My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller Read Online Free

from his forehead and blinked the droplets from his lashes. He reached for a bottle of beer balanced on the linen basket. Taking a gulp, he wiped away the sweat on his forehead. I swivelled round so that I could lie back onto his chest. Following my lead, Jason slotted his thighs around my hips.
    ‘A few weeks and it’ll be our wedding anniversary.’ Steam sheeted off his shins and up to the open window. ‘Shall we have some people round? To celebrate.’
    ‘We could have a barbecue? Make the most of this Indian summer.’
    ‘Done.’
    He paused, thinking.
    ‘But then we should do something with just us. A meal?’
    I imagined the evening to come. The awkward silences, the search for conversation.
    ‘Sounds good.’
    I loved being married to Jason. I loved our everyday life together. I did not love our anniversary.
    Ask any couple what happens when they celebrate their special day and they tell the same story: at some point in the evening one or both of you will take great pleasure in reliving how you got together in minute detail. You will dwell, misty-eyed, on the first flirtation; retell the moment of your meeting to each other over and over again, with lots of ‘and remember when’s and ‘then you said to me’s and finishing of each other’s sentences as you marvel at the Sliding Doors
twist of fate that helped two become one.
    But that never happened with us, and it never would.
    Neither of us had ever spoken it out loud, but the only reason our paths crossed was because we had both attended the same conference. And the only reason we were at that conference was because we’d both lost our children. Coordinated by the NSPCC, its theme was child safety and its aim was to improve the communication and procedures between everyone from Interpol to the Scouts. It was held over three days at one of those hotels that are all stale pastries at breakfast, patterned carpets and overheated rooms. Jason and I had been invited, along with members of the police and social services – and other parents who, like us, had had their children stolen from them.
    I’d seen Jason on the first morning. I’d just finished a seminar in which I and key personnel from the worlds of teaching and healthcare had spent an hour discussing the inadequacy of DBS criminal record and sex-offenders’ register checks as a vetting tool for staff who work or come into contact with children. Afterwards, I’d wanted nothing more than a cup of tea and a seat in a quiet corner, but instead I’d been corralled into coming along to the next scheduled session by our seminar’s moderator.
    The session was on Megan’s Law and Jason was part of a panel there to discuss its various pros and cons. He, along with the other speakers, was given a formal introduction at the start and I remember thinking how unnecessary that was in his case. Jason, along with his then wife Vicky, had endured so much press coverage in the months after Barney was taken that it had driven their relationship to its very public end. I and everyone else in the room had known who he was as soon as we set eyes on him.
    Wearing an oversized suit borrowed from a friend, he’d kept rubbing at the shortest part of his buzz-cut hair, near the base of his scalp. With dark brown eyes, a gap-toothed smile and weathered, wind-burnt skin, he looked both older and younger than his twenty-seven years.
    I spoke to him that afternoon. There’d been a coffee break and the only remaining free seats had been right next to each other. That night he came back to my hotel room and we’d talked until the early hours. The conversation was erratic. We flitted between funny potty-training anecdotes (it turned out both Barney and Lauren had had a thing for leaving stealth poos behind the living-room curtains) and shy confessionals (Jason revealed he had once been so desperate to talk to his son again that he had resorted to the services of mediums and psychics). Then, as dawn was breaking, we had