The Other Boy

The Other Boy by Heidi Field

ONE

Blair

Six in the morning seemed far too early to be trudging down the garden to my darkroom, the cacophony of birdsong reminding me that the still, cool dawn belonged to the wildlife, not to humans. If my client wasn’t insisting on seeing the contact sheets from yesterday’s shoot before lunchtime, I’d still be snuggled in bed beside Scott, but she was representing one of the biggest names in fashion, so pandering to her every whim was worth it—for my career and my bank balance.

I bunched my curls into a messy bun, tightened the knot on my dressing gown, and flicked on the safelight in the darkroom. Stepping inside, I inhaled the pungent metallic scents of the photography chemicals, not unlike the heady smell of gasoline and an odour that filled me with pleasure and comfort. I’d been in here till after midnight last night, giving the contact sheets a good five hours to dry. I reached up and began unclipping the sheets and slipping them into plastic sleeves.

That second glass of wine before bed was a bad idea. My mouth was dry and my eyes felt heavy and sore. The shoot yesterday had been one of the worst of my career. The client was a tyrant. I could barely take a shot without her bellowing at the models, fiddling with the lights, or telling me how I should be doing my job.

I had twenty years of experience in this business, and my photos had graced the covers of some of the world’s most famous magazines and been used to market many of the biggest brands in the fashion industry. Yesterday’s client had treated me like I was a novice who was hard of hearing. I cricked my neck to the left and right trying to release the tension that was already building up at the thought of another exhausting day with this woman.

A gentle knock at the door. I ignored it. Another. Scott and Jamie both knew better than to disturb me when the red pilot light switch was illuminated. It wasn’t that I needed the safelight right now, or that the contacts would be damaged in any way, but simply that I was tired and on edge and wanted to be left alone to organize the contact sheets in peace before racing off to the train station.

The handle of the door slowly turned, and the door opened an inch. “You need to come inside, BB. Now.”

I yanked open the door to find Scott standing in the alcove. He looked worse than I felt; his olive skin was several shades lighter, his wavy dark hair was all over the place, and his eyes were wide and unblinking. An uncomfortable feeling flittered about in my stomach, and I couldn’t swallow.

I gripped the doorframe. “What’s going on? You look terrible. Are you alright?”

Scott took my hand. “The police are here. About Jamie.”

My body felt light as a feather as I walked with Scott across the lawn. The pretty birdsong had ceased, and the trees that lined our garden stood still as statues. I floated through the kitchen and into the lounge as if I wasn’t properly connected to the world, fear building inside me, pulling me out of myself.

A dewy morning light filtered in through the bay window of our spacious front room, and I noticed a car drive slowly past the gate at the end of our drive. Two police officers sat on our large sofa. They seemed small, somehow, their bodies awkwardly sunk into the cream leather, our colourful cushions engulfing them, the cozy piece of furniture at odds with their officious demeanour. Their uniforms matched the thin stripes in the wallpaper on our feature wall, but this morning, the contrasting glitter strips seemed to have lost their sparkle.

I sat beside Scott on the other sofa, opposite the officers, the oak resin coffee table like a vibrant river between us.[BC3] I smiled, but my lips wobbled at the edges so I bit my cheek. I’d never spoken to a police officer before. Never had one knock on the door. They looked at each other, at me and Scott, around the room.

What was it Jamie had done? He was out yesterday when I got back from work, and I didn’t hear him come home. I’d tried to stay up, but I was exhausted. I began to list all the things that might get him in trouble with the police. Probably drinking and causing a disturbance. Maybe he’d sprayed graffiti somewhere, taken his art into the public domain. He was a good boy, insular. He wouldn’t do anything bad. Just normal, stupid teenage stuff, I guessed. They were probably here to rap him on the knuckles, give him a shock to keep him on the right path.

Scott gestured to the older male officer and then the younger female. “This is Officer Jelani and Officer Shah.”

The older officer took off his hat, revealing thick black hair neatly cropped and swept to the side. “Please call me Mika.”

I swallowed. “So, what’s Jamie done?”

Mika made eye contact with me and Scott, then paused for a moment. “A body has been found in Peasedale Forest. We have reason to believe that the body is your son. We would like to take a DNA sample to confirm the identity.”

