Someone Else's Son by Sam Hayes Read Free Book Online

first show aired. ‘It’s complicated.’ She meant her relationship with Dennis and the benefits that afforded. That was nearly ten years ago now. A heated fling – him wanting more, her killing it dead before he got too needy. Soon she would reach her five hundredth show. Carrie suddenly felt incredibly old; incredibly lonely.
    ‘Let’s go, Mr Plod.’ She tapped the young cop on the shoulder.
    ‘My mate used to live around here.’ He was doleful, suddenly grey-faced, staring around the desolate rows of pebble-dashed buildings. ‘Got killed. Drugs deal screw-up. Fifteen, he was.’
    Carrie smiled. This was good. A cop with a conscience. ‘Then you’ll have lots in common with Mrs . . .’ She glanced at her notes. ‘With Mrs Plummer, won’t you? Her kid was stabbed in the neck when he refused to give up his mobile phone to a gang of youths.’ She walked off, shaking her head, wishing she had a pair of those plastic shoe covers that surgeons used. The path was littered with dog muck and she didn’t reckon the house would be much better, if the outside was anything to go by.
    It was as the door eased back by a couple of inches, while Carrie was focusing on the thinnest, most gaunt and unbearably sad woman she had ever seen, that her mobile phone rang. Automatically she pulled it from her jacket pocket. She glanced at the screen. It was her son. With a swallow, she cut him off. Now was really not the time.
     
    Max Quinell liked to be on his own. With parents like his, he figured it was OK to escape for a few hours. No one knew the shed was down here.
    Inside, as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he glanced around as always. Nothing was missing. It was all in perfect order, unlike the rest of his life. OK, so the shed was dilapidated, the wall timbers clinging to each other with rot, and the roof dry-lined with an old tarpaulin, but for Max it was a home away from his homes. This was his real home. No one bothered him, no one else had yet staked a claim on the ten-foot square shack that sat forgotten beneath the railway bridge – a workers’ store once, he presumed – so therefore, by rights, Max considered it his. One day, he thought to himself, I might move in for good.
    He sat down in the old car seat that he’d dragged up from the canal bank. Ford, he reckoned. He pulled a packet of fags from his pocket and lit one, using the same match to light a scented candle on a wooden crate. It had been part of a set – lavender bath oils, face mask, the candle in a blue glass jar. He was going to give them to his mum for Mother’s Day, but really . . . He laughed, coughing as the smoke coursed into his lungs. That particular runner’s-up gift pack would have been better off going to Oxfam – or not, he thought, as he remembered how the face mask had stung his skin. Crap quality, he reckoned. It had given him a crop of spots for a week.
    ‘So,’ he said, gazing lovingly at his stuff. ‘Who and what next?’ He pulled the list out from under the crate. It ran into six pages now. Thirty items per page, that’s what he reckoned – going on two hundred items. Two hundred strokes of luck – or genius and skill, he preferred to think. Especially the ones with the captions. He usually won those; had always been good with words.
    The boxes were stacked as high as the old tarp clinging to the roof. Big ones at the bottom, smaller ones at the top. It made sense. It was order. He’d learnt that from his mother. The stuff that didn’t come in boxes was piled in the corner as best he could manage. It annoyed him, the lack of square edges, of stability, of dependability. He knew that if he piled the toasters, the juicers, the hairdryers, the fridges, they would be in the same spot the next day. Randomly shaped packets, long tubes, soft squashy toys often took a tumble and greeted his feet when he opened the door.
    Max chewed a pencil and ran his finger down the list. His nails were long. Best for the guitar, except his