The Sleepover Read online

  DCI Maxwell reaches into his own pocket and takes out a handkerchief. “I’ll need to keep hold of this, if I may. Our forensic guys might be able to recover prints from it.”

  “Prints. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”

  “You’re not a detective, Izzy.” His mouth twists, as though wryly acknowledging my need over the last two days to become an amateur one.

  “The battery’s dead. You’ll need a charger.” I stand up and cross the room to the sideboard in the corner. The top drawer is full of odds and ends, and it takes me a few moments to untangle the correct USB cable. “Sorry. I hope this is the right one.”

  “Let’s see.” DCI Maxwell takes the cable, plugging it into a wall socket by the sofa and carefully connecting it to the phone. “Bingo.” Perching on the bulky arm of the chesterfield, he studies the screen as he waits for the Nokia to power up. “Any password?”

  I shake my head. “I asked Nick not to put one on his phone. Not that I ever checked it,” I add, not wanting to sound like a snooping parent. “But I wanted the option. Just in case.”

  “You did the right thing. We’ve already looked into Nick’s text history via the server. Didn’t find anything of interest. But . . . Ah. This message is new. Hasn’t even been read, by the looks of it.” He tuts. “Which explains why it didn’t show up on our searches.”

  “What is it?” I stand next to him, craning my neck to get a look. “Who’s it from?”

  “‘True friends don’t tell,’” the detective reads aloud. “Sent shortly after midnight on Friday.” He looks up at me with a frown. “From Jason.”

  “What?”

  “Yep.” He stares at the text again, saying almost to himself: “So he sent this after Nick went missing.”

  “Was there any reply?” My heart is pounding; my head is spinning.

  “No,” he says, without looking up. “Like I say, it doesn’t appear that Nick read it. Damn. We must have missed this when we checked Jason’s texts on the server.” He frowns at the phone, then pulls out an evidence bag from his jacket pocket and slips it inside.

  “What does it mean?” I watch as he starts pacing the room, desperate to know what he’s thinking. “Is it a threat? Jason warning Nick to keep quiet about something?”

  “Perhaps,” he says noncommittally, still pacing.

  “Or some kind of pact. ‘True friends don’t tell.’ Maybe the boys made a pledge to do something crazy.” I look at DCI Maxwell in horror.

  He stops pacing and stands in the middle of the living room, his expression taut with concentration. “Neither Adrian nor Samir have mentioned any pact.”

  “Well, they haven’t said much about anything, have they?” I slump down on the sofa, disappointed that what feels like it should give us answers only seems to be adding to the confusion. I feel like I’m trying to run toward Nick on quicksand, and with every passing minute I sink deeper and he disappears farther out of reach.

  “True. They haven’t,” the detective agrees.

  “Maybe this text explains why? Maybe Jason pressured them into silence.”

  “Well, there were no texts like this in their message histories, either. If the boys did make some kind of pledge . . .” He pauses. “They’re young. Scared. My hunch is that if there was a pact between the boys, Jason’s death would almost certainly prompt them to break it.”

  “Unless it was just between Jason and Nick. And Adrian and Samir weren’t in on it?”

  “Again, possible. But let’s not jump to any conclusions. We could interpret Jason’s text in any number of ways. A vow as part of some kind of pact. A threat. Even a suicide note. It’s all speculation, though. He could simply have been having a joke with the boys.”

  “A joke?” I shake my head.

  “It was Friday the thirteenth. The boys were having a sleepover. Messing around. Sending scary messages, perhaps? Yes, the timing appears to suggest a connection with Nick’s disappearance, but that’s purely circumstantial. Possibly even coincidental.”

  “Oh. Right.” My hope of finding answers dips even further.

  “Kids send thousands of texts, Izzy. There’s no particular reason to believe this meant more or less than any other.”

  “But Nick’s phone was hidden outside Jason’s house. That has to mean something,” I appeal in desperation. Jason was the first one I suspected of knowing something about Nick’s disappearance, not only because of their past relationship but also because of his evasive manner yesterday morning. However cautious the detective is being, the discovery of Nick’s phone at Jason’s home rings loud, clanging alarm bells for me.

