There is a monkey-puzzle tree on Aberdare Close. It towers out of the front garden of number 26, a semi-detached property which is divided  into 26a, 26b and 26c, and casts snakes of shadow across the road at most times of the day but especially in the morning. The tree has been the subject of a great uproar in the street, many neighbours finding it objectionable, including the tenant at 26c. But the tree belongs to 26a, which has tenure of the front garden. Many visitors to the street find the controversy surrounding the tree surprising to say the least, for a monkey-puzzle tree is a thing of strange and unusual beauty. It is generally felt, however, that the poor thing is not only overbearing but out of character with the rest of the street. A street of grey, pebble-dashed semis whose price far exceeds their worth.

It was in the shadow of the monkey-puzzle tree that David Solomon knelt one Saturday morning. In the middle of the road, his Sabbath suit ground between his knees and the unforgiving tarmac, beginning to spot with blood. His hands held his head and his shoulders shook, giving the shadow-snakes the appearance of movement across his back. Alex Broder and Nikki Immanuel, a young couple and perpetual late-comers to the synagogue stood some meters away, gawping at the fallen man in the quiet close, its twist of street an empty stage, effortlessly commanded. They watched as, gradually and in clusters, the entirety of their community rounded the opposite corner and gathered on the other side, behind David, also keeping their distance. A woman ran up to him, holding her hat to her head and crouched awkwardly beside him.
“David,” her voice was almost lost in the thickness of the air in the close, “David, where’s Yuddy?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t move.

The Rabbi had graciously surrendered his office so that DC Kendrick could have the space and peace he needed to find out what was going on. Outside, it was chaotic, a scrum. Everyone and their neighbour delayed their Shabbat lunch to offer moral support, to express the deepest of concerns, to hungrily gobble up any scrap of information that lay spoiling long enough in the public domain. Kendrick could hear them out there; the clamour of nervous excitement and gossip. But in here, everything was cool, dark and still. The books held sway, their smell of ages permeating everything, as if their flaking paper was evaporating into clouds that sat heavily in the small room; row upon row layered up to the ceiling, hundreds of bindings stamped with an archaic and indecipherable foreign text.

In the shadow of the pages, Solomon sat in a straight-backed chair, exhibiting such discomfort that he would probably have been better off standing. His long legs twisted one way, his skinny torso the other, soft, spreading stomach like a sack in the middle of him. One hand was clamped onto the arm of the chair, the other fidgeted in his lap. The fabric over his knees was torn and stained. The face was hollow, wet eyes fixing on Kendrick one moment and bouncing distractedly around the room the next.
“Laying?” Asked Kendrick.
“Laining.” Solomon mumbled out the side of his mouth, barely looking at the officer. “It was in the laining.”
“And what’s… that?”
“The reading of the Torah. Part of the service where, the, erm, the laws are read. The five books of Moses.”
“The five… Oh, the Old Testament?”
“Well yes, but… no. We don’t call it that.”
“Okay, I get the idea.”
“It’s a long part of the service, about half way through. People talk a lot. It’s meant to be the focus but, erm, people get bored I suppose.”
“So that would have put it at about ten-thirty?”
“Probably.” Kendrick made a note.
“And that was when he approached you?”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t that be a bit strange if this was such an important part of…”
“No. That’s what I’m, I suppose I’m trying to tell you. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. I know the guy. People like kids. They’re bored at that point in the service, so they chat and wander about and play with kids.”
“This guy, this David Kirsch?”
“Yes.”
“Another David.”
“There’s a lot of us.”
“Well it’s not exactly an uncommon name.” Kendrick tried a chuckle, but Solomon wasn’t in the mood to be amused. “How well do you know David Kirsch?”
“Evidently not as well as I thought.”
“Yeah, but I mean…”
“He’s an… acquaintance I suppose. He’s a regular at shul. About my age but, erm, single. Doesn’t sit a million miles away from me. We might have had him for a meal at some point…”
“So you know him quite well?”
“Well, not really. We have a lot of people for meals. That’s just the way it’s done here.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yes, it’s supposed to be.”
“So you wouldn’t have had any trouble with him playing with,” Kendrick paused to look at his notepad, “Yoodai?” Solomon shut his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose, as if in pain.
“Yuddy.” He shook his head, “No,” and opened his eyes, “I wouldn’t.”
“Do you want to tell me, from then, what happened?”
“Well, there’s not much to tell. I was busy with Gabe, our youngest. He was, I don’t know, moaning or complaining about something. He always is. Especially in shul. Kirsch wandered over and starts chatting with Yuddy. I looked over at him, he gave me a nod, wished me good shabbos, but Gabe was being so awful that I didn’t even have time to respond. Anyway, he was there for a while and then it was time for Hagbah – when they lift up the scrolls. Everyone stood up and that was when I noticed that Kirsch had gone. I couldn’t see Yuddy either but it wasn’t bothering me yet, you know, everyone was standing up. He could easily have been down there somewhere. But then they all sat and… and he wasn’t. And I looked up and there was Kirsch, slipping out the door with Yuddy in his arms. I kind of wondered what he was playing at. I mean, the alarm bells still weren’t ringing, but I started walking towards him. He saw me and he gave me this glance. There was, I don’t know, something in his eyes. And that was when it twigged. I started moving faster and I called after him – everyone looked round – but he was out of there before I even got close.”
“What was… When you said you saw something in his eyes?”
“I couldn’t really say. It was a…” Solomon looked down at the space between his feet for a moment. When he looked up, he seemed a little more confused, his mouth curved as if his sadness rested deeper in him. “A seriousness. An intensity. Beyond that, it was… There was something else. I’m not sure, I… I just knew that something wasn’t right.” Kendrick nodded and scribbled something in his notebook. Solomon continued: “I got through the crowd and I ran, really ran, as fast as I could, through the corridors. When I got to the outside of the building I saw Kirsch just rounding the corner of the street. I chased him and a couple of times I caught sight of him but he, he was just moving so fast. Even though he was carrying Yuddy, he moved so quick. I… I didn’t stand a chance. And then I lost him. I just, I didn’t know what to do… what could I do? My lungs were burning, he was gone…”
“It’s alright. You did your best.” Kendrick put a hand on Solomon’s shoulder and did his best to look sincere and reassuring. “We’ll get him.”

