by Alex North
“Who’s that?”
“Norman Collins.” Pete looked up at her. “I know him.”
“Tell me.”
Pete ran through the basics. Norman Collins was a local man who had been questioned during the investigation twenty years ago, not because of any concrete evidence against him, but because of his behavior. From Pete’s description, he sounded like one of those creepy fuckers who sometimes insinuated themselves into ongoing investigations. You were trained to watch out for them. The ones who hung around at the back of press conferences and funerals. The ones who seemed to be eavesdropping or asking too many questions. The ones who appeared too interested or just felt off in some way. Because, while it could simply be sick or ghoulish behavior, it was also the way killers sometimes acted.
But not Collins, apparently.
“We had nothing on him,” Pete said. “Less than nothing, in fact. He had solid alibis for all the abductions. No connection to the kids or the families. No sheet to him at all. In the end, he was just a footnote in the case.”
“And yet you remember him.”
Pete stared at the photograph again.
“I never liked him,” he said.
It was likely nothing, and Amanda didn’t want to get her hopes up, but while you had to be methodical and sensible, there was also something to be said for gut instinct. If Pete remembered this man, there must have been something to cause that.
“And now he turns up again,” she said. “Got an address?”
Pete tapped on his keyboard.
“Yeah. He still lives in the same place as before.”
“Okay. Go and have the conversation. It’s probably nothing, but let’s find out why he was visiting Victor Tyler.”
Pete stared at the screen for a moment longer, then nodded and stood up.
Amanda walked back across the room. DS Stephanie Johnson caught her before she could reach her own desk.
“Ma’am?”
“Please don’t call me that, Steph. It makes me sound like someone’s grandmother. Anything from the door-to-doors yet?”
“Nothing so far. But you wanted to know if anything had come in from concerned parents? Reports of prowlers—things like that?”
Amanda nodded. Neil’s mother had missed that at first, and Amanda didn’t want them to repeat the mistake.
“We had one come in early hours this morning,” Steph said. “A man called us saying somebody had been outside the house, talking to his son.”
Amanda reached across Steph’s desk and turned the screen around so that she could read the details. The boy in question was seven. Rose Terrace School. A man outside the front door, supposedly speaking to him. But the report also mentioned the boy had been behaving strangely, and reading between the lines it was clear the attending officers hadn’t been sure the account was genuine.
She might have words with them about that.
Amanda stepped back, then walked across the room, glancing around angrily. She spotted DS John Dyson. He would do—the lazy bastard was sitting behind a pile of paperwork and messing around on his mobile. When she walked over and clicked her fingers in front of his face, he actually dropped it into his lap.
“Come with me,” she told him.
Twenty-six
It was a ten-minute drive to the house of Mrs. Shearing, the woman who had sold me our new home.
I parked outside a detached two-story house with a peaked roof and a large paved driveway, gated off from the pavement by metal railings with a black mailbox on a post outside. This was a much more prestigious area of Featherbank than the one where Jake and I now lived, in the house that Mrs. Shearing had owned and rented out for years.
Most recently, presumably, to Dominic Barnett.
I reached through the railings of the gate and undid the clasp there. As I pushed the gate open, a dog began barking furiously inside the house, and the noise intensified as I reached the front door, pressed the buzzer, and waited. Mrs. Shearing opened it on the second ring, but kept the chain on, peering out through the gap. The dog was behind her: a small Yorkshire terrier yapping angrily at me. Its fur was tipped with gray and it looked almost as old and fragile as she did.
“Yes?”
“Hello,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, Mrs. Shearing. My name’s Tom Kennedy. I bought your house off you a few weeks ago? We met a couple of times when I came to view it. My son and I.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Shoo, Morris. Get back.” The latter was to the dog. She brushed down her dress and turned back to me. “I’m sorry, he’s very excitable. What can I do for you?”
“It’s about the house. I was wondering if I could talk to you about one of the previous tenants?”
“I see.”
She looked a little awkward at that, as though she had a good inkling of which one I meant and would rather not. I decided to wait her out. After a few seconds of silence, civility got the better of any reservations she had, and she undid the chain.
“I see,” she said again. “Then you’d better come in.”
Inside, she seemed flustered, fussing at her clothes and hair, and apologizing for the state of the place. For the latter, there was certainly no need; the house was palatial and immaculate, the reception area alone the size of my living room, with a broad wooden staircase winding up to the floor above. I followed Mrs. Shearing into a cozy sitting room, with Morris cantering more enthusiastically around my ankles. Two couches and a chair were arranged around an open fire, the grate empty and spotless, and there were cabinets along one wall, with carefully spaced crystal-ware visible behind the glass panels. Paintings on the walls showed countryside and hunting scenes. The window at the front of the house was covered with plush red curtains, closed against the street.
“You have a lovely house,” I said.
