Random Acts of Unkindness Read Online Free PDF Page A

refused, saying Aiden would come here if he wasn’t in.
    The next morning Aiden wasn’t home and Sal went out to look for him again. I rang everyone and then I rang Ian.
    ‘OK. Look, Jan, I’ll report him as a missing child. Get it broadcast. When you come in today bring some photographs. And when did you last see him?’
    ‘I haven’t seen him since Friday. He was staying with his dad.’
    ‘OK. We’ll need a statement from him as well. Bring all Aiden’s details.’
    ‘He could come in with me.’
    I heard Ian miss a beat. He was thinking what to say next to placate me.
    ‘He could, yeah, but then there’s all the waiting.’ Roughly translated as we’ve got other things to think about. Things that aren’t a fifteen-year-old who’s gone off with some mates. Even at that point I was beginning to understand how this would be treated. ‘I’ll get some uniforms out to him. Might be later on today. Get a statement. I’ll see you when you get in. OK? Don’t worry.’
    Don’t worry. Easy for him to say. Don’t worry. I know from years of policing that it’s highly unlikely that he’s dead. It’s hard to conceal a dead body. Much easier to keep someone alive.
    I also know that nine out of ten missing teenagers are acting out, flexing their freedom muscles. But not Aiden. And I’ve got my reasons. Everyone thinks he’s run away from home. But I know he would never do that. He would never do this to me, his mother.
    Even now, right at this moment, in the middle of the night, I can’t drag my mind’s eye away from the lead up to Aiden’s disappearance and the aftermath. The surface of the storm was tumultuous, with Sal losing the plot and wrecking an interview room as I watched through the one-sided glass, frozen. It was like viewing my whole marriage, summed up in ten minutes of temper-fed violence.
    He’d tried to blame me. He’d told the interviewers that all this was my fault for being a bad mother, for having a job I loved, for making us split up. He’d told them about the time Aiden stayed out before, how he’d slunk off in the middle of an argument between Sal and I and not come home. How we had to phone his friends, until he waltzed back in at nine o’clock in the morning to get his football gear.
    At that point Stan had closed his notebook. Stan Bores, the elderly detective interviewing him, all they could spare for a ‘runaway’ case, as they labelled it, told him that the police force weren’t social services and whatever the reasons, it was their job simply to establish Aiden’s location.
    Poor Sal. It seemed that no one wanted to listen to his continual character assassination of me; every conversation wheedled around to that subject. So he reverted to type and blew. But what bothered me was that, in his anger and recrimination, he had more or less suggested that he too thought Aiden had run away. I knew he hadn’t.
    If the surface was choppy and rough going with sleepless nights and endless wondering, the undercurrent was more dangerous.
    Sal heaved the blame for Aiden running away—he had become convinced that this was what had happened now after copious amounts of statistics and data provided by officials who just don’t know where to look when nobody turns up—squarely on my shoulders. It was clearly all my fault.
    This was the main current driving the investigation forward, scaled down after a week of nothing—no use of bank card, no CCTV, no evidence at all.
    Yet I knew where to look. The underlying current was my doubt. Doubt that he had just upped and left. True, there had been arguments and there had been playing up, but nothing out of the ordinary. He was like Sal—quick tempered and unforgiving. At times I thought he hated me; he would just sit and stare at me. But that was no reason to run. He had two homes, always an alternative if one got too much.
    And I knew where to look. In the weeks running up to Aiden’s disappearance I’d received some menacing text