The Whisper Man

by Alex North

  “You’re aware of developments since?”

  I’m aware of the lack of them. But that would come across as a rebuke to Beck, and she didn’t deserve that. From the little he’d seen, she’d handled the investigation well and done everything she could. More to the point, she’d been the one to direct her officers not to criticize the parents, and he liked that.

  “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.

  It was a lovely day, though. And my nerves aside, it was impossible to deny that Featherbank was beautiful in the late summer sun. It was a suburb, and while it was only five miles away from a heaving city center, it felt more like the countryside here. Down by the river, on the southern edge of the village, there were cobbled roads and cottages. Farther north, away from a single row of shops, ther
e were steep streets of pretty sandstone houses, and most of the pavements were lined with trees, the leaves thick and green overhead. With the window rolled down, the air outside smelled of cut grass, and I could hear music and children playing. It felt peaceful and tranquil here—as slow and warm as a lazy morning.

  We reached our new street, which was a quiet residential road with a large field on one side. There were more trees around the edges, the sun cutting through the leaves and dappling the grass with light, and I tried to imagine Jake out there, running around just across from our house, his own T-shirt bright in the sun. Still as happy as he was now.

  Our house.

  We were here.

  I pulled into the driveway. The house still looked the same, of course, but the building seemed to have different ways of staring out at the world. The first time I’d seen it, it had seemed forbidding and frightening—almost dangerous—and then the second, I’d thought it had character. Now, just for a moment, the odd arrangement of windows reminded me of a beaten face, with an eye pushed up over a badly bruised cheek, the skull injured and lopsided. I shook my head and the image disappeared. But an ominous feeling remained.

  “Come on, then,” I said quietly.

  Outside the car, the day was still and quiet. With no breeze to move the warm air, we were in a capsule of silence. But the world was humming softly as we approached the house, and it felt to me as though the windows were watching us, or perhaps something just out of sight behind the glass. I turned the key in the lock and opened the door, and stale air wafted out. For a second it smelled as though the house had been sealed for far longer than it had been, perhaps even with something left rotting inside, but then all I could detect was the bleachy scent of cleaning products.

  Jake and I walked through the house, opening doors and cupboards, turning lights on and off, drawing and closing curtains. Our footsteps echoed; otherwise, the silence was absolute now. But as we worked our way through each room, I couldn’t shake the sensation that we were not alone. That someone else was here, hiding just out of sight, and that if I turned at the right moment I’d see a face peering around a doorframe. It was a stupid, irrational feeling, but it was there. And it wasn’t helped by Jake. He was excited, moving quickly from room to room, but every now and then I’d catch a slightly puzzled look on his face, as though he had been expecting to find something that wasn’t here.

  “Is this my room, Daddy?”

  What was going to be his bedroom was on the second floor, raised up from the landing outside, so that his window was smaller than the rest: the eye staring out across the field from above the swollen cheek.

  “Yes.” I ruffled his hair. “Do you like it?”

  He didn’t reply, and I stared down at him nervously. He was gazing around, lost in thought.

  “Jake?” I said.

  He looked up at me.

  “Is this really ours?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  And then he hugged my legs—so suddenly that it almost knocked me off balance. It was as though I’d shown him the best present he’d ever seen and he’d been worried he might not be able to keep it. I crouched down so we could embrace more properly. The relief I felt was palpable, and suddenly that was all that mattered. My son was happy to be here, and I’d done something good for him, and nothing else was important. I stared over his shoulder at the open door and the landing beyond. If it still felt like something was just around the corner there, I knew it was just my imagination.

  We were going to be safe here.

  We were going to be happy.

  And for the first week, we were.

  * * *

  At the time, I stood looking at a newly assembled bookcase, marveling at my industry. DIY had never been a strong point of mine, but I knew this was something Rebecca would have wanted me to do, and I imagined her pressed up behind me now, with the side of her face against my back and her arms around my chest. Smiling to herself. You see? You can do this. And while it was only a small taste of success, even that was an unusual feeling recently, and I liked it.

  Except, of course, I was still alone.

  I began filling the shelves.

  Because that was another of the things Rebecca would have done, and even though this new house was about Jake and me moving on, I still wanted to honor that. You always put out the books, she told me once. That’s when it starts to feel like home. She had never been happier than when reading. There had been so many warm, contented evenings, with the two of us curled up at different ends of the couch, me writing as best I could on my laptop, her lost in novel after novel. Over the years we had accumulated hundreds of books, and I set to work unpacking them now, sliding each one carefully into place.

