my thoughts kept straying back to the boy in the shop.
I didn’t want to raise the subject again, but I couldn’t get his face out of my head.
‘About that boy today –’ I ventured, once he was done.
‘We’ve talked about this,’ he jumped in. ‘You were only trying to help.’
I took a breath, steeling myself for what I was about to say.
‘Maybe we should go back and take another look?’
There was a pause in which I was grateful not to be able to see his expression. If I couldn’t see him then, for a few seconds, I could kid myself that he’d changed his mind.
‘Heidi, no,’ he said quietly. ‘I asked you to leave it alone.’
‘Please,’ I said, twisting round to face him. ‘What with that mesh cage and the awful lighting, maybe you didn’t get a proper view? What harm could it do?’
He took another sip of beer. I decided to keep going.
‘Or, if you don’t want to go back then maybe we could call Martin and ask the police to feed it into the investigation? They could do a background check?’
He finished the last of his drink and in one movement, tossed the bottle across the room, into the bin.