Like This, for Ever

gate swung open when she pushed it and Lacey walked through into the ghost of a garden.
    A rose had rambled the entire length of one wall, its branches clambering into the trees overhead, twisting and fighting with a bramble for tendril-holds. Berries from the previous autumn, shrivelled and rotting, clung to thorn-strewn branches and littered the ground. Further in, old fruit trees, their limbs dried and splitting, seemed to rely on the brick walls and the memory of former days to stay upright. One of them still bore fruit. Lacey blinked – apples in February – but they were real enough. The tree had lost its leaves but kept its fruit. In the streetlight the apples shone rosy-red, gleaming on the bare branches like baubles on aChristmas tree. More apples lay at its foot, rotting, the red skins smeared across the ground like bloodstains. She really had to get a move on.
    An echo of a path took her towards the house. Brown stalks lying prone across the gravel were all that was left of the summer’s weed growth. Lacey passed a stone bird-bath that lay crumbling on its side. Closer to the building was a skip, a quarter-filled with refuse. Running along half of the rear wall were the remains of an elaborate Victorian conservatory.
    The glasshouse stretched up to a high, vaulted roof, much of which looked intact, but as Lacey drew closer she could see splinters of glass scattered around like diamonds on the ground. The door she pushed at, more out of habit than any real expectation, opened.
    The exotic hot-house plants had long since shrivelled and died, but the raised beds of the original conservatory remained, as did the slim, rectangular pool that ran lengthwise down its centre. The interior still retained the smell of damp, warm vegetation that greenhouses never seem to lose, but the smell was deceptive. Even sheltered from the wind, the conservatory was freezing cold; the glass panes were starting to mist over at the touch of her breath. The wall between the conservatory and the interior of the house had two windows, both boarded up. The half-glass door that led into the building had been similarly secured. Lacey was on her way to check the door when she saw the bike.
    Tucked against the house wall, it looked modern, designed for a woman, with a low crossbar and with a plastic-covered baby-trailer attached to the back. Before she was close enough to touch it, Lacey could see that the coloured plastic of the trailer’s roof was wet. Raindrops. And yet the bike was completely sheltered beneath the glass roof. Some time in the last hour, this bike had been out in the rain.
    Crouching, Lacey peered inside the trailer, looking for any trace, even a scent, of Huck, but there was nothing. She tried the back door to the house. Locked and boarded. There was no easy way into this house and panic was rising up again, muddying her thinking and telling her it was hopeless.
    Back in the garden, she pulled out Huck’s phone. Joesbury wouldcome like a shot if she called, but apart from some vague thoughts about Neverland and a baby-trailer, what did she really have? She needed to get inside.
    The windows on the next floor up were open to the elements, but reaching them would mean scaling the iron framework of the conservatory. Almost as an experiment, Lacey reached up, and the stabbing of a tiny shard of glass was a reminder of her own stupidity. No child, even a strong and agile one, could scale the conservatory with another child on his back.
    She had to go, find Joesbury, tell him her hunch had come to nothing. He could probably organize a search of the house, just to be sure, but it would be little more than ticking the box. Lacey had almost turned away from the house when something caught her eye. At the corner of the building, strung from an upper window, was a collapsible rubble chute.
    Conscious of her heart beating faster again, Lacey stepped over to it. It was black, or she might have noticed it sooner, a long, wide pipe stretching from the upper floor of the building, designed to allow sharp rubble to be thrown safely to the ground. It was constructed in sections: when not in use each piece could slip inside the next so it became a manageable size. At one point, it had probably been directed into the skip.
    Suddenly, the hunch was alive again. This was the perfect way to get the body of a young boy in and out of the building. The lost boys had all been small, skinny ten-year-olds. Some sort of rope and pulley system