Page 19 (1/2)

Part One

July

One

The abduction of a child by a stranger is every parent’s worst nighthly unusual event Children are actually most at risk of harm and abuse from a family ht seeers are decent people, whereas the hoerous place of all

The round understood that only too well

Moving quietly, parallel to Neil behind a line of bushes, he kept a constant watch on the boy Neil alking slowly, unaware of the danger he was in Occasionally he kicked at the dusty ground, throwing up chalky whitefar more carefully, could hear the scuff each time And he made no sound at all

It was a war down hard and unrestrained for most of the day, but it was six o’clock now and the sky was hazier The teolden hue to it It was the sort of evening when youcold white wine and watching the sun set, without thinking about fetching a coat until it was too dark and too late to bother

Even the waste ground was beautiful, bathed in the ae of Featherbank on one side, with an old disused quarry on the other The undulating ground was h thickets here and there, lending the area a e’s children played here soh it was not particularly safe Over the years, many of them had been tempted to clamber down into the quarry, where the steep sides were prone to cruns, but the local feeling was that they should do more Children found ways over fences, after all

They had a habit of ignoring warning signs

The man knew a lot about Neil Spencer He had studied the boy and his family carefully, like a project The boy performed poorly at school, both acade, writing, and math His clothes were rown-up for his age—already displaying anger and resentment toward the world In a few years he would be perceived as a bully and a troubleh for people to forgive his more disruptive behavior He doesn’t mean it, they would say It’s not his fault It had not yet reached the point where Neil was considered solely responsible for his actions, and so instead people were forced to look elsewhere

The man had looked It wasn’t hard to see

Neil had spent today at his father’s house His ood thing Both parents were alcoholics, functioning to wavering degrees Both found life considerably easier when their son was at the other’s house, and both struggled to entertain hieneral, Neil was left to occupy and fend for hi the hardness the ht in his parents’ lives Certainly he was not loved

Not for the first ti to drive him back to his mother’s house, and apparently also too ambivalent to ith him The boy was nearly seven, his father reasoned, and had been fine alone all day And so Neil alking home by himself

He had no idea yet that he would be going to a very different hoht about the room he had prepared and tried to suppress his excitement

Halfway across the waste ground, Neil stopped

The h the shrubs to see what had caught the boy’s attention

An old television had been du but intact The e with his foot, but it was too heavy toout of another age to the boy, with grilles and buttons down the side of the screen and a back the size of a drum There were some rocks on the other side of the path The man watched, fascinated, as Neil walked over, selected one, and then threw it at the glass with all his strength