The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

  ‘What are you dreaming?’ I asked softly.

  And then I sat in the chair beside the bed for a time, rubbing my hands together slowly. The window was open, and I could smell the trees and the cut grass out there, and hear a slight rush of breeze.

  But although my body was there in the hospice, my mind kept returning to the attic and what I’d found there. And while I waited for my mother to wake up, I took out my phone and began searching online.

  There were thousands of hits. It would have taken me hours to read it all, but I clicked on to a large forum devoted to the murder in Gritten, and then scanned through the hundreds of posts there. The amount of information surprised me; every aspect of the case was being discussed in detail. But what I found most fascinating were the threads devoted to Charlie’s disappearance. The speculation there went on and on.

  It seemed so pointless. If the police couldn’t find Charlie a quarter of a century ago, what were a bunch of online amateurs going to achieve now? Regardless, they all had their own pet theory about how he had pulled off his vanishing act. Some thought his remains were out there in the depths of Gritten Wood, still waiting to be discovered. Others, that an accomplice had helped to spirit him away, and that he was still alive somewhere.

  The thought of that made me shiver.

  But even worse were the posts from people who appeared to believe the impossible. Charlie had thought a sacrifice would allow him to vanish into the dream world for ever, and there were people online who genuinely believed he had managed it.

  Which was ridiculous, of course. But at the same time, I remembered all too well the appeal that lucid dreams had had for me as a teenager – and how, even though I hadn’t bought into the outer reaches of Charlie’s bullshit, that central idea of escape had still pulled at me. If I hadn’t believed him, perhaps a part of me had wanted to. So yes, it was ridiculous. But I had seen it happen myself, hadn’t I? I’d watched a belief take hold, and then the awful repercussions of that conviction unfolding slowly and inexorably in real time.

  The killers of Andrew Brook and Ben Halsall had believed.

  It sickened me. What Charlie and Billy did that day had become a story, one that had grown and twisted over the years, and now at least two other teenagers were dead because of him. It might have been absurd to believe Charlie had disappeared into a fantasy world, but in some ways he had achieved his wish. The murder had leaked out into the lives of so many others, and Charlie lived on in their dreams and nightmares, just as he’d wanted.

  And because I had played my own role in what happened, it was impossible to shake off the feeling that I was partly responsible for the murders that had followed in its wake. That, whether I had known about them or not, in some way they were my fault.

  After a time, my mother began stirring in her sleep. Her breathing changed and, while it was probably my imagination, the soft beep of her heart monitor beside me seemed a little louder.

  She opened her eyes.

  I waited as she stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. She turned her head and looked at me blankly. And then she looked as sad as I’d ever seen her. It was as though she wanted to reach out to someone – to touch them – but a window was keeping the two of them apart.

  ‘You can do so much better, you know,’ she said.

  I remembered the photographs I’d seen back at the house. My mother as a young woman, full of hopes and dreams, laughing with such joy that it looked as though the whole world delighted her. The contrast right now was stark.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Paul.’

  She stared at me. I was worried she might react the way she had on my first visit, but instead, after a moment, her expression changed, the sadness softening into something slightly happier, yet still tinged with melancholy and loss.

  ‘You look so grown up,’ she said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Or at least you think you are. Everybody does at your age. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying about you. My son, going out by himself into the big, wide world.’

  I swallowed.

  She wasn’t here with me right now, but I knew where her mind was and what it was seeing. I didn’t need to close my eyes to picture that final day at the railway station as we waited for the train together. Me heading off to university, with my bags resting on the platform beside me. I remembered what she had said to me.

  It will be Christmas before you know it.

  My mother smiled sadly now.

  ‘And I know you’re not coming back,’ she said.

  For a few seconds, I said nothing. Just as I had at the time.

  Then I leaned forward.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to be.’

  ‘Are you sad about it?’

  She shook her head gently, then looked up at the ceiling and smiled again, this time more to herself.

  ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she said. ‘But I’m happy for you. I want you to go out and do great things. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. For you to get away from this place, and everything that happened here. I want to throw you as far as possible, so you can grow big and strong somewhere better. So you can have a good life. I don’t care if you ever think about me at all. I’ll think about you instead.’

  I didn’t reply. I hadn’t known what was going through my mother’s head that day, and I had never had a child of my own to help me understand the notion of unconditional sacrifice she was describing.

  That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  For you to get away from this place, and everything that happened here.

  All these years, she had known about the copycat murders. She had kept newspapers detailing crimes connected to me, and which I had been blissfully unaware of. She had let me have my escape, and then carried a weight in my absence that should have been mine.

  She had protected me.

  ‘I went up into the attic, Mum,’ I said.

