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About the Author

Karen Perry is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Your Closest Friend, Can You Keep a Secret?, Girl Unknown, Only We Know and The Boy That Never Was, which was selected for the Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club. She lives in Dublin with her family.

Nobody sees him. A small boy cutting a line through parked cars towards the green. He is alone and, from a distance, there is nothing extraordinary about him. Nothing to draw attention, nothing to cause alarm.

Heat shimmers above scorched grass although it is not yet noon. The air is filled with noise – laughter, the sound of a child’s temper tantrum, a mother admonishing him. Coloured flags flutter on lines of bunting strung between the streetlamps and trees of Wyndham Park. By mutual agreement, all dogs have been left at home and the occasional muffled bark reaches them. There is the bleat of a distant ringing, music from a beat-box, a crowd of teenagers sitting cross-legged around it. Two barbecues have been set up in the middle of the green – big ones, Weber, top of the range – and the men take turns flipping burgers and browning sausages, discussing the football.

The adults have split along gender lines, the women making a ring with their deckchairs, sipping from paper cups. A younger woman – a tenant of one of the basement apartments on the east side of the park – slips off her shirt to reveal a black bikini top. She lies stretched out on the grass some distance from the others, the soft hills of her breasts rising above the mound of her ribcage. The men glance over, and the women’s talk drops.

Perhaps it is because of this distraction that they don’t notice the small solitary boy coming out of Number 14, the plum-coloured heavy door closing behind him. They don’t notice his steady pilgrimage towards them.

One of the mums has brought face-paints with her, and a queue of children has formed, waiting to be transformed into cats and lions and butterflies. She is painstakingly sweeping black paint – tiger whiskers – over a child’s cheeks, when the little girl’s eyes widen, the pucker of a frown appearing on her brow.

‘You all right, sweetheart?’

The little girl opens her mouth to answer, eyes still fixed on something in the distance, but she doesn’t get a chance to speak.

A scream rises from the crowd followed by an instant hush while everyone looks around. Mothers scan the green for their children. Teenagers look over with casual disinterest. Only the rhythmic blare from the beat-box disturbs the air.

‘Jesus,’ a man says, as the boy steps towards them.

It’s as if he’s dropped out of the sky.

Small and slight, no more than six years old, his bare legs and arms and the insignia on his Batman T-shirt are smeared with blood.