That October, when he is ten and three-quarters of a year, Jim's stepmother marries her Irish boyfriend, Ethan McNeal, and all three of them pack up to move to Newhaven, which is further from London than the Powers had lived before. It is quite close to France if you take a ferry, and Jim's stepmother and her new husband are talking all the time about getting a summer home in France. Jim has studied French in case they should go there. He imagines he could do a lot of fun things in France, should they end up staying for a bit; even a day-trip to Paris could yield a number of new contacts that Jim could use. Jim doesn't have an empire, yet, but he does have a contacts list that is expanding at a good clip. Among them are some people from what is known to the layperson as "the underworld". This term conjures up dark sewers filled with thieves and murderers and blueprints of banks, but really it seems to Jim that "the underworld" is a loose term which encompasses everything from petty marijuana peddlers to gang bosses in their dilapidated offices and backstreet brothels. It isn't organized at all. This annoys Jim, for he likes order and patterns. He is excited by breaks in the pattern, and loves to learn their cause, but order is crucial if Jim ever wants anything to get done. He decides very early on that he will have to create some sort of system, so that there can be more overlap and exchange of ideas within the criminal world. Independent operators never get anything significant accomplished on their own, after all. You need to globalize.
In Grays School, Jim is bored. Not simply because of the classes, which are terrifically easy, but also because of the people. They are all incredibly easy to trick, to double-and triple-cross and run circles around. Jim acts gloriously polite around his elders and terrifically nervous and sweet around his peers. He helps a girl with her math homework, and he mutters to himself as if it's puzzling him, before getting the right answer and showing the girl, whose name is Beth, how he did it. Beth is very grateful, but Jim is modest and awkwardly humble, and she likes him immensely. Later that week, Jim is in gym class when some boys begin to jeer. It takes only moments before Jim identifies them and remembers their names, catalogues all the names they call him. Sissy, Pansy, Pouf. Not threatening, just making fun of him. Jim is genuinely bad at games in gym: he can't move fast enough to catch the ball or take the flag. He classifies each of the boys in turn. There is Scott, who is smiling too wide and shifting from foot to foot, and who always gives the wrong answer in class; there is Peter, who pulls girls' hair even though he is eleven and should have grown out of it by now; there is Evan, who is hated because he always says weird things and talks about video games and sports in detail when nobody wants to listen to him. Jim looks at them all and turns away, and when Peter pushes him over after taking his flag, Jim doesn't tell the teacher. He just giggles nervously and brushes himself off, and walks over to Beth, making sure that his steps are precise, small, and girlish, and that his wrists hang limp.
Peter is suspended for an indefinite period the following week for taking a knife to school and flashing it about at lunch break. Where he got it and what he was planning on doing with it are facts not forthcoming, and the staff do not find out when they ask Peter. Jim knows. Peter was out to get the little pouf who dared fancy him, as best he could. The information had circulated around the fifth form quickly, once Jim had confided in Beth. Everyone knows this is why Peter was suspended, and so Jim looks guilty and worried for several weeks, until Christmas. Then he tells Beth, in the strictest confidence, that Peter told him that he fancied an older boy in sixth form, but that he was scared that people would find out. Beth is very good, Jim knows, at keeping secrets badly.
Peter's school life becomes a torment in the early months of 1991. He is teased and picked on daily, especially by the sixth form pupils, and he never calls Jim a name again. This isn't really enough for Jim—he would like to see Peter dead—but this sort of killing, close by, is impractical and Jim senses that it would only attract attention. Besides, that might be construed as overly defensive and emotional. Jim doesn't kill for hatred. He kills to get things out of his way, like you'd run over a rabbit to get a bus of sick people to a hospital, or like you'd kill native populations in order to expand colonisation. Peter isn't in Jim's way at all.
Jim likes summer break. Beth doesn't have an email, and she rarely calls Jim. She's made more friends of her own sex, now, and so she doesn't bother Jim, unless she wants to gossip. This is a good thing, because she was, eventually, a bit annoying.
