Friends & Rivals

  At 9.15 p.m., feeling slightly foolish but not sure what else to do, Catriona called the police. ‘He didn’t go to school this morning, and nobody’s seen him since he left the house.’ The sergeant on the other end of the line was sympathetic and reassuring. Thirteen-year-olds did this sort of thing a lot. He might be in the cinema somewhere with his phone off, or at an arcade. Chances are he’ll walk in the door in an hour or so, wondering what all the fuss is about.

  Catriona hung up and tried to relax, turning on an old episode of NCIS to watch with Rosie. But she couldn’t concentrate, and at ten o’clock went up to Hector’s room, hoping to find some sort of clue as to his whereabouts.

  As usual the bedroom was a tip, clothes everywhere. Dirty football boots had shed clumps of mud all over the carpet and bed, and drawers were left hanging open, like gaping mouths appalled at the squalor in which teenage boys choose to live. Catriona glanced over at Hector’s desk, piled high with empty crisp wrappers and half-eaten crusts of sandwiches. She tried switching on his computer, but didn’t know the password. Maybe Rosie would know it? Pulling open a drawer, she found a scrunched-up piece of paper with a list scrawled on it in biro.

  ‘Shorts, T-shirt, Nintendo, charger, trainers …’

  It’s a packing list, thought Catriona. But why would he be packing? Then she saw the last three items and her blood ran cold. ‘Cash (mum office?). Present for J. Passport.’

  Passport? Catriona ran to her office, heart pounding, and opened the drawer on her dresser where she kept the family passports and important documents. Please don’t let it be gone. Please, please don’t let it be gone.

  Ivan scooped Kendall up into his arms and carried her into the bedroom.

  ‘You were amazing tonight,’ he whispered, laying her down on the bed and climbing on top of her, peeling down the shoulder straps of her dress.

  ‘You think so?’ giggled Kendall, her pupils already dilating with desire at the prospect of what was to come. The quickie they’d had before dinner had been rough and exciting. Ivan had taken her on the living-room floor, using a small vibrator in her ass at the same time as he fucked her, giving Kendall a terrifically intense orgasm. She could hardly wait for round two.

  ‘Wait there,’ he whispered, springing up and darting out of the room. Kendall lay back and wriggled out of her dress, wondering which toys or props he was going to fetch for her this time. Still in her knickers and bra – she wanted to leave him something to take off – she started to touch herself, building her excitement but being careful not to let herself get too close to the edge. Ivan would be furious if she came without him.

  After five minutes, she was starting to feel furious herself. Where was he? Just when she was about to get up and go and find him and drag him back to bed, Ivan came back in looking ashen.

  ‘It’s Hector,’ he said dully.

  ‘Again?’ asked Kendall. But it wasn’t a hostile question. She could see the misery on Ivan’s face. ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘He’s gone missing. Run away, I don’t know. He’s taken his passport and a few hundred quid in cash,’ said Ivan. ‘The police are at the house now. They’ve got people out looking for him.’

  Kendall walked over and put her arms around him. She knew that Hector’s hostility towards her was a sticking point in her and Ivan’s relationship. If she proved herself sensitive and mature now, perhaps that would change. ‘Try not to worry too much,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sure they’ll find him. Lots of teenagers do this sort of thing. I’ll bet you anything Catriona gets a phone call as soon as the money runs out.’

  ‘I’ll have to go down there in the morning,’ he said bleakly. ‘Talk to the police. Check on Rosie.’ He almost said ‘and Cat’, but wisely thought better of it.

  ‘Of course,’ said Kendall, hugging him. ‘I’ll come with you if you like.’

  Ivan hugged her back tightly, grateful that for once she wasn’t making a scene. ‘Thanks, sweetheart, but I should go alone. It’s a family thing. Besides,’ he added hastily, watching Kendall’s face fall, ‘there’s always a chance Hector might show up here. Someone should hold the fort, just in case.’

