you doing this?’ he asked, after a long pause. ‘I know you mean well, but believe me when I tell you that that boy was not Barney.’ His eyes were bloodshot. ‘The forensic artists, they know what they’re doing. They’ve talked me through every new picture, why the bone structure develops as it does, why they think his eyes will now look like they do, why his nose will seem bigger and his mouth smaller.’ He propped his feet up on the sides. I looked at the exposed soles. Pocked with tough, yellow callouses and half-healed blisters, they charted his love affair with long-distance running. ‘That kid, his face didn’t match up to any of it. Not that I could see.’
He was right. Of course he was right.
He let out a breath and, taking my hand in his, used his thumb to start stroking the edge of my wrist.
‘It’s more than that. As soon as the midwife handed Barney to me I knew he was mine. Everything about him – his smell, the way he looked, the shape of his fingers and toes – all of it meant he was my son. He was only just born, but he knew it and I knew it.’ He reached out his other hand and, cupping his palms together, cradled my hand inside them. ‘Those stories you hear about babies being mixed up in the hospital and the parents not realising, that could never have happened to me. The connection we had, that bond, it was animal-like.’ He released my hand and it dropped back under the water. ‘It never went away, even as he got older. That’s why I’m certain the next time I lay eyes on him, I’ll know. No matter how many years have passed. There’ll be that connection. I’ve told the police – when the time comes, when they find him, I want the psychologists and social workers kept at bay. For the first while, anyway. I don’t need our reunion to be supervised. I’ll know him and he’ll know me.’
I thought about the family reunions we sometimes liked to watch together on YouTube. The kidnapping back-stories were as varied as they were international. There was the Israeli boy, now man, taken by his father in order to override what he felt was an unsatisfactory custody arrangement; the Florida woman, stolen as a baby from the hospital where she had just been born; the South African girl, abducted aged four, only to be recognised two years later as her mother passed by her on the street.
Jason’s particular favourite featured a family in Bogotá whose six-year-old son had been kidnapped and held by a drug cartel for four years. At the time the boy was taken, his father had been a government official responsible for delicate congress negotiations that, if successful, would have resulted in an extradition treaty extremely damaging to the cartel. The boy had been taken as a bargaining chip but then, confusingly, even after the legislation stalled, his captors had refused to release him.
The YouTube clip was made up of grainy, bleached-out news footage and narrated in Spanish. Shot from a distance, it showed the mother, father and three sisters waiting nervously by their car. Behind them were trees. I always thought it looked like they were standing by the edge of a forest. As the video begins, the family are holding hands, searching the horizon, watching and waiting. Then, off camera, there is the sound of a car approaching. The family stiffen. As the camera pans right, we see a tall, thin boy wearing a football strip emerge from a blacked-out people carrier. As soon as the boy is despatched, the van accelerates back the way it came. The boy stands there bewildered for a few seconds and, almost before he has time to know what is happening, his family are rushing forward to embrace him.
The first few times we’d watched it I’d felt the same as Jason. It was life-affirming. It gave hope. But then I googled the story. It turned out there was a reason the cartel had not released the child, even though he was no longer useful. After he was kidnapped, the boy had been placed in the care of one of the cartel’s captains and his wife. The couple were childless and, over time, had genuinely grown to love and care for the boy. They’d claimed that the child loved them too, and so it had been accepted that the child