“Alan, is that you?” She always asked that when he came in. Why did she always ask that when he came in, Kendrick wondered. Did she really think that someone else might have let themselves in through the front door with the keys? Did being a policeman’s wife make you that paranoid? Or maybe there was someone else who had keys to their house, someone he didn’t know about. If there was, it certainly would have livened things up. Kendrick dumped his coat over the banister, trudged into the kitchen and found Julie standing over the dinner, the way she always did. At her usual station. He slumped into a chair at the kitchen table and looked up at her with a weary smile, the way he always did. His usual station.
“Are you hungry?” She asked.
“Starving.” If he had asked himself, he would have been forced to admit that he derived a dull satisfaction from reading out this same script night after night. Probably the same thing that made his kids demand to be read the same story night after night when they were little.
“Andy! Maddie! Dinner!” Kendrick’s eardrums cowered. Julie should have been an opera singer, he thought, and chuckled to himself.

Footsteps thundered from the deep recesses of the house, beating a familiar rhythm on the stairs. Before long the kids were there, bright and hungry, the way they’re supposed to be. They were both fighting their way through their teens and Kendrick was never sure whether they were marvels or terrors. Both, probably, he thought. They didn’t have to decide which they were going to be for a few years yet. Julie served up and kissed him on the cheek as she set his dinner down before him.

That night he lay awake in bed, eyes bright and watery in the darkness. Julie snuffled beside him in the close warmth of the room. From somewhere else, he could hear Andy snoring. Judy didn’t snore, but there were enough muffled sounds that he could pinpoint where everyone was, enabling him to map the night. It was a long time since he had lain awake like this. It only happened when there was something worth thinking about, something that deserved the quiet and the space to be examined all on its own. He wondered what that thing could have been. It had been an ordinary day. Everything had unfurled in its time-honoured, well-defined way. Work was work and it stayed at work. It certainly had no place in these most private, silent hours. What if someone had taken one of his kids when they were young, he thought. What would make him want to take someone’s kid? Of course, there were all sorts of awful reasons for that sort of thing, but ultimately, he couldn’t get away from the idea that he’d never met a thief who’d stolen something for its sentimental value.

Leith Mansions: a faceless block of flats above a news agent, a barber and a bookie  on a North London street. Thin, clouded windows were crammed in between the bricks as if for ventilation only. Vapour trailed out of little gullets in the walls. It brought Kendrick back to a time when he used to live in a place like this. Even in those days, when he had stood outside his own block, he couldn’t help but marvel that whole lives were walled in there, hidden in stacks of two.

Slick concrete stairs led up to a back-landscape of hung washing and concrete floors spotted with intriguing old stains. Here was a bottle, there a used condom – small things, not many, just choice details, disposables left where they fell into nobody’s remit but still had an impact on somebody’s space. The estate agent, a middle-aged woman with a haircut that wouldn’t have led one to think she’d be comfortable in such an environment, let Kendrick into the property and waited while he went inside.

The front door skutted open and eventually stuck on the pile of unopened mail that had amassed on the doormat. Beyond, the hallway fell away into darkness. There was a staleness about it. It seemed not to move – it could almost have been a still image, the air frozen. A sweaty, old smell had impregnated the place and had time to mature. Kendrick switched on the light and the air stirred slowly to life, like a soup. Particles danced under the struggling bulb. He knew he’d be breathing some of them in. Were they just dust? Or were they something else… like spores? And why was his wife’s voice in his head? So far, he had seen nothing that had not been commonplace in his student days. Walking in, he noticed a lack of pictures on the walls. The kitchen was clogged with dirty crocks. The science experiments he had conducted in halls-of-residence kitchens came to mind. They were always fun in a disgusting sort of way. Until something moved. But the filth here was more entrenched. These dishes had had serious time to get crusted in. Anything that might have lived in the dirt would be long dead by now. Kirsch clearly didn’t cook for himself, or at least hadn’t for a long time. Opening the fridge, he found an antique jar of olives, a faint tincture of camembert and some black, petrified fruit that eluded further classification.

The lounge was nest-like. A newspaper lay open on the coffee table, pinned by a used cereal bowl and bearing the marks of several others. Books, magazines, CDs, videos and pizza boxes congregated in ever tighter circles around one of the couches. It was arguably a more efficient system than the most organised of well-kept households. Everything one might need was kept close to hand, built up in usage-based tiers around that central point, allowing Kirsch to do pretty much anything he needed without having to get up. As fascinating as the logic was, it wasn’t telling Kendrick anything apart from that the guy was single and a slob. The deep furrow he carved in the dust when tracing his finger across a pile of papers only went to show that, despite the apparent chaos, nothing much had happened here in some time. Certainly, no kid had been dragged kicking and screaming round the flat.

