The Whisper Man (ARC)

by Alex North

  The field to the right was thick with the evening gloom. There seemed to be nobody out there right now, but it was already too dark to see to the far side. I started to walk even more quickly, aware that I was probably coming across as an absolute lunatic to Karen. But I was beginning to panic now, however irrational it was, and that mattered more.

  Jake . . .

  I reached the driveway.

  The front door was open, a block of light slanted out across the path.

  If you leave a door half open . . .

  And then I really did start running.

  “Tom—”

  I reached the door, but then stopped at the threshold. There were smears of bloody footprints all over the wood at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Jake?” I shouted inside.

  The house was silent. I stepped carefully inside, my heart pounding fast and hard in my ears.

  Karen had reached me now.

  “What—oh, God.”

  I looked to my right, into the living room, and the sight that awaited me there made no sense whatsoever. My father was lying on his side with his back to me, curled up on the floor by the window, almost as though he’d gone to sleep there. But he was surrounded by blood. I shook my head. There was blood all over the side of his body. Farther up, it was pooling around his head. He was completely still. And for a moment, unable to process what I was seeing, so was I.

  Beside me, Karen took a sharp, shocked intake of breath. I turned slightly and saw that she’d gone pale. Her eyes were wide and she was holding her hand over her mouth.

  Jake, I thought.

  “Tom—”

  But I didn’t hear anything after that, because the thought of my son had brought me back to life, galvanizing me into action. I moved past her, around her, then headed straight up the stairs as quickly as I could. Praying. Thinking, Please.

  “Jake!”

  There was blood on the upstairs landing too: pressed into the carpet by the shoes of whoever had committed the atrocity downstairs. Someone had attacked my father, and then they’d come up here, up here to . . .

  My son’s room.

  I stepped in. The bedsheet had been folded neatly back. Jake was not here. Nobody was here. I stood for a few seconds frozen in place, dread itching at my skin.

  Downstairs, Karen was on her phone, talking frantically. Ambulance. Police. Urgent. A jumble of words that made no sense to me right then. It felt like my mind was going to shut down—as though my skull had suddenly opened up and was exposed to a vast, incomprehensible kaleidoscope of horror.

  I walked across to the bed.

  Jake was gone, but that wasn’t possible, because Jake couldn’t be gone.

  This wasn’t happening.

  The Packet of Special Things was lying on the floor by the bed. It was when I picked that up, knowing that he would never have gone anywhere willingly without it, that reality hit me full force. The Packet was here and Jake wasn’t. This wasn’t a nightmare. It was actually happening.

  My son was gone.

  That was when I tried to scream.

  Part Five

  Fifty-three

  The first forty-eight hours after a child disappears are the most crucial.

  When Neil Spencer disappeared, the first two hours of that period had been wasted, because nobody had realized he was gone. With Jake Kennedy, the investigation began within minutes of his father and his friend arriving home. At that point, Amanda had been with Dyson in a police department fifty miles away. They had driven back as quickly as possible.

  Outside Tom Kennedy’s house now, she checked her watch. Just after ten o’clock at night. All the machinery that rolled out when a child went missing was already in motion. The odd-looking house beside her was brightly lit and busy with activity, shadows moving across the curtains, while up and down the street officers were standing at porches, interviewing neighbors. Flashlights moved over the field across the road. Statements were being taken; CCTV was being gathered; people were out searching.

  Under different circumstances, Pete himself would have been out with the search teams. But not tonight, of course. Trying to keep calm, Amanda took out her phone and called the hospital for an update, then listened as dispassionately as she could to the news. Pete remained unconscious and in critical condition. Christ. She remembered how formidable he had been for a man his age, but it appeared to have counted for little this evening. Perhaps he hadn’t been concentrating, for some reason, and had been taken unawares; he had received few defensive wounds, but had been stabbed several times in the side, neck, and head. The attack had been unnecessarily frenzied—clearly attempted murder, and the hours ahead would reveal whether that attempt had been successful. She was told that it was touch-and-go as to whether he would survive the night. She could only hope that his fitness would serve him now where it had failed him before.

  You can do it, Pete, she thought.

  He would pull through. He had to.

  She put the phone down and then quickly checked the online case file for updates. No developments as yet. Officers had already taken statements from Tom Kennedy and the woman he had been out with, Karen Shaw. Amanda recognized the name; Shaw was a local crime reporter. According to their accounts, they’d simply met up for a drink as friends. Their children were in the same year at school, so maybe that was all it was, but Amanda hoped for everyone’s sake that Shaw was more trustworthy than most in her profession. Especially now.

  Because she still didn’t know why Pete had been here.

  She remembered how alive he’d seemed this afternoon, reading the message he’d received and then making his arrangements. At the time, she’d suspected a date of some kind. In reality, it must have been this—and whatever this turned out to be, the fact remained that Pete was involved in the case and shouldn’t have been here off duty. It was a breach of professionalism.