  They both knew that there was zero chance of Hector turning up on his father’s doorstep. And that if, by some miracle, he did, one glimpse of Kendall would be enough to send him running for the hills. Kendall’s own theory was that half the reason the boy played up was to force his parents back together. With every Hector-induced crisis, Ivan was sucked back into the vortex of his old life, back to Catriona, while Kendall was the one left abandoned.

  In the past, the strategy had worked perfectly. Indeed, last time she and Ivan had almost broken up over it. But this time Kendall bit her tongue. I refuse to be outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old boy. I will keep my cool and wait for the storm to pass.

  ‘OK,’ she said, kissing Ivan on the lips and leading him back to bed. ‘I understand. But do try and get some sleep now, darling. There’s nothing you can do tonight. And you never know, he may even have turned up by morning.’

  Hector didn’t turn up by morning. Or the next morning. Or the next.

  Inevitably the press got wind of the story that Ivan Charles’s troubled teenage son had been reported missing, and soon Hector’s picture was appearing on the front page of national newspapers. Catriona’s house in Burford morphed into Piccadilly Circus, with friends and neighbours and parents from the school all ‘dropping in’ to see what they could do to help. Ned Williams was an almost constant presence, much to Ivan’s annoyance, but there was little he could do if Catriona wanted him there. Even more unnerving from Ivan’s point of view were the daily calls from Jack Messenger, checking in on Cat and for updates on Hector. It hadn’t occurred to Ivan that Catriona might have kept in touch with Jack after the divorce, still less that the two of them could become close. He wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his house and to leave his bloody wife alone. Except that it wasn’t his house, and Catriona wasn’t his wife, all of which added to his already sky-high stress levels.

  Meanwhile, the police’s early sanguine optimism about Hector’s likely return had gradually been replaced by a much more sober concern for his wellbeing. Airports, ports and train stations had all been on high alert for over seventy-two hours now, but no one had seen the boy since a CCTV camera picked up a grainy image of what looked to be Hector near a bus stop in Oxford early on Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, the police began to focus their suspicions on the mystery ‘J’ for whom Hector had intended to buy a present before he disappeared, trawling his computer for any friends or contacts whose names began with that initial and interviewing every Jenny, Jason and Jim at Burford High. The worst moment for Catriona came when Detective Inspector Rathers, the officer in charge of the case, suggested that ‘J’ might not be a real friend at all, but an older man who had groomed Hector on Facebook using an assumed identity.

  ‘Often these kids think they’re going to meet a girl, or a mate their own age, but the truth is they have no idea who set up half these profiles or what their motives might be.’

  Catriona slumped down on a kitchen chair. Ivan rested a comforting hand on her shoulder and asked bluntly, ‘And what might their motives be? Sexual? Violent?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said DI Rathers seriously. ‘In your case we should consider the possibility that there might be a financial motive involved. Although, if that were the case and someone had snatched your son, we’d have expected a kidnapper to have revealed their demands by now. Of course, all this is just speculation, Mrs Charles,’ he added. Poor Catriona looked as if she might be about to faint at any moment. ‘He could just as easily have gone to meet up with a girl; the two of them might have panicked because of all the media coverage and decided to lie low.’

  On Friday afternoon, after a perfunctory call to Kendall, Ivan dropped Rosie off at a friend’s house for the weekend. The Burford house was a zoo, with police tramping up and down the stairs day and night and photographers hanging from every nea
rby tree or rooftop. It didn’t make sense for Rosie to live cooped up there like a prisoner, and both Ivan and Cat struggled to control their anxiety around her.

  ‘Promise you’ll call me if you hear anything, Daddy. Anything at all, even bad news.’ As Rosie got out of the car, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I promise,’ said Ivan, kissing her. ‘And there won’t be any bad news. You know your brother, he’s the proverbial bad penny. He’ll turn up.’

  ‘Do you think … do you think me making friends with Kendall in the summer might have been the last straw?’ Rosie asked, her lower lip wobbling with emotion. ‘He was different after I came back from France. So angry.’

  ‘No,’ said Ivan firmly. ‘You had nothing to do with this, Rose. Nothing. It’s me he’s angry with, not you.’