  And then it came to my own. The shelves beside my computer desk were reserved for copies of my four novels, along with the various foreign translations. It felt ostentatious to have them on display, but Rebecca had been proud of me and had always insisted on it. So this was another gesture to her—as was the empty space I left on the shelves, ready for the ones that hadn’t been written yet, but would be.

  I glanced warily at the computer. Beyond turning it on to check that the new Wi-Fi worked, I hadn’t really done a thing with it this last week. I hadn’t written anything for a year. That was something that was going to change. New start, new—

  Creak.

  A noise from above me, the sound of a single footstep. I looked up. It was Jake’s room that was directly overhead, but I’d left him in the living room playing while I did the building and unpacking.

  I moved to the doorway and looked up the stairs. There was nobody on the landing. In fact, the whole house suddenly felt still and quiet, as though now that I was still, there was no movement at all. The silence rang in my ears.

  “Jake?” I shouted upstairs.

  Silence.

  “Jake?”

  “Daddy?”

  I almost jumped. His voice had come from the living room, directly beside me. Keeping one eye on the landing, I leaned in. My son was crouched on the floor with his back to me, drawing something.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I was just checking.”

  I leaned back out, then stared up at the landing again for a few seconds. It was still quiet up there, but the space had a strange sense of potential to it now, once again as though there were somebody standing just out of sight. Which was ridiculous, of course, because nobody could have come in through the front door without me knowing. Houses creaked. It took a while to get used to them, that was all.

  But even so.

  I walked upstairs slowly and cautiously, stepping quietly, with my left hand raised, ready to deflect anything that leaped out at me from that side. I reached the top—and of course the landing was empty. When I stepped into Jake’s room, that was empty too. A wedge of afternoon sunlight was coming through the window, and I could see tiny curls of dust hanging in the air, undisturbed.

  Just the house creaking.

  I went downstairs more confidently, feeling silly but also more relieved than I’d have liked to admit. At the bottom, I had to edge past the piles of mail on the last two steps. There had been a lot so far: the usual documents that inevitably come with moving into a new house, along with innumerable local take-out menus and other junk mail. But there had also been three proper letters, addressed to someone called Dominic Barnett. All three were marked either Private or Addressee Only.

  I remembered that the previous owner, Mrs. Shearing, had rented the house out for years, and on a whim I ripped one of the letters open now. Inside, I found an itemized account from a debt collection company. My heart sank. Whoever Dominic Barnett was, he owed the company on an old cell phone contract. I opened the others, and they were the same: notices for unpaid money. I scanned the details, frowning to myself. The amounts weren’t large, but the tone of the letters was threatening. I told myself it wasn’t an insurmountable problem an
d that a few phone calls would sort it out, but this move was meant to be a new start for Jake and me, not to deliver a fresh set of obstacles for me to overcome.

  “Daddy?”

  Jake had appeared in the living room doorway beside me. He was holding his Packet of Special Things in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

  “Is it all right if I play upstairs?”

  I thought of the creak I’d heard, and for a second I wanted to say no. But again, that was absurd. There was nobody up there, and it was his bedroom; he had every right to play in it. At the same time, we hadn’t seen much of each other that day, and it felt isolating for him to disappear upstairs now.

  “I guess,” I said. “Can I see your drawing first?”

  He hesitated. “Why?”

  “Because I’m interested. Because I’d like to.”

  Because I’m trying here, Jake.

  “It’s private.”

  Which was fair enough, and a part of me wanted to respect that, but I didn’t like the idea of him keeping secrets from me. The Packet was one thing, but it felt like if he wouldn’t even show me his drawings now, then the distance between us must be increasing.

  “Jake—” I started to say.

  “Oh, fine.”

  He thrust the sheet out at me. Now that it was being offered, I was reluctant to take it.

  But I did.

  Jake had never been good at drawing straightforward, realistic scenes before, preferring his convoluted, unfolding battles instead, but he’d attempted one here. The picture was rough, but it was obviously an approximation of our house from the outside, reminiscent of the original photograph that had caught his attention online. He had captured the odd look of the place well. The curved, childlike lines stretched the house into a strange shape, elongating the windows, and making it look more like a face than ever. The front door appeared to be moaning.

  But it was the upstairs that drew my attention. In the right-hand window he’d drawn me, standing by myself in my bedroom. On the left, there he was in his own room, the window large enough here to include his whole body: a smile on his face, the jeans and T-shirt he was wearing right now shaded with crayon.