Mrs Wilkinson?’
I can hear noises in the background, keyboards clacking and snatches of conversation.
‘I was at the train station on Friday,’ I say. ‘Temple Meads. I was on platform thirteen and I was …’ I falter. How do I explain the surety I felt that the ugly building I must have passed a thousand times holds a vital clue to my son’s disappearance? ‘I was wondering if you’ve searched the disused sorting office. There’s a lot of graffiti on it and Billy did say in his diary that he wanted to tag the station or one of the trains. Maybe he went there instead. Maybe he’s still there.’
DS Forbes doesn’t respond immediately. Someone in the same room shouts, ‘Yes!’ and there’s a smattering of applause.
‘DS Forbes?’ I say. ‘Did you—’
‘Yes, still here.’
‘Do you think it could be a lead? Do you think he might be squatting there? Sleeping rough.’
He makes a low humming sound. ‘I doubt it. That place is completely open to the elements. It’s basically a couple of floors on stilts. You’d be better off sleeping in a doorway.’
‘But he could be there?’
‘Billy could be anywhere, Claire. That’s the trouble. There are a thousand places in Bristol where he could be sleeping rough. Unfortunately we don’t have the time or resources to search them all. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get a lead as a result of the appeal. It’s still early days.’
‘But you’ll look? You’ll get someone to check it out.’
Another pause.
‘I’ll see what we can do.’
There is no way I can get into the old sorting office. Even if I was fifteen years old I still don’t think I’d be able to make it over the barbed-wire fence, even with a leg-up, and the double gates are securely padlocked. I wasn’t going to come here, not after I called DS Forbes this morning, but I wanted to get a glimpse inside, just to set my mind at rest. Cattle Market Road is a busy street, with cars whizzing backwards and forwards, but most of the shops are boarded up, long since abandoned. There is a red sign affixed to some railings just outside the gates warning the general public that it’s private property. The sorting office is clearly visible through the grey metal bars of the gates. It looks even bleaker from here than it did from the train station opposite. DS Forbes wasn’t joking about it being open to the elements. There are no longer any walls or partitions inside, just a series of concrete columns separating one floor from the next. Even if you could get over the barbed wire why would you shelter here? I’ve spent months wondering where I’d go if I was sleeping rough. I’d want to squirrel myself away from the world so I wouldn’t worry about being robbed or attacked as I slept. I’d go to a women’s shelter if I could or, if I didn’t want to be found, I’d settle down for the night in a shed in the allotments off Talbot Road and take my belongings with me each morning to avoid discovery. We’ve already checked the allotments, and posted up signs in BS4 and BS3 asking people to check their sheds. We’ve searched everywhere and anywhere we could think of – the river-bank near Marks & Spencer at Avonmeads, the local parks, the Downs. Everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. Or we’d have found him.
I look down at the notebook in my hands and Billy’s thick, black scrawl:
– Bristol T M (train?)
– The Arches
– Avonmouth
The Arches. I’ll go there next. It’s a railway viaduct – ripe for tagging – on the edge of Gloucester Road. It’s on the other side of Bristol but that never stopped Billy, not if he wanted to see his friends. He’d set off on his bike and cycle the eight and a half miles it takes to get there from our house. Billy was always secretive about who he was going to see. ‘Just mates, Mum,’ he’d say. When the kids were little and went to a local primary school I knew who all their friends were. We seemed to spend half our lives going to birthday parties and playdates and ferrying the kids to and from sleepovers. But when the boys started secondary school on the other side of town their friends, scattered all over Bristol, became a mystery to me. Jake told us that Billy’s Gloucester Road friends weren’t from school at all. He said they were older guys, in their late teens and early twenties, who lived in a squat. I was horrified. I imagined drugs and squalor and crime and I told Billy I didn’t want him to have anything to do with them. He told me I was narrow-minded and brainwashed by Mark. His friends weren’t down-and-outs, they were artists who refused to become wage monkeys to line some capitalist landlord’s pocket. Why shouldn’t they live in an abandoned building? They weren’t doing any harm to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t keep him locked in the house all weekend. The alternative was to ferry him into town in the car if he was going to the cinema with friends and then pick him up afterwards but what was to stop him from getting a bus to Gloucester Road the second we dropped him off? Mark said we should take Billy’s bike off him for a bit, until he learned some responsibility. I suggested that Billy take me to the squat to meet his new friends but my son said he’d rather die than do that.
‘Did you introduce your parents to all your friends when you were fifteen?’ he asked me and I had to admit, to myself anyway, that I hadn’t. There were countless boyfriends who I met at night after sneaking out of the house. Lots of older brothers and sisters of my mates who’d go into the Co-op to buy us bottles of White Lightning and Thunderbird to drink in the park. One of my male friends had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped after we got stupidly drunk and he was someone I’d known since childhood. I didn’t end up in A&E. I’d already puked into a flower bed.
I was torn. Billy was fifteen years old. He was stretching his wings. He was a good boy. He was sensible at heart and I trusted him not to do anything stupid. And then he got into trouble at school for graffitiing the science block and Mark said that was that, he was grounded for two months and he was going to take away Billy’s bike. Only we couldn’t find it. And Billy refused to say where it was.
Now I jump as the gate clangs open and a man and woman in neon yellow vests with lanyards around their necks step through the gap.
‘Excuse me,’ I say as the man closes the padlock. ‘My name is Claire Wilkinson. My son is missing. He’s called Billy, he’s fifteen. I’m worried that he might be sleeping rough and—’
‘Not here he’s not,’ the woman says. She’s mid-forties with a half-inch of grey roots showing through her curly red hair. ‘Bristol Council.’ She gestures towards her lanyard. ‘We’re redeveloping the place. Waterside offices and homes. There’s twenty-four-hour security in place.’
‘You’re quite sure there’s no one sleeping rough inside?’
The man pulls on the padlock. ‘Not unless he’s a pigeon. And we’ll be getting them out ASAP too.’
I glance through the gates and try to imagine the building coming back to life – with glass in the windows and families sitting on sofas in front of their tellies and office workers wheeling back and forth in front of computer screens – but I can’t see it.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you know of any squats in Gloucester Road, do you?’
But they’ve already wandered off.
I am a couple of hundred feet away from the