We all sat in silence. It was like the world had gone into slow motion, like we had been extracted from reality and were hovering in a vacuum, unable to speak or move.

Scott put his hand on my knee and squeezed. I looked down at his hand, his wedding ring, the wrinkles on his skin and the blood vessels tinged blue beneath.

“You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “Jamie is upstairs in bed. Why don’t you go and wake him up, BB?”

The room expanded, the walls moving farther and farther away from me, and my body felt like lead. I couldn’t move. A body? They found a body in the woods somewhere, and they think the body is Jamie.

I stared at Mika, looking for a sign that he had said the wrong thing by mistake. “A dead body?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

A dead body. In the woods. Who they think is my boy.

Scott moved his hand to my shoulder. “Blair?”

I snapped my head around to face Scott. “Did you see him last night?”

Scott clenched his jaw. “Just go upstairs and get him, and then all this will go away.”

He was so pale; his whole body was shaking. I’d never seen him like that before, and it terrified me. I stood up. My legs felt so weak, I had to reach for the doorframe as I left the sitting room. My heart was thudding in my chest, and I had to swallow to hold back the bile that was creeping up into my throat. I hadn’t heard Jamie come home. I hadn’t heard Minnie bark, which she always did every time one of us came in. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the hooks on the wall in the hallway. Jamie’s coat wasn’t hung there. His shoes weren’t on the rack underneath. His house key wasn’t in the saucer or discarded elsewhere on the dresser. There was no mud on the limestone tiles. Oh god, please don’t let this be happening.

I took the stairs one at a time. The carpet muffled the sound of the creak that the seventh step made. Jamie had learned to step over it when he got back too late, hoping not to disturb me, but I always heard him. Maybe he had just been extra quiet last night. I’d had two glasses of wine. I gripped the banister as I went, sweat from my palms making my hands slide along the polished chrome handrail.

I stood outside Jamie’s bedroom door and listened, willing him to make a noise, a groan, a cough. I leant[BC4] closer, desperate to hear the sound of his phone playing something. Twisting the handle, I pushed open the door. Please let him be in there. The door swung open and I stared at his bed, his untouched bed, still as pristine as he had left it the day before. I couldn’t take a deep breath, only shallow gulps, making my head swim. Racing to the bathroom, I threw open the door and looked in the shower cubicle. No Jamie. I checked the spare room, too. This was wrong. All wrong. What the police said about a body, about it being our son, they had to be wrong.

I stumbled down the stairs and back into the siting room. “He’s not there, Scott. He’s not there. I can’t find him.”

Scott leapt up and barged past me, looking for Jamie in the dining room and the kitchen. He even went outside; I could hear him yanking open the shed and shouting for Jamie in my darkroom. When he returned, his face was grey, sweat matted his hair and he was stroking the stubble on the sides of his cheeks. “Where the hell is he?”

Mika stood up. “I’d like to get a DNA sample and send it to the lab. The quicker we do that, the sooner we will know if the body is your son.”

Scott felt in his pockets. “I’ll call the school. Find out who he’s been hanging around with. He probably stayed at a mate’s house last night.”

Mika nodded sympathetically. “Does he do that a lot?”

Scott looked at me and then Mika. “No. No, he doesn’t.” He raised his hands in the air. ‘look, can we just take a breath? Stop a second? Surely we can just come to the morgue and identify the body. You must have a solid reason to think it’s our son, right? So, let’s just go and see for ourselves.”

Mika gripped his hat in both hands and held Scott’s wild, searching gaze. “We received an emergency call from Jamie’s phone last night. The body we found is not suitable for visual identification. There is significant trauma. Did Jamie have any specific markings on his body— a tattoo, scar, birthmark?”

Significant trauma. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I couldn’t let my mind go there. This would all turn out to be a mistake, I was sure if it. Jamie would walk through the front door any minute.

Scott ran a hand through his now damp hair. “He had a scar on the outside of his left calf from falling off his scooter, shaped like a boomerang, about an inch long.”

I reached for Scott’s hand and squeezed. “It’s not Jamie. I know it’s not him.”

Mika gestured toward the stairs with his hat. “Could you take officer Shah upstairs so that she can get the sample? A toothbrush or hairbrush.”

