My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller by Deborah O'Connor Read Free Book Online Page B

I was struck, as always, by the insalubrious nature of Ashbrook House. There was no Keith Veitch, but among the 154 people Jason had noted, there were three prostitutes, one drug dealer and two registered sex-offenders. One of the flats was derelict and regularly used as a doss-house by local drunks and addicts.
    The question of whether or not someone from the flats had been involved in Barney’s disappearance was something Jason obsessed over endlessly. Since we’d got together, he must have talked through dozens of different potential scenarios. Had Barney wandered off and been taken on the spur of the moment by someone who wanted a child of their own? Had a nearby paedophile noticed Barney’s regular visits to Mrs McCallum’s flat and, when he’d appeared 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