by Alex North
They scared me too.
The door opened. Mrs. Shelley appeared and then began looking at the parents and calling children’s names back over her shoulder. Her gaze drifted across Karen and me.
“Adam,” she said, and then moved immediately on to a different boy.
“Uh-oh,” Karen said. “Looks like you’re on the naughty step again.”
“The day I’ve had, that really wouldn’t surprise me.”
“It can feel like you’re a child again yourself, can’t it? The way they talk to you sometimes.”
I nodded. Although I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to put up with it today.
“Anyway, take care of yourself,” Karen said, as Adam reached us.
“I will.”
I watched them go, then waited while the rest of the children were released. At least Dyson was getting a good chance to take precautions, I supposed—and the thought made me scan the faces in the playground myself. Except what was the point? A few of the parents were familiar, but I hadn’t been here long enough to recognize more than a handful. To them I probably looked like a suspicious character myself.
When there was only Jake left, Mrs. Shelley beckoned me over. Jake emerged at her side, once again staring down at the ground. He looked so vulnerable that I wanted to rescue him—just scoop him up and take him somewhere safe. I felt a burst of love for him. Maybe he was too fragile to be ordinary, to fit in and be accepted. But after everything that had happened, so fucking what?
“Trouble again?” I said.
“I’m afraid so.” Mrs. Shelley smiled sadly. “Jake was put on red today. He had to go to see Miss Wallace, didn’t you, Jake?”
Jake nodded miserably.
“What happened?” I said.
“He hit another boy in the class.”
“Oh.”
“Owen started it.” Jake sounded as though he was about to cry. “He was trying to take my Packet of Special Things. I didn’t mean to hit him.”
“Yes, well.” Mrs. Shelley folded her arms and looked at me pointedly. “I’m not entirely sure that’s an appropriate thing for a child your age to be bringing into school in the first place.”
I had no idea what to say. Social convention dictated that I side with the grown-up here, which meant that I should tell Jake that hitting was bad, and that maybe his teacher was right about the Packet. But I couldn’t. This situation suddenly seemed so laughably trivial. The stupid fucking traffic light system. The terror of Miss Wallace. And most of all, the idea of telling Jake off because some little shit had messed with him and, most likely, gotten exactly what he deserved.
I looked at my son, standing there so timidly, probably expecting me to tell him off, when what I actually wanted to say to him was: Well done.
I never had the courage to do that at your age.
I hope you hit him hard.
And yet social convention won out.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
“Good. Because it’s not been a fantastic start, has it, Jake?”
Mrs. Shelley ruffled his hair, and social convention lost.
“Don’t touch my son,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
She moved her hand as though Jake were electric. There was some satisfaction in that, even though my words had come out without any thought and I wasn’t remotely sure what I was going to say next.
“Just that,” I said. “You can’t put him on your traffic light system and then pretend to be nice. To be honest, I think it’s a pretty terrible thing to do to any child, never mind one who’s obviously having problems right now.”
“What problems?” She was flustered. “If there are problems, then we can talk about that.”
I knew it was stupid to be so confrontational, but I still felt a small degree of pleasure in standing up for my son. I looked at Jake again, who was staring at me curiously now, as though he wasn’t sure what to make of me. I smiled at him. I was glad he’d stood up for himself. Glad that he’d made an impact on the world.
I looked back at Mrs. Shelley.
“I will talk to him,” I said. “Because hitting is wrong. So he and I will have a long discussion about better ways to stand up to bullies.”
“Well … that’s good to hear.”
“Fine. Got everything, mate?”
Jake nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Because I don’t think we can go home tonight.”
“Why not?”
Because of the boy in the floor.
But I didn’t say that. The strangest thing was, I thought he knew the answer to his own question already.
“Come on,” I said gently.
Thirty
They’ve found him, Pete thought.
After all this time. They’ve found Tony.
Sitting in his car, he watched the CSI officers entering Norman Collins’s property. At the moment it was the only activity on the street. Despite the gathering police presence, the media had yet to arrive, and whatever neighbors were home were staying out of view for now. One of the CSI team stood on the front step, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched.
Cuffed and ensconced in the backseat, Collins was watching the activity too.
“You have no authority to do this,” Collins said blankly.
“Be quiet, Norman.”
In the confines of the car, Pete couldn’t avoid smelling the man, but he had no intention of talking to him. As the situation was still developing, he had arrested Collins on suspicion of receipt of stolen goods in the first instance, simply because—given the nature of some of the items in the man’s collection—it was a charge they could likely make stick, and also one that gave them authority to search the man’s home. But, of course, they wanted him for more than that. And no matter how many questions he had, Pete wasn’t about to jeopardize the investigation by interviewing Collins here and now. It had to be done at the department. Recorded and watertight.
“They won’t find anything,” Collins said.
