Black Rabbit Summer (46 page)

‘Yeah,’ I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

At the time, neither of us had the courage to talk about what we really wanted to talk about, and we were both quite happy to pretend that we were in a hurry to be somewhere else. And it was pretty much the same a couple of weeks later when I saw her again at the bus stop: a few mumbled words, lots of awkward glances, strained smiles, fidgeting feet…

But then, the next night, she called me.

And we talked.

And we both cried a little.

And since then we’ve been meeting up quite regularly, and we’ve talked a lot more, and we’ve gradually got over the awkwardness and got back to being good friends again… or maybe even more than just good friends.

But it’s hard.

I mean, it’s good when we’re together. It feels really good. And I think it’s probably going to work out for us in the end.

But it’s still really hard sometimes.

For lots of reasons.

There’s Eric, for one thing. I mean, whatever I think of him, and whatever Nic thinks of him, he’s still her twin brother. He’s still part of her life. And that’s bound to make things difficult for us. And then there’s Raymond…

There’s always Raymond.

Raymond and me…

I don’t know.

It’s just so hard.

Because a lot of the time I simply don’t care about the rest of it – Pauly, Eric, Campbell, Stella, the police, Nicole, Mum and Dad, the rest of the world… it’s all out there somewhere – the horizons, the skies, the days and the nights – I just don’t want anything to do with it.

All I want to do is talk to Raymond.

But he’s gone.

Disappeared.

Vanished.

No one knows where he is, no one knows what’s happened to him, no one knows whether he’s dead or alive.

He’s just gone.

It took the police a long time to start treating Raymond as a victim rather than a suspect, but after questioning Eric and Campbell, DI Barry finally got round to launching a full-scale investigation. Raymond’s parents made an emotional appeal on TV too, with lots of tears and lots of anguish, which I’m sure was all very genuine… but I can’t help feeling that it was all far too late. If the police had started looking for him earlier… if Mr and Mrs Daggett had shown him some emotion when he needed it… I mean, it’s all very well going on TV and telling the world how much you love your missing son, but how about telling
him
once or twice? You know,
before
he goes missing.

Anyway, they made an appeal, and the police kept looking for him – searching the river, searching the factory, searching the wasteground and the woods around Back Lane – but so far they haven’t found anything. The only useful thing to come out of all the publicity has been a spate of reports about mutilated animals – a couple of slaughtered cats, a stray dog found hacked up in a park, chickens with their heads chopped off. All of these
incidents have occurred in the last year or so, and all of them happened in and around St Leonard’s. Which could mean something. It could mean that there’s a madman out there, a bloodthirsty lunatic who might have something to do with Raymond’s disappearance. Or it could just mean that there’s a madman out there who killed Black Rabbit and cut off his head and hung it on the gate but who
didn’t
have anything to do with Raymond’s disappearance. It could be just a coincidence – a pointless and barbaric coincidence.

The police are still looking into it.

They’re also still looking into the possibility of a link between Raymond’s disappearance and the other kids who went missing from fairgrounds, and apparently there are one or two promising leads, but as yet there’s nothing definite.

It’s all just possibilities.

Theories.

Suspicions.

Maybes.

Maybe Raymond was abducted.

Maybe he just ran away.

Maybe he’s still out there somewhere.

Maybe he’s still alive.

I don’t know…

All I know is that he’ll always be with me – in my head, in my heart…

He’ll always be here.

No matter what.