by Alex North
I realized I was gripping the plate too tightly.
“Your sandwich is ready.”
I put it down on the couch, not waiting to see if he stopped drawing or not. Instead, I went straight back through to the kitchen, leaned on the counter there, and closed my eyes. For some reason, my heart was pounding.
I miss you so much, I thought to Rebecca.
I wish you were here. For so many reasons, but right now because I don’t think I can do this.
I started to cry. It didn’t matter. Jake would either be drawing or eating his sandwich for a while, and he wasn’t going to come into the kitchen. Why would he, when there was only me here to see? So it was fine. My son could talk quietly to people who didn’t exist for a while. As long as I was equally quiet, so could I.
I miss you.
* * *
That night, as always, I carried Jake up to bed. It had been that way ever since Rebecca’s death. He refused to look at the place where he had seen her body, clinging to me instead, with his breath held and his face buried in my shoulder. Every morning; every night; every time he needed the bathroom. I understood why, but he was beginning to grow too heavy for me, in more ways than one.
Hopefully that would change soon.
After he was asleep, I went back downstairs and sat on the couch with a glass of wine and my iPad, loading up the details of our new house. Looking at the photograph on the website made me uneasy on a different level.
It was safe to say it was Jake who had chosen this house. I hadn’t been able to see the appeal at first. It was a small, detached property—old, two stories, with the ramshackle feel of a cottage. But there was something a little strange about it. The windows seemed oddly placed, so that it was hard to imagine the layout inside, and the angle of the roof was slightly off, so that the face of the building appeared to be tilted inquisitively, perhaps even angrily. But there was also a more general sensation—a tickling at the back of the skull. At first glance, the house had unnerved me.
And yet, from the moment Jake had seen it, he had been settled on it. Something about it had utterly entranced him, to the point that he refused to look at any others.
When he’d accompanied me to the first viewing, he had seemed almost hypnotized by the place. I had still not been convinced. The interior was a good size, but also grimy. There were dusty cabinets and chairs, bundles of old newspapers, cardboard boxes, a mattress in the spare room downstairs. The owner, an elderly woman called Mrs. Shearing, had been apologetic; this all belonged to a tenant she had been renting to, she explained, and would be gone by the time it was sold.
But Jake had been adamant, and so I’d organized a second viewing, this time by myself. That was when I had started to see the place with different eyes. Yes, it was odd-looking, but that gave it a sort of mongrel charm. And what had initially felt like an angry look now seemed more like wariness, as though the property had been hurt in the past and you’d have to work to earn its trust.
Character, I supposed.
Even so, the thought of moving terrified me. In fact, there had been a part of me that afternoon that had hoped the bank manager would see through the half-truths I’d told about my financial situation and just turn down the mortgage application outright. I was relieved now, though. When I looked around the living room at the dusty, discarded remnants of the life we’d once had, it was obvious that the two of us couldn’t continue as we were. Whatever difficulties lay ahead, we had to get out of this place. And however hard it was going to be for me over the coming months, my son needed this. We both did.
We had to make a fresh start. Someplace where he wouldn’t need to be carried up and down the stairs. Where he could find friends that existed outside his head. Where I didn’t see ghosts of my own in every corner.
Looking at the house again now on my screen, I thought that, in a strange way, it suited Jake and me. That, like us, it was an outsider that found it hard to fit in. That we would go together well. Even the name of the village was warm and comforting.
Featherbank.
It sounded like a place where we would be safe.
Six
Like Pete Willis, DI Amanda Beck knew very well the importance of the first forty-eight hours. She had her team spend the next twelve of them continuing to search the various routes that Neil Spencer might have taken, along with interviewing family members and beginning to build a profile of the missing boy. Photos were acquired. Histories were probed. And then at nine the next morning, a press conference was held and a description of Neil and his clothing was released to the media.
Neil’s parents sat mutely on either side of Amanda while she made the requisite appeals and encouraged witnesses to come forward. Cameras flashed intermittently across the three of them. Amanda did her best to ignore them, but she could sense Neil’s parents registering each one, flinching a little as though the photographers were jabbing at them.
“We encourage people to check any garages and sheds on their property,” she told the room.
It was all kept as calm and low-key as possible. Her main aim right now, besides locating Neil Spencer, was to assuage people’s fears, and while she could hardly claim outright that Neil had absolutely not been abducted, she could at least make it clear where the focus of the investigation rested for the moment.
“The most likely explanation is that Neil has had an accident of some kind,” she said. “While he has been missing for fifteen hours, we are holding out every hope of finding him, safe and well and soon.”
Inside herself, she was not so confident. One of her first actions back in the operations room afterward was to arrange for the handful of known sex offenders in the area to be brought in quietly, and then questioned more loudly.
Over the course of the day, the search area was expanded. Sections of the canal—an unlikely proposition—began to be dredged, and extensive door-to-door inquiries were carried out. CCTV footage was analyzed. She studied the latter herself; it showed the beginning of Neil’s journey, but lost him before he reached the waste ground and failed to pick him up again afterward. Somewhere between those two points, the little boy had vanished.
