The Whisper Man

by Alex North

  I pulled up after the other vehicles. My father’s car drove past, then parked in front of me.

  Not my father, I reminded myself.

  DI Pete Willis.

  There was no need to acknowledge him as anything else, was there? And with the exception of the way he’d knelt down and looked at Jake, there was no sign he wanted to acknowledge it either. That was a situation I was more than happy to go along with.

  The shock had subsided a little now, but only in the way I imagined there might be a few beats of silence after an earthquake hit before the screaming started. I could still remember how it had felt at the police station, my father standing there, looking back at me, seeing me. My mind had immediately leaped back to the long-ago time when I’d last seen him, and I’d felt small and powerless. I had been transported. The fear and anxiety. The desire to diminish myself so that he might not notice me. But then the anger had come. He had no fucking right to talk to my son. And then the resentment. The fact that he got to be involved in my life—in a position of power over me, even—seemed so deeply unfair that I almost couldn’t bear it.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  “I’m fine, mate.”

  I was staring at the car in front of me. At the man in the driver’s seat.

  His name is DI Pete Willis, I reminded myself, and he means nothing to you.

  Nothing at all.

  Not if I didn’t let him.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He met us at the cordon, showed his identification to the officers there, and then led us into the house without saying anything. The resentment flowered again. I needed his permission to enter my own fucking home. It felt humiliating to follow him inside like a boy who had to do what he was told. And it was made worse by the fact that he seemed so indifferent to it all.

  He had a clipboard and pen.

  “I need to know what’s yours, and what was here when you moved in that you haven’t touched.”

  “Everything in the house is mine,” I said. “Mrs. Shearing cleared all the older stuff out to the garage.”

  “We’ll check with her, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  We went from room to room, gathering some basic things together. Toiletries. Clothes for Jake and me. A few toys from his room. It burned me so hard that I had to ask my father each time, but he just nodded and noted them down, and in the end I stopped asking. If he cared, he didn’t mention it. He barely looked at me at all, in fact. I wondered what he might be thinking or feeling. But then I fought that down, because it didn’t matter.

  We finished in my office downstairs.

  “I need my laptop—” I started to say, but Jake interrupted me.

  “Who did Daddy find in the garage? Was it Neil Spencer?”

  My father looked awkward.

  “No. Those remains were much older.”

  “Who are they of?”

  “Well … between you and me, I think they might be from another little boy. One who disappeared a long time ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Wow.” Jake paused to take in such an expanse of time.

  “Yes. And I hope they are, because I’ve been searching for him ever since.”

  Jake looked amazed by that, like it was some kind of accomplishment, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t want him interested in this man at all, never mind impressed by him.

  “I’d have given up by now.”

  My father smiled sadly.

  “It’s always been important to me. Everybody should get to go home, don’t you think?”

  “Can I take this, DI Willis?” I started unplugging my laptop, wanting to bring the conversation to an end. “I need it for work.”

  “Yes.” He turned away from both of us. “Of course you can.”

  * * *

  The “safe house” was just an apartment above a newsdealer’s at one end of Town Street. It didn’t look like much from the street, and it looked like even less when Willis took us inside.

  A staircase led up from the front door to a landing with four doors leading off it. There was a sitting room, bathroom, kitchen, and a room with two single beds, all of it minimally furnished. The only signs that it was used by the police, rather than simply rented out dirt cheap, were the security camera positioned subtly on the wall outside, the panic buttons within, and the proliferation of bolts on the inside of the front door.

  “I’m sorry, the two of you’ll have to share.”

  Willis walked into the bedroom carrying sheets and blankets that he’d gathered from an airing cupboard. I was unpacking our clothes and piling them on top of the old wooden dresser, having wiped away a sheen of dust first. The apartment clearly hadn’t been cleaned in a long time and the air was itchy with it.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “I know it’s small. We use it for witnesses sometimes, but it’s mostly women and children.” He seemed about to say something, but then shook his head. “They usually want to be in the same room.”

  “Domestic violence, I guess.”

  My father didn’t answer, but the atmosphere between us heated up a notch, and I knew the hit had landed. What was between us remained unspoken but was growing louder, in the way that silence sometimes can.

  “It’s fine,” I said again. “How long will we be here?”

  “Shouldn’t be more than a day or two. Maybe not even that. It’s potentially a big case, though. We need to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

  “You think the man you’ve arrested killed Neil Spencer?”

  “Possibly. Like I said, I think the remains we’ve found in your house are from a similar crime. There was always speculation that Frank Carter—the killer back then—had an accomplice of some kind. Norman Collins was never officially a suspect, but he was too interested in the case. I never thought he was directly involved, but…”

  “But?”

  “Maybe I got that wrong.”

  “Yeah, I guess maybe you did.”

