The Suspect by Fiona Barton.
Title: The Child.
Author: Fiona Barton.
Genre: Fiction, crime, mystery, parenthood.
Country: England.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2019.
Summary: When two eighteen-year-old girls go missing in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight-desperate, bereft and frantic with worry. Journalist Kate Waters always does everything she can to be first to the story, first with the exclusive, first to discover the truth-and this time is no exception. But she can't help thinking of her own son, whom she hasn't seen in two years, when he dropped out of university and left home to travel to Thailand himself. This time it's personal. And as the case of the missing girls unfolds, and becomes something more sinister, they will all find that even this far away, danger can lie closer to Home than one might think...
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ He flicked back to look at the laughing faces of the missing girls. Fresh faces. Lost children.
Where were they?
♥ I'd raged at him that he was ruining his life, and we were barely speaking when he left for Thailand.
We didn't hear from him for the first month, and Steve had blamed me. "He thinks you are still angry," he'd said.
"I am still angry," I'd snapped back.
"You need to be careful, Kate, or you'll lose him."
I'd wanted to shout: "How do you lose a son? He's been part of me for twenty-two years. I will always be his mother." But I kept it to myself. I hid the hurt and pretended to be indifferent to his silence. But fear had taken root inside me, creating lurid images of him dying in a motorbike crash or being brutally mugged.
Being a reporter means I know that these things happen to people like us.
♥ I stare at the screen. My heartbeat feels like it is bruising my ribs. My child is missing, too. At home, we all pretend that it's all fine; he's an adult, living his own life, making his own choices. But we don't even know which country he's in, really. I've googled the price of plane tickets for Thailand so many times. Just looking, I tell myself. And I've secretly e-mailed dozens of conservation projects in Phuket over the last two years, asking for him, but Jake hasn't registered with any of them. He could be anywhere, but I've kept it to myself. No point worrying Steve. Sometimes I wonder if he's done the same thing and is keeping it secret from me.
♥ I try to picture the man on the other end of the line. Middle-aged, thinning hair? Desperate, anyway. I'd hoped to get the mother. Women are so much easier to talk to about grief, emotions, loss. Blokes, even fathers, struggle to find the words. And putting on a brave face sounds so cold in print.
♥ Sparkes stepped forward, clearing his throat as they knocked. Mike Shaw was expecting them, but he still looked up warily when they were ushered in by the latest Mrs. Shaw. Everyone did when they saw a police officer. Even the innocent.
♥ Alex had got into the habit of getting up as soon as it was light every day to walk round different parts of the city, while it was quiet and cooler. Mostly she went on her own, wandering by the river, catching boats to somewhere new, and taking photos she posted on Facebook and Instagram with emojis of champagne bottles and stars.
She should have been on a beach by now but Rosie wouldn't budge. She was having too good a time to want to leave. And Alex was too nervous to continue alone. So she carried on writing variations on Alex O'Connor... is having the time of her life on her timeline and counted the Likes, the Loves, the funny comments, from her friends and passing strangers. They helped bolster the fiction. She kept Alex O'Connor wishes she'd never come to herself.
The truth didn't have a suitable emoji.
♥ They'd talked about lots of things in the way that lonely people do; revealing themselves too quickly in the rush for instant intimacy.
♥ Bob had leaned forward quickly to kiss her forehead. It'd felt damp and cold and he'd fancied he could taste the chemicals being piped through her.
His kiss had nudged her wig-she'd picked it from a hospital catalog the first time round and had gone for a new color.
"I felt like a change and I've always wanted to be a blonde," she said, chirpy, pale, bald, and holding up a helmet of ash-blond hair for inspection. He'd laughed-the first proper laugh since her diagnosis-and kissed her hard. A lover's kiss. The new Eileen had still stopped him in his tracks each time he'd come through the door, but when she took the wig off, stubble prickled her scalp and colored her back to brown.
"I might bleach it when I get home," she'd teased when she caught him looking. "What do you think? Sexy?" He'd smiled and held her hand. They'd been winning then.
♥ He would go and pick her up tomorrow morning, after the ward round. She'd be bright and cheerful for him. Eileen could still turn it on with the help of her morphine, but that would fade as the day wore on. He could picture her moving slowly round the house, touching things as if she were about to leave. The agony of cancer was changing her. There were times when she pushed away his attempts at loving attention. And it was at these darkest times that he realized how much he loved her. How much there was to lose. Months, please make it months...
♥ Lesley twists a tissue in her restless hands into shreds. "I'll manage."
I nod, never taking my eyes off the woman disintegrating in front of me.
♥ Where are you? I think. I've been asking this question since the first of May 2012 when he walked out of the house with his backpack and his hurt feelings. I should never have let it go on this long.
I need to do something. Anything.
♥ "So is he a hero or a suspect?" Louise says.
"Shut up, Louise," George says. "Ignore her, Kate."
I look at them, at the faces I know so well. They are people I have been scared with, laughed with, confided in, got drunk with, but suddenly I am the stranger in their midst. I am the story.