Exhausted, she tried to rub some life into her face.
Officers went over the waste ground again, this time in full daylight, and the exploration of the quarry continued.
There was still no sign of Neil Spencer.
The boy did make an appearance of sorts, though, and increasingly so as the day wore on: photographs were circulated on the news, particularly the one of Neil smiling shyly in a football jersey—one of the few pictures his parents had of him looking happy. Reports showed simple maps with key locations marked with red circles and possible routes dotted in yellow.
Video of the press conference was also aired. Amanda watched it on her tablet in bed at home that evening, and thought that Neil’s parents seemed even more beaten down on camera than it had felt at the time. They looked guilty. And if they weren’t feeling guilty yet, then they would soon; they would be made to. At the briefing that afternoon, she had cautioned her officers, many of whom were parents themselves, that while the circumstances around Neil Spencer’s disappearance might be controversial, his mother and father were to be treated with sensitivity. It went without saying that they were hardly model parents, but Amanda didn’t suspect them of any direct involvement. The father had some minor offenses on his record—drunk-and-disorderlies; fighting—but nothing that raised any warning flags. The mother’s record was clean. More to the point, they both appeared genuinely devastated by events. There hadn’t even been any recrimination between the two of them, as hard as that was to imagine. They both just wanted their boy home.
She slept poorly and was back at the department early. With over thirty-six hours behind her, only a bare handful of them spent resting, she sat in her office, thinking about the five categories of child disappearance, forced increasingly toward an uncomfortable conclusion. She did not believe that Neil had been abandone
d or disposed of by his parents. If he had suffered an accident on his route, then he would have been found by now. Abduction by a different family member seemed unlikely. And while it was not impossible he’d run away, she refused to believe that she’d been outwitted for this long by a six-year-old boy with no money or supplies.
She gazed at the photo of Neil Spencer on the wall, considering the nightmare scenario.
Nonfamily abduction.
The public at large might generally have thought of it as stranger abduction, but precision was important. Children in this category were rarely abducted by people who were completely unknown to them. More often, they were befriended—groomed by people on the periphery of their lives. So the focus of the investigation that day shifted, with the strands that had formed a more subtle part of the last day and a half now brought front and center. Friends of the family. Families of friends. An even closer look at known offenders. Internet activity in the home. Amanda loaded up the available CCTV footage again and began examining it from different mental angles, concentrating less on the prey now than on potential predators in the background.
Neil’s parents were interviewed again.
“Did your son express any concerns about unwanted attention from other adults?” Amanda said. “Did he mention being approached by anyone?”
“No.” Neil’s father looked affronted by the very idea of it. “I’d have fucking well done something about that, wouldn’t I? And for fuck’s sake, don’t you think I’d also have mentioned it before now?”
Amanda smiled politely.
“No,” Neil’s mother said.
But less firmly.
When Amanda pressed her, the woman said that actually she did recall something. It hadn’t occurred to her to report it at the time, or even when Neil went missing, because it had been so strange, so stupid—and anyway, she’d been half asleep at the time, so she hardly even remembered it.
Amanda smiled politely again, while also resisting the urge to rip the woman’s head off.
Ten minutes later she was in the upstairs office of her superior, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons. Whether from the tiredness or the nerves, she was having to stop her leg from jittering slightly. Lyons himself just looked pained. He had been closely involved in the investigation and understood as well as Amanda did the situation they were now likely to be facing. Even so, this recent development was not one he’d wanted to hear.
“This doesn’t go to the media,” Lyons said quietly.
“No, sir.”
“And the mother?” He looked at her suddenly, alarmed. “You’ve told her not to mention this in public? At all?”
“Yes, sir.”
Of fucking course, sir. Although Amanda doubted it had been necessary. The tone of some of the press was already judgmental and accusatory, and Neil’s parents had enough culpability to deal with already without deliberately copping to more.
“Good,” Lyons said. “Because Jesus Christ.”
“I know, sir.”
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathing deeply. “Do you know the case?”
Amanda shrugged. Everybody knew the case. That wasn’t the same thing as knowing it.
“Not everything,” she said.
Lyons opened his eyes and sat there staring at the ceiling.
“Then we’re going to need some help,” he said.
Amanda’s heart sank a little at that. For one thing, she’d worked herself to the brink these last two days, and she didn’t relish the thought of having to share any spoils of the case now. For another, there was also the specter that was being acknowledged here. Frank Carter. The Whisper Man. Assuaging fear among the public was going to get harder now. Impossible, even, if this new detail got out.
They would have to be very careful indeed.
“Yes, sir.”
Lyons picked up the phone on his desk.
Which was how, as the time of Neil Spencer’s disappearance ticked close to the end of that crucial forty-eight-hour period, DI Pete Willis became involved in the investigation again.
Seven
Not that he wanted to.
