Dying Art (A Dylan Scott Mystery) (12 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Dylan found it difficult to remember that this flat had once been his home. When Bev had thrown him out, telling him he was a “drunkard and a bloody loser,” she’d found this awful flat for him and he hadn’t been here a week before his mother had turned up on his doorstep. He shuddered at the memory. Life had been hell and he’d hated everything about this glorified shoebox.

When he’d returned to the marital home, his mother had stayed on here. She’d been looking for somewhere to buy ever since but was no further forward. She looked settled here, and Dylan had to admit that the flat looked nothing like it had when he’d lived in it. It was full of colour for one thing. Bright pictures broke up white walls, butterfly mobiles hung from ceilings, rugs and cushions adorned floors and furniture.

It was still small though. Still cramped. Far too small for a party of six. Dylan, Bev and the kids had been invited to lunch to meet the new man in his mother’s life. Boris. Who the hell looked at a newborn baby and called the poor bugger Boris?

His mother didn’t look particularly excited. She was busy lighting candles and inhaling burning incense. You needed strong lungs to survive in Vicky Scott’s company for long.

Not trusting her choice of drinks, Dylan had brought along a couple of bottles of decent wine. He opened one and filled two glasses, one for him and one for Bev. His mother rarely drank alcohol. She preferred nettle tea or whatever her favourite evil-tasting concoction of the moment was.

“What time’s he coming?” Bev asked her.

“Twelve-thirty,” Vicky said, “and I don’t want you getting any ideas. I don’t want him getting any either. He’s just an old friend. We had fun when we were out in Turkey but that’s forty years ago. People change. They become staid.”

“You haven’t.” Dylan would love her to become staid. Or just plain normal would do.

Vicky didn’t argue with that. “I don’t think I’ll see him again.”

Dylan had been hoping that Boris would whisk her back to Turkey or maybe make a home with her on the Isle of Man but that hope was receding. It seemed that Boris wasn’t exciting enough for her. Few men were.

“How’s the nut casserole coming along?” he asked and she looked at him in surprise.

“How did you know we were having nut casserole?”

“Oh, just a lucky guess.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bev smiling to herself as she played around with Freya. Luke, as always, followed his grandmother around like a shadow. As odd at it was, he adored the woman.

“Does the table look all right?” Vicky asked.

“For someone who’s not really interested, you’re very concerned about that table,” Bev said. “And yes, it looks lovely. Perfect. He’ll be very impressed.”

Vicky pulled a face. “I’m not out to impress him. But let’s have a nice afternoon, shall we?”

“Of course we will,” Bev said as if there had never been any doubt. “Our taxi’s booked for three so you’ll have plenty of time alone with him.”

“Ha. Away with you.”

Dylan would rather be at home getting ready for the morning. His first job after leaving Collins’s gallery had been to phone his one-time boss, Frank.

“Tell me it’s crazy to go to France,” he’d said.

“I’d like to,” Frank had replied, “but it’s probably what I’d do. It’s the unexpected things that make cases interesting, and a Jack McIntyre miniature is very unexpected.”

“Do you fancy coming along for a pub crawl?”

“God, yes. Anything to get me away from the clinging vine.”

The clinging vine was Frank’s neighbour. Esme was an over-friendly woman determined to be the fourth Mrs. Willoughby. Frank was adamant there would be no fourth Mrs. Willoughby.

“When are you planning to go?” Frank had asked.

“The sooner the better. Tomorrow?”

“Suits me. I’m not sure what time the first train to London leaves on a Sunday but I’ll be on it...”

Bev thought he was crazy to go and she was probably right.

He was dragged from his thoughts by the doorbell. His mother ran fingers through her hair, presumably to tidy it although it had the opposite effect, before going to answer it.

Boris, a smiling man in his sixties, came into the room and introductions were made all round. Dylan was shocked to see such a normal-looking bloke. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—long hair and a Love and Peace T-shirt at the very least—but he hadn’t expected someone so ordinary.

Bev must have been equally surprised because she was so busy staring at him that she didn’t notice his outstretched hand.

He was around the five-feet-ten mark with dark hair that was sprinkled with grey. There was something familiar about him but Dylan was damned if he could think what it was.