Jim's summer project is getting rid of his stepmother and stepfather. He could do this easily, with a carefully placed cigarette in their bed (thanks to his stepfather's smoking, these are easy to find) or a malfunctioning gas tank. Jim wants it to be special, though, this project. Besides, if his step-parents die in an accident, it's likely that Jim will be shunted off to the nearest relative, once again in the company of a faux family who will always remain connected with his past. Jim hates that idea.
Jim's plan is careful. At first, he wasn't going to make a big production of it, because he hates getting his hands dirty, but he decides that his stepmother is worth it. He wants a mirror image of Carl's death, with the pills, and so this is what he does: Jim goes to each nearby supermarket in Newhaven every day for the month of June and he buys two packages of Sudafed from all of them. Sudafed purchased by an eleven-year old isn't too suspicious, or if it is, the kid isn't the suspect.
Jim makes some friends with his project, once it's gotten started, but it is the getting started that's difficult. He sets it all up in the backyard shed, which is filled with spiders and grubs and things neither of his new parents want to touch. Jim thinks it's silly not to know a piece of your own property, but after watching them since they moved in, he knows that they won't ever use the shed, and it has no windows, so they never look in, and it's far enough from the house and the garden, so they never go too near. He looks up all the things you have to do online, and though it's hard, he gets his hands on all of the equipment and chemicals necessary. His step-parents don't even ask where he is. It is really too easy. Simple chemistry, simple plan.
Jim can only make small batches, since it's a small shed. He puts up some notices with the phone number around the neighborhood, in terms only someone who knew what was being talked about could understand. Jim sells a few bags of the stuff he's made to teenagers, behaving as if he doesn't know what's going on, telling them his mother sent him. The word spreads. It isn't long before someone breaks the fence in the night trying to get in. Someone stupid, Jim thinks, who probably doesn't even know how the drug is made, but they set off the porch-light and scare his stepfather, and act as a precursor, a warning of things to come. If Jim were his stepfather, he'd check the back shed to see if the intruder had messed things up or hidden something there, but Ethan McNeal is not that sort of man. He pretends instead that nothing has happened after a few days go by. This is unwise.
It's September again when the police catch word of the lab from a teenage girl who has Jim's little pamphlet with the phone number in her back pocket. Jim is over at Beth's house when the police storm the place, and Jim's eyes go big when he hears about what's happening the next morning, when the police come over to Beth's house. He starts to cry. Beth is worried, and she is more scared than Jim looks. The police explain that nothing is Jim's fault, and Jim swallows his sobs and lifts his dark child's eyes and nods and goes with them, snuffling, to the police department, and he thinks, oh, oh you stupid men.
He tells the police department exactly what happened, the whole truth, all of it, how his stepmother has been making meth for a few years, how they moved to Newhaven because she was almost caught at it in their old town. How they've been getting Jim—poor Jim, the policewoman's eyes says—to go and traffick for them. It is a story to break anybody's heart. It's a pretty major operation for such a small shed, and worth a hefty prison sentence. Jim watches from behind the policewoman in court as his stepmother denies it all, becoming more and more hysterical, and watches his stepfather start to doubt his wife. It all happens rather well, in the end. The lie is so much easier to believe than the truth. Supermarket employees tell the attorneys that they've seen Jim buying Sudafed for months, the poor boy made to fetch things for his wicked stepmother's drug lab. The stepmother denies everything, and her statements seem to imply that she's delusional: she seems to be insinuating that Jim, the eleven-year-old, had set up the lab himself. It's a story for the newspapers, but like all stories, it isn't reported for long. Jim is quietly removed from Newhaven and put into foster care. And of course this is just how it was always going to happen.
Jim Powers disappears for good. Jim Moriarty is a little boy in London, starting sixth form at a school in the suburbs. He has adoring foster parents, and he shows them every affection. He is in counseling for a while, but by eighth form that's ended; he's perfectly mentally stable, well-rounded, and a happy young man as could be, considering the circumstances. It is hinted that he has a high-functioning form of autism, but that's all. He's all right, by any measure, and only getting better.