Pete’s philosophy was a relatively simple one, ingrained in him over so many years that it was now more implicit than consciously considered: a blueprint on which his life was built. The devil finds work for idle hands.
Bad thoughts find empty heads.
So he kept his hands busy and his mind occupied. Discipline and structure were important to him, and after the nonresult at the waste ground he had spent most of the last forty-odd hours doing exactly what he always did.
Early that morning had found him in the gym in the basement of the department: overhead presses; side laterals; rear deltoids. He worked on a different body part each day. It wasn’t a matter of vanity or health, more that he found the solitude and concentration involved in physical exercise a comforting distraction. After three-quarters of an hour, he was often surprised to discover his mind had been mercifully empty for most of it.
That morning, he had managed not to think about Neil Spencer at all.
He had then spent most of the day upstairs in his office, where the multitude of minor cases piled on his desk provided ample distraction. As a younger, more impetuous man, he would probably have yearned for greater excitement than the trivial crimes he was dealing with, but today he appreciated the calm to be found in boring minutiae. Excitement was not only rare in police work, it was a bad thing; usually it meant someone’s life had been damaged. Wishing for excitement was wishing for hurt, and Pete had had more than enough of both. There was comfort to be had in the car thefts, the shoplifting, the court appearances for endless banal offenses. They spoke of a city ticking quietly along, never quite perfect, perhaps, but never falling apart either.
But while he’d had no direct involvement with the Neil Spencer investigation, it was impossible to avoid it entirely. A small boy, when missing, cast a large shadow, and it had become the most prominent case in the department. He heard officers talking about it in the corridors: where Neil might be; what might have happened to him; and the parents, of course. The latter was quieter speculation, and had been officially discouraged, but he kept hearing it anyway—the irresponsibility of letting a little boy walk home alone. He remembered similar talk from twenty years ago and walked on quickly, no more disposed to entertain it now than he had been back then.
Just before five o’clock that evening, he was sitting quietly at his desk, already considering what he would do that evening. He lived alone and socialized rarely, so his habit was to work his way through cookbooks, often making elaborate meals before eating them alone at the dinner table. Afterward, he would watch a film or read a book.
And the ritual, of course.
The bottle and the photograph.
And yet, as he gathered his things together, almost ready to leave, he realized his pulse was racing. Last night, the nightmare had returned for the first time in months: Jane Carter whispering, You have to hurry, down the phone to him. Despite himself, it had been impossible to escape from Neil Spencer completely, which meant the darker thoughts and memories were a little closer to the surface than he preferred to keep them. And so, as he pulled his jacket on, he was not entirely surprised when the phone on his desk began ringing. There was no way of knowing for sure, and yet somehow he already did.
His hand trembled a little as he picked it up.
“Pete,” DCI Colin Lyons said down the line. “Glad to catch you. I was hoping I could have a quick word upstairs.”
* * *
His suspicions were confirmed as soon as he entered Lyons’s office. The DCI had revealed nothing in the call, but DI Amanda Beck was there too, sitting with her back to him on the side of the desk nearest the door. There was only one investigation she was working on right now, which meant there was only one reason his presence could have been requested.
He tried to keep calm as he closed the door. Tried—especially—no
t to think about the scene that had awaited him twenty years ago when he had finally gained access to the extension Frank Carter had built on his house.
Lyons smiled broadly. The DCI had a smile that could power a room.
“Good of you to come up. Have a seat.”
“Thanks.” Pete sat down beside Beck. “Amanda.”
Beck nodded a greeting, and gave him the flicker of a smile—an exceedingly low-wattage equivalent of Lyons’s that barely even powered her face. Pete didn’t know her well. She was twenty years younger than him, but right now looked much older than her years. Blatantly exhausted—and nervous too, he thought. Maybe she was worried her authority was being undermined and that the case was about to be taken away from her; he’d heard she was ambitious. He could have set her mind at rest on that score. While Lyons was probably ruthless enough to remove her from the investigation if it suited him, he was never going to pass it on to Pete instead.
They were relative contemporaries, he and Lyons, but despite the disparity in their ranks Pete had actually joined the department a year earlier, and in many ways his career had been the more decorated. In a different world, the two of them would have been sitting on opposite sides of the desk right now, and perhaps even should have been. But Lyons had always been ambitious, whereas Pete, aware that promotion brought conflict and drama of its own, had little desire to climb the professional ladder any further than he already had. That had always rankled with Lyons, Pete knew. When you go after something as hard as he had, there were few things as irritating as someone who could have had it more easily but never seemed to want it.
“You’re aware of the investigation into the disappearance of Neil Spencer?” Lyons said.
“Yes. I was involved in the search of the waste ground on the first evening.”
Lyons stared at him for a moment, perhaps evaluating that as a criticism.
“I live close to there,” Pete added.
But then, Lyons lived in the area as well, and he hadn’t been out there trawling the streets that night. A second later, though, the DCI nodded to himself. He knew that Pete had his own reasons to be interested in missing children.