In  the bedroom, a similar regime held sway. Mounds of clothes all but obscured the floor. An ironing board lay crippled in a corner, perhaps kicked over, a shirt still plastered to it. But this wasn’t abandonment. There were no signs of sudden departure here. This was the home of somebody who had simply ceased to care, or perhaps never had. The desk was all but submerged under a pile of debris, a laptop just visible, discarded like any of the other rubbish there. Kendrick picked it up. He would take it back to the station and have them scour it for kiddie-porn, although he was already getting an inkling that they would not find anything. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that this was not the sort of man he was dealing with.

He found himself drawn towards the bed. There was nothing exceptional in the melee of tangled sheets. It wasn’t their spectacular squalor, their long encrusted stains that drew him there. It was a photograph. Framed in lacquered cardboard, it lay face down on the bedside table, discarded like everything else but perhaps, Kendrick thought, not quite as carelessly. It was that cheap frame that had got his attention. The weak cardboard stand sticking up, buckled and slightly torn. Even from the back he recognised it, the kind of frame that they only use for one thing. He picked up the school photograph and stared at it: Manchester Grammar, 1992. They stared back. A class of thirty boys in their early teens, all uniformed. Studious-looking for the most part; an air of mischief about some of them - a cocky smile, a devilish glint, the frozen hint of a laugh; an air of defeat about others - the downcast face, the glazed eyes, the indifferent expression. These were futures in the making. Thirty futures that had become presents some time ago. It was as if they were gazing expectantly out from that captured instant. As if, knowing that this portrait would exist beyond it, they could gain some insight from the dark circle behind the lens. As if those boys, now consigned to the past, could see into the physical world that surrounded this small fragment of them, the only piece of what they once were that still existed.
“Well boys,” Kendrick muttered to them, “did it turn out how you thought it would?”

“That bad is it?” He turned to find the estate agent standing in the doorway.
“Huh?”
“Do all the detectives end up talking to themselves?” She leant her shoulder against the doorpost and smiled with one side of her mouth.
“Nah, just me.” He walked over to her. “Mental infirmity’s a hobby of mine. I try and keep it outside of work but sometimes I just feel like, you know, spoiling myself.” She chuckled.
“It’s disgusting, isn’t it?” Her eyes flicked around the flat.
“Aah, I’ve seen worse.”
“I bet you have.”
“Haven’t you?”
“I don’t know… Maybe on a par. At least there’s nothing dead in here.” Kendrick snorted a grim assent. People always assumed the worst when it came to crime. It was seldom as bad as all that. They expected drama, but they cut the boring bits out in crime drama too. He held up the picture.
“Which one do you think is him?” He asked her. She examined the class for a few moments and then singled out a boy.
“That one,” she said, leaving her finger print on him. With a pleasant, well-behaved smile, puppy fat and curly Jewish hair, the thirteen-year-old stared out at them from behind large, thick-lensed glasses.

In the station, Kendrick stood over his desk. Around him, other detectives rushed and hustled, phones rang and keyboards rattled. He was still: one hand in his jacket pocket, the other holding the photograph, head bent over it. His expression was indeterminate. So much so that it was difficult to tell whether he was looking at the picture or through it, beyond it. He may have been searching with his detective’s eyes for something deep in the picture, way past the surface; or maybe he had just stopped. Maybe there was something about this case, something so ominous that it had jarred him. Maybe he had emptied himself, confronted by a banality he was only beginning to get an inkling of. Or maybe he just wasn’t there, had zoned out.

His nostrils tasted the whisper of a light, girlish scent. For the first time in minutes that hadn’t been counted, he blinked. Alice Stanley appeared over his shoulder and slung a file onto his desk.
“There’s the background check on Kirsch,” she muttered. She had a closed-lipped way of talking. She moved round in front of him and leant back on the desk. He looked at her over the picture and smiled. “It’s pretty damn boring, to be honest.” The way she talked didn’t really suit her. She was nice-looking, a good dresser; blonde with clear, grey eyes. But when she spoke it bled her of charisma. She expressed herself in a dusty monotone that made her sound like she was reading out the phone book. She was lovely. It just took a while for it to come out. But Kendrick was a patient man. His eyes dipped back to the photo.
“You got a picture of Kirsch in there?” He asked her. She flicked through the file and slotted an image in between his thumb and the school portrait. “Thanks,” he murmured. After a moment he handed both pictures over to her. “Which one do you reckon is him?” She looked back and forth between the two images and promptly pointed out the same boy. “Funny, that,” he said, “that’s not him.”
“Where is he then?” She arched an eyebrow.
“That one is David Solomon,” he looked up at her. “This is David Kirsch.” He pointed out another boy one row below, on the other side of the picture. This boy was a similar height, had different hair – it was straight and just slightly overlong, looking like it needed cutting but actually a premature sign of the wilder fashions that would set in in the later teens – and, though it was worn properly, tie done up, shirt tucked in, his uniform just looked slightly messier on him for some reason. Those were the differences. Otherwise, they had the same puppy fat, the same neatly proportioned features, even the same glasses. But it was that the expression was identical; that was the striking thing. Absolutely identical. As if the two boys had exactly the same thoughts running through their heads at that moment. It was not just the mask that they had on, the well-behaved smile that mummy would have castrated them over had they done otherwise. It was every interior motivator, everything behind the eyes and deeper which contributed to the composure of the face. And if this was the case, then it must have been the moment before and the moment that followed as well, and countless other moments in all probability, that the boys had shared the same thoughts, that exactly the same things had been going through their minds. Would they have looked so alike had this not been the case?

