Like This, for Ever

He couldn’t tell anyone. And what if she told his dad?
    When everything had been put away and all the surfaces were clean again, Barney went up two flights of stairs to the top floor. Onthe way, he switched off the divert that sent all incoming calls to his mobile. He wasn’t supposed to go out when his dad wasn’t home.
    On the second floor of their house were Barney’s bedroom, bathroom and his den. On one wall of his den was a giant poster of the solar system, on the other a large artist’s impression of a black hole. He wasn’t particularly interested in astronomy, the two posters had just been the biggest he could find on Amazon. He pulled out the eight map pins that held them to the wall and rolled them up. Underneath were his investigations. The first was about the boys who’d been killed. Their photographs, taken from news sites, ran along the top. Beneath them, he’d fastened a map of the river with tiny coloured stickers marking the spots where the bodies had been found. Barney didn’t think there was much chance of his dad finding his investigations, he hardly ever came into his den, but he had a plan just in case. He would say they were for a school project about the work of the Metropolitan Police.
    He ran his finger along the course of the river, starting way downstream in Deptford where the first body had been found. The killer was working his way up-river, getting closer. Barney’s finger hovered near Tower Bridge.
    On the wall opposite was another large map, this time of all the London boroughs. Right now, he was doing Haringey. The envelopes he’d posted earlier each contained a classified ad to go into the
Haringey Independent
and the
Haringey Advertiser
. B ARNEY R UBBLE was the bold heading at the top, because that had been his mum’s name for him when he was little. Barney Rubble, after the Flintstones character. That was the attention-grabber. The message below he changed often, because he still hadn’t decided which would work the best. Sometimes it just said: MISSING YOU. Other times it was chatty, quite informal: WOULD LOVE TO CATCH UP SOME TIME. Once, he’d even tried: DIES A LITTLE EVERY DAY WITHOUT YOU, but he’d regretted that the moment he’d posted it. It just wasn’t the sort of thing you said in a newspaper, even if it was anonymous. Even if it was true.
    The ads always ended with an email address, the one he’d set up in secret, which only he knew about. The one he checked everymorning of his life because this could be the day his mum finally got in touch.
    Next month he’d move on to Islington. By the time he was thirteen he’d have done the whole of Greater London and it would be time to move on to the Home Counties.
    It didn’t matter really, if his dad found this map. He would never guess what it was all about. It was just important, somehow, to keep it to himself.
    Replacing both astronomy posters, Barney crossed the room to his desktop computer. In his in-box were a couple of emails from friends at school, one from his PE teacher, Mr Green, about a fixture that weekend, and a long list of notifications telling him people had replied to a comment stream he’d contributed to on Facebook. Strictly, Barney wasn’t old enough to be on Facebook, but most of his class had their own pages. They just lied about their year of birth. He looked at the time; he had a few minutes before he was supposed to go to bed.
    On Facebook he went straight to the Missing Boys page that had been set up a few weeks earlier, when Ryan Jackson had become the second South London boy to vanish. 5,673 people were now following the site and, as always, there was a huge number of posts, ranging from the sensible to the downright weird.
    One guy thought the boys were being used for unorthodox medical experiments in a secret research facility somewhere along the riverbank.
    Some comments appeared to be from genuine friends of the boys, others from strangers offering best wishes for their safety. Not all the comments were good-natured, and there were the usual people expressing outrage that a social media site should encourage this sort of ‘wallowing’ in others’ misery.
    Finally, Barney neared the bottom of the thread. God, some people were weird. And this guy, Peter Sweep, was probably the weirdest of the lot. No profile picture, for one thing, just a photograph of some blood-red roses. No personal information either, although that wasn’t so unusual for kids on Facebook. He had