  “Nick could have put it there himself,” DCI Maxwell points out logically.

  “But when? Why? I’m not sure he even knew about that hiding place, either.”

  The detective sighs, holding his hands up. “Look, I’m slightly playing devil’s advocate here. The point is, we can’t just join up all the dots and make the picture we think fits. We’re still almost completely in the dark about what happened on Friday night.”

  The word “dark” pulls my eyes to the window. It’s early evening now, and almost pitch-black outside. I glance at the clock on the sideboard. Nick has been gone since Friday night, and it’s now Sunday evening. If we don’t find answers soon . . .

  Where are you, Nick? I close my eyes, remembering TV news interviews with parents of missing children convinced they’d feel it if their child were dead. I trace Nick’s face with my mind’s eye, searching for any sense of him. All I see is darkness; all I feel is blank terror.

  “So what’s next?” I say, pinning all my faith on the detective now.

  DCI Maxwell doesn’t reply. Instead he takes out his phone, swiping the screen before pressing it to his ear. “Sarah? Yes, I’m with her now. The boys are with you at the station? Good. Yes, I thought that, too.” He ends the call abruptly, without signing off.

  I take in the tension around his mouth, the sharp expression in his eyes. “You think Adrian and Samir are in danger now, too, don’t you?”

  “All I know is that four boys were at that sleepover. One is missing. One is dead. That leaves two.” He buttons up his coat, heading to the door. “It’s like a bloody ring of roses.”

  And they all fall down, I think, sending up yet another prayer: that Nick isn’t next.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The police station feels like a maze of corridors. I check my voice mail as I follow DCI Maxwell, wondering where Craig is and why he’s still not picking up his phone. It’s beginning to feel as though he’s dropped off the face of the earth, too. After insisting to DCI Maxwell that I accompany him to talk to the boys and their parents, I phoned Craig, leaving yet another message, this time asking him to meet me at the police station. He hasn’t replied.

  Now I think of it, he hasn’t been in touch since he left my house yesterday afternoon. I know I upset him with my impulsive accusations; I guess I offended him further by excluding him from the press conference. I made the decision with the best of intentions—so as not to confuse Nick, if he was watching—but I suppose it’s understandable if Craig feels hurt.

  I hope he isn’t sulking: aside from wanting to ask him if Nick ever talked about going to live with him, I want to break the news about Jason in person. I look around, hoping to see him as we emerge into the main reception area. The first person I see is DS Clarke, talking in a low voice to a dark-haired woman I recognize immediately. “Beth. Beth!”

  She doesn’t hear me; all her attention is focused on Adrian as she turns and hurries him toward the exit. DS Clarke must have told her about Jason. That will have been shocking enough, and I’m sure she and Ayesha are both acutely worried about their own boys’ safety now. Two boys down; two to go. I can’t stop myself imagining the headlines.

  “Where are they going?” I ask DCI Maxwell. “They can’t have interviewed Adrian already.” I was hoping to speak to him myself. Samir, too.

  The detective rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Let me find out.”

  I try to overhear his hushed conversation with DS Clarke, but I’m distracted when Adrian lets go of his mum’s hand to turn and wave at me. Touched by his brave smile, and concerned to know how he’s really taking the news about Jason, I start walking toward him. DCI Maxwell blocks my path.

  “Samir Matlock has made a statement,” he says immediately.

  “A statement?” So his hunch was spot on: Jason’s shocking death has driven Samir to talk after all. “Does he know where Nick is? Has he told you what’s happened?”

  “Let’s find a seat somewhere quiet, Izzy.” He takes hold of my arm, leading me back up the same corridor we walked down moments ago.

  “Oh. Sure.” I look over my shoulder for Beth and Adrian. They’ve gone now, and I feel a jolt of frustration that Beth has heard Samir’s statement before me. I hate the feeling that I’m always the last to know; I’m suddenly terrified about what the detective needs to usher me into a private room to tell me.

