The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘That’s going to be a big list. Part of the home’s role was short-term assessments. Some beds had a pretty high turnover.’

Neither of them responded. Flynn folded her arms.

‘I’ll see what I can dig up,’ Jackson said.

She returned with files on the boys. Poe suspected she’d recently been looking at them. She placed them on the table. They were pitifully thin.

There were four of them. One for each boy. Four kids who’d been dealt a shit hand. Looked after by the state because their parents couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t. Seven Pines should have been their sanctuary. A place for them to mend, to learn how to love and to be loved. A place for them to trust adults again.

Instead, they were sold for the sport of rich, bored men.

Poe’s resolve hardened. He didn’t care if he had to look at paperwork for the next ten years, if the answer was in these files, he’d find it.

He opened them all and laid out the basic information side by side.

Michael Hilton.

Mathew Malone.

Andrew Smith.

Scott Johnston.

Four lives snuffed out. He took a sip from the coffee Jackson had brought for them and began reading. Flynn started on the other children.

An hour later and his despair had deepened. Each file was horribly different and depressingly similar.

Michael Hilton: neglected so much that, at the age of nine, he weighed less than the average five-year-old. When the social workers finally managed to remove him from the family home, he’d been eating flies to stay alive. The parents each got a year in custody. Poe hoped they’d been force-fed insects in prison. Michael had been passed around the system, but behavioural problems rooted in the appalling start he had to life meant he couldn’t settle. Seven Pines was his last chance and he appeared to have grabbed it with both hands.

Andrew Smith: a star pupil at school until his grades began slipping. When he was asked to stay behind one night to discuss why, he’d freaked out

. He told his teacher he had to go to work. Mystified, they’d called the police who found heroin in his satchel. His father had been using him as a drug mule. Both his parents fled to Spain, where they still lived, apparently. They sent Children’s Services a birthday card for him every year, along with some money. With no forwarding address for Andrew, the last few were still in the file.

Scott Johnston probably had the most common reason for being removed from the family home. His mother was a domestic abuse victim who refused to leave her partner. Poe wasn’t surprised. It happened more than people realised. Regardless of the consequences, some women found it impossible to leave their abusers. When Children’s Services said that the home wasn’t safe for young Scott, and that she had to make a choice – her partner or her child – she chose her partner. The social worker had tried to locate his natural father, without success. Scott entered the system and never left it. Poe made a note about his father. He’d get Reid to chase it up later. So far, he was the only person who’d had even the hint of motive.

And finally, Mathew Malone. Perhaps the saddest case of all because he’d come from a happy, well-adjusted family in Brighton. His mother had died when he was young and, proving just how fragile family units could be, his father had hooked up with a heroin addict from Zaire. Within a month they’d fled her drug debts in Brighton and moved up to Cumbria. A month after that, the woman was accusing Mathew of being a sorcerer. His father – who by then had an eighty-pound a day habit of his own – had either been oblivious to it or happy to let it happen. The woman was obsessed with the idea of ridding the boy of his demons, and believed the best way to do that was by driving them out with pain. Mathew was tied to a hard-backed chair while she stubbed out cigarettes on his arms and torso. Mathew, to his credit, wasn’t having any of that. As soon as he could get away, he fled to Workington police station. His father was imprisoned for four years for allowing it to happen. He served two, and, according to the file, overdosed on the day of release – an all too familiar tale of addicts underestimating the strength of ‘street’ heroin compared to ‘prison’ heroin. The woman got nine years for grievous bodily harm with intent but died during her first year in prison – the result of the same type of shit. This time, though, instead of an eight-year-old boy, it was her cellmate, a fifteen-stone Glaswegian head case, whom she’d accused of being a witch. The Scot, a lifer who’d murdered her husband, smashed her accuser’s head onto the rim of the cell toilet until her skull had the consistency of an over-ripe banana.

Poe grunted in satisfaction.

He reviewed the notes various social workers, family judges and guardians ad litem had made throughout the years. The boys had never stood a chance.

Apart from Scott Johnston’s father, there was little evidence that any of the boys’ families would be out there somewhere, seeking their revenge. They were either dead, in prison, or didn’t give a shit.

There was one photograph of the four boys together. It looked as though it had been taken with an instant camera. It had that thick white band at the bottom, the part you held as you waved it in the air waiting for it to dry. The photograph was poor quality, and had presumably been taken during a Seven Pines outing to a beach somewhere. The boys were smiling in the sunshine. It was tops-off weather. Smith was holding a football. They looked happy. Despite the quality of the old photograph, Poe could see the cigarette scars on Malone’s arms and chest. He put it down carefully. His eyes were moist and he wiped them before tears could form.

‘Why weren’t any of them fostered out?’ he asked. ‘I know Hilton had behavioural problems, but the other three seemed to be thriving at Seven Pines. Was it because they didn’t want to be separated?’

Jackson shook her head. ‘Apart from Michael – who as you said had some deep-rooted psychological issues he still hadn’t worked through – they all came to us later in life, and at that time it was virtually impossible to get young boys placed. They ended up friends because they weren’t being fostered,’ she explained. ‘It became a badge of honour with them, a “nobody likes us and we don’t care” kind of thing.’

It was a depressing answer and Poe went back to the files. When he’d finished skimming them, he put them down. He needed some fresh air before he tackled a deeper study. Flynn, who was reading similar horror stories with different children, followed him. Jackson joined them a few moments later. She sparked up a cigarette and drew the poison deep into her lungs.

‘How do you put up with this shit, day in day out?’ Poe asked.

She shrugged. ‘If I don’t, who will?’

It was an answer of sorts. It didn’t invite further conversation. Jackson lit another cigarette from the one she’d been smoking. After five minutes, they went back inside. Poe reopened the files, determined to find something.

Flynn’s phone rang. She showed Poe the caller ID. It was Gamble.