by Alex North
So drink, then.
You’re worthless. You’re useless. Just do it.
The urge was stronger than ever, but he could survive this. After all, he had resisted the voice in the past. And yet the idea of returning the bottle unopened to the kitchen cabinet brought a sense of despair. It felt like there was an inevitability to him drinking.
He pressed his hand to his chin, slowly rubbing the skin around his mouth, and looked at the photograph of him and Sally.
Many years ago, in an effort to combat the self-hatred that plagued him, Sally had encouraged him to make a list: two columns, one for his positive attributes, one for negative, so that he could see for himself how well they balanced out. It hadn’t helped. The feeling of failure was too ingrained to be dispelled with mathematics. She had tried so hard to help him, but in the end it had always been the drink he’d turned to instead.
And he could see that in the photograph. Although they both looked happy, the signs were there. The way Sally’s eyes were wide open to the sun, her skin luminescent, whereas he seemed unsure of it, as though a part of him were reluctant to allow the light in. He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language with foreign grammar to him. And because he believed he was undeserving of such love, he had slowly drunk himself into a man who was. As with his memories of his father, distance had helped him understand all that. Battles often make more sense from the sky.
Too late.
It had been so many years now, but he wondered where Sally was and what she was doing. The only consolation was that he knew she must be happy somewhere, and that their separation had saved her from a life with him. The idea that she was out there, living the life she had always deserved, sustained him.
This is what you lose by drinking.
This is why it’s not worth it.
But, of course, the voice had an answer to that, just as it had an answer to everything. If he’d already lost the most amazing thing he’d ever have in his life, why put himself through this torment?
What did it matter?
He stared at the bottle. And then he felt his phone vibrating against his hip.
It always comes back to me for you, doesn’t it? It always ends where it starts.
Frank Carter’s words returned to him as he swept the beam of his flashlight over the waste ground, walking slowly and carefully into its pitch-black heart. The sense of sickness and foreboding in his chest was matched only by the feeling of failure. The certainty of it. Carter’s words had seemed casual and throwaway at the time, but Pete should have known better. Nothing Carter said or did was meaningless. He should have recognized the subtle deployment of a message, one deliberately intended to be understood only in hindsight.
He saw the tent and floodlights up ahead of him, with the silhouettes of officers moving cautiously around it. The sickness intensified, and he almost stumbled. One foot in front of the other. Two months earlier, he had been here searching for a little boy who had gone missing. Tonight, he was here because a little boy had been found.
He remembered how, that night in July, he’d left a dinner going cold on the dining room table. Tonight, the bottle was there. If he found what he was expecting to here, then he would be opening it when he got home.
He reached the canopy and clicked off his flashlight. The beam was redundant under the strength of the floodlights positioned around it. Seeing what was lying in the center, in fact, there was altogether too much light. He wasn’t ready for that yet. Glancing away, he spotted DCI Lyons standing at the side of the tent, staring back at him, the man’s expression blank. For a moment Pete imagined he saw a flash of contempt there—you should have stopped this—and he looked away again quickly, his gaze falling on the television with the pockmarked screen. It was a moment before he realized Amanda was standing beside him.
“This is where he was taken from,” Pete said.
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
She looked away into the darkness. The brightness and intensity of activity in front of them only emphasized the blackness of the waste ground surrounding them.
“It always ends where it starts,” Amanda said. “That’s what Carter told you, right?”
“Yes. I should have picked up on that.”
“Or I should have. It’s not your fault.”
“Then it’s not yours either.”
“Maybe.” She smiled sadly. “But you look like you need to hear it more than I do.”
He could tell that wasn’t true. She looked pale and sick. Over the past couple of months, he’d noticed how efficient and capable she was, and he’d suspected she was ambitious too—that she’d imagined a case like this might help her career without fully understanding what else it might do. He felt a strange kind of kinship with her now. Finding the dead boys in Carter’s house had broken him for a time. He knew that Amanda had worked—and hoped—just as hard as he had twenty years ago, and that right now, whatever her expectations, she must be feeling like an open wound.
But it wasn’t a kinship that could be spoken of out loud. You walked the road alone. You got through it or you didn’t.
Amanda breathed out slowly.
“The fucker knew,” she said. “Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So the question then is how did he know?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got nothing on that level so far. But there’s still a long list of friends inside to look at.”
She hesitated.
“Do you want to see the body?”
You can have a drink when you get home.
I’ll let you.
“Yes,” he said.
Together, they moved under the canopy to where the boy was lying spread-eagled close to the old television. His backpack was on the ground beside him. Pete did his best to take in the details as dispassionately as possible. The clothes, obviously: the blue tracksuit pants; the Minecraft T-shirt that had been pulled up over the boy’s face, turning the design on the front inside out.
“That was never made public,” he said.
Another connection to Carter.
