Billy shrugged, a sullen look on his face, as though he’d been told off for something. Since he often looked that way, it was impossible to say for sure. Charlie still didn’t respond. But as we reached the back of the room, he frowned to himself, and then carefully wrote something in the notebook.

I sat down in one of the armchairs across from Billy, got out the packed lunch I’d made for myself that morning, and ignored Charlie right back. I’d become accustomed to this sort of behavior. Every now and then, we’d arrive to find Charlie very conspicuously doing something mysterious. As I ate, I noticed the curiosity in James’s expression, and had to suppress the irritation it brought. He had become a little too impressed with Charlie for my liking. While I was prepared to entertain Charlie’s eccentricities, I made sure there was always a little mental eye roll there, whereas it was obvious James often thought Charlie was exactly as important as Charlie did himself. For reasons I found hard to articulate, that annoyed me.

“What are you doing, Charlie?” James said eventually.

“I already asked him that.” Billy pulled a face but didn’t look up from his magazine. “It’s a secret, apparently.”

Charlie sighed, then put his pen down on the desk.

“It’s not a secret,” he said. “I was concentrating. When you’re thinking about something important, you want to carry on without being interrupted.”

“Jesus,” Billy muttered. “Sorry.”

“The same way you wouldn’t want me to interrupt … whatever it is you’re reading.”

Billy glanced down at the magazine. He closed it.

Charlie smiled at James.

“I was writing in my dream diary.”

“What’s a dream diary?”

Charlie held up the notebook.

“Every morning, I write down what I dreamed the night before.”

I took a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s not the morning.”

“I didn’t say that’s what I was doing right now.”

I swallowed. Annoyingly true.

“I never remember my dreams,” James said.

“Most people can’t.” Charlie put the notebook down. “I used to be the same. Dreams are stored in the short-term memory, which is why it’s important to write them down as soon as you wake up, before you forget. If you don’t, they vanish forever.”

I resisted the urge to do an actual eye roll. I had become used to Charlie’s fascination with arcane bullshit. He’d bring books on magic and demonology in to school, but I always thought it was more to be seen reading them than out of any genuine interest—that it was part of a persona he liked to cultivate. Charlie would have been more than happy for people to believe he spent his evenings cross-legged in a chalk pentagram surrounded by candles. But he usually liked his reputation to have more of an edge to it than talking about dreams.

“So what were you doing?” I said.

“Searching for patterns.” He looked at me. “Making notes on what I’ve discovered. Once you start doing that, you begin to notice the same dreams crop up time and time again. The same themes. The same places. The same people.”

“And so what?”

“It helps with incubation.” Charlie smiled.

And I hesitated for a moment, the sandwich halfway to my mouth. It felt a little like when he had spoken to Hague on the day of the accident—saying something unexpected and odd enough to pull you up.

Incubation.

I didn’t like the word. It made me think of something awful being cultivated in a jar. And, of course, I realized I had been wrong just then—after what had happened to Hague, dreams actually did have an edge when it came to Charlie.

James seemed uneasy too.

“What does incubation mean?”

“Influencing what you dream about,” Charlie told him. “Which helps to waken lucidity. Do you know what a lucid dream is?”

James shook his head.

“It’s when you become aware that you’re dreaming while you’re in a dream. Almost as if you’re waking up inside your dream but staying asleep. Once you do that, you’re in control of what happens. You can do anything you want, live any experience you want, make your dream world exactly how you want it to be. Anything you can think of can be real.”

I looked at James and I could see he was considering that, and I wondered what he would choose to do if he could do anything at all. Get back at the bullies who tormented him? Envision a happier home life? Escape from Gritten altogether? I imagined the idea must appeal to him, and I didn’t like the way he was staring at Charlie as though he’d just been offered something magical.

“They’re still just dreams,” I said. “When you wake up, it’s not like it matters. It hasn’t changed anything.”

Charlie looked at me. For a moment his expression seemed completely blank, but there was an undercurrent to it that set me on edge, as though I’d committed some kind of transgression by challenging him.

“What do you mean?” he said.

I shrugged. “Just that. They’re only dreams. They don’t make any difference.”

Charlie smiled then, and for some reason it unnerved me more than the blankness had. It was the same smile he’d shown to Hague that day, one that suggested he was way ahead of me, and that I’d said something simplistic and childish that he himself had gotten past a long time ago.

They’re only dreams.

A smile that said he knew a secret I didn’t.

SIX

NOW

 

Amanda worked late that night.

She drew the blinds in her office and turned off the light, so that the only illumination in the room came from the computer screen on her desk and an angled lamp beside it. The arrangement was probably not great for her eyesight, but she liked working this way when she could. It concentrated her attention and made the rest of the world go away. It allowed her to think.

What she was thinking about right now was dream diaries.

The concept seemed ridiculous to her. Everyday diaries were alien enough—if something happened that wasn’t important enough to remember in your actual head, what was the point in writing it down? The idea of going one step further and recording your dreams as well was so far off-planet she needed a telescope to see it. But that appeared to be what she was looking at now.

While Robbie Foster was not cooperating, and Elliot Hick was borderline hysterical, the police had managed to establish a rough timeline of events, and Amanda now knew a little more about what had happened. Close to midday, Hick and Foster had gone to the quarry with a friend of theirs named Michael Price, and they had murdered him there. Afterward, they had taken sleeping pills. When they eventually woke up, they had wandered out across the waste ground, bloodstained and lost, at which point they had been spotted by a concerned member of the public. Each of the boys was carrying a knife and a book. Neither had denied the killing, and while the forensics would take time, Amanda had no doubt the two teenagers were guilty. She had the what and she had the who.

What she didn’t understand yet was why.

She’d had a meeting with her boss, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons, an hour ago. Lyons was a notorious bastard, and she had known full well the calculations that had been going through his head at the time. There had been a murder on his patch, which looked bad, but the killers were already in custody and there appeared to be no risk to the wider community. The convictions were going to be iron clad, and the department would look good as a result. A boy was dead, basically, but things could have been worse.