Read Online Hold Your Breath by Caroline Green - Free Book Online Page A

on a tip-off from the ‘psychic’, has said that this false information prevented police from finding
     the child early enough to receive vital medical care. A source at Horsley Hospital, where the boy was treated, has confirmed that they may have been able to save his life if he had been found a
     few hours sooner. The three year old died from injuries sustained on Thursday.
    His mother Siobhan Evans and his brother and sister are said to be in deep shock. They are currently being cared for by relatives.
    Tara’s sobs came from deep inside, wracking her body with spasms of pain and guilt.
    She cried hard for some time. Eventually, exhausted and shivering, she pulled the pale green throw that covered her duvet around her arms and stared up at the ceiling with throbbing eyes.
    As always, she began to torture herself by remembering how she’d stared up at the entrance to the police station that day. It was like pressing on a painful bruise. She imagined an
alternative reality in which she simply turned around and walked away. There was a kind of agonising bliss in picturing this. How she wished she could go back and make it happen.
    But she hadn’t done that. Instead, she had gone inside and somehow persuaded them to listen to her.
    Tara had heard that the three year old had gone missing a few weeks into the spring term. Tyler Evans was the brother of a girl in the year below her, Chelsea. Everyone had been talking about it
in class. Tara knew where the family lived; the address was a few streets away from her.
    When she’d passed the house on her way home from school, she’d seen a scrum of reporters already forming around the small, neat garden at the front. Outside the garden was one of
those yellow bubble cars, the sort every small child in Britain seemed to own. Tara’s fingertips brushed across it and then she’d started to go a bit dizzy.
    The pictures came, stronger than they had ever been about lost keys or jewellery. So strong they hurt her head and made her feel sick.
    A stone angel towered over her, eyes blank and uncaring. Gravestones and statues crowding in. A terrible, hollow
feeling of fear only helped by the rough, comforting sensation of a
grubby toy pig in her hand.
    Tara had staggered away, trying to process what she’d just seen. It was Tyler. She knew this deep in her bones. He was in some sort of . . . graveyard?
    She didn’t tell anyone. It was too weird. But she spent a whole night tossing and turning as the images bombarded her mind. She told Mum she was sick the next day and as soon as the house
was quiet, she’d dressed with shaking hands and walked to the police station.
    They hadn’t wanted to listen to her at first but then Siobhan Evans was in the station and overheard what was going on. Digging her long nails into Tara’s shoulders, she’d made
her repeat what she’d just said.
    It was Tara’s description of the toy that swung opinion towards believing her. No one else knew that Tyler’s beloved Piggy was missing too. Siobhan’s excitement and insistence
that Tara’s hunch be investigated made the police act. They had no other information and even though it was obvious the officers Tara met were deeply dubious about this, Siobhan made a scene
about the consequences of them ignoring potentially vital information.
    So Tara was forced to describe every tiny detail of her images all over again, to several different police officers. Siobhan made Tara hold a baby photo of Tyler on a keyring and more images had
come so violently, and in such bright detail, that Tara had retched and almost been sick on the floor of the police station. The images of the statues were so powerful, everyone agreed he must be
close to a graveyard. There was a huge cemetery nearby, which served a ten-mile radius. It seemed the obvious place. A massive fingertip search was carried out there, involving police and the many
locals who had come out to help.
    But there was no sign of Tyler.
    Then