Make Believe by Cath Staincliffe Page A

story,’ McEvoy protested.
    ‘ Not any more, you’re not.’ Shap lit a fag of his own.
    ‘ What about free speech?’ McEvoy bleated.
    ‘ It isn’t free if it costs us the case,’ Shap told him.  ‘Get it?  Now – dates, places, times.  I need to go over it all with you again.’
    ‘ Fine,’ he said.  ‘It’s all in here,’ he tapped at his head.  ‘I can see it, that little bundle.  It was horrific …’
    ‘ Back up a-ways,’ Shap interrupted.  He got out his phone to record McEvoy’s answers.  ‘Let’s start at the beginning, how long had you been working at Kendal Avenue?’
     
      Butchers called Lisa who was at Felicity Wray’s to check that the search was still ongoing.  It was Phoebe’s bedroom he was most interested in and when he walked into it, he could see it looked promising. The posters on the wall were the stuff of nightmares: people in clown masks looking far from funny, blood and gore, vampires and images of war, a band all dressed in skeleton suits.  One slogan read, Death is Freedom .
    He scanned the bookshelves, and then he saw the title: Children Who Kill by Carol Anne Davis.  He grabbed it and opened the cover.  A name written inside, Luke Stafford . 
    ‘ Look at this,’ he said to Lisa, ‘Luke Stafford has lent her a book on child murders.’
    Lisa raised her eyebrows.  ‘And everyone says kids don’t read anymore,’ she joked. 
    Butchers placed the book in a sealed evidence bag.  He hadn’t pieced it all together yet but there was something here, he could feel it.  Two teenagers going off the rails, egging each other on.  Impressionable at that age, risk takers, no sense of consequences.  Butchers felt a kick of excitement; he was onto them, he was going to hunt them down and bring them in.  Not exactly sure who’d done what yet.  But both Luke Stafford and Phoebe Wray looked guilty as sin.

Chapter 14
     
    Claire’s mind was on a loop, it’s not Sammy, it’s not Sammy, it’s not Sammy .  She found the concept impossible to grasp.  The  previous forty-eight hours she had been doing her hardest to accept the awful truth; to accept the image of her little boy in a drainage tunnel, his small body lifeless, so terribly damaged they would not let her see him.
    She had been carrying that in her heart and now they were telling her that poor child was not her child.  They didn’t know who he was but they were absolutely certain he was not Sammy.
    It was a violent wrench, them snatching away the truth, the certainty, cruel finality, almost as violent as Sammy being stolen in the first place and Claire was reeling from it, unable to reconfigure the features of the dead child into those of a stranger.  It’s not Sammy.
    The words didn’t sink in.  Her body, every fibre from the hair on her skin to the marrow in her bones had been devastated by the shock of Sammy’s death, fighting to absorb it.  And now to have it reversed, to have this macabre resurrection was incomprehensible.  It was so hard to unthink it, unfeel it.
    Perhaps he was dead anyway.  Was this her mother’s instinct recognizing the fundamen tal truth?  That even though this dead child was not her boy, her boy was still a dead child.
    She was sick and dizzy with it all.  And angry.  Angry that suddenly she was expected to readjust.  For a third time.
    First to be bereft, full of fear and shame, mad with desperation that her boy had gone, disappeared.  Magic, Mummy, Izzy-whizzy.
    Then to be crushed, sobered, broken by the notification of death.
    And now, a third yank of the rope, fresh torture.
    It hurt when she breathed, her lungs, her ribs were sore.
    How dare they, the police, fate, whoever.
    The logical part of her brain told her this might yet be a good thing.  Sammy might be alive if he’s not in that sewer.  But her instincts felt heavy, swollen, leaden.   Then there were flashes of piercing guilt when she thought that her reprieve meant that somewhere else another