The Missing: The gripping psychological thriller that’s got everyone talking...

‘Jake! Are you ignoring me?’

He doesn’t reply. Instead he grunts as he dips the bar down to his chest and then presses it into the air.

His interest in lifting weights began about six weeks after Billy disappeared. I welcomed it initially – Jake lifting weights was preferable to Jake spending every waking moment in the pub – but he became obsessed. An hour after work in the early evening became two hours and then he added another two hours in the morning. The bleep, bleep, bleep of his alarm at 5 a.m. drove Mark to distraction. Jake began spending less and less time with Kira and the family and more and more time in the garage. If he did deign to join us in the living room he’d be lost in the pages of Lifting or Power Grunt or whatever magazine he couldn’t get his nose out of. Kira would sit beside him, tap-tap-tapping into her phone, nodding politely as he’d explain how he was going to increase his deltoids by doing a certain combination of lifts.

Kira’s always been a quiet girl but she shrank into herself during the height of Jake’s obsession. The bigger he grew the smaller and more silent she became. Shortly after she first came to live with us she told me how our home was like a breath of fresh air. We weren’t the perfect family by any means but I could see why our living situation was preferable to the one she’d escaped. But then Billy disappeared and everything fell apart. We fell apart. Poor Kira. She’d swapped one screwed-up, dysfunctional family for another.

‘Jake.’ I take a step towards him. ‘You need to tell me what’s going on.’

‘I’d have thought –’ his face contorts as he presses the bar into the air – ‘that was obvious.’

I stride across the room and switch off the stereo.

A muscle twitches in my son’s cheek as he stares up at the corrugated roof. The barbell wobbles above him and for one horrible moment I imagine it slipping from his hands and pinning him to the bench but then he grunts and lowers it onto the rest.

‘Sorry.’ He sits up and runs a hand over his face.

‘You need to talk to me,’ I say softly as I crouch on the edge of the bench.

He reaches for the sports bottle on the floor and takes a swig, grimacing as he swallows. Jake is almost the spitting image of his dad. Whilst Billy inherited my dark hair, Jake is fair like Mark with the same small eyes, prominent nose and thin lips. His is a masculine face; strong and angular with a wide expanse of forehead. Billy’s features are more refined. He has my large brown eyes, a smaller nose and fuller lips. Dad always used to go on about what a pretty boy he was when he was little. ‘Angelic,’ Mum called him. I’ve always been careful never to comment on the way my boys look – they’re both beautiful in my eyes – but the world isn’t so circumspect. I lost track of the number of times old ladies would nod at Jake, then gaze at Billy in the buggy and announce, ‘He’s going to be a right heartbreaker that one.’ The comparison wasn’t lost on Jake. ‘Why don’t me and Billy look the same?’ he’d ask when he was nine and Billy was five. ‘Arrogant bastard,’ he growled when Billy was twelve and the letterbox rattled with cards for Valentine’s Day; only one of them was for Jake (and that was from me).

Jake replaces the sports bottle on the floor and his gaze flickers towards me. ‘I’m just stressed, that’s all.’

‘About what?’

His pale blue eyes are unreadable. ‘Everything. Work, Kira, Dad, this house, Bill.’

‘Is that why you’ve started drinking again?’

‘What do you mean, again?’ he says but he knows what I mean. After Billy left I lost track of the times he’d stumble into the house at night, crashing into the kitchen table, swearing at the coat hooks as his hoody hit the floor, stumbling up the stairs and into bed with Kira. I confronted him about it but he said he wasn’t doing anything that other nineteen-year-olds didn’t do and if he went to work every day and he paid me my rent then what right did I have to hassle him about it?

What could I do? It was obviously his way of dealing with the loss of his brother. But I can’t stick my head in the sand any more. I can’t stand idly by as he destroys himself. We need to talk.

‘Jake, we need to discuss what happened on the day of the appeal. I know everyone’s been worried about me, but I can’t just forget about the fact that you were drinking at seven o’clock in the morning.’

He takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair. ‘I just had a bit of a session, okay? We got back from the club at three and I kept drinking because I was pissed off.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Do you have to be such a control freak?’ He shifts position to stand up but the sudden movement is too much for his foot and he’s forced to sit back down again.

The accusation stings and it takes everything I’ve got not to retaliate. Instead I take a steadying breath.

‘Sorry. That was out of order.’ He puts a hand on mine, his palm sticky with sweat. ‘Look, if you really want to know, I was pissed off because some bloke started chatting up Kira while I was in the loo.’

‘He was probably just trying his luck.’

‘Yeah, I know. But she looked really happy. She was laughing and playing with her hair, like she did when we first got together.’ He shrugs. ‘And I was shitting myself about Billy’s appeal. So I kept drinking to try and block it all out. That’s all there is to it.’

I want to tell him that I understand, that it’s been longer than I can remember since his dad looked at me that way too, but this isn’t about me. And it certainly isn’t about Mark. This is about my son opening up to me for the first time in a long time.

‘Oh, Jake.’ I wrap my arms around his broad shoulders and pull him in to me. His body feels hard and unwieldy in my arms. ‘I understand. Really I do. She’ll look at you like that again. I promise. You and Kira have been to hell and back, we all have. When Billy comes home everything will go back to normal. I promise you.’

Jake stiffens and it’s as though I’m hugging rock.

(#ulink_2f53180a-122c-5ed6-b408-85fabe2b4d7e)

Thursday 25th September 2014 (#ulink_2f53180a-122c-5ed6-b408-85fabe2b4d7e)

Jackdaw44: I saw you in town today.

ICE9: Shouldn’t you be at school?

Jackdaw44: Skiving.

ICE9: I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.

Jackdaw44: Liv was stirring shit with her mates at lunchtime. I’ve fucking had it with girls. I left before I hit her.

ICE9: You can’t hit girls!

Jackdaw44: Duh! That’s why I left.

ICE9: Why do you keep texting me?

Jackdaw44: I like talking to you. You got a problem with that?

ICE9: Wow, so aggressive!

Jackdaw44: Fuck this shit. You’re a piss taker like everyone else.

ICE9: No, I’m not.

Jackdaw44: You look down on me. You think I’m a stupid kid.

ICE9: a) I don’t look down on you and b) You’re cleverer than you let on.

Jackdaw44: Fucking Stephen Hawkins, me.

ICE9: You know what I mean.

Jackdaw44: Yeah. Don’t tell anyone though.

ICE9: Your secret is safe with me.

Jackdaw44: If you ever need to share a secret you know where I am.

ICE9: I’ll bear that in mind.