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Life is a wonderful gift.

He didn’t know how his dad could say that. How he could even think it, not after what had happened to Maggie. James thought about her every day. He had since she had gone. He had wondered where she was and what had happened to her and in his head he saw her suffering violent and endless torture, heard her screams and cries for help and was powerless to do anything.

In his dreams, he rescued her. In the daytime he endured her suffering.

And his dad said life is a wonderful gift? It wasn’t. It was anything but.

He’d made up his mind that his was over. In truth it had been over for a while. There was nothing worth living for. Every day was such a fight. All he had was the drugs, and that was no life.

He was going to get a massive dose. Take it all. Dissolve into a state of bliss.

Mum and Dad would be sad, but it was better for them in the long run. He was worthless, a pathetic, useless excuse for a son who caused them nothing but trouble and pain. It was time to set them free.

It was time to set himself free. The sense of relief now he had made the decision was overwhelming.

He felt the notes in his pocket. Two hundred pounds. More than enough to buy what he needed.

Thanks, Dad, he thought.

Martin

He didn’t cry until he was back in his car. He would have preferred to wait until he got home but the car was as far as he could make it. He had walked through the town centre, eyes ahead, back straight, lips pressed together, holding his face as expressionless as he could, rehearsing what he would say if he bumped into someone he knew who wanted to stop for a chat.

Great to see you but I’m late for a train. Sorry. Have to run!

No one had stopped him and he was grateful to the universe for that small mercy. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to get out even those few sentences without his words dissolving into tears.

He sat behind in the front seat, hands gripping the steering wheel, and cried, loud and hard, his shoulders heaving with each fresh sob.

His boy – his son, the baby he had held – was vanishing before his eyes. Maggie had gone quickly; James was slowly fading away. He’d been shocked to see him. His face was drawn, his eyes sunken and red. There was a grey pallor to his skin, and the smell – they’d been camping once in France and in one corner of the campsite there was a stream that he discovered was effectively an open sewer. That was what James reminded him of.

He didn’t know why. Why James was doing it, why Maggie had been taken, why he was being punished. What had he done to deserve this? Why him?

He wiped the tears from his eyes. While he was with James he’d wanted to stay calm, let him know he was loved and that his parents were there for him, whatever happened. What he wanted to do was grab his son and drag him home and lock him in his room until he was better, but he’d spoken to a bunch of different experts and one thing was clear: James could only get better if he wanted to. It had to come from him. Martin could try to get him to see how desperate the situation was – stage an intervention of sorts – but it would only work if James wanted it to.

That was the crux of it all. James had to want to stop. He had to see the drugs as a problem and not a solution and then they could start to get rid of them.

But he was a long way from that. Martin had seen the hunger flash across his eyes when he suggested that James come with him. He had seen that – for now – his son’s first love was the high he needed, and his recovery would have to wait.

If it came. That was the worst of it. The uncertainty. The not knowing whether his son would survive. Whether his son wanted to survive.

And he could not go through it again. He could not lose a second child. When Maggie had gone it was as though his world had ended. He had carefully pieced together a life: a career, a wife, a house, his kids, and then it had been taken from him. He had seen how flimsy it all was. And, slowly, he had put it back together again.

It had been all he could manage to avoid doing what James was doing now. He had flirted with it; he had sat in the darkness alone with a bottle in his hand and stared into the abyss, but for whatever reason – and he took no credit, it was no more than dumb luck – he had pulled back from it. Maybe it was James: maybe he knew his son needed him. Whatever it was he had escaped it.

Now James would have to do the same.

And, if it came to it, Martin would make him. He knew that by meeting his son and giving him money he was simply enabling his addiction, but that was fine by him. The alternative was to refuse and leave him penniless. James would then have a choice – give up, or fund his habit by other means. Means that would get him in more trouble, in an even deeper hole. No – it was better, far better, to see him every week or two, make sure he did not need to steal, try to get him to eat something, check he was still functioning.

But the time was coming when Martin would have to find a way to get him out of his squalid flat and into a rehab facility. He wanted that to come from James. He wanted his son to be cured, whole again. He didn’t want him forced into sobriety and fighting it every day of his life.

But it might come to that. And soon. James had looked worse than he had ever seen him. He put his key in the ignition and started the car. He pulled out of the parking space. James’s smell lingered on his clothes.

He shook his head and picked up his phone. He searched for the number of the electric company.

He’d call them and pay the bill. He knew James wouldn’t use the money for that, and he wanted his son to have hot water.

DI Wynne