“Thank you. It’s too big for me, really, especially after the children moved out and Derek passed, bless him. But I’m too old to move now. A girl comes in every few days to clean it. An awful luxury, but what else can I do? Please—have a seat.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I get you some tea? Coffee?”
“No, I’m fine.”
I sat down. The couch was rigid and hard.
“How are you settling in?” she asked.
“We’re doing okay.”
“That’s wonderful to know.” She smiled fondly. “I grew up in that house, you know, and I always wanted it to go to someone nice in the end. A decent family. Your son—Jake, if I remember correctly? How is he?”
“He’s just started school.”
“Rose Terrace?”
“Yes.”
That smile again. “It’s a very good school. I went there when I was a child.”
“Are your handprints on the wall?”
“They are.” She nodded proudly. “One red, one blue.”
“That’s nice. You said you grew up on Garholt Street?”
“Yes. After my parents died, Derek and I kept it on as an investment. It was my husband’s idea, but I didn’t take much persuading. I’ve always been fond of it. Such memories there, you see?”
“Of course.” I thought of the man who had called around, attempting to do the math. He had been considerably younger than Mrs. Shearing, but it wasn’t impossible. “Did you have a younger brother, at all?”
“No, I was an only child. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always had such affection for the house. It was mine, you see? All mine. I loved it.” She pulled a face. “When I was growing up, my friends were a little scared by it.”
“Why scared?”
“Oh, it’s just that kind of house, I think. It looks a little strange, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” Karen had said much the same to me yesterday. I repeated what I’d said to her, even though, frankly, it was beginning to sound hollow. “It has character.”
“Exactly!” Mrs. Shearing seemed pleased. “That’s exactly what I always thought too. And that’s why I’m glad it’
s in safe hands again now.”
I swallowed that down, because the house didn’t feel remotely safe to me. But, as I’d suspected, whoever the man was who’d come by, he had been lying about growing up there. I was also struck by her phrasing. Safe hands again now. She had wanted it to go to someone nice in the end.
“Was it not in safe hands before?”
She looked uncomfortable again.
“Not especially, no. Let’s just say that I haven’t been blessed with the best of tenants in the past. But then, it’s so hard to tell, isn’t it? People can seem perfectly pleasant when you meet them. And I never had any real reason to complain. They paid their rent on time. They looked after the property well enough . . .”
She trailed off, as though she didn’t know how to explain what the real problems had been and would rather leave it. While she had that luxury, I didn’t.
“But?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never had anything concrete I could use against them, or else I wouldn’t have hesitated. Just suspicions. That perhaps there were other people staying there from time to time.”
“That they were renting out rooms?”
“Yes. And that unsavory things might sometimes be going on.” She pulled a face. “The house often smelled funny when I stopped by—but, of course, you’re not allowed to do that these days without an appointment. Can you believe that? An appointment to enter your own property. Advance warning, more like it. The only time I ever turned up unannounced, he wouldn’t let me in.”
“This would be Dominic Barnett?”
She hesitated.
“Yes. Him. Although the one before was no better. I think I’ve just had a run of very bad luck with that house.”
One you’ve passed on to me.
“You do know what happened to Dominic Barnett?” I said.
“Yes, of course.”
She looked down at her hands, resting neatly and delicately in her lap, and was silent for a moment.
“Which was terrible, obviously. Not a fate I would wish on anyone. But from what I heard afterward, he did move in those kinds of circles.”
“Drugs,” I said bluntly.
Another moment of silence. Then she sighed, as though we were talking about aspects of the world that were wholly alien to her.
“There was never any evidence he was selling them from my property. But yes. It was a very sad business. And I suppose I could have searched for another tenant after he died, but I’m old now, and I decided not to. I thought it was time to sell it and draw a line. That way I could give my old house a new chance with someone else. Someone who would make a better go of it than I had recently.”
“Jake and me.”
“Yes!” She brightened at the thought. “You and your lovely little boy! I had better offers, but money doesn’t matter to me these days, and the two of you seemed right. I liked to think of my old house going to a young family, so that there’d be another small child playing there again. I wanted to feel it might end up full of light and love again. Full of color, like it was when I was a little girl. I’m so pleased to hear that both of you are happy there.”
I leaned back.
Jake and I weren’t happy there, of course, and a part of me was very angry with Mrs. Shearing. It felt like the history of the house was something she should really have told me at the time. But she also seemed genuinely pleased, as though she thought she really had done a good thing, and I could understand her motivation for choosing me and Jake to sell the property to, instead of . . .
And then I frowned.
“You said you had better offers on the house?”
“Oh, yes—very much so, actually. One man was prepared to pay far more than the asking price.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “But I didn’t like him at all. He reminded me a little of the others. He was very persistent, as well, which put me off even more. I dislike being pestered.”
I leaned forward again.