Pete ignored him. Because, of course, they already had, and Collins appeared to be implicated in that. An older set of remains had been discovered. Collins had always been obsessed with Carter and his crimes; he had visited Frank Carter’s friend in prison; he had been stalking the house where the second body had been found. Collins had known the body was there—Pete was certain of it. But more importantly, while official identification would come in time, he was also sure that the remains belonged to Tony Smith.
After twenty years, you’ve been found.
All else aside, the development should have brought a sense of relief and closure, because he had been searching for the boy for so long. But it didn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking of all those weekend searches, combing through hedgerows and woodlands many miles from here, when the whole time Tony had been lying far closer to home than anyone imagined.
Which meant there must have been something Pete had missed twenty years ago.
He looked down at the tablet on his lap.
God, he wanted a drink right now—and wasn’t it strange how that worked? People often thought of alcohol as a buffer against the horrors of the world. But Tony Smith’s body had been found, and it was more than possible that the man responsible for Neil Spencer’s murder was in custody, sitting behind him right now, and yet the urge to drink was stronger than ever. There were always so many reasons to drink, though. Only ever one real reason not to.
You can drink later. As much as you want.
He accepted that he would. Whatever works—it was that simple. In a war, you used any weapon at hand to win an individual battle, and then you regrouped and fought the next one. And the next. And all the ones that followed.
Whatever works.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Collins insisted.
“Shut up.”
Pete clicked on the tablet. There was no avoiding this: he needed to figure out what he had missed all those years ago and why, and the house on Garholt Stree
t where Tony’s remains had been found was the place to start.
He scanned through the details. Until recently the house had been owned by a woman named Anne Shearing. She had inherited it from her parents, but hadn’t lived in it for decades, instead renting it out over the years to numerous individuals.
There was a long list of those on record, but Pete presumed he could discount occupants from before 1997, when Frank Carter had committed his murders. The tenant at that time had been a man named Julian Simpson. Simpson had been renting the property for four years beforehand, and his residency continued until 2008. Opening a new tab on-screen, Pete ran a search and discovered Simpson had died of cancer that year, at the age of seventy. He clicked back. The house’s next tenant was a man named Dominic Barnett, who had occupied the house until earlier this year.
Dominic Barnett.
Pete frowned. The name rang a bell. He ran another search, and the details came back to him, even though he hadn’t worked the case himself. Barnett had been a minor underworld figure involved in drugs and extortion, known to police but considered small fry in the grand scheme of things. There were no convictions on file for the last ten years—but, of course, that didn’t mean he’d gone straight, and nobody had been remotely surprised when he turned up dead. The murder weapon—a hammer—had been recovered with partial prints, but there had been no match on the database. Subsequent inquiries had failed to turn up a credible suspect. But the public, at least, had been reassured. Despite the lack of an arrest, the police believed it to be an isolated, targeted incident, and anybody reading between the lines of that could probably have intuited what lay behind it.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
To the extent that Pete had paid attention, he had assumed the same. But he wondered about it now. Drugs remained the most likely motive for the murder, but Barnett had lived in a house where human remains had been kept hidden, and it seemed impossible that he would have been unaware of it. Did that suggest a different motive?
He looked up and watched Norman Collins in the rearview mirror for a moment. Collins was staring blankly out of the window at his house.
There were three men to think about: Julian Simpson and Dominic Barnett, who had both lived at the property, and Norman, who seemed to be aware of what had been stored there. What was the connection between the three? What had happened twenty years ago, and in the time since?
Pete loaded up a map of Featherbank.
Garholt Street was on a natural route between the scene of Tony Smith’s abduction and the direction in which Frank Carter had fled. At the time, forensic evidence had established Tony had been in the killer’s vehicle—but if Carter had somehow been tipped off that his house was being searched, he could have dropped the boy’s body there before going on the run. Julian Simpson had been living there at the time.
Pete didn’t need to consult the case file to know that Simpson hadn’t come up in the investigation at the time. All of Carter’s known acquaintances had been investigated carefully. Simpson’s name had not been among them.
And yet.
Simpson would have been around fifty at the time of the abductions, and that age would match the conflicting description given in one of the witness statements. Perhaps he had been Carter’s accomplice. If so, there had to have been some connection between the two men, however oblique, which Pete hadn’t discovered.
The sense of failure hit hard.
You should have found him sooner.
Whatever he had or hadn’t done, it would still be his fault. He knew he would find a way to twist it around so that the blame rested with him. But the feeling remained.
Worthless.
Useless.
You can drink later.
His phone rang—Amanda again.
“Willis,” he answered. “I’m still at Collins’s house. I’m on my way back in a minute.”
“How’s the search going?”
“It’s going.”
He glanced at the house, knowing that was where his focus needed to be. The priority right now was nailing Collins for his involvement, not working out what Pete himself had and hadn’t missed twenty years ago. That dissection could come later.