♥ Back at the hotel, the arrangements for their press statement had been made. Clive Barnes pointed out the chairs for the reporters and the stubby black microphones placed on the table where the families would sit. A young woman was setting out printed name cards on the white cloth. They'd spelled her name wrong. Lesley O'Conner.
She went to say so but stopped. What did it matter? Alex was dead.
♥ "They caught him. There was a formal disciplinary process and he was asked to leave."
"Christ" is all I can say.
"We're running it, Kate," Joe says quietly. "I'm so sorry."
"Really?" I say. "How is this a story? It's got nothing to do with the fire. I suppose Jake dumped this girl? That's why she rang. She's got an ax to grind." It is my last feeble attempt to kill the story. But I've trained Joe too well.
"No, she said she dumped him because of the drugs. They were changing him. And I've checked her story out. It adds up. The university has issued a statement confirming he was sent down."
"Well done, you." I hate myself for sounding so bitter. Two days ago, I'd have been cheering him on. But I can't now. You see, I've been where Joe Jackson is a thousands times, hoisting up the truth in triumph. We're taught that the truth is all that matters. My first news editor used to say: "It doesn't matter how beautifully you write a story. If it isn't accurate, it's worthless."
Everyone wants to know the truth. Except those who don't. Those who stand to lose by it. I know that now.
♥ Lesley sat down next to her on the unmade bed. Jenny's grief dripped down the walls of the room. It was there in the tortured sheets, the discarded empty miniatures from the minibar, and the untouched dinner congealing on the bedside table.
The world had stopped here in this room.
♥ "I've kept some of his T-shirts and that baseball cap he wore to annoy you."
"Have you? I didn't know."
"Yeah," he says, and I hear the tremble in his voice. "They're in my cupboard. Stupid, I know, but they smelled of him. I missed him, Mum."
And I hadn't noticed. I'd been too busy putting on my own brave face.
♥ "Why didn't we know any of this before?" he said. "We were told they were having a great time."
Salmond got up Alex's Facebook page. "Because that's what Alex wanted us to think. Look, for example, on August the second. When she told Mags that Rosie was sleeping her way through the blokes, she posted a photo here on Facebook of the two of them clinking glasses. 'Living the dream with my roomie,' it says here."
"Why would she pretend to be having a good time?"
Salmond looked at him. "Because that's what she wants her "friends" to think. This is her public profile. It has nothing to do with what's really going on in her life.
"Public profile?" Sparkes said. "She was a schoolgirl from Winchester, not on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here."
"Ah, but we are all stars of our own reality shows now, sir. Didn't you know?"
♥ We've made a list. I like a list. A tiny piece of order in a chaotic world.
♥ ..she waited for the photo of Alex and Rosie to pop onto the screen just after the headline.
And the photo of Jake Waters. She'd taped the whole segment and frozen the frame with his face staring out of the screen. Not the horrible photo on the beach, where he looked like the devil, but a new one where he looked like someone's son. He had glasses on and had wavy hair and a lopsided smile.
"Did you do this?" she asked the face. "Could you have done it?" She tried to imagine her own son hurting someone, but the image wouldn't come. Not her boy, then. But could someone else's? Could Kate's?
♥ I smile back, trying to keep the gentle joshing going. It's what we do when things are blacker than black. We make a joke. A bad one. It's bravura, I suppose. Showing we can laugh in the face of anything.
♥ I'd waited for a long time after he headed off to catch his flight on Friday. I'd just stood there, weighed down by his quiet grief. He hadn't cried again. He'd stitched it under his damp skin, holding t in until he reached home.
♥ I would never have thought of Lesley as an advocate for capital punishment. More of a campaigner for road safety. But I know now that protecting our children changes who we are. Who we seem to be.
♥ He will, I tell myself in the small hours of sleepless nights. He'll be a better person.
But there are days when I find it hard to look at my eldest son without choking on the guilt I feel for hiding his. I study that face that I gave birth to and search for his remorse, but he seems to have managed to put up a shield to "what happened in Thailand," as it is now referred to in our house.
Steve smiles optimistically and calls it the resilience of youth. And I let him think that.
I decided not to tell him the truth, because he would want to do the right thing-ring Bob Sparkes, have Jake own up and take the consequences. Because he sees things so simply-they're either right or they're wrong. I see beyond, into the gray, blurred margins where the consequences wait. Steve didn't see our son in prison. I did. I saw the old-man face of our boy, felt his despair. I can't be responsible for that happening to him again.
♥ "DI Sparkes," he answers.
"Hello, Bob, it's Kate."
"Well, how are you doing?" He sounds unsure but not hostile, so I plow on.
"Not bad-you?"
"Same. Back at work full-time now."
"Good for you. I'm ringing because guess who I've heard from."
"Go on..." And I can hear the smile in his voice.
"Jean Taylor."
"Bloody hell! What did she have to say?"
And we are back on common ground, picking up the threads of a former life. Perhaps I ought to write and thank Jean Taylor for her intervention.