  Her smile flickered at that. It was as though my words had interfered with her reception, interrupting the clarity of the signal she was receiving, like a burst of unpleasant static across the screen of her memories. I regretted it immediately. If she had done that for me over the years, surely it was my turn to shoulder the burden now. What mattered most was that her final days and hours were peaceful.

  ‘What was that?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing, Mum.’

  She breathed slowly. The seconds passed.

  Then she frowned slightly.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  More silence. Just that quiet breathing.

  ‘I just can’t remember what it is,’ she said.

  I waited. I had no idea what time or place my mother was speaking from right now, as my own words had clearly disrupted her. Was she still at the railway station that day with me? Or were these thoughts coming from somewhere else entirely?

  But there was no answer to that question. Whatever my mother had been dreaming about before, she returned to it now.

  12

  Are you saying my son was murdered because of a ghost?

  Amanda was still thinking about that question as she arrived back at the department. Instead of heading straight to her office, she got into the lift and pressed the button for the basement.

  It was certainly the place for ghosts down here. While the rest of the building had been modernized a few years previously, the basement remained untouched. The paint on the walls was coming away in patches, as though picked at by fingernails, and a couple of the overhead lights flickered as she walked beneath them. The corridors down here were silent, other than an omnipresent buzzing sound. Whenever Amanda visited the basement, she was never sure if the noise came from the lights above, the wiring in the walls, or something else altogether. Or which of those options unnerved her the most.

  The dark room, then.

  When she reached it, she knocked on the
door and waited. Even though she didn’t like it down here, it seemed easier to pay a personal call than to pick up the phone or send an email.

  She heard movement from inside, and then the door opened a few seconds later. Detective Theo Rowan had a way of opening a door not quite as wide as you might expect; it reminded her of someone keeping the chain on at the arrival of an unwelcome visitor. But the reputation he had throughout the department was largely down to the work he did; in person, Amanda imagined he would be a surprise to people who had heard of but never met him. Theo was in his late twenties, with an athletic build and a mass of curly blond hair. And despite all the talk about him being creepy, he had a nice smile. It appeared now.

  ‘Amanda.’

  ‘Hi, Theo.’

  While the smile remained, the door didn’t open any wider.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ he said.

  ‘I need help finding someone.’

  Which was not, both of them knew, his job. But she had already tried the usual channels without success, and she figured Theo would recognize she was looking for a slightly different approach. Not outright illegal, but perhaps less conventional than the rulebook strictly allowed for.

  She also guessed he would be intrigued by the prospect of that. She was right. After a moment, the door opened properly.

  ‘You should absolutely come in then.’

  She followed Theo into the room, closing the door behind her. Despite the unofficial title that officers had given it, the dark room was in reality anything but. Although it lacked natural light, it was so brightly illuminated, and the surfaces so impeccably clean and polished, that it reminded her of a laboratory.

  And in a way, there really were things growing in here.

  Amanda looked to one side. While most of the room was white and swept clear, the desks covered with neatly arranged monitors, one of the walls was darker and messier. A huge library of black hard drives was slotted into an elaborate shelving system; the cables that emerged between them were carefully looped and tied but still created a mass of bristly texture from which a multitude of tiny green and red LED lights blinked out like spiders’ eyes. Each of the hard drives was carefully marked with a thin white label. Many of them, she knew, were the names of children. Not real, living ones, but the fake online personas that Theo and his team had created. There were equally fabricated adult identities. Other drives simply listed the names of internet forums. Some of those were notorious, but others, mercifully, were well beneath the radar of the general public.

  The work Theo did in the dark room was simultaneously straightforward and horrifying. He and his team spent their days in the depths of the internet, dredging its silt. If there was anybody who could help her track down a ghost online, it was Detective Theo Rowan.

  He was the only one in right now, and he led her over to a desk at the far end of the room.

  ‘This is to do with the Price murder?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. The Unsolved and –’

  ‘The Unknown. Yes, I remember. Tell me what you need.’

  Amanda explained about the history of the case, and the user on the forum who had sent the photograph of what appeared to be Charlie Crabtree’s dream diary. Using Foster’s login, she had established that everybody registered on the site had a personal profile, but CC666’s had been left entirely blank. The site was hosted outside of the country, and the registration was private. She had contacted the anonymous owner through a link on the forum but had been met with silence. He or she seemed to have no desire to cooperate with the police. All of which meant that, so far, the only lead she had on the user known as CC666 was their words on a screen. It seemed like there was nowhere else to go.

  Theo listened carefully, but halfway through he had already turned his attention to a monitor in front of him and begun typing quickly.