“Curiouser and curiouser said Alice,” said Alice. “You know it’s not just the same school that these two have in common?”
“Really? Kendrick took a seat on the edge of his desk, next to her.
“They were both born into families of second generation Jewish Polish immigrants living in Prestwich, North Manchester, exactly one month apart. They went to the same primary school and secondary school, both then going on to study law at Leeds University. Both of them moved to London at about the same time upon finishing their degrees and did their legal practice courses, although not at the same institutions. They then both got jobs in top city legal firms.”
“Weird.”
“And yet Solomon insists that he doesn’t know Kirsch all that well?”
“He seemed pretty sure about it.”
“How odd.”
“Very.”

In the Solomons’ sitting room, Kendrick and Stanley sat opposite the anxious parents. Alice smiled, tipped her head and cleared her throat.
“Tell us about the time Kirsch came for dinner,” she said. Solomon, still sick with worry and wrung, only now a man who had been wrung for over twenty four hours, stared back at her, his eyes wide and featureless. He pursed his lips, clearly struggling to see the point behind the question.
“To be honest,” he sighed, “I don’t really remember  it.”
“But you did say he came for dinner?” Alice looked over at Kendrick.
“I remember it.” Annette Solomon’s voice cut through the room in clear, curt syllables. “It was that time when we had Barbara and Neil and the boys and, erm, oh what was that girl’s name? We were trying to set them up I think.”
“Oh yes.” Solomon conceded with a single nod. Annette launched into an in-depth discussion of the events of that night. She leant forward slightly, hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes narrowed as she talked, as if she thought that, now that she had something to tell them, they were actually getting somewhere. That strange belief, one clearly not shared by her husband, that somehow these professionals would be able to divine the answer from some hidden detail, invisible to the layman, couched amongst these flat, unremarkable events.
“What was he like?” Alice asked.
“He was… he was quite funny, I think. Bright boy, that one, certainly.”
“Boy? Isn’t he a similar age to you?”
“Yes, but, you know, it’s an expression isn’t it. Anyway, he seemed like a boy, something about him. I don’t know… Do you remember, darling, he made that joke? Oh what was it? Oh I don’t know, it was so funny…”

Kendrick paid little attention as Annette rattled on. He was watching Solomon. He also saw an almost physical discomfort. The last twenty four hours might have been spent having his blood let drop by drop. He was slowly being worn down. And below that was an emotion as strong as any other that he displayed: hatred. Not really for Kirsch directly. It was hatred of the discomfort. Here was a man who had worked all his life at being comfortable. Within that comfort lay any power that he owned. And he hated being robbed of it. He hated it more deeply than he had hated anything before. Kendrick also saw the boy in there. It took him a while but he did see it. Under those years of growing fat and content in the comfort of marital languor, and under the hard-boiled cynicism that escapes nobody as they age, the boy from the photograph stared out. And he was terrified. But it was not, perhaps, a fear that the boy in the history-trap could ever have felt. It was a fear that Kendrick understood, that he himself could have felt if, God forbid, he was in the same situation. Buried deep though he was, the boy still lived inside Solomon, but had evolved. This boy was not, like the one in the photo, a token of the tragedy that is inherent in nostalgia, this boy was potential realised, this boy had become what he was capable of being, and this fear was entirely selfless.

“And I… Well, I don’t suppose there’s anything else to say, really.” Annette tapered off, her head tilting to one side with a vapid smile.
“You’re sure you haven’t spent any time with him before? Significant time, I mean.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”
“But, David, you knew him before, didn’t you?” Kendrick turned sharply towards Solomon, who looked back at him with a furrowed brow.
“What do you mean?”
“David Kirsch. You’ve known this guy all your life.”
“I don’t quite know what you’re…” Kendrick found that he was wavering a little. Important as their discovery might have been, there just didn’t seem to be anything about Solomon that made the information even slightly relevant. Regardless, he continued:
“You and Kirsch grew up in the same neighbourhood, went to the same primary school, secondary school and university, where you studied the same subject and both moved to London, looking for the same sort of jobs. And you’ve lived here, in the same neighbourhood, ever since.” Kendrick waited, hands clasped in front of him as Solomon took in the information. The man shook is head slightly and then shrugged.
“Well if that’s the case, you’d think I’d definitely remember if I knew him, wouldn’t you? I know it seems strange, but it’s a…
“You were in the same class.”
“So I forgot. It was a long time ago. But it’s not like he’d ever brought it up, either. Look, it’s not entirely uncommon for…” Kendrick was getting frustrated. How could this not be leading anywhere?
“You know him.”
“No, I really don’t.” Solomon’s gaze was entirely earnest.
“How could you not know him?” And how could you not care that you don’t, thought Kendrick.

In her bed, Alice Stanley lay on her back and gazed up at the ceiling. Kendrick watched her eyes as they studied the plaster-work. The gentle smile on her lips faded. It was not much of a change.
“I wonder if we’ll find the kid,” she said. Kendrick sighed in agreement and propped himself up on an elbow. He crooked his neck to smell her hair. The cooling sweat excited her chemical fragrance. He chuckled softly.
“We’ve got to stop making this mistake,” he said. She raised herself onto her side, her back to him, and reached for a glass of water. She took a few sips and then cradled it, but did not turn to look at him. The skin of her back folded slightly under her shoulder blade, like a continuation of the bed sheet. “Hey, Alice, don’t be upset.” He touched her arm, but she still didn’t move.
“Maybe it’s not a mistake to me.”

Kendrick was woken the next morning by the telephone ringing. His wife snored beside him, oblivious. She had learned to sleep through anything. He answered. It was the station. His alarm went off and he told them to wait while he hit it. He asked what they wanted. They had found the boy, they said.

