And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just – something he could never quite put his finger on – a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.
Johnny was given the family name and became a Prescott – for the time being, anyway. But right from the start he didn’t get along with his sister. They couldn’t be left alone together for five minutes without fighting, and the glances they stabbed at each other were poisonous even for mismatched children. Alice Prescott blamed her small daughter for being spoilt (which is to say she blamed herself for spoiling her), and her husband blamed Johnny for being . . . odd. There was just something, well; odd about the boy.
‘Well, of course there is!’ His wife would round on him. ‘Johnny’s been a waif, without home and family except in the shape of the orphanage. Yes, and that wasn’t the best sort of place, either! Love? Suffer the little children? They seemed altogether too eager to be rid of him, if you ask me! Precious little of love there!’
And David Prescott had wondered: With reason, maybe? But what possible reason? Johnny isn’t even six yet. How can anyone turn against a child that small? And certainly not an orphanage, charged with the care of such unfortunates.
The Prescotts had a corner shop which did very nicely, a general store that sold just about everything. It was less than a mile from their home, on the main road into Darlington from the north, and served a recently matured estate of some three hundred homes. Working nine till five four days a week, and Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they made a good living out of it. With the help of a part-time nanny, a young girl who lived locally, they were not overstretched.
David kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of their large secluded garden; Alice liked to be out digging, planting and growing things when the day’s work was done; they took turns seeing to the kids on those occasions when their nanny took time off. So that apart from the friction between Johnny and his sister Carol, the lives of the Prescotts could be said to be normal, pleasant and fairly average. Which was how things stood until the summer when Johnny turned eight. Indeed until then, their lives might even be described as idyllic.
But that was when David Prescott started having problems with his birds; and the family cat – a placid, neutered torn called Moggit, who slept with Carol and was the apple of her eye – went out one morning and never came back in; and there were long periods of that hot, sultry weather which irritates, exacerbates, and occasionally causes eruptions. And it was the same summer when David built a pool for the kids, and roofed it over with polythene on an aluminium frame.
Johnny had thought it would be great fun, swimming and fooling around in his own pool, but he soon became bored with it. Carol loved it, however, which annoyed her adopted brother: he didn’t care for people enjoying things which he didn’t enjoy, and in any case he didn’t much care for Carol at all.
Then, one morning three or four days after Moggit had gone missing, Johnny got up early. He didn’t know it, but Carol was awake and throwing her clothes on as soon as she heard his door gently opening and closing. Her brother (she always put a heavy sneering accent on the word), had been getting up early a lot recently – hours before the rest of the household – and she wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn’t especially malicious of her, but the fact was she was a little jealous and more than a little curious. Even if Johnny was a pig, still she’d rather have him playing with her in the pool than off on his own playing his stupid, mysterious, lonely games.
As for Johnny: his time was all his own now and no one to make demands on it. School was out for the summer holidays; he had ‘things’ to do; he could usually be found beyond the garden wall, in the hedgerows where they blended into meadow and farmland that stretched out and away to the north and north west. But he would always come when he was wanted (a loud call would usually bring him home directly), and he was sensible about getting back for mealtimes.