Humber Boy B Read Free

kid who murdered a kid. And we’re giving him a prime flat in the marina.” He pushed a piece of paper across the desk, “Here’s the address.”
    Cate made a note and handed it to Penny who continued to update them. “Jessica is posting on Facebook, ‘please help me find Humber Boy B’ et cetera, but she’s just fishing, she has no idea where he is. If we can just keep this from the press and vigilantes we’ll be fine. Things will die down after a few weeks. He needs to live like a hermit, one on a vow of silence.”
    “I’d like to think we can do more than that, and give him a chance at a normal life.” Cate said, quietly but with feeling. “He was only ten when it happened. Barely formed.”
    “Still ten in here,” said Steve, tapping his temple. “Don’t go thinking you can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, Cate. Keep his identity secret and he can rot in his flat for all I care. At least he’s got a view.”
    Beyond the conference room window the blueness of the sky now seemed oppressive in its constancy.
    “Have you met him yet, Cate?” asked Penny.
    “Our first meeting is today.”
    “He’s strange. Of course, he’s been locked up since he was a child. But he’s not our usual sort.”
    “What’s our usual sort?” Cate was genuinely interested, having lost the notion years ago that such a person existed. Working in the prison with Rose Wilks, then supervising the Suffolk Cannibal, Alice Mariani, Cate didn’t make assumptions anymore.
    “You know how it usually is, young man, just out of prison. How they blag, how pale they are and cocky, fluent in Hackney patois and bullshit. Ben’s different. Looks like a choir boy. But evil.”
    An evil choir boy sounded like something from a tacky horror film.
    “What he did was evil.” Cate said, thinking of Roger Palmer’s witness statement, the boy in the single red trainer hitting the water with the weight of death. “But he was just a child. There’s got to be some reason, some sort of explanation.”
    “There is. He’s evil. End of story,” said Ged, now standing. “Are we done here?”

4
    Ben
    Something’s wrong.
    At first I think it’s the sun, it’s too bright and making me blink. There was a storm yesterday, grumbling thunder then cracks of lightning, but today the sky is as blue as… as…
    I haven’t seen blue in very many different ways since I was ten, so all I can think of is blue as a prison shirt that’s just come out of its plastic. I only had that happen once, a prison shirt that hadn’t been worn by fifteen other sweaty bodies. As blue as the water after that shirt’s first washed, when the dye seeps into the milky bucket. I saw that a lot when I was working in the laundry, last prison but one. It was a good job, a privileged one for cons close to release, but my fingers wrinkled and cracked and then got itchy. Turns out I have eczema. So when I was moved to Suffolk, my final prison stay in open conditions, I asked for a different job. My personal officer said I should be working in the community anyway, get some experience of the outside world after being locked away for so long, so I got placed down the road with the Suffolk Punch horses. I’d never touched a horse before, not even a normal-sized one, and a Punch is a giant. When I was told I’d be grooming Axel, the stud, I was scared. I had to learn how to move around the horse, not behind its back, and slowly, so it could see what I was doing.
    That horse was just like me. It just wanted to see what was going on and not be taken by surprise, no-one could be blamed for that. An animal only kicks out because it’s scared, but the kick will be vicious and a bone is easily broken.
    And then I realise it isn’t the sun that’s the problem, it’s that I can’t see all that’s going on and there are people behind me, moving and talking. I want to kick out because I’m afraid.
    For the first time in my life I’m on my own. I haven’t been alone in eight