Surprisingly, he’d brought wine and flowers. Decent wine too.

Any fool could see that this man wasn’t Vicky Scott’s type. He didn’t look as if he knitted yoghurt for one thing. He looked too sensible and respectable to have anything in common with Dylan’s dope-smoking mother.

Lunch—if you could call munching your way through a nut casserole lunch—was a strange affair. The conversation flowed as easily as the wine, but Dylan’s mum was adrift with her memories and it was Bev who was watching Boris’s every move and hanging on his every word. She was fascinated by the man.

Freya had eaten before they left home and slept through the whole thing. Dylan was envious.

Luke ate as he usually did. As if he hadn’t been fed for six months.

Boris had his own courier business although he was looking forward to retirement so was delegating more and more. He’d been married and divorced, then married again. He was a widower now as his second wife had died eighteen months ago. He’d lived just over a mile from Dylan for the past twenty years.

“I can’t tell you how good it was to bump into Vicky again after all these years,” he said, smiling fondly. “We had great times together, didn’t we, Vicky?”

She looked at him, smiled and nodded. “The best.”

“We were young and foolish,” Boris said with a laugh. “When I think back—” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the antics of the young and foolish people they’d been. “Still, we grew up eventually. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

“Do you have children?” Bev asked him.

“No. My first wife couldn’t have them. We had dogs instead,” he said with a wry smile. “We never had less than two at any one time. Then, when I married again, well—it was too late for children.” He talked of plans he had for his retirement. “What I’d really like to do is hire a Harley-Davidson and drive along Route 66. Imagine that.”

Dylan looked at his mother, thinking she’d see this as a wonderful adventure, but she was concentrating on her food, a quiet smile on her face. He could imagine her riding pillion on a huge Harley with the wind in her hair and a joint in her hand.

After lunch, they chatted easily about the economy, the government and the weather, and Dylan was surprised to find that he liked Boris. He said as much to Bev in the taxi on the way home.

“He’s lovely, isn’t he?” she said.

Dylan watched the driver to make sure he took a left turn up ahead. The cunning bastards would take a much longer route to his house if they were in the mood. This one, however, turned left so Dylan sat back and relaxed.

“Dylan?”

“Yes?”

“Did you notice anything—anything about him? About Boris?”

“Like what?”

“Like the way he looked.”

“No. Well, I did think he reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who it was.”

“He reminded me of someone too,” she said.

“Oh? Who?”

She was a long time answering and when she finally did speak, Dylan thought he must have misheard.

“You.”

Chapter Eighteen

For the first time ever, Sarah wished Ron would stick to his Saturday ritual and go to the pub or the bookies. He kept uttering meaningless platitudes until she could no longer bear to look at him.

“He’ll be all right,” he said. “He’ll have stayed with one of his mates and be too scared to tell us. Knowing them, they had a few beers too many and are too hungover to even think about crawling home.”

Sarah nodded, but as hard as she tried, she couldn’t believe it. That wasn’t the son she knew and loved. He might be a bit rebellious right now, and she knew he wasn’t particularly happy, but he knew the difference between right and wrong and he wouldn’t let them worry unnecessarily.

“You know what sixteen-year-olds are like,” Ron said. “Look at the trouble I used to get in.”

Sarah wanted to scream at him.

“Maybe he’s gone further afield,” Ron said.

She tried to calm down but her heart was pounding in her ears and she was a breath away from losing control.

She should have called the police last night. If it hadn’t been for Ron, she would have. She’d sat up till gone midnight but had then climbed into bed because she hadn’t wanted Ron to know that Kevin was still out. At best, there would have been a blazing row. Ron had been drinking for hours so it might have been even worse.

She’d woken early, before six o’clock, and had gone straight to Kevin’s bedroom. His bed hadn’t been slept in.

At first, she’d thought, like Ron, that he’d stayed the night at a friend’s house. If he’d called to ask if he could, his dad would have said no so he wouldn’t have bothered. He was sixteen and believed he should be treated like an adult whereas Ron treated him like a ten-year-old. Sometimes, Sarah thought Ron said no to everything just to make himself feel better, to kid himself that he still had some control and influence.

At eight o’clock, she’d phoned his friends’ parents but no one had seen him. No one knew anything about football practice at the school last night either. Just before nine, she’d phoned the police.

