“I’m aware that Neil hasn’t been found,” he said. “Despite extensive searches and inquiries.”

“What would your theory be?”

“I haven’t followed the investigation closely enough to have one.”

“You haven’t?” Lyons looked surprised at that. “I thought you said that you were out searching on the first night.”

“That was when I thought he’d be found.”

“So you don’t think he will be now?”

“I don’t know. I hope he will.”

“I’d have thought you would have followed the case, given your history?”

The first mention there. The first hint.

“Maybe my history gives me a reason not to.”

“Yes, I can understand that. It was a difficult time for all of us.”

Lyons sounded sympathetic, but Pete knew this was another source of resentment between them. Pete was the one who’d closed the area’s biggest case in the last fifty years, and yet Lyons was the one who’d ended up in charge. In different ways, the investigation they were circling was uncomfortable for both of them.

Lyons was the one to bring that spiral to its point.

“I also understand you’re the only one Frank Carter will ever talk to?”

And there it was.

It had been a while since Pete had heard the name out loud, and so perhaps it should have delivered a jolt. But all it did was bring the crawling sensation inside him to the surface. Frank Carter. The man who had kidnapped and murdered five young boys in Featherbank twenty years ago. The man whom Pete had eventually caught. The name alone conjured up such horror for him that it always felt like it should never be spoken out loud—as though it were some kind of curse that would summon a monster behind you. Worse still was what the papers had called him. The Whisper Man. That was based on the idea that Carter had befriended his victims—vulnerable and neglected children—before taking them away. He would talk quietly to them at night outside their windows. It was a nickname that Pete had never allowed himself to use.

He had to fight down the urge to leave the room.

You’re the only one he’ll talk to.

“Yes.”

“Why do you think that is?” Lyons said.

“He enjoys taunting me.”

“About what?”

“The things he did back then. The things I never found out.”

“But he never tells you?”

“No.”

“Why bother speaking to him, then?”

Pete hesitated. It was a question he had asked himself numerous times over the years. He dreaded the encounters, and always had to suppress the shivers he felt as he sat in the private interview room at the prison, anticipating Carter’s approach. He would feel broken afterward, sometimes for weeks. There would be days when he would shake uncontrollably, and evenings when the bottle would be harder to resist. At night, Carter found him in dreams—a hulking, malevolent shadow that would bring him screaming out of sleep. Every meeting with the man damaged Pete a little more.

And yet still he went.

“I suppose I’m hoping that one day he’ll slip up,” he answered carefully. “That maybe he’ll reveal something important by accident.”

“Something about where he dumped the Smith boy?”

“Yes.”

“And about his accomplice?”

Pete didn’t reply.

Because, again, there it was.

Twenty years ago, the remains of four of the missing boys had been found in Frank Carter’s house, but the body of his final victim, Tony Smith, had never been recovered. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Carter was responsible for all five murders, and he himself had never denied it. But it was also true that there were certain inconsistencies within the case. Nothing that could have exonerated the man: just little strands that left the investigation frayed and untidy. One of the abductions was estimated to have occurred within a certain time period, but Carter had an alibi for most of it, which didn’t make it impossible for him to have taken the boy, just stretched the likelihood somewhat. There were witness accounts that, while not definitive, described a different individual at certain scenes. The forensic evidence in Carter’s house was overwhelming, and they had witness statements that were far more concrete and reliable, but a doubt had always remained as to whether Carter had acted alone.

Pete wasn’t sure whether he shared that doubt or not, and most of the time he did his best to ignore the possibility. But that was clearly why he was here. And, like any horror that had to be faced, it was preferable to drag it out into the light and get it over with. So he decided to ignore Lyons’s question and get to the point.

“Can I ask what this is about, sir?”

The DCI hesitated.

“What we’re going to discuss goes no farther than the four walls of this office right now. Is that clear?”

“Of course.”

“The CCTV we have suggests Neil Spencer did walk in the direction of the waste ground, but somewhere in the vicinity he vanished. The search has drawn a blank so far. All the locations he’s likely to have wandered into by accident have been cleared. He’s not with friends or other family members. Naturally, we’re forced to consider other possibilities. DI Beck?”

Beside Pete, Amanda Beck came to life. When she spoke, she sounded a little defensive.

“Obviously, we considered those other possibilities from the beginning. We’ve done the door-to-doors. Interviewed all the usual candidates. That’s got us nowhere yet.”

There has to be more to it than that, Pete thought. “But?”

Beck took a deep breath. “But I interviewed the parents again an hour ago. Looking for anything that might have been missed. Any kind of lead. And his mother told me something. She hadn’t mentioned it before because she thought it was stupid.”

“What was it?”

But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. Perhaps not the exact form it would take, but close enough. Over the course of the meeting, the pieces of a new nightmare had been steadily coming together into a single picture.

A little boy missing.

Frank Carter.

An accomplice.

Beck added the final piece now.

“A few weeks ago, Neil woke his mother in the middle of the night. He said that he’d seen a monster outside his window. The curtains were open, like he really had been looking out, but there was nothing there.”

She paused.

“He said it had been whispering things to him.”

Part Two

 

September

Eight

Jake was excited when we collected the keys from the estate agent in Featherbank, whereas I just felt anxious as we drove to our new home. What if the house wasn’t how I remembered it from the viewings? What if I got inside and hated the place now—or, worse, that Jake did?

All of this would have been for nothing.

“Stop kicking the passenger seat, Jake.”

The drumming of his feet from behind me stopped, but then started up again almost immediately. I sighed to myself as I turned a corner. But then, he was excited, which was a rare enough occurrence in itself, so I decided to ignore it. At least one of us was happy.