  My father said nothing. The knowledge that I might have hurt him again brought a kind of thrill, but it was a small, disappointing one. He seemed so beaten down and uncomfortable. In his own way, perhaps he felt as powerless right now as I did.

  “Okay.”

  We moved back through to the sitting room, where Jake was kneeling down and drawing. There was a couch and a chair, a small table on wheels, and an old television balanced on a wooden chest of drawers with a mess of old cables behind it. The whole place felt cold and bleak. I tried not to think about what was happening in our house—our real home—right now. Whatever problems it had thrown up, it felt like paradise compared to this.

  But you’ll deal with it. And this will be over soon.

  And Pete Willis would be out of my life again.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Good to meet you, Jake.”

  “Good to meet you too, Pete,” Jake said, not looking up from his picture. “Thank you for this delightful apartment.”

  He hesitated. “You’re welcome.”

  Out on the landing, I closed the door to the sitting room. There was a window here, but it was early evening now and the light coming in was dim. Willis seemed reluctant to leave, and so we stood in the gloom for a moment, his face full of shadow.

  “You have everything you need?” he said finally.

  “I think so.”

  “Jake seems like a good kid.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  “He’s creative. Just like you.”

  I didn’t reply. The silence between us was tingling now. As much as it was possible to tell in this half-light, Willis looked as though he wished he hadn’t spoken. But then he explained himself.

  “I saw your books in the house.”

  “You didn’t know before?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’d have thought you might have been interested,”
I said. “Maybe looked me up or something.”

  “Did you look me up?”

  “No, but that’s different.”

  As soon as I said it, I hated myself for it, because it acknowledged that power balance again—the idea that it was his job to look for me, to be concerned about me, to care about me, rather than the other way around. I didn’t want him to imagine that was true. It wasn’t. He was nothing to me.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “I decided it would be best for me to keep out of your life. Your mother and I decided between us.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “I suppose so. It’s my way of putting it. And I’ve honored that. It’s not always been easy. I’ve often wondered. But it’s been for the best…”

  He trailed off, suddenly looking weaker than ever.

  Spare me the self-pity.

  But I didn’t say it. Whatever my father had done in the past, he’d obviously moved on since. He didn’t look or smell like an alcoholic now. He was in good shape. And despite the weariness, there was an air of calm to him. I reminded myself again that this man and I were strangers to each other. We weren’t father and son. We weren’t enemies.

  We were nothing.

  He was looking off toward the window, toward the day slowly dying outside.

  “Sally—your mother, I mean. What happened to her?”

  Glass smashing.

  My mother screaming.

  I thought of everything that had followed. The way she did her best for me in spite of all the difficulties she faced as a single mother. The pain and ignominy of her death. Like Rebecca, taken far too young, long before either she or I deserved such a loss.

  “She’s dead,” I told him.

  He was silent. For a moment he even seemed broken. But then he gathered himself.

  “When?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  The anger in my voice surprised me—but apparently not my father. He stood there, absorbing the force of the blow.

  “No,” he said quietly. “I suppose not.”

  And then he started walking down the stairs to the front door. I watched him go. When he was halfway down I spoke again, just loud enough for him to hear.

  “I remember that last night, you know. The night before you were gone. The last time you ever saw me. I remember how drunk you were. How red in the face you were. What you did. Throwing that glass at her. The way she screamed.”

  He stopped on the stairs and stood completely still.

  “I remember it all,” I said. “So how dare you ask about her now?”

  He didn’t reply.

  And then he continued silently down the stairs, leaving me with nothing but the sick and angry thud of my heartbeat.

  Thirty-five

  After leaving the safe house, Pete drove too fast along empty roads, heading straight home. The kitchen cabinet was calling to him, and he was going to surrender to it. Now that the decision was made, the urge was stronger than ever, and it felt like his whole life depended on getting there as quickly as possible.

  Back home, he locked the door and drew the curtains. The house around him was still and silent, and it seemed as empty with him standing in it as it must have been before his arrival. Because, after all, what did he add to it? He looked around at the spartan furnishings in the living room. It was the same throughout the house—every space just as ascetic and carefully organized. The truth was that he had lived in an empty house for years. The meager debris of a life barely lived, a real life avoided, was no less sad because it was tidy and clean.

  Empty. Pointless.

  Worthless.

  The voice was gleeful in its victory. He stood there, breathing slowly, aware of his heart pounding. But he’d been here many times before, and this was the way it always worked. When the compulsion to drink was at its strongest, everything bolstered it. Any event or observation, good or bad, could be turned around and made to fit.

  But it was all a lie.

  You’ve been here before.

  You can do this.

  The urge fell silent for a moment, but then began to howl inside his head, conscious of the trick he was attempting to pull. He’d let it drive him home on autopilot, allowed it to believe that he was giving in, but now he was taking the wheel again.

  The pain circled in his chest, swirling and unbearable.

  You’ve been here before.

  You can do this.

  The table. The bottle and the photograph.

