by Alex North
“I don’t know,” I said again. “It was a long time ago. All I know is that it’s good to see you again now.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She smiled at me. “So: Any developments?”
I faltered slightly.
“I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Yeah, I can tell. All the more reason for you to, I reckon.”
And so, after a moment’s hesitation, I did. I told her about the knocks on the door and the figure I’d seen in the woods. The fact that Billy was dead.
“Well,” she said of the latter, “I’m glad about that.”
“I thought you would be. I know I should be too.”
“Yeah, but you were always more sensitive.” She frowned. “So what do you think is happening?”
“I don’t know. But do you remember the dolls Charlie made?”
“I remember you telling me about them.”
“Someone put one through my mother’s mail slot yesterday.”
“What?”
Jenny came to a stop beside me, looking horrified.
“Why would anyone do that?” she said.
That was one of the questions that was bothering me. So far, the attention I’d received had been threatening but not harmful. Perhaps that meant whoever was behind it just wanted to frighten me away, for some reason. But the behavior also seemed to be escalating—building toward something—and I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was in danger here.
But there was a question that scared me more. Who?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You need to go to the police,” Jenny told me.
I looked at her.
“I don’t,” I said. “I can always just leave.”
And as I said it, I realized I meant it—that the thought had arrived along with the doll yesterday, even if I hadn’t admitted it to myself until now. I could leave. No law compelled me to stay here in Gritten. If I would be letting my mother down by doing so, I had lived with worse guilt over the years, and hadn’t she told me herself that I shouldn’t be here?
There was no need for me to stay.
Jenny smiled sadly.
“I don’t think you’re going to do that this time, Paul.”
And then she reached out and touched my arm.
It was the first physical contact we’d had in over twenty years. The sensation sent a jolt through me, and when she left her hand there I felt warmth spreading through my skin.
I don’t think you’re going to do that this time.
“I owe it to my mother, right?” I said.
“No, you owe it to yourself. And you know what? I think a part of you wants to. After all, you didn’t have to come back here at all, did you? You didn’t have to stay in the house or look in the attic. But you did.”
“Yes.”
“Because deep down, you know you need to.”
I didn’t reply. After a moment, she moved her hand.
“This is me, by the way.”
I looked to the side and realized we were standing outside a café on one of the main roads. I’d been so engrossed in talking to her that I hadn’t paid attention to the world around us.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said. “But thank you.”
“Hey—anytime.”
And then she walked inside, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, my arm still tingling from the contact. Her words stayed with me too, and I knew she was right. Yes, I could pack my things into the car and be gone from here. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But not what I needed to do.
And I realized there was another question that needed to be asked about the doll. Not just why and who, but how? I didn’t know what had happened to the other three dolls, but I couldn’t remember getting rid of mine. I supposed it should have been in the box along with everything else from back then. But it hadn’t been. And if the doll that had been delivered to me was my own, then how had someone else gotten hold of it?
There was only one answer I could think of.
They had to have been in the house at some point.
TWENTY-FIVE
It was midmorning when the autopsy results for Billy Roberts finally came through, and Amanda already felt dead on her feet. Hotels did not agree with her. Or was it the other way around? The thought momentarily baffled her. Then she shook her head, took a sip of cheap coffee, and tried to concentrate on the screen in front of her.
It wasn’t easy. One of the many things she had learned from this case was that dreams occurred in the shallowest part of sleep. Last night, the uncomfortable mattress had done its best to keep her there and had helped to supply a wealth of them.
The nightmare, of course.
Given some of the horrors Amanda had witnessed in her career, she might have expected any bad dreams to be grim and visceral, but the most common one she had was superficially benign. Everything around her was pitch-black, and there was a feeling of vast space on every side, as though the whole world had been swept empty and clean. There was no sound. There was no real sensation at all, in fact, beyond the tight knot of awareness in her mind that somewhere out there in the darkness a child was lost. That he was going to die if she didn’t find him. And that she was not going to do so in time.
She always woke from the dream in a state of profound distress, with an ache in her chest. It was not a pain so much as an absence: a feeling of hopelessness and despair. This morning, that feeling had been compounded by panic. The bedroom around her was almost as dark as the world in the nightmare, and what little she could see in the gloom was unfamiliar and threatening.
She had sat up quickly.
Where was she? For a few seconds, she hadn’t been able to think. In that time, she had felt like a child again herself, the despair heightened by the dim knowledge that her father was dead, and if she cried out nobody would come.
At least she knew where she was right now. The Gritten Police Department cafeteria. It was a classic of its kind: a small room with beige chairs and old folding tables with the Formica chipped at the edges. The catering arrangements amounted to a vending machine in one corner. She took another sip of the shit coffee she’d gotten from it and thought, Focus, woman. Then she opened the autopsy report on her laptop.
There were photos attached, but she avoided them for the moment. It turned out there was more than enough devil in the details themselves, and she scanned them as dispassionately as she could. Time of death was estimated to be late morning yesterday. That information made her shiver. She had been sure the killer was still in the house when she arrived, and the forensics report all but confirmed it. When she had knocked, there had been a monster on the other side of that door, staring back out at her.
