Eye Snatcher (3 page)

“You have any missing persons reports over the last few days? Specifically boys aged around ten, eleven?”

Brian and Brad followed Carter back to her desk. Carter leaned over. Her workspace smelled of perfume and was filled with origami swans and bundles of elastic bands. Way too messy for Brian’s liking. He liked a clean desk. He liked to know where everything was.

Sure, he hadn’t quite been that way when he was in a state a few years ago back when his marriage to Vanessa broke down, but times changed.

“A few from the last couple of weeks but nothing abnormal,” Carter said. “And most of them were resolved before the forty-eight hour window slammed shut anyway.”

“Great,” Brian said. “A little Jonnie Doe with no identification. Just what we—”

“Wait, wait—we do have one. Sam Betts. Jean Betts, his mum, she reported him missing two days ago. Went for a walk with his doggie in the evening. Dog showed up on its lead but no sign of Sam.”

“Do we have a picture?”

“Hold on,” Carter said, tapping around on the keyboard. “Yep. School photo from last year, so he might’ve changed a little. Here you go.”

Brian’s stomach tensed when he leaned over to Carter’s screen to take a look. A part of him, a large part of him, begged that he didn’t recognise the kid on the screen. Begged that he’d never find out the identity of the Jonnie Doe, because it just rammed home the reality of the brutality. It rammed home that the kid had a family. Friends.

It made the Jonnie Doe a real person, not just an alias.

But Brian’s stomach dropped when he looked at the screen. Muscles in his arms loosened, like a cold wave had crashed over his body.

“That your boy?” Carter asked.

Brian stared at the picture. Felt more anger, more sickness, growing inside him.

He didn’t recognise the boy from his bright blue eyes. He couldn’t.

But the curly dark hair. The way his thick eyebrows met, just slightly, in the middle. The little silver stud in his left ear.

“That’s him,” Brian said and turned away.

Their Jonnie Doe was a Jonnie Doe no longer.

Jean Betts looked outside the window of her cottage on Westhaven Road and twiddled her necklace around in her fingers.

She stared at the hedges, at the cloudy sky that autumn rain pummelled down from. It’d been two days since she’d last seen Sam now. He’d gone out for a walk with Clara. Gone for a walk, like a good lad he always was for taking her for his mum.

And then he’d gone. He hadn’t shown up. Wednesday night was the last time Jean saw her son.

She heard a whimpering. Turned around and saw Clara sat in the middle of the wooden floor of the cottage, looking at Jean and tilting her head to one side.

“I know,” she said. “Your brother, he’ll be back soon. He’ll be back.”

Clara just turned her head some more. Let out another series of little whimpers.

Jean sniffed up, got a whiff of the wood burner drifting down their chimney and through the open fireplace from next door. Her nose was a bit on the stuffy side. Allergic to dogs. Always had been. But it was just something she’d put up with, for Sam. He’d been through a lot already in his short life. Jean had moved him around a lot—moved him away from his dad, then away from Plungington, then in and out of Stan’s life. He needed someone else. Someone to keep him company other than those bloody videogames of his.

Clara, a rescue dog that a client kindly gave her, was the answer.

“He’ll come back,” a voice said from the kitchen.

The voice made Jean’s stomach turn. She knew she shouldn’t have let him stay over. She knew it was a bad idea. It went against her beliefs, her protocol.

But she was lonely. Since Sam had gone missing two nights ago, she was scared.

And he was here. Someone to lean on the shoulder of.

Even if it was costing him his hard earned cash, he was here.

Jean stepped towards the open-door kitchen area. She could see him leaning against one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table. He was dressed in a suit. Slicked back dark hair. Smelled of aftershave that Jean didn’t recognise—borderline perfume. His nails were well cut. Scrubbed.

That’s something Jean always noticed about her clients. Their nails. Their nails told her a lot about the person paying her for sex. About their lives, their attitudes towards themselves.

This man clearly cared about himself.

Jean started walking towards the kitchen, towards this professional, when she caught a glance of herself in the mirror. God, when had she got so old? Her blonde hair looked scruffy. There were wrinkles under her baggy eyes. Spots on her chin.