“Okay,” Amanda told him. “I’ve got the home owner and his son here, and I need someone to help me with them. Sort out accommodation for them for the night. That kind of thing.”
Pete frowned to himself. That was grunt work at best, and he knew the implications: Amanda would be the one handling the interview with Norman Collins. But perhaps that was better. Cleaner. They didn’t want to risk his past history with the man coloring the investigation now. The answers to his questions would come in time, but it didn’t need to be him who asked them. He started the engine.
“On my way.”
“The guy’s called Tom Kennedy,” Amanda said. “His son is Jake. Book Collins in first, and then they’re in one of the comfort suites.”
For a moment Pete didn’t respond. His free hand was on the steering wheel. He stared at it, and noticed it begin to tremble.
“Pete?” Amanda said. “You there?”
“Yes. I’m on my way.”
He hung up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. But rather than driving away, he turned the engine off and picked up the tablet again. He’d been too lost in the past to think about the present. He hadn’t even considered the man who owned the property now.
Failing, as always.
He clicked through to the report, wondering if he’d misheard what Amanda had said. But there it was.
Tom Kennedy.
Finally. A name he recognized.
Thirty-one
“Did they find him, Daddy?” Jake said.
I had been pacing back and forth across the room in the police station, waiting for DI Amanda Beck to bring the statement for me to sign, but my son’s words brought me to a halt.
He was sitting on a chair that was far too big for him, kicking his legs slightly, an untouched orange juice box on the table beside him. The latter had been a gift from DS Dyson after we’d arrived. Allegedly there was coffee on its way for me, but we’d been here for twenty minutes now, and it showed about as much sign of imminent arrival as Beck did. Jake and I hadn’t really spoken the whole time. I didn’t know what to say to him right now, and my pacing had been as much about filling the silence in the room as the space.
Did they find him, Daddy?
I walked over now and knelt down in front of him.
“Yes. They found the man who came to our house.”
“That’s not who I meant.”
The boy in the floor.
I stared at my son for a second, but he looked back at me without any apparent fear or concern. It was astounding that he could take everything that was happening in stride, as though it were all perfectly normal—as though we were talking about a boy who had been playing hide-and-seek, not human remains that had been in the floor of our garage for God knew how many years, and which it was impossible for him to have known about.
It was something we shouldn’t be talking about. Not here. My statement to the police had been honest but incomplete. I hadn’t mentioned the drawings of the butterflies or told them about Jake talking to the boy in the floor. I wasn’t sure why, beyond the fact that I couldn’t make any sense of it myself, and because I wanted to protect my son. That all this was a grown-up’s burden to shoulder, not a seven-year-old’s.
“Yes, Jake,” I said. “That is who you meant. Okay? This is serious.”
He thought about it.
“Okay.”
“We’ll talk about the other thing later.” I stood up, realizing that what I’d said wasn’t quite enough, and that he deserved to know more. “But yes, they found him.”
I found him.
“That’s good,” Jake said. “He was scaring me a little.”
“I know.”
“Although I don’t think he was meaning to.” Jake frowned. “I think he was just hurt an
d lonely, and that was making him a little bit mean. But they’ve found him, and so he won’t be lonely now, will he? He can go home. So he won’t be mean anymore.”
“It was just your imagination, Jake.”
“It wasn’t.”
“We’ll talk about it later. Okay?”
I gave him the serious look I always attempted when I wanted to draw a line under a conversation. It usually had no authority whatsoever, and a minute later one or the other of us would end up shouting, but today he nodded. Then he swiveled on his chair, picked up the juice box, and began drinking it seemingly without a care in the world.
The door opened behind me, and I turned to see DS Dyson entering, carrying two cups of coffee. He held the door open with his back for DI Beck, who marched in past him. She was brandishing papers and looked as tired as I felt: a woman with a million things to do, determined to do each of them herself.
“Mr. Kennedy,” she said. “I’m really sorry about your wait. Ah—and this must be Jake.”
Still distracted by the juice box, my son ignored her.
“Jake?” I prompted. “Can you say hello, please?”
“Hi.”
I turned back to Beck. “It’s been a long day.”
“I completely understand. This must be very strange for him indeed.” She leaned down toward him, pressing her hands against her knees a little awkwardly, as though unsure how to talk to a child. “Have you ever been in a police station before, Jake?”
He shook his head but didn’t answer.
“Well.” She gave an awkward laugh, then stood up. “First and last time, hopefully. Anyway—Mr. Kennedy. I have your statement here. If you could just read through it, make sure you’re happy with the contents, and then sign it. And your drink is here too.”
“Thanks.”
Dyson passed me the coffee, and I sipped it while I scanned the statement on the table. I’d explained about Norman Collins, what Mrs. Shearing had told me about him and Dominic Barnett, and the man who’d been at the door whispering to Jake last night. All of which had led me to investigate the garage, wondering what Collins might have been looking for. That was why and how I’d found the remains in there.