Someone had been prepared to offer way over the asking price for the house, and Mrs. Shearing had refused him. He had been persistent and pushy. There had been something off about him.
“This man,” I said carefully. “What did he look like? Was he quite short? Gray hair round here?”
I gestured to my head, but she was already nodding.
“That’s him, yes. Always impeccably dressed.”
And she pulled another face, as though she had been no more fooled by that veneer of respectability than I had.
“Mr. Collins,” she said. “Norman Collins.”
Twenty-seven
Back home, I parked and stared down the driveway.
I was thinking—or trying to, at least. It felt like facts and ideas and explanations were all whirling in my head like birds, slow enough to glimpse but too swift to catch.
The man who had been snooping around here was called Norman Collins. Despite his claims, he had not grown up in this house, and yet for some reason he had been prepared to pay well over the asking price to purchase it. Which meant the property obviously meant something to him.
But what?
I stared down the driveway at the garage.
That was where Collins had been skulking when I first spotted him. The garage, filled with the debris removed from the house before I moved in, some of which had presumably belonged to Dominic Barnett. Had it been Collins at the door last night, trying to persuade Jake to open it? If so, maybe it wasn’t that Jake himself had been in danger, just that Collins had wanted something.
The key to the garage, perhaps.
But thought could only take me so far. I got out of the car and headed to the garage, unlocking it and then pulling one of the doors and wedging it open with the same can of paint as yesterday.
I stepped inside.
All the junk remained, of course: the old furniture; the dirty mattress; the haphazard piles of damp cardboard boxes in the center. Looking down to my right, the spider was still spanning its thick web, surrounded now by a few more remnants than before. Butterflies, presumably, chewed into small, pale knots of string.
I glanced around. One of the butterflies remained perched delicately on the window. Another was resting on the side of the box of Christmas decoration, its wings lifting and lowering gently. They reminded me of Jake’s picture, along with the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen them in here. But that was a mystery I couldn’t solve for now.
What about you, Norman?
What were you looking for in here?
I scraped some dry leaves away with my foot to clear a space, then took the box of decorations down and began sifting through it.
It took half an hour to work my way through all the cardboard boxes, emptying each in turn and spreading the contents around. While I was kneeling down among it all, the stone floor of the garage felt cold, as though the knees of my jeans were gathering ovals of damp.
The garage door rattled behind me, and I turned around quickly, startled by the noise. But the driveway was sunlit and empty. Just the warm breeze, knocking the door against the can of paint.
I turned back to what’d found.
Which was nothing. The boxes all contained the kind of random debris you had no immediate use for but were still unwilling to throw away. There were the decorations, of course; ropes of tinsel were strewn around me now, their colors dulled and lifeless with age. There were magazines and newspapers, with nothing obvious to unite the dates and editions. Clothes that had been folded and stored away and smelled of mold. Dusty old extension cords. None of it looked to have been deliberately hidden so much as casually packed away and forgotten about.
I fought down the frustration. There were no answers here.
My investigation had disturbed several more of the butterflies, though. Five or six of them were crawling over the debris I’d unpacked, their antennae twitching, while another two were fluttering against the window. I watched as one on the tinsel lifted up into the air, then flickered past me, heading for the open do
or, before the stupid thing looped back in again and landed on the floor in front of me, on one of the bricks there.
I watched it for a moment, once again admiring the rich, distinctive colors on its wings. It crawled steadily across the surface of the bricks, and then disappeared down into a crack between them.
I stared at the floor.
A large section of the garage floor in front of me was made up of haphazardly arranged house bricks, and it took me a second to recognize what I must be looking at. An old mechanic’s pit, where someone could lie down underneath a car to work on it. It had been filled in with bricks to approximate a flat surface.
Tentatively, I lifted up the one the butterfly had been on. It came out of the floor covered in dust and old webbing, the butterfly clinging obstinately to one side.
In the hole the brick had left, I could see the top of what appeared to be another cardboard box below.
The garage door banged again behind me.
Jesus.
This time I stood up and walked back out onto the driveway to check. There was nobody in sight, but in the last few minutes the sun had disappeared behind a cloud and the world felt darker and colder. The breeze had picked up. Looking down, I saw that I was still holding the brick, and that my hand was trembling slightly.
Back in the garage, I put the brick to one side, and then began to remove more from the pit, gradually revealing the box hidden underneath. It was the same size as the others, but had been sealed across the top with parcel tape. I took out my keys and selected the one with the sharpest tip, my heart humming.
Is this what you were looking for, Norman?
I drew the point across the center of the tape, then dug my fingers in to pull the seams apart. They came away at each end with a crackling sound. Then I peered inside.
Immediately I sat back on my heels, either unable or unwilling to comprehend what I had seen. My thoughts went back to what Jake had said last night after he’d been talking to himself in the living room. I want to scare you. That was when I’d assumed the imaginary little girl had come back into our lives.