She used to be beautiful. Just years ago, Jean used to be beautiful.

And sure, she was still only thirty-two, but she wasn’t what she was. Her lifestyle had a way of breaking her down, taking everything good away from her.

And it wasn’t like she lived a particularly wild life for an escort either. She didn’t drink much. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t do any drugs, not since her early twenties. She was a responsible parent. She just did a job that responsible parents didn’t do, and she had to make up for that in every other area of her life.

She stepped away from the mirror and saw the man looking at her.

He had steely green eyes. Eyes that made her stomach quiver; made her smile no matter what mood she was in. Thick black stubble. He looked at her like she mattered. Like he cared.

Like no one ever looked at her.

“I was always running away when I was a boy,” he said. “Ran into the woods and wild-camped there for a couple of days once when my dad wouldn’t buy me a new toy.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. Why do you find that so hard to believe?”

Jean shook her head. “Just you… you seem so clean. Way too clean to be wild-camping.”

He pulled her close. Pressed his lips against her neck and moved his mouth up to her right ear. “You weren’t saying that last night,” he whispered, hot breath covering the side of her face.

She wanted to be with him. She wanted to put all the bad thoughts of Sam, all the bad memories of his disappearance, to the back of her mind again. She felt bad for not looking for Sam more. But he had run off in the past, to be fair. Disappeared for five days once. Turned out he was just giving camping a go, just like her Han Solo spoke of. It just seemed strange that he’d left Clara. That wasn’t like him.

But she’d called the police on Wednesday night. They’d do their jobs.

She pressed against his solid body underneath the man’s white shirt as he kissed her neck more. Dug her nails into his chest and pushed him back. “I… I can’t. I—”

“That’s okay,” he said. Didn’t even try to fight back. Stepped away, raised his arms.

Jean felt herself liking this guy even more simply for not demanding what he wanted from her.

That was the thing about being an escort. Men thought that by paying you money for a service, they had a God-given right to do whatever they pleased with you. But you wouldn’t go into McDonalds and order a Happy Meal only to demand a Big Mac.

Escorting was the same. It was a business. And all good businesses had rules, regulations.

So far, this man was ticking every box.

He was earning his Happy Meal.

“Would it break professional code to tell me your name?” Jean asked.

He looked at her with those eyes. Smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Like I said. You can call me—”

“Han Solo. I know. But that’s just ridiculous. I refuse to even think of you with that name.”

“Wow. Charming.”

“Sorry. I…”

She saw the car pull up outside the house in the corner of her eyes. Looked around—a black Honda. Two men in decent clothing getting out. One of them was older, slightly chubbier, with dark and thinning hair. The other was younger and skinnier, a black leather jacket over his white shirt, top button undone. Doc Martens on his feet. He was looking right through the window, right at her.

“Expecting visitors?” ‘Han Solo’ asked.

Jean continued to stare at the men as they cleared their throats, walked up to her door, knocked against the wood.

“No, I… I don’t think…”

And then it hit her. She’d seen men like this before. She’d seen them knocking at her door before when she’d been badly abused by a client two years back. They didn’t come in the usual uniform—just smart wear, not like the movies suggested.

The police.

“I…” Jean stepped towards the door, transfixed. Heartbeat picked up. Palms sweated. She tried to think of reasons why the police would be here. Reasons other than Sam. Had something happened to one of her clients? Was she witness to anything recently—any crimes that she’d forgotten to report?

She stepped closer to the front door, through the lounge, through the first doorway and into the porch way, still no closer to an answer. She could hear ‘Han Solo’ muttering things, hear Clara growling at the men at the door like she always did at guests, as Jean reached for the handle and hoped—prayed—for news on Sam.

Or if it was bad news, she prayed for no news at all.

She unlatched the door, nerves tingling through her body like they always did in uncomfortable situations. She’d managed to dull them down, tune them down, over the years. Came with the territory of meeting so many men every day. But the socially anxious teenage girl lived on inside her.

And that teenage girl reared her ugly head in the darkest of situations.

