Two sides to every story

Detective Moran had had better days. The coffee machine was broken, his phone was missing and his office was in danger of being buried beneath a ton of paperwork he had no interest in doing.

Historically Moran had made a concentrated effort not to work Halloween or the days surrounding it. October 31st encouraged supposed adults to dress up and act like children, and children to dress up and stop pretending not to be monsters.

Loitering in the doorway and scrolling on her phone, D.S Lee asked "Which one should we talk to first?"

"Does the boy have his appropriate adult yet?"

"No."

"Then we go talk to the creepy Uncle." Pushing away from his desk, Moran let the chair carry him halfway across the room.

"Aren't you a bit old to still be doing that?"

“You are never too old to be lazy.” He stood up, his bones creaking, and headed down the hallway.

The man sitting in Interview Room One was the definition of average. His black hair was turning grey and the middle-age spread had settled in. He wore a paper Tyvek suit after his clothes had been taken. And hopefully burned, Moran thought.

"Good evening, Mr. Todd. Do you mind if I call you Alan?"

"No." This was one of the two words anyone had gotten out of Todd since being brought into the station.

"Excellent, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Moran and this is Detective Sergeant Lee. Can we get you...well, water is all we have at the moment."

"No."

After the usual preamble, Moran settled down to the business at hand. He made a show of ignoring the files on the table, instead folding his hands and trying to look the suspect in the eye.

"So, why don't you tell me what happened?"

Todd said nothing. He just gazed over Moran's shoulder at the door, as if expecting it to open any moment.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Yes."

"And why you are here?"

"Yes."

"Well, at least that is something." Moran turned to Lee and gave a slight shrug.

"Hopefully we will get more information out of your nephew Alex"

The mention of the boy's name drained the colour from Todd's face.

"Yeah, people tend to believe the kids in situations like this. If I was you, I would want to make sure my side of the story is heard."

"It's not a child." The words were barely a whisper.

"Pardon?"

Silently Todd began hugging himself. The crinkling of the paper suit rubbing against itself set Moran's teeth on edge.

"Alan, I don't think being glib is going to help your case. Neither was turning down the offer of a solicitor." Lee was failing to hide her obvious disdain for the man.

"My colleague here already thinks you are some kind of monster. People get like that when children are involved. Me, I've been in this job long enough to know that two plus two doesn't always add up to four."

"Whatever that thing wearing Alex is, it's not a boy...or at least not a human one."

Todd's voice was raw and cracked as if he had been gargling razor blades and smoking fifty a day since he was twelve.

Lee gave him an exaggerated eye roll and Moran responded with a scratch of his nose. It was the signal for her to tone down the bad cop routine.

"If he's not a...boy...then just what is he?"

Todd rubbed his eyes with his palms, as if he was trying to obliterate something only he could see. “I... I...” he muttered.

"Take your time. We haven't spoken to Alex yet; we're still trying to track down his parents."

"They're dead."

The words sucked the air out of the room. Moran glanced at Lee, before turning back to Todd.

"How do you know that?"

"I saw him kill them...tear them apart..." Todd flopped onto the table and began sobbing. The detectives suspended the interview and had the man returned to his cell.

"I've sent uniforms to the boy's house, they will either find a crime scene or a couple of negligent parents. I'm not sure which one I would prefer." Moran stood before the vending machine, wishing death upon the man who invented "caffeine-free" drinks.

"Do you think Todd killed the parents in some kind of attempt to cover up his crime?" Lee had settled on water and much to Moran's surprise, was enjoying it.

"Why not just kill the boy and be done with it? And that wouldn't explain where all the blood came from." Their biggest problem was they had a man and a boy covered in blood, without a scratch on either of them.

"Surely the boy is the point. People like him want to..." The words caught in Lee's throat. She found cases involving kids hard; it was the mother in her. He noticed she had no such qualms when bad things befell someone's husband though.

Ten minutes later they were informed that wherever Alex Shelby's parents were it wasn't in the family home. SOCO compared it to the Mary Celeste.

Child services had provided an appropriate adult, however. She was an older lady called Nora, whose dress was as severe as her face. Moran couldn't imagine any child warming to this woman. He was pretty sure she had a house made of gingerbread somewhere.

Alex wore the same paper Tyvek suit as his uncle and his blonde hair was still stained with blood.

"So for the tape we have Miss Nora..."

"Mother Nora" the woman interrupted.

Suitably chastised, Moran apologized and continued setting the scene for the benefit of the recording.

"OK, Alex, can you tell me what happened tonight?"

"I can."

In any other situation Moran would have reached across the table and clipped the boy round the ear.

"Where should I start? What would you like to know?"

"Whatever you feel comfortable telling us," Mother Nora answered. Moran could only nod in agreement, while trying to glare the woman into obedience.

"Uncle Alan came and got me from school,"

"Was that usual?" Lee asked.

"No, I'd never met him before he came to collect me,"

"How did the school..."

"Not important, carry on Alex."

"He said that mum and dad were sick and that he had been sent to collect me before...” The boy was struggling to remember the words.

"...anyway, when he told me to get into his car that's when I ran. Through the park and down into the woods. It's the long way home but I didn't think he would leave his car. Not that it mattered, he was waiting for me when I got home."

"Was he parked outside your house?"

"No, he was inside, sitting in the chair mum usually piles the laundry on, drinking a cup of coffee. I think he was watching the cricket, or at least that's what was on the TV."

Moran felt as if the movie had skipped a scene and, from the look on Lee's face, he could see he was not the only one.

