The dead boy from the gravel pit was finally identified. He was a boy from Sunnybank Park, an undersized fifteen-year-old with the unpromising name of Lee Bagshot. He too made the Malbry Examiner—not the front page, but the third, next to the news of a series of burglaries in Pog Hill and a drunken driver in Huddersfield. I vaguely remember his photograph: the mullet; the V-neck pullover; the pinched and grinning little face.

Lee Bagshot was the son of Marie Bagshot (30), a shopgirl from White City, and John “Lefty” Sykes (32), a self-employed plumber from Barnsley. Lee Bagshot spent his time between his mother’s house and his grandparents’, and due to a confusion over whose turn it was, his absence between December 30 and January 4 had gone unnoticed on both sides.

There were no tearful eulogies for Lee Bagshot; no vigils; no claims that he had ever been promising or popular. The mother appeared on Nationwide, pleading, a little shrilly perhaps, for the clay pits to be filled in. She was not a powerful advocate. She had bleached hair and too much makeup and seemed to be wearing every piece of jewelry she possessed. And yet there was something in her eyes that Nutter, MP, had never shown, not even at the height of the search for his son. At the time, I thought it was confusion, or guilt, or maybe just the excitement of being on TV. Now I think perhaps it was grief—the kind of grief that is hard and dry-eyed and belongs with those pebble-dashed houses with their bleak little squares of lawn and the steel shutters on the windows to make sure the stones don’t crack the glass.

“He were allus going down to them pits,” she kept saying, as if it excused the fact that for nearly a week she had partied, and gone out with her friends, and smoked, and drunk beer, and slept with several different men, and twice gone to the beauty shop without even knowing her son was dead, without even asking herself where he was—

“I telled ’im,” she said. “I kept tellin’ ’im. But he were a lad, they dun’t listen.”

He wasn’t the only one, it seemed. Nobody listened to Marie. If Mrs. Nutter had spoken out—elegant Mrs. Nutter, with her round vowels and her place on the governing bodies of the choral society and the Women’s Institute—then things might have been different. As it was, the clay pits stayed as they were for seven more years, after which the council had them filled in, and grassed over the place where they’d been to make a park that nobody used, except for youngsters up to no good. Lee Bagshot’s case was quickly closed. The coroner ruled it an accident, and life went on as usual.