12 St Jennifer St. A large, Georgian terraced townhouse. Kendrick and Alice stood on the front step as the sound of the doorbell echoed away into its depths. A squad stood on the street, not sure what to expect but prepared for anything. They were a serious bunch of guys. Kendrick looked round at them. The sergeant looked very serious. Like he was going to war. Kendrick turned back to the door and smiled to himself. These guys always made him laugh. He looked at Alice. She returned his glance in the way that she might have done on any other day. If she was pissed off with him, she was doing a very good job of hiding it. Then again, she was not exactly cheery either.

The door opened. A tall, skinny, blonde woman stood there. She flinched as she saw the force of men, their meat wagon behind them screening off the rest of the street.
“Yes?” she spoke cautiously in an eastern-European accent. Kendrick showed his badge:
“Detective Constable Kendrick. Are you Elaine Abbot?” The woman sniffed and shook her head.
“No, I am carer. You want to come in? You can come. And her. They must wait here.”
“Course.” Kendrick smirked. “Don’t worry about them. I’m sure they can amuse themselves.” As he and Stanley followed her in, he turned. “See you in a mo, boys.”

The inside of the house was vast. They followed the carer through a series of cavernous rooms, all stone and hard woods. Everywhere the curtains were drawn or the windows shuttered, casting it all into a cold, polished gloom. What light did creep in was anaemic and diluted, strained through the curtains like weak tea. The pictures on the walls were swallowed up by so much shadow that they became little more than looming black quadrilaterals. Via a long flight of stairs and round a sharp turn, they were brought to a landing. It was lighter here. At the other end, an open window breathed in fresh air and let tepid daylight splash freely onto the parquet floor. The carer led them to the first of several doors.

It opened out onto a bright, airy room, rolled in pastels and drapery. The large bed in the centre was a pile of soft fabrics; pillows upon pillows upon velvet and satin and stuffed toys. The boy, Yuddy, sat in the middle of them, gurgling. He pattered among the bears and rabbits, his puffy palms pressing into their padded depths. His face radiated innocence and ease, a playful smile sunk in a round face that was entirely oblivious to the whirlwind of trouble and hurt that wheeled around him. Alan and Alice stared at the boy. Momentarily transfixed, they became like him, their adult lives obscured.

It was Kendrick that first noticed Elaine, although Stanley caught the movement of his head and also turned to look at the figure in the wheelchair. At first they thought they were looking at an old woman. It was only after several seconds that it became apparent that the hunched and twisted skeleton in the chair was headed by a face that hadn’t even seen the end of its third decade. And it was a beautiful face. Watching the child, she seemed lost in that state which both of the detectives had enjoyed a moment ago. Amidst the tumbling auburn hair, her features exploded with a fragile bliss. When did she last move?

“I suppose he has to go, doesn’t he?” She didn’t look at them. She was going to drink in every last moment of this gift.
“Yes,” said Kendrick.
“I’m sorry,” Stanley added. Kendrick turned and frowned at her briefly.
“It’s okay.” There was a pause. Only the boy made any sound. Soft sounds swallowed by the softness all around them. Stanley spoke again:
“He didn’t do this for you, did he?”  Asked Stanley.
“No,” said Elaine, her smile altered subtly but remained a smile, “I’m afraid I was only an afterthought. But I’m grateful all the same. We’ve had a lovely time.”
“Did he bring him straight to you?” Kendrick’s tone was harder. Stanley was being too nice about this. He felt the need to bring an air of professionalism back into the proceedings. “Has he been here the whole time? You know this is very serious, don’t you?” Elaine doubled over in her chair, her throat rasping, full of fishing hooks. Rivets of pain dimpled her face, waves of age sweeping over her as she coughed. When she stopped, she turned to look at him. Beauty returned to her with composure but, now  that they had been made obvious, the rivets remained visible under that flawless skin.
“No.” She said. Her smile disarmed him when it came back. Made him feel remorse. “He dropped him off last night. I would have called you straight away but the poor lad was tuckered out. I didn’t think it would be fair to put him through any more upheaval without a good night’s sleep.” Kendrick swallowed and nodded, pausing before posing his next question, taking a moment to make sure his tone was right.
“Was he… distressed when he got here?”
“Not at all.” Elaine shook her head went back to looking at the boy, settling back into that blissful cast. “David’s a good man, officer. Too good to hurt anybody. Especially someone like Yuddy. He could never justify it. And he’d need to justify it. He’s a good man. He just a little lost.”
“Why did he do it?”
“I couldn’t tell you that.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I just mean… I couldn’t tell you. You could ask him yourself though.” Moving slowly, she held up a tremulous hand. Kendrick moved towards her and took hold of the crumpled piece of paper that was pinned unevenly in her atrophied, inward-curled claw. He met Elaine’s eyes and his breath caught in his throat. The control he had attempted to bring to bear on the situation was entirely lost under her watery glare. He tugged lightly at the note. It didn’t move. Her eyes flickered down towards her hand and then up at him again. There was a plea there, and an apology, one that she was deeply embarrassed to have to make. He looked down at the hand and gently pried away her fingers. Removing the note, he didn’t meet her eyes again. He didn’t want her to see the expression on his face.

Kendrick turned away from Elaine and looked at Stanley.
“You take the boy. I’m going to see him now.” She nodded and he walked towards the exit, nodding a quick thanks to the carer. Opening the door, he paused on the threshold as he heard Elaine’s voice again. It was quiet, addressing no one in particular.
“Poor David,” she said, “Poor, poor David.” Kendrick stepped out of the room.

