He seemed to be on Facebook frequently: most recently last night, a sweaty selfie saying he’d run 6.2 miles and the name of the app he used to record time and distance. The day before that was a picture of his kids – three small boys – all wearing Superman outfits. A story he’d shared from BuzzFeed about Kim Kardashian, a video of a cat in fancy dress riding on a robotic vacuum cleaner, another post-run selfie detailing how far he’d run on Sunday night, and so it went on. Once again, I was reminded that looking at a stranger’s Facebook timeline gave a warped view of that person’s life.

I decided to ignore Larssen’s advice – showing the police Ben was alive would mean I’d get my life back too, so I texted and emailed Adam again, in case he’d seen or heard anything, or had any ideas on what else I should do. Either I way I could really do with talking to my friend again, to get his view on things. He’d been behaving strangely these last few days – almost as if he was keeping me at arm’s length, like he was worried the contagion of my problems would infect his own marriage. There was no denying that he’d been ignoring me.

But even if my closest male friend didn’t return my messages or calls, I would still be OK, as long as I had Mel. In truth, she was my best friend – had been for ten years. She was all I needed. She and I and William were a unit, an exclusive club that no one else could join. Sport had been everything to me for fifteen years growing up, and then that had been taken away and my family had filled the void. More than filled it, in ways I’d never expected.

I didn’t need a lot of best friends, I only needed one.

And nobody was going to bust up our exclusive club.

Chapter 62

62

My car was gone, taken away by the police. The only alternative was Mel’s old moped, propped in the corner of the garage for a year or so, gathering dust since her short-lived attempt to avoid the Underground on her daily commute. It turned out that riding into central London every day had proved just too hazardous, even for my daredevil wife. I found her old helmet on a shelf and set off, taking it slowly.

Fifteen minutes later I sat down next to Beth on a bench at Golders Hill Park, halfway between my house and hers. We watched a small boy, perhaps three or four years old, clamber up the steps of the slide and sit down at the top. He didn’t move for a moment, then shuffled forward on his bottom once, twice, three times, until gravity took him and he slid slowly to the bottom, a look of intense concentration on his face.