  ‘And you think this person might be Crabtree?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amanda said. ‘It doesn’t seem possible, but that’s what they seem to be implying in their messages. And given the way they encouraged Hick and Foster, I’d very much like to find out who they are. I just can’t see how.’

  Theo finished typing.

  ‘I can maybe get you their IP address.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Possibly. But you have to bear in mind that, even if I do, that might not be precise enough to identify them. IP addresses vary in their accuracy. I might not be able to pinpoint their exact house for you, but it might at least narrow it down to an area.’

  ‘That would be good,’ Amanda said. ‘How?’

  Theo gestured across the room at his wall of hard drives.

  ‘With a little help from my friends.’

  Or in other words: set a ghost to catch a ghost.

  Theo explained he would use one of his cultivated false identities to set up an account at the forum, providing enough information on the profile for someone looking at it to establish they appeared to be a living, breathing person with no connection to the police. He would then send a direct message to CC666, including a link designed to pique their curiosity. The link itself would look generic and innocent – the two of them chose a newspaper article – but it would run through a spoof page first that the person who clicked on it would never see. That page would record extensive data about the user: their internet connection; the details of their computer; a location of sorts. And since CC666 was the only person who would ever visit that link, they could be confident any information they got would belong to their man or woman.

  Theo made it sound simple.

  ‘Of course, it depends on CC666 taking the bait,’ he said.

  ‘Would you?’

  He raised an eyebrow and laughed.

  As Amanda took the lift upstairs, she was still pondering the question she’d now been asked twice that day.

  Did she think the user was Charlie Crabtree?

  It was hard to imagine. Surely Crabtree must be dead by now. Or else someone would have found him. He had been fifteen years old at the time of the murder, and while what she had learned about the case had given her an idea of how cunning he had been, and how carefully his plan had unfolded, it was difficult to believe he could have evaded capture all these years.

  But not impossible.

  The idea chilled her. If it really was him, then what was he doing?

  What might his plan be now?

  Back in her office, Amanda closed the blinds, switched off the light, and turned to her computer. She told herself to be sensible. Before she started thinking about ghosts, there were other avenues to explore.

  I was there. DM me.

  The police might not have found Charlie Crabtree twenty-five years ago, but the evidence against Billy Roberts had been overwhelming. Roberts had pleaded guilty to the murder. His lawyer had attempted to argue the boy was suffering from schizophrenia, but the diagnosis was contested by a second psychiatric examination, and the judge had ultimately rejected it. Implications of childhood abuse were taken into account, along with an acceptance that Crabtree had taken the lead in the crime. In the end, Roberts had been sentenced to twenty years in prison for the killing.

  According to the online files she read through, he had responded well to the various initiatives and programmes he had enrolled in over the course of his sentence. Evaluative reports repeatedly described him as thoughtful, repentant and unlikely to present a further danger to society. He had been judged fit for release, and paroled over ten years ago.

  Amanda leaned back in her chair.

  Billy Roberts, a person who really had been there that day, was out there in the world somewhere right now.

  The knowledge provoked mixed feelings. She had become familiar with the killing in Gritten, and the ferocity of what had been done there had lodged in her head. How could it not, she thought, when she had seen a reproduction of it with her own eyes in the quarry? The idea that one of the people responsible for such an atrocity was free in the community shook her a li
ttle.

  But, of course, Billy Roberts had been little more than a child himself at the time of the murder. And she had to believe that people could change.

  At the same time, she was reluctant to rely entirely on the judgements of strangers when it came to that. She read the reports on the screen again. Roberts may well have presented himself as thoughtful and repentant on the surface, but who knew what unseen damage the murder and subsequent incarceration had done to him on a deeper level?

  Especially when he knew that Charlie had got away with it.

  Amanda opened a new tab on the computer and started typing. She was prepared to attempt to trace Billy Roberts through the parole system – albeit gritting her teeth at the contortions that might involve – but it turned out that would not be necessary. As unbelievable as she found it, his address and phone number were publicly listed.

  At least, she assumed it was him. It had to be. The address on the system was only a couple of miles away from the centre of Gritten, and a quick sideways check to the original file told her it had been where Roberts’s parents had lived at the time. Digging a little deeper, she found herself blinking at what she discovered. Roberts’s mother had died while he was in prison. Upon his release, it seemed he had returned home and lived with his father, who had then died a couple of years afterwards. Roberts had remained in the family home ever since.

  Jesus, she thought.

  Presumably, given his background, he’d had little choice, but it was still hard to imagine a man committing such a crime and then returning to the town where it had happened. Living there – or at least attempting to. She wondered how many of his neighbours had remembered or learned what Roberts had done, and whether his continuing presence in the area had been more difficult for them or for him.

  Amanda picked up the phone.

  It rang for a while.

  ‘Hello?’