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His face went into panic mode when they both showed their IDs.
She had the urge to tell him he’d done nothing wrong but something stopped her. She hadn’t stepped inside yet and this was Hollytree. There were innocents and good people but not very many of them. Hollytree had the distinguished reputation of housing the area’s worst dregs so that other council estates in the area could breathe more easily.
‘May we come in?’ she asked.
He looked behind him. ‘It’s not really a good time.’
‘We’ll only take a minute,’ she said, appraising him. The dirty toenails protruding from the grubby jogging bottoms said he was barefoot, and the grease-stained T-shirt indicated he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
He pointed to the living room at the end of the hallway. She didn’t need telling. It was the same layout as the other two blocks. The long windows that offered a view of the small playing ground below were drowning beneath heavy brown curtains that were both too wide and too long.
He rushed to clear the sofa and two armchairs.
‘Sorry, flatmate’s a pig.’
Kim said nothing as she took a seat. Her eagle eye had spotted nothing untoward except for a can of beer that could easily have been from the night before.
Josh disabused her of that notion when he lifted it to his mouth and finished it off.
Not illegal. Just early.
‘Josh, can we just ask you about that day ten years ago when Bradley was abducted?’
He swallowed. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, reaching for the can that he’d already emptied.
‘Can you take us through it once more?’
‘Yeah, yeah, but why?’
‘We want to offer his mother closure if we can.’
‘Oh, okay, well, yeah, I mean we set off for school; Brad said to race through the woods. He took off and I got a puncture. By the time I got to the end of the woods, I saw a van closing its back door and driving off at speed. I didn’t know Brad hadn’t carried on to school until I got there. Then I told the teacher what had happened.’
The same story he’d told the police at the time. Almost.
‘Could you tell us again but in more detail?’ Kim asked.
‘There ain’t no more detail. We were going to school, we raced, I got a puncture and my mate got grabbed by some sort of pervert who killed him and hid the body in Cannock.’
‘Was there any particular reason he wanted to race?’
‘Nah, we did it all the time.’
‘Did he normally win?’
‘About fifty-fifty.’
‘Sometimes you won?’ Kim asked.
‘Oh yeah.’
‘But not that day?’
‘I got a puncture,’ he repeated.
‘Yes, you said,’ Kim offered, slowing down the questions. ‘Had you ever seen a van like that on your way to school before?’
He shrugged. ‘Probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had.’