"What did your parents say?"

"They weren't there. It was just him. There was a can of juice and a bar of chocolate on the table..."

Moran closed his eyes, Lee's glare was full of enough judgement.

"I was hungry," the boy shouted.

The rest of his story boiled down to Alex blacking out and then coming to, covered in blood, with a policeman asking him his name.

Mother Nora rested a hand on the boy's shoulder. Moran wasn't sure how much comfort Alex would get from it. Stepping out into the hall to regroup, the two detectives shared a frustrated sigh.

The custody sergeant stormed up to them, his puce face struggling to decide if it wanted to grin or snarl.

"Your prisoner is demanding to see you, well actually he is demanding a lot of things including being moved to a different station, or at the very least having the boy moved. He's upsetting our usual guests and your fellow officers. So if you wouldn't mind..."

Her phone pinged and Lee smiled.

Taking the device, Moran skimmed the email and its attachments, leaving his partner to placate the grumpy sergeant. He needed a couple of minutes to arrange his thoughts. In the old days he would have gone out for a cigarette, recently it would have been a coffee, but as neither was available to him he settled for playing a game of solitaire on Lee's phone. He was sure she wouldn't mind, it wasn't like he was reading her emails.

Sitting opposite Alan Todd again, Moran could see police custody had taken its toll. His eyes couldn't stay focused for longer than a few seconds. To Moran it looked like he was having withdrawal symptoms, but Todd had been tested when he was first checked in and was clean.

"We've spoken to Alex, Uncle Alan, and you don't come out of his story all that well. It's an all-too-familiar, and honestly quite pathetic tale. So why don't you just save us all a hell of a lot of time and confess?"

Lee laid a series of pictures on the table. They showed the inside of a garage with the usual tools, cabinets and random pieces of wood. The remains of a dozen candles were arranged in a circle on the floor, beneath all the blood, black markings were visible.

"You don't understand. I really am the boy's uncle."

"That doesn't make it any better." Lee had stopped playing a bad cop, Moran could hear the disdain in every word.

"It was his parents' doing. They did it, not me. I was trying to save him, I have been ever since I found out my sister had had a kid." He stopped talking but Moran could tell he was searching for something.

"It's not my garage!" A look of triumph bloomed on Todd's face, as if that one sentence proved his innocence.

"We know it belongs to Martin Shelby, who, you will be pleased to know, we believe is your brother in law." Moran wrested control of the conversation from Lee.

"Well then," Todd muttered and returned to watching the doors and windows.

"OK, so we know you drugged the boy and we know his parents disappeared and it had something to do with a dirty garage miles from either of your homes. But right now that's all we know. But we can surmise, as will the judge and jury, about what happened."

"No, you can't." Todd's sudden vehemence caught Moran off guard.

"Then tell us what happened in that garage."

"My sister was always a little odd. Our parents were too soft on her. Let her live in a fantasy world. When she met Martin Shelby, who was just as crazy as she was, it was love at first sight. He was a sorcerer, one that could travel between worlds, raise the dead, that kind of thing. One night the two of them just up and left."

"Then you found out about the boy?"

"Yeah, I tried calling social services but, unless the kid is covered in bruises or smashing up the school they aren't interested. So I..."

"Decided to take matters into your own hands." Lee cut him off.

"I'm his uncle, I had to protect the boy. Only I was too late, they had already picked him up and taken him to that garage."

He was expecting a story about accidentally killing Martin Shelby followed by a botched job at covering it up. Something to keep the paperwork simple and stop Lee from reaching across the table and slapping the man.

"I could hear the screaming as soon as I turned the engine off, I jumped out the car and pulled the doors open..." Moran watched Todd struggle to recall the memory.

"...The boy stood in the middle of the room. His eyes had gone black, no whites, no iris, no nothing, just black. My sister and her husband were floating in the air, limp and lifeless...then...then..." Collapsing onto the table the man began to sob.

That was as much as Moran or Lee got out of him. Todd was returned to his cell pending a full psychiatric investigation.

"I'll say this for him, that's maybe the strangest story I have ever heard, but at least it was entertaining." Moran gazed out his office window. The streetlights and the dawn were doing battle over the color of the world. He had one eye on the clock and another on the snack van in the nearby industrial estate.

"We are going to charge him with attempted abduction at least?" Lee stopped packing up her things and waited for an answer.

"We can try, but..."

"You can't tell me you're buying his story?"

A taxi pulled into the station car park, and Moran watched Mother Nora run out and climb into the back. She had left the door open and he wondered who the Sister was waiting on. A boy, who looked like Alex Shelby, emerged from the building and headed towards the waiting vehicle without a care in the world.

"Are you listening to me?" Lee asked.

The boy looked up and waved. For a second it looked as if the streetlights were reflecting off the colourless surface of his eyes. Moran took a step back, pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes. Opening them just in time to see the tail lights of the taxi as it pulled out of the station car park.

"You ok?" Lee placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

Just as Lee finished pulling on her coat, the phone on the desk let out a shrill noise, shattering the silence.

"Whatever it is, it can wait, we're done for the...huh...OK...I'll be down in a minute..."

Lee carefully replaced the receiver. "That's the front desk, the appropriate adult is here for Alex Shelby"

"You can always count on child protective services to give you all the support you need, after the fact. Apologize, explain the mix-up and send them on their way." Moran pulled his own coat, dreaming of a bacon roll and a cup of coffee.

"Apparently we never needed them at all, Nora Shelby has been here all afternoon and she's just taken her son home in a taxi."