“You thought wrong. Look, Jim, all I’m doing is searching the streets. I owe Susan Reed that much at least. Besides, the guy went on the national news with her. His name’s going to come out soon enough anyway.”
“I’ll tell you this much. He’s clean, no warrants, no record, and he’s got an airtight alibi.”
“He could have an accomplice.”
Jim sighed and tried to change the subject. “Have you spoken to Eve?”
“Yes. She asked if I wanted to meet up.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said no.”
“You want a piece of advice, Harlan. Call her back, tell her you’ve changed your mind.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why? She still loves you, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I can’t see her.”
Jim huffed his breath into the receiver. “Christ, I’ve never heard such a load of bollocks. If you think you’re doing Eve a favour by staying away from her, you’re wrong. All you’re doing is making both of you miserable. But then again, maybe that’s what you want. Maybe prison’s turned you into the kind of guy who enjoys misery, wallows in it like a pig in muck.”
“Maybe so.” Harlan’s eyes were drawn to the television by the sound of smashing glass. Someone had hurled a bottle at Jones’s house. The police quickly moved in to usher the crowd onwards. The camera homed in on Susan Reed, milking every ounce of agony and despair. Her boyfriend, or whatever he was, looked pale and uncomfortable, like he wanted to be somewhere else. “So what’s the guy’s alibi?”
“Jesus, Harlan,” snapped Jim, and he hung up.
Harlan switched off the television and headed for bed. He set the alarm clock for two hours hence and shut his eyes. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought about what Jim had said. Jim was wrong, prison hadn’t changed him — at least, not in the way he meant. He’d always needed a bit of misery in his life. As a detective, he’d needed it the way an oyster needs sand to form pearls. It’d provided him with the edge and insight required to do the job. The difference was that back then he’d used his misery, controlled it. Now it was the other way around.
Chapter 5
All that night and the following day and night, Harlan relentlessly scoured the streets. He saw dozens of silver VW Golfs, but none of their number plates came close to being a match. As the hands of time ticked mercilessly towards the four day mark, his searching became ever more frantic. One time, after glimpsing a silver car in his rearview mirror, he did a high-speed U-turn and gave chase. A mile or so later, leaving a trail of blaring horns in his wake, he caught up with the car only to find it wasn’t even a VW.
There was little new to be heard on the news. For some undisclosed reason, a pond was dragged, but turned up nothing. William Jones was released without charge. The police issued warnings that vigilantism wouldn’t be tolerated. They also put up a ten thousand pound reward for information that would lead them to Ethan. Their search was building to a fever-pitch too — over a third of the regional force’s manpower was now involved. An army of volunteers wallpapered the city with Ethan’s face and handed out reams of leaflets. Susan Reed spoke to dozens of journalists, making a series of increasingly desperate appeals. But answers seemed non-existent and fear swelled like waves of fire, ready to consume the city. Parents kept their children indoors. Home security companies couldn’t keep up with demand. Police were inundated with reports of suspected prowlers.
On the evening of the third day, Garrett gave another press conference at which he admitted that the police had few clues to go on and called on people not to lose hope. Don’t lose hope! In the past, Harlan had spoken those same words to the families of missing and kidnapped persons, and they’d rung as hollow on his lips as they did on Garrett’s. He glanced at the clock. Half-past seven. There were approximately eight or nine hours of hope left. After that, anyone who knew anything about child abductions knew that Ethan would almost certainly be dead.
Time wore on. Ten PM, eleven…one AM, two… Harlan didn’t stop for food, didn’t stop for red lights, barely stopped to breathe, until the clock hit four AM. Then he pulled over and sat for a long moment with his head pressed against the steering-wheel, eyes closed. “It’s over,” he murmured to himself, and he turned the car to head back to his flat.
Harlan dropped like a stone onto his bed, but despite his exhaustion it took him hours to get to sleep. And when he did eventually manage to drop off, his sleep was one long sweaty nightmare in which he was chasing a silver VW Golf through the city. A child’s terrified face was pressed against the car’s rear windscreen, but that child wasn’t Ethan it was Thomas. On and on the chase went, but Harlan never got any closer to the car. He awoke choking on tears of frustration and rage. “It’s not fucking over!” he gasped, shaking his head. With or without hope, he had to continue searching.
Harlan yanked on his clothes and checked the news to see if there’d been any developments — there was one, the identity of Susan Reed’s companion had finally come out. His name was Neil Price. He was thirty-one years old and worked as a night-porter at the Northern General Hospital — which explained his airtight alibi. He was referred to as ‘Mrs Reed’s media-shy boyfriend’. The way the news reader said it, as if there was something intrinsically dubious in being media-shy, made Harlan’s toast stick in his craw. There was no suggestion that Price was under any kind of official suspicion, but a criminologist in the studio insidiously invited viewers to regard him with narrowed eyes by describing the classic profile of a potential abductor — white male, early thirties, unskilled worker. Harlan found himself wanting to speak up in Price’s defence — not because he thought there was no possibility the guy was involved, but because he despised the media’s tactics. He’d seen too many lives indelibly marked by shit-flinging journalists.
Over the next few days, Harlan spent every waking moment searching for Ethan. He trawled the suburbs, peering over fences and into garages. He drove around supermarket car parks, and multi-storey car parks, and industrial estate car parks, constantly moving, constantly looking.
Nothing. It was as though the VW didn’t exist. Harlan began to wonder whether the milkman had got the car’s make wrong. If so, he might as well be out hunting for a ghost. Whenever he returned to the flat, bone-weary though he was, he lay awake with doubts swirling inside him.
Days stretched into weeks. Harlan hardly slept, ate or washed. Telephone calls from his parole officer — he’d failed to report for a meeting — went unanswered. Mail piled up unopened. He was searching further and further afield. Villages and towns he’d never been to before. Sometimes he didn’t return home for days. He stayed in cheap hotels and B amp;Bs, and when he ran low on cash, he slept in his car.
With every passing day, the media and the public’s interest in the case waned. News reports got shorter and less frequent. Newspaper articles were relegated from the front pages. Volunteers pasting up posters and handing out leaflets disappeared from the streets. Ethan’s sun-and-rain faded face was gradually blotted out by fly-posters, defaced by graffiti, even torn down — some people, it seemed, objected to being constantly reminded that something so terrible had happened in the place they lived.
There was no longer a plainclothes on Harlan’s tail wherever he went. The police’s search — at least on a street level — was winding down. In the Northwest, whatever leads they’d been following had apparently led to nothing. Locally, they’d searched hundreds of addresses, spoken to thousands of people, pried into every corner of Ethan and his family’s life, but all their efforts had failed. The jigsaw remained incomplete.
Exactly a month after Ethan’s abduction a local Baptist preacher named Lewis Gunn whipped up interest in the case by appearing on the news to urge church members nationwide to continue the search. He announced that an all-night prayer vigil was to be held at tabernacles across the city at which he would be collecting donations for a reward fund. Harlan had previously stayed away from all such gatherings, partly out of fear of being recognised, but mainly because he knew Garrett would use his presence as an excuse to haul him in for further questioning, maybe even try to get his parole revoked. But now that he was no longer being followed he saw no reason not to go along. And there was little chance of him being recognised — he barely recognised himself with several weeks’ growth of beard on his sleep and food deprived face.