  And what bothered her more was the knowledge that she’d effectively pushed him into it. She’d wanted him to be happy. If she hadn’t pressed him, he would still be alive.

  He is still alive.

  She had to cling to that. More than anything else, she needed to be professional and focused right now. She couldn’t afford to let her emotions out. Guilt. Fear. Anger. Once loose, any one of them would charge off, dragging the others along like dogs chained in a pack. And that was no good at all.

  Pete was still alive.

  Jake Kennedy was still alive.

  She was not going to lose either of them. But there was only one that she could do anything about right now, and so finally she shut down the case file and got out of the car.

  Inside the house, she stepped gingerly over the dance of dried of blood at the bottom of the stairs, then walked cautiously into the living room, preparing herself for the sight she knew awaited her.

  Several CSIs were at work in here, measuring, analyzing, and taking photographs, but she tuned them out, focusing instead on the overturned coffee table and, inevitably, the blood smeared and pooled on the floor. There was enough of it that she could smell it in the air. Her career had brought her face-to-face her with worse than this, but knowing it had been Pete attacked in here meant what she was seeing now was impossible to accept.

  She watched the CSIs for a moment. The forensic work was so somber, so thorough, that it felt like the room was already being treated as a murder scene. As though everybody in here knew a truth that she had yet to catch up with.

  She went through to the spare room. The walls were lined with bookcases, with several boxes on the floor still to be unpacked. Tom Kennedy was pacing back and forth between them, following an elaborate path, the same way an animal might wear away the ground in an enclosure. Karen Shaw was sitting in a chair by a computer table, holding one elbow, her other hand at her mouth, staring at the floor.

  Tom noticed Amanda and came to a stop. She recognized the expression on his face. People dealt with situations like this in different ways—some almost supernaturally calm, othe
rs distracting themselves with motion and activity—but in every case, the behavior was about displacement. Right now Tom Kennedy was panicking and struggling to contain it. If he couldn’t move in the direction of his son, then he needed to be moving somewhere. After he stopped walking, his body began to tremble.

  “Tom,” she told him, “I know this is difficult. I know this is terrifying for you. But I need you to listen to me and I need you to believe me. We are going to find Jake. I promise you.”

  He stared back at her. It was obvious that he didn’t believe her, and perhaps it wasn’t a promise she could keep. But she meant it all the same. The determination was burning inside her. She wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t rest, until she’d found Jake and caught the man who had taken him. Who had taken Neil Spencer before him. Who had hurt Pete so badly.

  I am not losing another child on my watch.

  “We believe we know who’s taken him, and we’re going to find him. Like I said, I give you my word. Every available officer is focused on hunting this man down and finding your son. We are going to bring him home safe.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I can’t tell you that right now.”

  “My son is alone with him.”

  She could tell from his face that right now he was picturing every terrible possibility—that a reel of the worst imaginable horrors was unfolding in his head.

  “I know it’s hard, Tom,” she said. “But I also want you to remember that, assuming this is the same man who took Neil Spencer, Neil was well cared for at first.”

  “And then murdered.”

  She had no answer to that. Instead, she thought about the abandoned apartment she had visited a few hours earlier, and the way Francis Carter had re-created the decorations in his father’s extension. He must have seen the horrors in there as a child, and it seemed that he had never truly escaped that room—that a part of him had remained trapped there, unable to move on. Yes, he had looked after Neil Spencer for a time. But then some darker impulse had emerged, and there was no reason to think he would contain it any better with Jake than he had with Neil. The opposite, in fact—once the dam was broken, killers like this had a tendency to accelerate.

  But she was not prepared to entertain that idea right now.

  Tom, of course, had no such luxury.

  “Why Jake?”

  “We don’t know for certain.” The desperation in his question was also familiar to her. Faced with tragedy and horror, it was natural to search for explanations: reasons why the tragedy could not have been prevented, to help ease the pain; or ways in which the horror could have been avoided, serving only to stoke the guilt. “We believe the suspect may have had an interest in this house, the same way that Norman Collins did. It’s likely he discovered your son was living here, and probably decided upon him as a target as a result of that.”

  “Fixated on him, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  A few beats of silence.

  “How is he?” Tom said.

  Amanda thought he must still be talking about Jake, but then she realized he was staring past her toward the living room, and understood he was asking after Pete.

  “He’s in intensive care,” she said. “That’s the last I’ve heard. His condition is critical, but . . . well. Pete’s a fighter. If anyone can make it through, then it’s him.”

  Tom nodded to himself, as though that resonated with him on some level. Which didn’t make sense, because he had barely known Pete at all. Once again she remembered how pleased Pete had been that afternoon. How suddenly alive he had seemed.

  “Why was he here?” she said. “He shouldn’t have been.”

  “He was babysitting Jake.”

  “Why Pete, though?”