“No real blood.” He peered around the body. “Not enough, anyway—not for those injuries. He was killed elsewhere.”
“Looks that way.”
“That’s a difference between our new man and Carter. Carter killed those children where I found them, and he kept them in his house. He never made any attempt to dump the remains.”
“Apart from Tony Smith.”
“That was down to circumstances. And also, this is public.” He gestured around. “Whoever did this, they wanted the body to be found. And not just anywhere either. Back where it started, just like Carter told me.”
You can have a drink when you get home.
“The clothes are the ones he went missing in. The injuries aside, it looks like he’s been reasonably well cared for. Not obviously emaciated.”
“Another difference from Carter,” Amanda said.
“Yes.”
Pete closed his eyes, trying to think this through. Neil Spencer had been held somewhere for two months before he was killed. He had been looked after. And then something had changed. Afterward, he had been returned to the place he’d been abducted from.
Like a present, he thought.
A present someone had been given that they decided they didn’t want anymore.
“The backpack.” He opened his eyes. “Is the water bottle in there?”
“Yes. I’ll show you.”
He followed her closer still, edging around the boy’s body. She used a gloved hand to open the top, and he looked inside. There was the bottle, half full of water. Something else. A blue rabbit—a bedtime toy. That had never been on the list.
“Did he have that with him?”
“We’re trying to find out from the parents.” Amanda scrabbled in her pocket. “But yes. I think he had that with him as well, and they
just didn’t know.”
Pete nodded slowly. He knew all about Neil Spencer by now. The boy had been disruptive at school. Aggressive. Already old and toughened beyond his years, the way people get when life bruises them.
But underneath all that, still just six years old.
He forced himself to look at the boy’s body, not caring about the feelings it evoked or the memories it stirred. He could have a drink when he got home.
We’re going to get the person who did this to you.
And then he turned around and stepped away, flicking his flashlight back on as he entered the darkness there.
“I’m going to need you on this, Pete,” Amanda called after him.
“I know.” But he was thinking about that bottle on the dining room table and trying not to break into a run. “And you’re going to have me.”
Twenty
The man stood shivering in the darkness.
Above him, the blue-black sky was clear and speckled with stars, the night a stark, cold contrast to the heat of the day behind him. But it was not the temperature that was making him tremble. Even though he refused to think directly about what he had done that afternoon, the impact of his actions remained with him, just out of sight beneath his skin.
He had never killed before today.
Beforehand, he had imagined he was prepared to do so, and in the moment the rage and hatred he had felt had carried him through. But the act had left him off-kilter afterward, unsure what he was feeling. He had laughed this evening, and he had cried. He had shaken with shame and self-hatred, but also rocked on the bathroom floor in confused elation. It was impossible to describe. Which made sense, he supposed. He had opened a door that could never be closed, and experienced something few others on the planet ever had or would. There was no preparation or guidebook for the journey he had embarked on. No map showing the course through it. The act of killing had left him adrift on an entirely uncharted sea of emotions.
He breathed the cool night air in slowly now, his body still singing. It was so quiet here that all he could hear was the rush of the air, as though the world were murmuring secrets in its sleep. The streetlights in the distance shone brightly, but he was so far from the light here, and standing so motionless, that someone could walk past meters away without seeing him. He would see them, though—or sense them, at least. He felt attuned to the world. And right now, in the early hours of the morning, he could tell that he was totally alone out here.
Waiting.
Full of shivers.
It was difficult now to remember how angry he had been this afternoon. At the time, the rage had simply consumed him, flaring within his chest until his whole body was twisting with the force of it, like a puppet wrenched about on its strings. His head had been so full of blinding light that perhaps he wouldn’t be able to recall what he’d done even if he tried. It felt like he had stepped outside himself for a time, and in doing so had allowed something else to emerge. If he had been a religious man, it would have been easy to imagine himself possessed by some external force. But he was not, and he knew that whatever had taken him over in those terrible minutes had come from inside.
It was gone now—or at least it had slunk back down into its cave. What had felt right at the time now brought little but a sense of guilt and failure. In Neil Spencer he had found a troubled child who needed to be rescued and cared for, and he had believed that he was the one to do so. He would help and nurture Neil. House him. Care for him.
It had never been his intention to hurt him.
And for two months, it had worked. The man had felt such peace. The boy’s presence and apparent contentment had been a balm to him. For the first time he could remember, his world had felt not only possible but right, as though some long-standing infection inside him had finally begun to heal.
But, of course, it had all been an illusion.
Neil had been lying to him all along, biding his time and only ever pretending to be happy. And finally the man had been forced to accept that the spark of goodness he’d imagined in the boy’s eyes had never been real, just trickery and deceit. From the beginning he had been too naïve and trusting. Neil Spencer had only ever been a snake in a little boy suit, and the truth was that he had deserved exactly what happened to him today . . .
The man’s heart was beating too hard.
