Evan held it up to his eyes and peered through the holes as if they were binoculars. He tapped the plastic casing. His finger stroked the shiny blackness of the—what? To him, it looked like ribbon or the decorative trimmings his mother sometimes wrapped around presents. He wanted to slip his nail under it and pull it free, but some instinct stopped him.

Evan examined it again. Across the top of the flat rectangle was a yellowing sticker. He peered closer. Words in pencil. The handwriting was oversized, a little clunky. Much like his own.

Play Me.

He turned it over and over in his hands, wondering what it meant. Should he play with it? But it didn’t say that, and anyway, he didn’t know how to. In his head, he drew up a list of things that could be played. DVDs. Instruments. Music. He picked at the graze on his elbow. That thought wouldn’t go away.

Music.

He knew it wasn’t a CD because he’d gotten his own player for Christmas when he was seven, and he knew it wasn’t a record because it was nothing like the round, crackling discs his father played on his turntable.

He flipped it over and inspected the other side. Another yellowing sticker. And the faint remnants of the same childish handwriting, although smaller this time, more cramped.

The boy could just about make out half a sentence.

Don’t ever

Frustratingly, the rest of the words were too faded to read, as if the graphite had been smudged in haste or rubbed out.

“I knew you couldn’t keep away, you naughty boy.”

Evan’s mother’s voice drifted up into the tree house. He leaned over the hole where the trunk stood, and looked down. Olivia Lockwood was gazing up at him, hands on her hips, and she wasn’t smiling. “Get down now.”

Evan slipped his find down the elastic of his soccer shorts. He didn’t know what he’d discovered and why it had been hidden, but he was going to find out.

18

Monday 30th July 2018, 11:37 A.M.

32 The Avenue

They were outside his house.

Trefor Lovell could hear them, catcalling and whispering. Experience warned him that soon they would be at his door, ringing the bell and running off. Laughing. Loud. High on the adrenaline of a dare.

If only they would leave him alone. What exactly had he done to them? Nothing, except mind his own damn business.

He imagined a garbage truck rolling up the road, tipping over on its side and crushing them to death, their arms and legs as mangled as the spokes of their bicycle wheels. Or looping rope around their scrawny little necks and letting them swing from the branches of the hornbeam. Death by long drop or suspension? A severed spinal column or slow strangulation? Slow would be better, he decided. More time for regrets.

He finished making the bed and hovered at the top of the landing. Someone laughed again, boyish with a hint of cruelty. He was looking straight down the valley of the stairwell when the letter box opened.