  As always on his rare trips to Oxfordshire, Ivan was booked in at Burford House, a cosy, family-run hotel in a charming Tudor building on the high street. He drove back there now to shower and change before walking over to Catriona’s for supper and their first totally private chat in four days.

  He found Catriona in the kitchen, sitting at the table staring blankly at the wall. In front of her were a bowl of potatoes that she’d begun to peel, then forgotten about, overwhelmed by desperate thoughts about her son.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Ivan quietly, sitting down next to her. Catriona looked up, startled. She hadn’t even recognized that he’d come in. ‘Any news since I’ve been gone?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  For a while they sat together in silence, Ivan peeling, Catriona staring numbly ahead. Eventually Catriona spoke. ‘DI Rathers was asking me more questions this afternoon, about the morning Hector left and the evening before. He said that anything I remembered, anything I could tell them about Hector’s state of mind might be vitally important.’ She started to cry. ‘But I couldn’t tell them anything, Ivan. I was so blotto the night before, I doubt I’d have noticed if Hector had come home with a sub-machine-gun under his arm. And the morning he left, I was out cold. I didn’t even … I didn’t even say goodbye to him.’

  Ivan got up and pulled her to her feet, hugging her tightly. He felt the tears stinging his own eyes. ‘Cat, you have to stop this. Wherever Hector went, he’d been planning it for days, maybe even weeks. You having a few drinks had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘It wasn’t a few drinks,’ Cat sobbed. ‘I was blind drunk, Ivan. What if I never see him again?’

  ‘You will see him again,’ Ivan looked at her sternly. ‘They’re going to find him, darling. Look at me. They are going to find him.’

  Catriona looked at Ivan through a haze of tears. It was amazing how he could be so strong in some things, and so weak in others. She realized, slightly to her own surprise, that she was glad he was here.

  He started to stroke her hair, the way a father might pet a child. ‘Why don’t I stay here tonight? In the guest room, obviously. I don’t like leaving you here alone.’

  ‘I’m used to being alone,’ said Cat, not to make him feel guilty but because it was the truth. ‘Besides, I don’t suppose Kendall would be too pleased about it.’

  ‘Kendall understands,’ said Ivan brusquely. He did not want to think about Kendall. Even hearing Catriona say her name felt wrong and uncomfortable. Here, in this house with his wife, the woman he’d spent half his life with, Kendall didn’t exist. None of his life in London existed. ‘Anyway it’s not just for you, it’s for me too. I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight.’

  He moved closer. For one terrifying, thrilling moment, Catriona thought he might be about to kiss her. Did she want him to? Before she had an answer to the question he backed away almost shyly and sat back down at the table. ‘Only if you feel comfortable, of course,’ he mumbled, picking up another potato and staring at it intently, avoiding eye contact. ‘I wouldn’t want to impose.’

  Catriona smiled. It was a long time since she’d seen this side to Ivan. The kindness, but also the neediness, the lost little boy wanting his mother. ‘You’re not imposing. Of course you can stay.’

  It was a bittersweet evening. Catriona fried up some mince, onions, garlic and home-grown tomatoes and made a delicious scratch shepherd’s pie. While she was cooking, Ivan set the table, pouring a glass of red wine for himself and a Diet Coke for Catriona at her request, and chatting about anything and everything other than Hector. Old friends, anecdotes from their Oxford days that had both of them alternately laughing and gasping with horror at what complete idiots they’d been back then. It felt good to be distracted. But every few minutes the laughter would stop, and one or other of them would fall silent, their minds drawn inexorably back to Hector and the hideous uncertainties of the present.

  In the end, after supper, Ivan suggested getting out some of the old photo albums and looking at pictures of Hector and Rosie as babies. ‘Are you mad?’ said Catriona. ‘I’m barely holding it together as it is.’ But to her surprise she found flipping through the pages immensely calming. Anything to push out the image of Hector locked up in some paedophile’s cellar somewhere, or lying cold and dead in a ditch.