He shook his head, then forced himself to calm down, breathing steadily again and putting such thoughts out of his mind. What had happened today was abhorrent. If, among all the other emotions, it had also brought its own strange sense of harmony and satisfaction, that was horrible and wrong and had to be fought against. He had to cling instead to the tranquility of the weeks beforehand, however false it had turned out to be. He had chosen badly—that was all. Neil had been a mistake, and that wouldn’t happen again.
The next little boy would be perfect.
Twenty-one
It was harder than ever to get to sleep that night.
I hadn’t managed to resolve anything with Jake after our argument. While I could justify what I’d written about Rebecca to myself, it was impossible to make a seven-year-old boy understand. To him, they were just words attacking his mother. He wouldn’t talk back to me, and it wasn’t clear whether he was even listening. At bedtime he refused a story, and I stood there helplessly again for a moment, torn between frustration and self-hatred and the desperate need to make him understand. In the end, I just kissed the side of his head gently, told him I loved him, and said good night, hoping things might be better in the morning. As if it ever works like that. Tomorrow is always a new day, but there’s never any reason to think it will be a better one.
Later, I lay in my own bedroom, shifting from side to side, trying to settle. I couldn’t bear the distance that was growing between us. Even worse was the fact that I had no idea how to stop it from increasing, never mind close it. And lying there in the dark, I also kept remembering the rasping voice Jake had put on, and shivering each time I did.
I want to scare you.
The boy in the floor.
But as unnerving as that had been, for some reason it was his drawing of the butterflies that bothered me more. The garage was padlocked. There was no way Jake could have been in there without my knowledge. And yet I’d looked at the picture over and over, and there was no mistaking them. Somehow, he’d seen them. But how and where?
It was a coincidence, of course; it had to be. Maybe the butterflies were more common than I realized—the ones in the garage must have arrived from somewhere, after all. Obviously, I had tried to talk to Jake about them too. Equally obviously, he had refused to answer me. And so, as I tossed and turned, trying to sleep, I realized the mystery of the butterflies came down to the same thing as the argument itself. I’d just have to hope it would be better in the morning.
Glass smashing.
A man shouting.
My mother screaming.
Wake up, Tom.
Wake up now.
Someone shook my foot.
I jerked awake, soaked with sweat, my heart hammering in my chest. The bedroom was pitch-black and quiet—still the middle of the night. Jake was standing at the bottom of the bed again, a black silhouette against the darkness behind him. I rubbed my face.
“Jake?” I said quietly.
No reply. I couldn’t see his face, but his upper body was moving gently from side to side, swaying on his feet like a metronome. I frowned.
“Are you awake?”
Again, there was no answer. I sat up in bed, wondering what the best thing to do was. If he was sleepwalking, should I wake him gently, or try to steer him, still asleep, back to his room? But then my eyes adapted a little better to the darkness and the silhouette grew clearer. His hair was wrong. It was much longer than it should have been, and it seemed to be splayed out to one side.
And . . .
Someone was whispering.
But the figure at the end of the bed, still swaying ever so slowly from side to
side, was entirely silent. The sound I could hear was coming from somewhere else in the house.
I looked to my left. The open bedroom door gave me a view of the dark hallway. It was empty, but I thought the whispering was coming from somewhere out there.
“Jake—”
But when I looked back, the silhouette at the end of my bed had disappeared and the room was empty.
I rubbed the sleep from my face, then slid across the cold side of the bed and padded quietly out into the hall. The whispering was a little louder out here. While I couldn’t make out any words, it was obvious now that I was hearing two voices: a hushed conversation, with one participant slightly gruffer than the other. Jake was talking to himself again. I moved instinctively toward his room, but then glanced down the stairs and froze where I stood.
My son was at the bottom, sitting by the front door. A soft wedge of streetlight was cutting around the edge of the curtains in my office to the side, staining his tousled hair orange. His legs were curled up underneath him, and his head was against the door, with one hand pressed there beside it. In the other, resting against his leg, were the spare keys I kept on the desk in the office.
I listened.
“I’m not sure,” Jake whispered.
The reply was the gruffer voice I’d heard.
“I’ll look after you, I promise.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Let me in, Jake.”
My son moved his hand toward the mail slot in the door. That was when I noticed that it was being pushed open from the outside. There were fingers there. My heart leaped at the sight of them. Four thin, pale fingers, poking through among the spidery black bristles, holding the mail slot open.
“Let me in.”
Jake rested the side of his small hand against one of them, and it curled around to stroke him.
“Just let me in.”
He reached up for the chain.
“Don’t move!” I shouted.
It came out without me thinking, from my heart as much as my mouth. The fingers retreated immediately and the mail slot snapped shut behind them. Jake turned to look up at me as I thudded down the stairs toward him, my heart hammering in my chest. At the bottom, I snatched the keys out of his hand.
