I set up a crudely fashioned crime board from the supplies I had purchased. Printouts, notes and newspaper clippings all surrounded a timeline of Jack Ellington’s disappearance. At one end I added an image of the boy himself. Barbs of grief touched me when I saw how alike Jack had been to my own son.
The other end of the whiteboard was centered around possible suspects and the ‘Unsub’. The unknown subject behind his vanishing. It was possible Jack had vanished of his own accord, but my years of experience and gut feeling told me otherwise.
The office seemed like an entirely different place as it was filled with productivity. Like the activity burned away the smoke and the memories.
All boiled down, the case was fairly simple. There were small scattered stories here and there of how a ten-year-old Jack Ellington never quite got along with his mother after his father died. Elizabeth had become very protective of Jack after losing her husband, going so far as to walk him to school. Jack was teased by his friends about this, as indicated by a few articles I read.
At some point, Elizabeth backed off and let Jack live his life like a normal ten-year-old. He walked to school with his friends, had playdates, and participated in sports. It was around this time that he went missing. According to reports, he had been walking home from soccer practice. When he was an hour late, Elizabeth had called the cops. The next morning, he was still not home, and a manhunt was launched.
The hunt never turned up anything. Not a single shred of evidence. Ultimately the case had been signed off as an unsolved disappearance.
After six hours, I had a nice stack of paper on my desk. I read back through them as the day faded out, bringing in the night. A light spattering of rain still fell, rhythmically pelting my windows. I threw together a hasty dinner of a ham and cheese sandwich, cracked open a beer, and pulled my office chair over to my window.
As I the night drew on, my mind kept returning to what Amir had told me. How solving my family’s murder wouldn’t bring them back. About how it was a waste of my talents to seek vengeance when there were people out there that needed my help. Maybe Elizabeth Ellington was one of those people. I couldn’t bring Tommy back, but if there was even the slightest chance that I could help this mother find out what happened to her son… Well, that might not be so bad.
And besides, I needed the work. If I kept spending everyday reading Sarah and Tommy’s case files over and over again, I would run out of money. If the cops didn’t deport me first, that was.
So, I kept looking out for headlights and slowly approaching cars, waiting for my nervous visitor to return. But Elizabeth didn’t show up that night. If she did, it was sometime after two in the morning, at which point I fell asleep in my chair with reports of her son’s disappearance scattered in my lap.
***
The little computer program I had pilfered was doing no good for a case that was almost 10 years old, so the following day I took a trip to the library. The grand old structure near St James’s Square was an imposing stone edifice now tinged by centuries of diesel smoke and fumes. It took nearly an hour to arrive but it felt good to be moving again, to be actively working towards something other than cheating spouses. But in the back of my mind, reality was whispering sweet nothings.
The case isn’t even yours. You’re putting all of this time and effort into it for free.
Maybe that was true, but as I sifted through all of the files and public records on the events, I didn’t care. Not once had I felt such a sense of purpose since arriving in London as a haggard and beaten man.
I managed to uncover a bit more in the public records than the internet had offered the day before. I scraped together a full timeline of the last known day of Jack Ellington’s life, from when he was seen walking on the way to school by a neighbor to the last of his friends indicating that he had seen Jack on the street, headed home, shortly after 6.00 in the evening.
With that ironed out, I also put together a list of names that, to me, seemed to be suspects. Many of them were already logged as having been questioned by police, but I wasn’t willing to rule anything out. Last on my list was the name of the officer in charge of the investigation. I didn’t think he was a suspect per se, but definitely someone that would be a great source of information.
I was about switch the library computer off when one last result caught my eye. My search had thrown up one final news story, this one from only a few days ago. It was unrelated to Ellington but the similarities were troubling enough to grab my attention. A missing schoolboy named Charlie Haines, about the same age, had disappeared right after band practice. This time from a suburb 20 miles outside of London. Hell, the kid even looked like Jack Ellington.
Could there be a connection?
***
I nearly stopped at Amir’s for lunch to fill him in on how I had decided to dig into the Ellington case. But I had things to do, people to see. Namely a man by the name of Henry Atkinson, the former police chief who had been in charge of Jack Ellington’s investigation all those years ago.
Atkinson’s record was more polished than a conflict diamond. After a tough childhood in the North of England, raised by a foster family after his parents died in a car accident, he’d gone on to an exemplary career in the Metropolitan Police. Moving from beat cop to Detective in record time, then on to Head of the Major Crimes Unit, receiving a string of awards and a New Year’s honor along the way.
One of the trophies he’d picked up was also apparently a nice fat pension. His house was large and expensive looking. The kind of place that had a gardener and maybe housekeeper; people to cover up the dirt.
Located 40 minutes away in a high-scale Hampton neighborhood where all the houses had manicured lawns, Atkinson’s place was situated neatly in the center of an idyllic row of similar houses, its siding sparkling clean and its grass immaculate.
I parked on the edge of the street, got out and threw my jacket over my head, quickly dashing to the large porch to escape the increasing strength of the rain.
I knocked on the front door, taking in the quaint digs. A few blossoming potted plants lined the porch. A porch swing hung from the rafters at the end, like something from the cover of a cheesy college poetry magazine.
I knocked again and had to wait another twenty seconds before the door was answered. A man who looked to be in his seventies looked out at me through a partially opened door. His close-cropped beard was white, and what little hair he had remaining on his head was the same shade, trimmed in a short no-nonsense style.
“Who are you?” Atkinson snapped, skipping pleasantries altogether.
“Are you Henry Atkinson?” I asked.
“Maybe. Again…who are you?” His accent had a hint of somewhere up north.
“My name is Thomas Blume. I’m a…” I faltered. After all, what was I? “I’m a private investigator who has been hired by Elizabeth Ellington to do some digging into her son’s disappearance.” The lie came far too easily, and I wondered if it would potentially get me in some legal trouble further down the line.
I’d worry about that later, though. Currently, Atkinson was opening his door wider. “I guess you hoped I could help with some answers?” he asked.
“I was hoping, yes.”
He eyed me cautiously for a few seconds as if sizing me up, and for a moment I thought he would slam the door in my face. “We’ll see,” he said to my surprise, opening the door all the way. “That ship sailed a while ago, but I remember most of it. Come on in, Mr. Blume.”