She pulled open the door. Prayed for relief. Prayed for some kind of good news, even though she wasn’t much religious and she’d done way too many bad things in her life to ask for God’s forgiveness already.

She could tell by the way the chubby one looked at her. The flat half-smile he gave her. But she wouldn’t believe him. Not until she heard it. Not until he said the words.

“Mrs Betts? Jean Betts?”

Jean nodded. Looked from the chubby one to the skinny one and back again, looked at their blank, distant faces. “My… it’s not my boy, is it? It’s not my Sam?”

The chubby one looked at his companion and gulped.

“I’m Detective Inspector McDone and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Richards—”

“My Sam. Please. Please tell me he’s… tell me he’s okay. Please.”

Another pause. Another awkward look between the officers.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Detective Sergeant Richards said. “Can we come inside please? It’d be better if we sat down.”

Jean wanted to protest. Wanted to fight and kick up a fuss.

Instead, she nodded. Sniffed back her tears, wiped the corners of her eyes.

She led the two police officers into her living room towards the sofa.

When they told her the news about Sam Betts, the rain blasting against the window, she didn’t scream. Didn’t cry, like grieving mothers did in clichéd stories.

She just froze.

Her life stopped, right there.

Everything changed.

Jean Betts didn’t say much about her son’s death.

Brian sat on her cream leather sofa with a cup of tea in hand. It was weak and sugary even though he’d specifically asked for no sugar. Rain pattered against the front window of the cottage, specks of it spitting through the single-glazed frames. The place was nice. But much like anything nice, it was dulled by the events that had occurred. It was ruined by the things that had happened to Sam Betts.

Because anything nice could never be nice again with that kind of news.

Brad was beside McDone. Jean’s little Yorkshire Terrier, Clara, sat pressed up against his lap. She stared out of the window, sad little eyes. Every time a car or someone went by, she lifted her head and her thin tail wagged from side to side, then she lowered her head again and sighed when she saw it wasn’t Sam.

“What time did Sam leave to walk Clara?” Brian asked.

Jean sat on the edge of the single chair at the other side of the room. She gripped onto her brew, hands shaking, but she hadn’t taken much more than a sip of it either. Her wide brown eyes stared at the fireplace, stared into space. Brian couldn’t imagine ever being told about Davey what she had about Sam. He didn’t want to imagine it.

But he’d broken enough bad news to parents over his career that he knew Jean Betts was in a severe state of shock.

“Mrs Betts?” Brad asked.

She blinked. Looked over at Brad, then at Brian, as if noticing them for the first time. “Yes. I… Sorry. I…”

“You don’t need to apologise,” Brian said. “Just take your time. I have no idea how difficult this may be for you, but the more you give us, the more we can do our job. What time did Sam leave to walk Clara on Wednesday night?”

Jean Betts gulped. Took in a quivery breath and nodded. “He… Usual time. Time he always takes her. No, later. Later than usual. About half six. But it was… it was going dark and I knew… I shouldn’t have let him go. I knew I shouldn’t…”

She shook her head. Didn’t crumble into tears, just shook her head. Stared in a trance again.

“And what time did Clara show up?”

Another gulp from Jean. Rapid blinking as she tried to wrap her head around the question. “She… About a couple of hours later. Eight, maybe. Scratching at the door and barking and—and I thought Sam was with her at first. Thought he was… thought he was hiding or something. And that’s when I… when I rang the police. And… But he… he was always so safe. Always so careful. You know?”

She glanced at the pair of them and Brian nodded.

Brad looked around the room with those scanner eyes of his.

“Mrs Betts, if you don’t mind me asking,” Brian said, shuffling onto the edge of the sofa. “What were you doing when Sam disappeared?”

“I was at home,” she said. The answer was sharp. Rehearsed, almost. Brian didn’t like it. Not that he suspected this woman had any involvement in what had happened to her son. He’d just built up an understanding of when someone was bullshitting him over the years. Developed an ear for certain intonations, certain ways of responding, of using body language to try and convey meaning and getting the opposite result.

And right now, Jean Betts was completely rigid. That question had hit a sore spot.