All night Harlan searched in vain. When darkness began to give way to the blue of dawn, he grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe. The breakfast news blared out of a television on the wall. The waitress served him in silence, then quickly retreated behind the counter, where she fell into a whispered conversation with another woman. Both women shot him uneasy, frowning glances. He ignored them, concentrating on eating and the news. The police were having no more luck than him, it seemed. There had been no reported sightings of Ethan, and the police had expanded the focus of their search beyond Sheffield into the surrounding regions, particularly the Northwest where there’d recently been a suspected child abduction — Jamie Sutton, an eleven-year old boy, had disappeared while out riding his bike in Prestwich, a northern suburb of Manchester, nearly two months ago. A massive search had been conducted, thousands of missing-person posters had been distributed, private donors had put together a reward of two-hundred thousand pounds for anyone who came forward with solid information that led to the boy’s rescue. All to no avail. Jamie Sutton, it seemed, had literally vanished into thin air.
Harlan considered expanding the focus of his search too, but quickly decided against it. The connection between the cases was too tenuous. For starters, it was impossible to say with certainty that Jamie Sutton had been abducted. He might’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run, met with some kind of accident, or maybe even be a runaway. Secondly, if Jamie had been abducted, then the kidnapper’s MO was significantly different, more suggestive of an opportunistic mindset. Thirdly, Jamie was a very different boy from Ethan — whereas Ethan looked shy and timid, Jamie had a broad face and bold, self-confident eyes. Finally, and most importantly as far as Harlan was concerned, he saw little hope in himself succeeding where the best efforts of the police had failed. Better to continue the search here, where the trail was still fresh.
It was midday when the posters started appearing on lampposts and in shop windows. They featured close-ups of Ethan taken from different angles and with different expressions. Above his face in big letters was the word ‘KIDNAPPED’. Below his face were the numbers of a couple of freephone tip hotlines. There were also groups of people on the streets — not police, but volunteers — handing out leaflets to passersby and motorists. Harlan rolled his window down to take one from a woman. “There’s going to be a march through the streets around Ethan’s home tonight,” she said. “Everybody’s welcome.”
“Everybody doesn’t include me,” said Harlan, and he drove on, working his way methodically through the city.
New information trickled through the radio. Police dogs had picked up Ethan’s scent, but the trail they’d found ended several feet from the backyard gate. Detectives were holding a local man for questioning. William Jones, a fifty-two year old unmarried, unemployed steel worker with convictions for child sex offences, had apparently been seen on several occasions recently hanging around outside Ethan’s school and at a nearby play-park that the boy frequented. Jones was well-known in the community as a sex-offender, and his home and car had been vandalised many times in the past. In a brief statement to the press, Detective Chief Inspector Garrett said that Jones was on the Sex Offenders’ Register and was considered a medium risk.
Harlan pulled over at a cafe with internet access, navigated to the website of a local newspaper, typed ‘William Jones’ into the search-term box, and scanned down the list of related articles until he came to the headline, ‘Man Jailed For Child Sex Offences’. He clicked the link and skim-read the article it led to. Jones had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 2005 for ten counts of making indecent images of a girl under fourteen-years old and one count of indecent assault. There was a photo of him — overweight, vein-streaked alcoholic’s cheeks, receding grey-brown hair. Although, at a stretch, Jones might fit the kidnapper’s description, Harlan dismissed him as a suspect. The guy was a relatively low-grade offender with a taste for young girls. A nasty piece of work, but not the type to snatch eight-year old boys from their bedrooms. That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth bringing him in and grilling him for a while. After all, birds of a feather flocked together — especially when no one else wanted anything to do with them — which meant that characters like Jones were often the best source of information about offenders operating under the police radar in an area.
Harlan returned to his car and the search. Afternoon wore away like a corpse in a hot country. Five o’clock, six, seven…Every time he glanced at the clock, another hour seemed to have passed. He swallowed Pro-Plus tablets with black coffee, but even so his vision began to grow blurry as if he was looking through a haze of tears. It’d been nearly forty-eight hours since he last slept. Reluctantly accepting that if he continued searching he’d be likely to miss more than he saw, he headed back to his flat.
Remembering about the march, Harlan flicked the television on and found himself confronted by Susan Reed’s haggard, almost cadaverous face. She looked like she’d aged two years for every day that’d passed since he last saw her. Her eyes, which peered out from under tear-swollen lids, had a glazed look about them. More than likely, she’d been given a mild sedative. A man had one arm cupped around her narrow shoulders as if to hold her up. He was maybe five or ten years younger than her, tall and skinny, with a pale, lumpy face, and a fine fuzz of blond hair on his skull and above his upper lip. Watery blue eyes — it was difficult to tell if they were watery with tears or just watery — peered at the cameras through cheap-looking spectacles. Harlan wondered who the man was. A friend? A relative? No, his body language spoke of a different kind of intimacy. A boyfriend, maybe. A person of interest, definitely.
A gang of reporters pushed microphones closer to Susan’s trembling lips as she opened her mouth to speak. “Ethan…” Her voice cracked and she seemed to lose her breath. She was silent a moment, wrestling with her emotions, on the edge of being overcome with grief. “Ethan, if you’re out there and you can hear me, we’re doing everything we possibly can to find you.” She looked away from the cameras, steadying herself, then she addressed the kidnapper. “Please let my beautiful little boy go. Please! Please!” She couldn’t hold it together any longer. Tears spilled down her face. She dropped her head, shoulders quaking, and the man at her side gently guided her away from the microphones.
The camera panned around to focus on a crowd about four or five hundred strong, many of them carrying flowers and lighted candles. At the front of the crowd a line of children held a large banner with two pictures of Ethan flanking the words ‘HELP FIND ETHAN’ and a telephone number. The crowd applauded as Susan and the man joined them. They set off along the streets, chanting Ethan’s name. Their voices were full of a kind of sad enthusiasm, but suddenly a discordant, angry note came to the fore. The crowd bunched into tight knot outside a dilapidated two-up two-down terraced house. The house’s downstairs window was boarded with warped, rain-stained chipboard on which was graffitied in red paint ‘Pedo Scum’. As the camera homed in on the graffiti, a voiceover explained that the house belonged to William Jones.
Jones was lucky the police were holding him, Harlan reflected. He knew from experience how quickly a peaceful gathering could transform into a lynch mob. He’d once been part of a task force set up to investigate the death of a convicted paedophile whose house was ransacked by an angry mob, some of whom were only a couple of years older than Ethan.
Harlan phoned Jim. This time his ex-partner answered. “Who’s the guy with Susan Reed?” asked Harlan.
“Forget it, Harlan. You’re not getting anything else out of me, not after the way you’ve behaved. I thought we had a deal that you were going to keep away from this thing.”