  Tom fell silent. She watched him. It was clear that he was considering what to tell her, choosing his words carefully. And suddenly she realized she had seen this expression before too. The tilt of Tom Kennedy’s head. The angle of his jawline. The serious expression. Standing in front of her now, his hollow face illuminated by the light above, Tom Kennedy looked almost exactly like Pete.

  Christ, she thought.

  But then he shook his head and moved slightly, and the resemblance disappeared.

  “He left me his card. He said, if we needed anything, to get in touch. And he and Jake . . . well. Jake liked him. They liked each other.”

  The explanation stumbled to an end, and Amanda continued to stare at him. Although she could no longer see the similarity outright, she hadn’t imagined it. She could press that point, but she decided that it wasn’t important—not right now. If she was correct, then the repercussions of that could be dealt with later. Right now, in fact, she needed to be back at the department, making good on the promise she’d made as best she could.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s going to happen next is that I’m going to leave here, and I’m going to find your son and bring him home.”

  “What do I do?”

  Amanda glanced back toward the living room. It went without saying that Tom couldn’t stay here overnight.

  “You don’t have family in the area, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You can come to my place,” Karen said. “It’s not a problem.”

  She hadn’t spoken until now. Amanda looked at her.

  “Are you sure about that?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Amanda could tell from Karen’s expression that she understood the severity of the situation. Tom was silent for a moment, considering the offer. Despite Amanda’s reservations about the journalist, she hoped to God he said yes. She could do without the headache of finding him somewhere else to be right now. And it was obvious that he wanted to say yes—that he was a man on the verge of collapse—and so Amanda decided to give him a push.

  “Okay, then.” She held out her card. “Those are my details. Direct line. I’ll get family liaison out to you first thing in the morning anyway, but for now, if you need anything, you call me. I’ve got your number too. Any developments at all, and that includes about Pete, and you’ll hear from me the same minute.”

  She hesitated, then lowered her voice slightly.

  “The same fucking minute, Tom. I promise you.”

  Fifty-four

  The day was dead and the night was cool.

  The man stood in his driveway, warming his hands on a mug of coffee. The front door of his house was open behind him, the inside dark and silent. The world was so quiet that he imagined he could hear the steam rising from the cup.

  He had made his home on an out-of-the-way street in an undesirable area, a few miles from Featherbank itself. It was partly for financial reasons, but mainly for privacy. One of the neighboring houses was vacant, while the occupants of the other kept to themselves, even when they weren’t drinking. The hedges on either side of his small driveway were overgrown, shielding his comings and goings from view, and there was never anything in the way of traffic. This wasn’t a street you came to, nor was it anywhere you would pass through on your way to somewhere else. It was, put simply, a place you avoided.

  Francis liked to think that his presence here had contributed to that. That if you did find yourself driving past for some reason, you would understand on some primal level that it was not a location in which to linger.

  Much like Jake Kennedy’s former home, of course.

  The scary house.

  The man remembered that monstrosity from his own childhood. It appeared to have been common knowledge among the other children that the place was dangerous, although none of them had known why. Some said it was haunted; others claimed that a former murderer lived there. All without reason, of course—it was solely down to how it looked. If they hadn’t treated Francis the same way, he would have been able to tell them the real reason the house was frightening. But there had been nobody for him to tell.

  It felt like a long time ago. He wondered if the police had found the remnants of his old life yet. Even if so, it didn’t
matter; he’d left little behind but dust. He remembered how easy it had been—how simple it was, on one level, to become someone else if you wanted. It had cost less than a grand to acquire a new identity from a man sixty miles south of here. Ever since, he had been building a shell around himself to enable him to begin his transformation, the same way a caterpillar emerges from its own cocoon, vibrant and powerful and unrecognizable.

  And yet traces of the frightened, hateful boy he had once been remained. Francis had not been his name in years, but it was still how he thought of himself. He could remember his father making him watch the things he did to those boys. From the look on his father’s face, Francis had understood only too well that the man had hated him, and that he would have done the same to Francis if he could. The boys he killed had only ever been stand-ins for the child he despised most of all. Francis had always been well aware of how worthless and disgusting he was.

  He couldn’t save the boys he’d seen murdered all those years ago, just as he couldn’t help or comfort the child he had once been. But he could make amends. Because there were so many children like him in the world, and it wasn’t too late to rescue and protect them.

  He and Jake would be good for each other.

  Francis sipped his coffee, then stared up at the night sky and its meaningless patterns of constellations. His thoughts drifted to the violence back at the house. His skin was still singing with the thrill of that, and he knew it was a sensation his mind should avoid. Because even though he had known in advance the evening would involve a physical confrontation, it had been surprising how natural it had been when it happened. He had killed once, and it had been easy to kill again. It was as though what he’d been forced to do to Neil had turned a key inside him, unlocking desires he’d only been dimly aware of beforehand.

  It had felt good, hadn’t it?