  At eleven o’clock, leaving Cat with the pictures, Ivan went into the kitchen to make them both some hot chocolate. Opening the larder, he found shelves stuffed with chef’s ingredients, herbs and spices and an endless bottled array of pickles and chutneys and jams, as well as the usual staples of family life: Coco Pops, Hobnobs, giant multipacks of Mini Cheddars, Hector’s favourite. He thought about his and Kendall’s kitchen in Cheyne Walk, with its unused chrome appliances and bare cupboards. All they had in the fridge was champagne and Kendall’s Essie nail polish. All of a sudden he felt unbearably lonely.

  Sloshing milk into a Le Creuset pan and sticking it on the hot ring of the Aga to boil, he filled two mugs with chocolate powder and looked around the room. It was smaller and far less grand than the kitchen at The Rookery, but Cat had managed to make it bright and homely, as warm and welcoming as a womb. Photographs of the children and examples of their childhood artwork were everywhere, as well as some of Catriona’s own more recent work. A jug of fading peonies littered petals onto the scratched farmhouse table, and jaunty, mismatched china in a rainbow of colours hung from hooks on the ceiling above Ivan’s head. Hector must have been mad to want to run away from here, thought Ivan. I must have been mad.

  Through the half-open door he watched Catriona, poring lovingly over the pictures of their children. She’d gained some weight and looked a mess in an old, holey brown cardigan, with her tangled hair sticking out at all angles, the result of running her hands through it so many times. But there was still something luminous about her. Her flushed, youthful skin, soulful blue eyes, but most of all the immense kindness and warmth that seemed to seep out of her pores like sap oozing from a tree. It struck Ivan then like a bolt from the blue.

  I still love her.

  ‘Ivan!’ She spun around suddenly. ‘The milk! It’s boiling over, I can hear it.’

  ‘Oh! Shit.’ Ivan grabbed the pan, scalding his wrist with bubbling white liquid. ‘Fuck!’

  Just then the phone rang. Ivan and Catriona stared at each other for a second in panic – at eleven at night, this wasn’t a social call – then Catriona literally dived on the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Cat. How are you?’ Jack Messenger’s voice seemed to come from another world. Languid, happy, relaxed.

  It wasn’t the police, calling to say they’d found a body.

  It wasn’t Hector, calling to say he was coming home.

  Relief and despair landed a double punch to Catriona’s stomach so violent she had to sit down. ‘Jack. Hi.’ She shook her head at Ivan, who had a face like fury. What the fuck was Messenger doing calling at this time of night? How selfish could he possibly be? ‘I’m OK,’ lied Catriona. ‘I was just going to bed.’

  ‘Well before you do,’ said Jack, ‘I have someone here who’d like to talk to you.’

  There was a crackle on the en
d of the line. Then Catriona heard the most wonderful, miraculous two words in the world. ‘Hello, Mum.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my GOD. Oh my actual GOD!’

  Hector Charles turned fully around to stare at the gold hot-pants-wearing blonde twins rollerblading past him on the Santa Monica bike path. Unfortunately he himself was on a bike at the time and came within a hair’s breadth of ploughing into a young mother jogging with her stroller.

  ‘Moron!’ yelled the mother. ‘Look where you’re going!’

  Jack Messenger pulled his godson aside. ‘They’re not worth getting killed for, you know,’ he grinned.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived in Burford,’ sighed Hector. ‘This place is amazing. I’m never going home.’

  The relief Jack felt when Hector had turned up on his doorstep six days ago was hard to describe. He’d spoken to Catriona almost every day since the boy had gone missing, and though he’d always been supportive and encouraging, privately he’d begun to think that perhaps the worst really had happened. So when the familiar freckled, dirty, mischiev-ous face appeared on his front porch, a little older than when Jack had last seen him but otherwise not much changed, he’d been too overjoyed even to be angry.

  He had, however, insisted that Hector call his parents immediately. ‘You do realize they’ve been out of their minds with worry?’

  ‘Mum has, you mean,’ said Hector bitterly.

  ‘They both have,’ said Jack firmly. Much as he hated Ivan, he knew from Cat just how torn up he was about Hector’s disappearance. ‘And Rosie. You’ve had half the British police force out looking for you, you know. Your face is on an Interpol alert.’