  Drifting through the door he holds open, I look around blankly as we enter the small room. With radiators blasting out heat against the winter freeze, it’s oppressively airless. I can hardly breathe, and my chest tightens even more as DS Clarke follows us in, closing the door behind her.

  They have bad news; I can read it in her eyes. She doesn’t greet me as she usually does, either; she doesn’t offer condolences for Jason’s death. Instead, she takes hold of my hand. I want to yank it away; I don’t want to hear what I think she’s about to tell me.

  “Izzy, we think we know where Nick might be,” she says gently. “Samir told us everything.”

  “Is he . . . ?” Alive? Dead? The room seems to spin and I grab the chair DCI Maxwell pulls toward me just in time: the quicksand is tugging harder; it’s about to swallow me up.

  “I’m afraid all we can confirm at this point is that he was in Osterley Park. On Friday night, at least.”

  DCI Maxwell strides back to the door. “Izzy, I’m going to leave you here with Sarah, OK? I need to organize a search party. If you could bear with—”

  “No. No. I’m coming with you.” I lurch to my feet, crossing the room in two strides to grab hold of his arm, hanging on for dear life—for my son’s life.

  * * *

  It feels like the car journey will never end. Even while I’m dizzy with relief, fear crowds in, more stifling than ever. To be so close to finding Nick, yet not knowing if he’s all right, if he is even alive . . . He’s been in the woods for two nights, and this late in the day the temperature must be close to zero.

  “It was some kind of dare, by the sound of it.” DCI Maxwell sits in the front passenger seat of the police car, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Samir described it as an ‘initiation trial’—a stunt the boys cooked up before Nick was allowed to join their gang.”

  “Their gang. A stunt,” I repeat in disgust, closing my eyes and resting my head against the back seat. The glare of streetlights flashes across my eyelids; my stomach churns with motion sickness and dread.

  “We’ll be there soon,” DS Clarke says at my side. “Samir gave us clear directions.”

  “Can I read what he said?” I nod at the file on her lap.

  “Sorry, Izzy. Witness statements are confidential.”

  “Oh.” I feel surrounded by walls of silence at every turn: blocked from seeing, stopped from hearing. Left to flounder in a vacuum of not knowing.

  “But I can give you the gist of it,” she offers, picking up on my frustration. “Basically, as the boss said, the boys set Nick a dare. A ‘terror test,’ they called it. Nick was the last to join their little gang. The others wanted him to prove himself worthy of being a member.”

  “Prove himself worthy? What kind of . . . ? I thought they were his friends.” I clench my fists, furious that Nick has been let down again—this time by kids he thought he could trust.

  “It was supposed to be just for a laugh, apparently. Yes, I know. Not funny to us. But they saw it as a harmless prank.”

  “A sort of elaborate game of Chicken,” DCI Maxwell chips in. “You know, testing how long you can hold your nerve. The loser gives in first.”

  “Yes, but . . .” I turn back to DS Clarke, frowning. “What did Nick have to do to win?”

  “Hide out in the woods until his disappearance became breaking news,” she explains with a slight shake of her head. “That was the agreed goal.”

  “What? They wanted Nick’s name to be splashed across the headlines?”

  “Apparently so. At that point he was supposed to come home, confess it was all a dare, high-five his mates, and be fully accepted into the gang. Only he didn’t come home. The boys got scared, realized they’d messed up, panicked, and—”

  “Clammed up. They kept their mouths shut to protect themselves, in other words. Great. Just great.” All children lie when they think they’re in trouble. That’s what I said to Beth, and I was right. “So why own up now?”

  “As I guessed, Jason’s death has hit the boys hard,” DCI Maxwell says with a sigh.

  “But they weren’t so bothered about the state Nick might be in.” I can’t hide my anger. I feel awful about Jason, but it strikes me as horribly typical that his life seems to have been deemed more important than Nick’s.

  “I know it doesn’t help you, Izzy, but the boys have been terrified.” DS Clarke rests a hand on my arm. “They haven’t got a clue why Nick didn’t come home. They’ve sort of frozen. Jason’s death was the bombshell that shocked them out of it. Samir was in bits giving his statement.”