The note lay on the passenger seat as Kendrick drove north along the motorway. It read: “Travelodge Carlisle/Southwaite. Between junction 41 and 42. Room 23.” He kept an even speed. His eyes were on the road, his mind racing. Normally he’d be listening to music when taking a journey like this, but right now it would have felt wrong. He was there, in the moment, and music would only have served as a distraction. There was him, there was the car, and there was the road. The rumble of the tyres sounded his advance along the deepening tarmac. It grew blacker as the evening started to close around him. It became empty, lights springing up to mark his path. The air lowered, a chill spreading in through the open window, and with it came a freshness. He kept the window open, needing to be connected to the physical reality of that moment: the road just a couple of feet beneath him, the sky staining midnight blue all around. Ahead lay Carlisle, lay Kirsch, lay an answer to something that he could only feel but somehow needed to understand.

After six hours driving, of that steady, silent approach, Kendrick hit junction 41 of the M6. In no time, the service station was upon him. He slowed to a crawl as he pulled into the slip road. The untamed featurelessness of the motorway gave way to tungsten-edged shrubberies, globes of light planted periodically between them. With the sound of the car hushed to a whispering growl, Kendrick found calm in the wide, empty car park. Stepping outside, he stood for a moment, taking in the silent peace of that place. Large service station buildings presided over the flat emptiness, strips of neon and glowing windows establishing an anonymous domesticity. It was an outpost, an island of civilisation in the wild night that stretched on forever outside.

His footsteps echoing, sharp cracks in the soundlessness that faded away into the boundless, invisible distance, Kendrick made his way towards the travelodge. He had deliberately parked some distance away. He wanted to take his time here. It was important to maintain the slow, meditative approach and not to lapse into the automatic behaviours that police work had trained into him.

Moving past the main building of the service station, he was taken by the immaculate sterility of the place. It was a wide space of gleaming floors and countertops. The occasional customer or staff-member moved about inside, sleepwalkers in a place isolated from the world, abstract, ephemeral. If they were dreaming, Kendrick thought, what was he? Out here in the dark, he was off the page, he was in the black where there is nothing. Beyond the land of sleep. He walked on, unnoticed.

The Travelodge was an appealing structure. Though ultimately an ugly, square building, it had been made pleasant. Everything about it was inviting. The car park was divided into bays by well-kept flowerbeds. Glowing spheres cast the place in a homely light from where they were fixed on walls and on poles. The building’s portico lowered over the entrance, crafted into a log-cabin façade.

The doors slid open as he approached and he crossed over into an air-conditioned realm. The brightness of the place made him blink slightly. Freshened carpet stretched away from him, a deep russet marked by repeating thistle devices. A fish tank bubbled gently in the corner. At the desk, a receptionist toiled over a crossword. She looked up at him and smiled, eyes sparkling, far too awake for this time of night: a caffeine junkie, a speed freak, or perhaps just a native in this other province. He nodded and passed on towards the back of the reception area, where an opening gave a glimpse of corridor dropping away.

Clearly the owners of the Travelodge had not felt it necessary to keep up appearances beyond the reception . Once Kendrick had moved some way along, the carpet changed to a cheap and colourless cord weave. His footsteps crunched in it, as if he was walking on soggy biscuits. The roof seemed lower here, textured old plaster walls hemming in. Fluorescent strip lights peeled away, marking the corridor’s perspective and casting everything in a weak green that vibrated at an imperceptible frequency. Antiseptic undertones hovered beneath a cloying floral air freshener. And then there was room twenty three.

He was about to knock when he noticed that the door was actually slightly ajar. It was poised on its latch as if its not-quite-closing had been accidental. Kendrick sucked a gulp of air in quick, his fingers tingling on the rubberised blue paint of the door. He pushed it and it swung listlessly open. From where he stood, in the nasty light of the corridor, the room was a funnel of blackness, converging at a vanishing point that had itself been swallowed up. Presumably, had he been able to see better, it would have been roughly where the room opened out.

Stepping over the threshold, he paused for a minute, allowing his eyes to adjust. A thin odour hit him: stale sweat and old clothes, just starting to mature. That same air freshener smell was there, but fading beneath it. After a moment blinking in the darkness, Kendrick realised that the TV was on. He could see its unhealthy flickering in the room beyond - and this was when he really bristled, when the cold sweat pricked him. He had become aware of the presence of another person in close proximity. It always had this effect on him. Countless times he had walked into darkened domiciles and experienced this same sensation. It was an involuntary physical reaction. He had grown used to it now. But what was different this time was that he actually felt the nerves. The adrenaline wasn’t channelled quite right. His pulse was genuinely quickened and he couldn’t quite reign it in. Once again on this case he found he was asking himself a question he was not really able to answer.

He walked into the room. The boundaries of the space were not quite defined. Every suggestion of the half-light was almost instantly negated and replaced. The glow from the television almost showed wall, chair, bed or window, but… His eyes were inadvertently drawn to the screen for a second – long enough to recognise the woman on channel 3 that baited people who were up too-late to call in with the answers to horribly easy questions – and his night-vision was ruined. Gone. He was blind and alone in the room with this stranger. He killed the TV and everything was plunged into a solid black. In that solid black, someone stirred.