Two young constables had knocked on the door less than half an hour later. They’d asked questions—what had Kevin been wearing? where did he say he was going? who was he friendly with? had anything been troubling him?

Sarah had answered their questions as best she could but each one had sent a dart of pure fear through her heart.

The policemen had spoken reassuringly. They’d smilingly told her that sixteen-year-olds never think about the consequences of staying out of the house. Every police officer in the county would be looking for Kevin, they’d said.

It was almost three o’clock now and Sarah’s terror was increasing with every passing minute so that she was struggling to breathe. Panic made her dizzy, caused her throat to dry up and her heart to race.

She’d made them several cups of tea, most of which had remained untouched, but they’d had no breakfast or lunch. She couldn’t face food and, when she’d offered to get Ron something, he’d said he’d have something later.

She gasped as a dark shadow passed the window seconds before the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it, love.” Ron was already on his feet.

He returned to the kitchen with a young man following him.

“Hello, Mrs. Mills. Sarah, isn’t it? I’m Detective Sergeant Alan Green. I don’t have any real news, but I’m the officer in charge and, believe me, we’re doing all we can to find your son.”

Sarah nodded, but she couldn’t speak for the wedge of fear in her throat.

“Shall we sit down?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes. Sorry. Come on through here,” Ron said.

They trooped into the sitting room. Sarah, worried that her legs wouldn’t support her, sank onto the sofa. Ron sat beside her and the sergeant stood for a moment gazing out the window. When he turned round, he gave them a confident smile and sat in the armchair.

“If Kevin was going from here to the town centre,” he said, “which way would he go?”

Sarah frowned, puzzled by the question. “Well, if he was in a hurry, he’d cut through the cemetery.”

Sergeant Green looked worried, she thought. And young. God, he didn’t look much older than Kevin.

“That makes sense then,” he said. “We’ve found the bag containing his football kit. It was behind one of the gravestones in the cemetery.”

He gave them a moment to let that sink in. Except it didn’t. Ron reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“What was it doing there?” Ron asked.

“We’ve spoken to some of his friends, and we know that he met up with a young girl, a Carly Trueman, at six o’clock last night. If he’d told you he was meeting her, would you have allowed him to go?”

“Well—” Ron didn’t have an answer to that one.

“It depends,” Sarah said. A girl? He’d met a girl?

“If it was important to him, might he have invented the football practice as an excuse?” Sergeant Green asked.

“Yes.” Sarah knew it was possible. “Who is this girl?”

“She’s a school friend of Kevin’s,” he said, and he looked sad that they didn’t know. But how would they know? There were eight hundred pupils at the school and they knew very few of them. “Carly said they had a few cans of beer under Cooperative Bridge and then Kevin walked her home. He left her shortly before eleven o’clock and, as far as she knows, he was intending to come straight home.”

“So what did he do? Was he all right then? Did that girl say he was all right? Was he unwell? Is that it?”

“She said he was fine. He was in good spirits.”

“How much had he had to drink?” Ron asked.

“Three cans of beer. Maybe four.”

“Oh, God.” Sarah bit her lip. The physical pain was far easier to bear than the mental anguish. “If he was drunk, anything could have happened to him. What about the hospital? We should call the hospital?”

“There’s no record of anyone fitting Kevin’s description being admitted to any of the medical centres last night.”

The questions went on, and Sarah felt as if she was discussing a stranger. It didn’t seem possible that her Kevin had lied about football practice to meet up with a girl. It didn’t seem possible that he’d—vanished.

Two more police officers arrived.

“We need to look at Kevin’s room,” Sergeant Green said. “Also, you said you’d find a better photo for us.”

While the officers searched through Kevin’s bedroom for any clue as to where he might have gone, Sarah went to the kitchen, where she’d put half a dozen recent photos of Kevin. In each one, he was smiling and carefree. She hoped now that, wherever he was, he was smiling. She longed to see him walk into the house, bang the doors, throw his coat down and head straight for the bread bin or the biscuit jar.

She handed over the photos.

“Thank you.” Sergeant Green gave her arm a reassuring squeeze that didn’t reassure at all. “We’re doing everything we can to find your son, Sarah.”