  Tonight, he added a glass, and after a moment’s hesitation, he opened the bottle and poured two fingers of vodka. Because why not? Either he would drink or he wouldn’t. It wasn’t how far down the road he went; it was whether he arrived at the end.

  His phone buzzed. He picked it up to find a message from Amanda, filling him in on her interview with Norman Collins. They had Collins on the murder of Dominic Barnett, it seemed, but the situation with Neil Spencer was hazier, and Collins had decided to lawyer up.

  You think the man you’ve arrested killed Neil Spencer?

  Possibly, he’d told Tom—and it was clear that Collins was involved somehow. But if it wasn’t him who had abducted and murdered Neil, that meant the actual killer was still out there. Any relief he’d felt after arresting Collins evaporated entirely at that thought, just as surely as it had twenty years ago when he’d seen Miranda and Alan Smith in the department’s reception and realized the nightmare was far from over.

  It shouldn’t be his problem now. Tom was his son, albeit long estranged, and that conflict of interest meant he should talk to Amanda tomorrow and recuse himself from the investigation. He supposed it would bring relief of its own to be free from this pressure. And yet, having been dragged in this deep—having been forced to confront Carter again, and to look at Neil Spencer’s body on the waste ground last night—he wanted to see this through, however damaging it might be.

  He put the phone to one side, then stared at the glass, trying to analyze how he felt about seeing Tom again after so many years. The encounter should have shaken him to the core, he supposed, and yet he felt oddly calm. Over the years, he had grown numb to the fact of his fatherhood, as though it were something he had learned at school that no longer had any bearing on his life. Memories of Sally were on the right side of the pain threshold for him to bear, but his failure toward Tom had been absolute, and Pete had done his best never to think about that. It was better to have nothing to do with his son’s life, and whenever he had found himself imagining what kind of man Tom might have become, he had quickly shoved those thoughts away. They were too hot to touch.

  But now he knew.

  He had no right to think of himself as a father, but it was impossible not to evaluate the man he had met that afternoon. A writer. That made sense, of course. Tom had always been creative as a little boy—always making up stories Pete couldn’t follow, or playing out elaborate scenarios with his toys. Jake appeared to be a lot like Tom had been at that age: a sensitive and clever child. From the little Pete had learned, it was obvious Tom had suffered hardship and tragedy throughout his life, and yet he was capably raising Jake alone. There could be little doubt that his son had grown into a good man.

  Not worthless. Not useless or a failure.

  Which was good.

  Pete ran his fingertip around the edge of the glass. It was good that Tom had succeeded in overcoming the miserable childhood he had offered him. Good that he had absented himself from Tom’s life before he could poison it any more than he already had. Because it was clear that he had. Even after all this time, he was remembered. His impact had been terrible enough to leave a lasting impression.

  I remember the last time I saw you.

  Pete could still picture the look of hatred on his son’s face when he’d said that. He picked up the glass. Put it down again. That wasn’t quite right, though, was it? He deserved hatred—he was more than aware of that—but hatred had to be earned. Pete had been drinking almost
constantly by the time Sally and Tom left him, and his days and nights had been a blur, but he remembered that particular evening with absolute clarity. Tom’s description of what had happened was impossible.

  Did it matter?

  Perhaps not. If his son’s memory was not literally true, then, like Pete’s own feelings of failure, it presumably still felt true enough, and that was the kind of truth that mattered most in the end.

  He looked at the familiar photograph of him and Sally. It had been taken before Tom was conceived, but Pete thought you could see the knowledge of impending fatherhood in his expression if you wanted to. The squint against the sun. The half smile that looked like it would soon disappear. It was as though the man in the photo already knew he was about to fail badly and lose everything.

  Sally still looked so happy.

  He had lost her a long time ago, but had maintained the fantasy that she was alive somewhere, leading a contented, loving life. Keeping up the miserable belief that his own loss had been her and Tom’s gain. But now he knew the truth. There had been no gain. Sally was dead.

  It felt like everything was.

  Again, he picked up the glass, but this time he kept hold of it, watching the silky liquid fold over on itself. It looked so innocent until it did that—so much like water until you moved it and saw the mist hiding there.

  He’d been here before. He could survive this.

  But why bother?

  He looked around the room, weighing again the emptiness of his existence. There was nothing to him. He was a man made of air. A life with no heft. There was nothing good in his past that could be saved, and nothing in his future that was worth trying to.

  Except that wasn’t true, was it? Neil Spencer’s killer might still be out there. If the boy’s murder stemmed from some past failing of his, then it was his responsibility to put it right, whatever the personal repercussions might be. Whether he liked it or not, he was back in the nightmare now, and he thought that he needed to see it through to the end, even if it broke him. There was a conflict of interest, yes, but if he was careful, then perhaps nobody would ever know. He doubted Tom would ever want their distant history aired.