It was a groan, followed by the smack of parched lips that frequently follows a glut of unneeded sleep. Sheets shifted; a body moved.
“You took your time,” the voice said, cracked with disorientation, “I thought you’d be here last night. Or, at least, in the early hours.” Kendrick strained to see as his vision attempted to compensate.
“You waited up for me?”
“Uh-huh.” Finally, the room settled. Outlined by the residual light coming in from outside, Kendrick saw Kirsch propped up on the bed, his legs still splayed the way they must have been when he dropped off. Kirsch moved, leaning towards the bedside table and the detective froze, not quite sure what to do. As the fugitive’s hand fumbled, scrabbling for something, Kendrick readied himself. And then the light flashed on. The room was instantly obliterated in a burst of orange. It stung his eyes and he threw up a hand to shield them.

Kirsch was sitting up properly on the bed now. He stared back at the detective with a mild smirk – although not an unkind one. He still had his shoes on. They were folded beneath him. He was wearing suit trousers, a shirt and tie, all creased up – most probably the same clothes he had worn the day of the abduction. His face was thin and a little drawn, brow furrowed even though he wasn’t frowning. The stubble was several days old, his hair a lank, thinning mess. The resemblance to Solomon had faded over the years – they had perhaps been kinder to the other man – although it was just about still there, like the first sight of a relative since childhood. There was definitely worry in those features, in those eyes, beaded and glistening. Certainly, the last few days had taken their toll. Nonetheless, he kept smiling. He had been waiting for Kendrick. And the waiting had been the worst. So now the worst was over.

Neither man spoke for a moment. They were studying each other. Both had questions. And already, just seeing each other, they had been provided with some much needed answers. The smile dropped from Kirsch’s face.
“I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t touch him.” Kendrick stared down at his quarry, who had now taken on a pitiful aspect. He needed to be believed and the detective’s well-worn stare betrayed little.
“I know,” said Kendrick.
“I thought so. I just… I wasn’t sure.”
“Do you mind if I sit?” Kirsch shrugged and smiled. He swung his legs over the edge, mirroring Kendrick’s posture as he took a seat on the edge of the bed. Kirsch pulled open the bedside draw and Kendrick froze for a second, relaxing when he saw a pack of cigarettes produced.
“You want one?” Kirsch put one in his mouth.
“Yeah, sure.” He threw one over and held up a light. They sat and smoked several drags in silence, each trying to work out what to say first.

Kendrick leaned back and blew a jet of smoke up at the ceiling. “So what did you do with the kid? I mean, you had him for, what, thirty-six hours?”
“I took him to the zoo. I wasn’t sure what to do at first so, so that’s where we went. It made sense. Keep him amused, take his mind off the trauma a bit, give myself a little time to think about what I was going to do next. Not that, really, he needed calming down at all. He’s a good little kid. Very… very pleasant. You know that, though. You’ve met him, haven’t you?” Kendrick nodded. “I was pretty stressed to start out with. Didn’t know which way to turn. But then I just, well, forgot about it, really. It was just really nice to be out with the kid. Seeing him fascinated with everything and laughing and stuff. Being with all the other parents and their kids. How a Saturday afternoon should be, I guess.”
“Other parents?” Kirsch flinched and then smiled uncomfortably.
“Oh yeah. Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, after that he was pretty tired, so I booked us into a hotel and put him to bed. The next day we went to Alton Towers.”
“How was that?”
“It was good.” Kirsch seemed to be briefly transported by the memory. The tension in his face eased, everything lifting off for a moment. Kendrick dipped his head, smiling to himself. He thought about his own kids when they were that age. He had felt this delight then, at least he thought so. “I did do something bad, though…” Kendrick’s head popped up. His eyes widened in alarm and then narrowed with suspicion. Kirsch wasn’t looking at him, he was staring off through the wall somewhere. He had trailed off. Anxious, Kendrick grabbed his arm.
“What did you do?” He demanded. Kirsch’s head whipped round, trance broken. He looked confused for a moment but gradually settled. “What did you do bad?” Kirsch swallowed. He looked awkward.
“I gave him a sausage. When we were at Alton Towers, I took him for lunch and I gave him a sausage.” Kendrick stared blankly back at him. “A pork one.”
“Oh. Right… Right.”
“I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t seem bad to you, but…”
“No, no, it’s… Why did you do that, then?”
“I don’t know, I… I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see what would happen. Not that I thought anything would happen, but… Funny thing is I didn’t have one myself.” Kendrick shrugged. Kirsch’s tone was becoming vague again. It was time to cut to the chase.

“Why did you do it, David?”
“What? Which…”
“Why did you take the kid.”
“Of course, sorry. Um, did they miss him?” Kendrick gave him a look that told him not to ask silly questions. “I just, I don’t think most people appreciate what they have. I wanted to give them a jolt, that’s all. Wanted to make them see what’s important in their lives…”
“Is that it?”
“It might be. It’s what I’ve been telling myself some of the time. Cos, you know, I wasn’t sure right away. There was a lot of working out to do.”
“I don’t think that’s true. You knew why.”
“Are you married?”
“Yeah.”
“Kids?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How many?”
“Two. Teenagers.”
“That’s nice.” Kirsch went quiet. Kendrick, watched him. He was beginning to become frustrated with the man. If anybody else from the force had turned up, this guy would be in jail now and here he was leaving sentences unfinished, slotting in inane chit-chat just as they seemed to be getting towards the meat of the issue, taking his time and being almost deliberately frustrating. However, he had been patient thus far and it would be a shame to throw it all away at this point. It was in trying to get command of his impatience, though, that Kendrick noticed the difference. He looked at Kirsch. The man was leaning on his fist, forehead creased as he contemplated the carpet. He wasn’t away with the fairies; he wasn’t off on another of his reveries. He was thinking, and thinking hard. A change was happening there: a hardness around the mouth, a flaring of the nostrils, something was being fixed and clarified.