Officer Shah was shorter than me and half my age, with beautiful light brown skin and the kind of thick, straight chocolate-coloured hair that I had always coveted. She had a presence about her that made me nervous, her bright eyes and soft features hiding a far sharper demeanour. She was watching me, judging, trying to decide if I was genuine, if I was keeping secrets.

As we headed upstairs, I heard Mika and Scott talk about Jamie’s friends, where he might have been the night before, and the reasons why he might not have come home. I wasn’t sure if Scott knew the right answers. I wanted to go back down and help him, but I didn’t know the answers either. What would the officer think of us, not knowing where our fifteen-year-old son had been after school yesterday?

Jamie’s room smelled of him, his strong teenage body odour mixed with a hint of deodorant and those incense sticks. I glanced around, hoping to see something that would give me a sign as to where he was, that he was okay. Officer Shah bagged up Jamie’s hairbrush and took his toothbrush from the sink in the corner of his room. It was so surreal, like a dream, and I wanted so desperately to wake up.

TWO

A Day Later

Scott

I’d drunk so much coffee over the last twenty-four hours that I couldn’t focus, I had the shakes, and my head was throbbing. Blair was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table, staring at her mobile. Staring at that emergency message from Jamie’s phone, sent at 11:53 on Monday evening. I got the same message: Emergency SOS. Jamie called emergency services. Jamie has listed you as an emergency contact. The next message, sent a few minutes later, showed his location. Somewhere remote in Peasedale Forest.

The police had responded and found a body, but as yet, no sign of Jamie’s mobile phone. The search continued yesterday and they found more bodies, although the information we were given was minimal. They couldn’t go telling members of the public details about a crime until they had hard evidence proving that those members of the public were relatives of the victim. And, even then, they needed to be sure those relatives weren’t involved. We were under strict instructions not to talk to anyone, including family.

Being on the other side of a police investigation was a strange and daunting experience, and no amount of experience as a crime reporter could have prepared me for how isolating it felt. Our world had stopped, and the walls of our house were closing in, crushing us, sucking out all the oxygen from the air.

Waiting to hear if our son was dead made my insides curdle. Cold toast sat in the rack untouched, the butter knives clean, and the lids still firmly on the jam and honey jars. That was breakfast—yesterday. Neither of us had eaten a crumb.

Blair pushed her mug of coffee across the table toward me. “I can’t drink anymore. I don’t know if I’m coming or going, and I think if I stand up I’ll pass out.”

“We need to eat. This is crazy. There’s no way that body is Jamie. He must have lost his phone or it was stolen. Whoever had it got themselves into some trouble and used it to call for help. I bet Jamie has no idea what’s going on and is hanging out with his mates and playing truant from school.”

“What mates, though? We went over and over this so many times yesterday. Have you ever met any of his friends? Has he ever spoken about them to you? You’re assuming he has friends, but I’ve seen him sitting on that swing in the park all on his own so many times, and Christ knows where he goes or what he does when we’re not back from work till late.”

“He’s home, painting and eating dinner. He’s always leaving those microwave meal packets lying around or the empty plate from the food you leave for him.”

“Was Frank sure he hadn’t seen him? Frank’s always at home.”

“I went round to talk to him twice yesterday, and he’s sure that the last time he saw Jamie was when he left for school on Monday morning. I shouldn’t have spoken to him at all. Not until the DNA results. The police didn’t want us talking to anyone just to ensure nothing would get leaked to the media. And I can assure you that someone in the office will already have gotten wind of something going on. Police and forensics lugging equipment into a forest will draw attention from some nosy members of the public, and before you know it there’ll be a media onslaught.”

“Why is it taking so long? Surely they can get a DNA test done faster than this. They’ve found a dead body, for pity’s sake.”

“Officer Shah said that they had found more than one, remember, so that could slow down the test results. She said that the police had expanded the crime scene, which would mean a lot more forensic evidence.”

[BC1]Obviously, title page, copyright page, et al, need to be added.

[HF2]Do I do this or does Tule do this for me?

[BC3]This is the first of 34 spots where there are 2 spaces instead of 1. I turned off Track Changes for the rest of them so you needn’t approve them.

[BC4]Leant is the British version of the word, but the author intermittently uses both “leaned” AND “leant.” I changed all 19 of them to “leant” for consistency, but perhaps ask the author if that’s okay or if “leaned” is best in some or all spots.