  “He’s a gentle boy,” I acknowledge, digging deep to find sympathy.

  “He did ask me to pass along how sorry he is,” DS Clarke adds.

  “And Adrian?”

  “Showing all the symptoms of shock, I’d say. Not saying much. Acting like none of this is really happening. Samir was the one who finally talked.”

  “I guess they’re only twelve.” I picture their pale, shocked faces as they sat on the sofa in Beth’s house yesterday morning. “They must be feeling completely overwhelmed. Out of their depth,” I acknowledge. “What a stupid, stupid thing to do.”

  I sit back as DCI Maxwell directs the driver to take a left turn, bracing my hands against the black leather passenger seat in front of me to counteract the motion of the car as it swings around a corner. We’re almost at the park now. I recognize the houses flashing past and try to make out the faces pressed to windows, their interest caught by the flashing lights. There are no sirens, just a convoy of police cars, a trail of electric blue streaking through the darkness.

  “Thanks for filling me in, anyway,” I say to DS Clarke.

  “Of course. I get that the hardest thing is not knowing.”

  “Did Samir mention Nick’s phone? If Jason hid it?” That’s still bothering me.

  “No. He knew nothing about Jason’s text, either.” She opens the file and double-checks, frowning as she closes it again. Leaning forward, she rests a hand on DCI Maxwell’s shoulder. He turns around in his seat to look at her, eyes narrowed.

  “Nick didn’t have his phone with him,” he says quietly before DS Clarke can speak. “When he went into the woods. And it isn’t a smartphone, in any case.”

  “Dammit.” DS Clarke screws up her nose. “It’s just like his Facebook account. No phone. No Internet connection. There’s no way he could have deleted his profile. Likewise, how was he supposed to know when he’d completed this terror test?”

  “Exactly,” her boss agrees. “And if this was just a dare—an initiation trial—as Samir suggests . . . Why did none of them go back to tell Nick he’d passed?”

  I’m about to interrupt their low, urgent conversation and demand to know what they’re thinking, when the car suddenly jolts. Looking out of the window, I see we’re entering the grand gateway into Osterley Park. All four of us fall silent, cocooned in our own thoughts as we speed along the drive and around the lake toward the stately home that sits at the center of the vast, ram
bling estate.

  Seeing a police cordon ahead, the driver slows down and cuts across rough parkland, finally pulling up behind a lineup of police vans. I stare out at them, pressing my fingers against the rear side window, tracing the skeletal outline of trees silhouetted against a purple sky. The detectives talk quietly between themselves again, but all my questions evaporate, my mind filling with only one thought: My son is in those woods.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The line of flashlights is incongruously pretty as it hovers like fat fireflies in the dark. I know this park, I’ve walked here hundreds of times, and I can already imagine the heavy stamp of the officers’ boots, the swish of their canes as they cut through the trees.

  I know the police looked here once before, in their initial searches after Nick went missing, but that was on the other side of the park, in the formal gardens where I told DS Clarke that Nick liked to play when he was younger. This time uniformed officers are preparing to go deeper into the woods at the other, wilder, less cultivated side. They have Samir’s statement and, whatever inconsistencies it holds, the detectives seem confident his directions will lead them to Nick. An ambulance is on standby; multiple officers have emerged from the police vans. DCI Maxwell assured me they will search all night if they have to.

  I want to get out there and hunt for Nick, too, but DS Clarke pacified me by saying it would be faster and more effective if I left it to the experts. She wanted to be sure Nick was alive first. I knew that was the truth behind her gentle diplomacy, and my heart pumps furiously as I stare out into the darkness. It almost beats out of my chest as a fist raps sharply on the window.

  “Craig! Where the hell have you been?”

  Let me in, he mimes back, pointing at the door.

  Before I can reach for the handle, he disappears from view, and I shuffle around, trying to see where he’s gone.

  “Beat you to it,” he says, sliding in from the other side of the car a second later.

  “Dammit, Craig. You made me jump.” Icy air rushes in behind him, stinging my face.