Kirsch turned to him, a weight in his expression, a seriousness in his tone that had not been there before.
“Do you ever think what might have happened if you’d never met your wife?” He asked the detective. Kendrick shrugged.
“I don’t know. Not really. If I hadn’t met her, I’d be single – or I’d have met someone else – but I did, didn’t I?” Kirsch simply glared back at him, that pure and unfaltering stare boring into his forehead. A cloud seemed to settle on the room, a change in atmospheric pressure. Suddenly it seemed that the space they occupied was much smaller, as if it was only just big enough to contain the two of them and nothing else. Everything around them faded out – all the details of the room. Kendrick’s gaze was drawn into the other man, focussing only upon him. Was it Kirsch that wrought this change? His intensity effacing everything else? “I appreciate them, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Kendrick’s tone was low. He had needed to answer, even though he knew that this was not what the man was getting at.
“Did you plan things to go the way they did?”
“No. I don’t think you can plan things like that – who you fall in love with.”
“Who you… fall. You just fell into it all, is that right?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“Or you could say that it’s just how it was meant to turn out. That everything – your parents, your date of birth, your upbringing, your class, your school – all that contributed. That it all poured into the things that happened later. That your wife, your career, your kids, that these were all consequences of every coincidence that makes you you and that other things, other equally inevitable things will be consequences of them.”
“Maybe.”
“David Solomon and I were on the same path. Our lives were mirror images. Nothing to pick between them. You know this, don’t you?”
“I had noticed.”
“The school photo?” Kendrick nodded. “Could you tell which was which?” Kendrick shook his head.
“We were built the same way. There was no way that we should have ended up any different. I mean, of course, as time goes on and mounting probabilities, accumulating variations and things… but at the point that we diverged - it just shouldn’t have happened. I didn’t deserve this. I deserved to be happy. Like he is. Like you are.” Kirsch maintained his steady, heavy glare. Despite the depth and gravity of his features, and the bitterness of his words, he expressed himself without emotion. There was no fight for control there, it was simply that he was explaining what he knew to be true.
“Did you ever think,” offered Kendrick tentatively, “that maybe your actions…”
“My what?”
“That your actions…”
“My actions!” Now it was there. Kendrick had pricked something and Kirsch was impassioned, keenly in touch with his perceived injustices. “You show me an action. You show me something that was different. Because if you don’t know about it, I sure as hell don’t. There’s nothing furtive or… nothing I ever did that…” His words gave way to ragged breaths. Slowly, he calmed himself and the steady, assured intensity returned to him. “I’m not arrogant enough to pretend that either of us could have been anything other than what we became. Or that there was anything so special about me that I should be different. But the horrible irony of the thing is that you can’t wind it back. Whatever anomaly there was has come and gone and left everything mutated in its wake. I’m stuck on my path. I’ve known that for years. This is my life and nothing’s going to change that.”
“Oh, come on now…”
“Please. I…” He steadied himself, raising a hand as if to touch the moment, the light of the bedside lamp split into beams between his curled fingers. “I realised something. Not long after I kidnapped Yuddy. You see, I could have told myself the first reason I gave you – that I just wanted them to taste absence. I could have told myself that and gone back to normality, paid damages maybe, or… But what I realised was that even though we’re all on a track, there are occasions – every once in a while, every so often, every once or twice in a lifetime, where we have an opportunity to get off that track, to skip onto another one. To jump existences. Maybe I had had one of those before and just not noticed it – I, I can accept that – but at that point I saw, I saw that I was at one of those moments. That destiny had presented me with a fork, that it was time to choose.” His hand curled into a ball and sunk into his lap. “I didn’t plan to abduct the kid, it was spontaneous, it was a wild break from the blue. It was an opportunity being laid before me.” Kendrick noticed at this point that Kirsch was reaching for something. The hand that had come down was now inside the already open bedside draw. He saw this. But he did nothing. “I’m jumping. I’m leaving it all behind.”

When Kirsch drew the knife, Kendrick didn’t move. He watched as it was driven towards him and all he could think was,
“I know. I know.” He didn’t feel the blade as it slipped into him. If Kirsch was watching closely, he might have noticed that there was not even a change in the detective’s expression as he slipped off the bed and slid to the floor. Kendrick lay on his back, hand clutching the handle that jutted from him, staring up at the stuccoed ceiling. But he felt no pain. And in the very core of his being, he knew now what it was that had so drawn him to this case. He knew why he had handled it with such delicacy, and why he had felt the emotional tug of every element so keenly.

Kirsch stood, his shirt and trousers stippled with red. He turned and, through brand-new murderer’s eyes, he watched Kendrick. But Alan Kendrick wasn’t interested in him anymore. He was seeing the whole picture now, how everything had conspired to tell him, to give him a gut feeling, that at the end of this path lay his death and that he could do nothing other than move towards it as surely as Newton’s apple fell.

In Aberdare Close last summer, there was a freak gust of wind. To call it a gust, though, would perhaps be to understate matters a little. It was a gale force wind. Right there in the close, in the suburbs of North London, in the middle of August. Not too far short of a tornado. It only lasted for a few seconds, but in that time, it tore the monkey-puzzle tree down for spite. In the act of falling, the tree broke all of the front windows of 26b and 26c, taking a good portion of the roof with it, before falling across the road and smashing its way into the front room of number 27. The street was closed for two days while it was removed. Sadly, the residents of 27, 26b and 26c’s insurance policies did not cover acts of God.