Christ, if she’d tried the handle right then …
She did her best to shake the thought away and read on. The cause of death appeared to be a savage knife wound to Roberts’s throat, but as she’d observed at the scene itself, there were numerous other injuries listed in the report: cuts to his face and arms; extensive bruising to the head and body; bones that had been methodically broken. Billy Roberts had been badly tortured prior to his actual death, and marks around his wrists suggested he’d been handcuffed for much of his ordeal.
Amanda steeled herself and opened one of the photos.
It showed a close-up of what was left of his face. She leaned back slightly, recoiling from the image. Over the course of her research she had seen photographs of Billy Roberts as a teenager, and the one that had stuck with her was from the press coverage: the surly face staring back at the camera, somewhere in that nebulous state between boy and man. The discrepancy between the teenage photograph and the sight before her now was stark in every possible way.
Who did this to you, Billy? she thought.
But, as always, another question pressed at her. Right now it seemed more important than ever.
And why?
* * *
Detective Graham Dwyer was fairly sure he ha
d the answer to both questions.
“Walt Barnaby, Jimmy Till, and Stephen Hyde,” he said. “They’re fucking scumbags.”
Amanda followed him down one of the Gritten department’s ancient corridors, caught between the need to keep up and the desire not to. Dwyer was a large man. The back of his barely tucked-in shirt was stained with sweat, and his thin gray hair was damp with it; she could smell him even from a distance, and it was obvious he didn’t care in the slightest. It was equally clear that he was tolerating her presence here rather than welcoming it—that whatever strings Lyons had pulled higher up in Gritten had become a little more tangled on the way down.
Which was understandable, she supposed; she would probably have been the same if their situations had been reversed. But then she considered that. Maybe it wasn’t true anymore. She remembered the investigation into the little boy’s disappearance, and how she had initially resented another officer being drafted in to assist her, whereas now all she did was miss him.
“That’s three people,” she said.
Dwyer didn’t break stride. “Well counted.”
“I only saw one set of footprints at the scene,” she said.
“One set of bloody footprints.”
“Indicating one bloody killer.”
“Who will be one of the three men I mentioned.”
Dwyer led her into his office. It was tidier than she’d been expecting, the shelves lined with carefully labeled box files, the desk clear aside from his computer and some neatly stacked brown folders. The window behind the desk—mercifully—was open.
Dwyer sat down heavily in his chair and sighed.
“You have to understand, you don’t know these people. Barnaby, Till, and Hyde. Like I said—complete scumbags. If you don’t believe me, the files are right there.” He gestured at the pile of folders without making any effort to pass them to her. “Be my guest.”
“Thank you.”
She flicked through them, thinking that Dwyer’s definition of fucking scumbag differed slightly from hers. Maybe she was mellowing as she aged, but she found herself feeling slightly sorry for the three men. They were all in their forties, but looked much older in the mug shots that had been taken. Sallow skin. Bedraggled hair. Wild eyes. She recognized the type, of course, and could read between the lines of the various arrests and charges. These were the type of men who had drifted to the edge of society, or fallen through its cracks. You found them everywhere: drinking in the daytime in cheap, rough pubs; sitting with cans in the park; passing out in each other’s houses and flats, the days and nights blurring into one. A volatile network of friends where the threat of violence was always humming away below the surface. All it took was one wrong word or perceived slight. One falling-out.
Dwyer was staring at her.
“We have all three in custody,” he said. “We have numerous witnesses who say they were drinking with Billy Roberts in the house on the day before his murder.”
Amanda remembered the raised voices she’d heard in the brief phone call she’d made to Roberts.
“And what else?”
“They all say they left at some point.” Dwyer spread his hands. “Except none of them can corroborate that. And their stories all conflict.”
“Maybe they were drunk.”
Dwyer laughed. “Oh, they were certainly that.”
“Okay,” she said. “Was anything taken from the house?”
“Who can tell? And before you ask, we’re waiting on forensics. My guess is we’re going to find tons of that.”
“Well, you already said they were all in the house.”
Dwyer ignored her.
“We’re searching what passes for their properties. We’re also talking to them—or trying to. Two of them are still plastered. But trust me. I know from experience that one of them will turn out to be the bloody killer.”
Amanda put the files back down on the desk, torn between the instinct she had to disagree with Dwyer and the knowledge that he was probably right. There was no reason to believe Billy Roberts’s murder was in any way connected to what had happened in Featherbank, and more often than not the most obvious solution turned out to be the correct one. Dwyer was placing his bet in exactly the same way she would probably have if she’d been in his shoes. Not everything had to have a deeper meaning; sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.
And yet.
The ferocity of what had been done to Roberts had stayed with her. Yes, the level of violence fit with a perpetrator whose mind had been ravaged by years of drink and drugs and God only knew what else. But it still felt like there had been more control to what had happened in his house than that, and that there was something here they were missing.
“You look worried,” Dwyer said.
“I am.”
“About what?”
“I’m worried this has something to do with why I’m here.”
Dwyer rolled his eyes.
“Detective Beck,” he said, “I know why you’re here. And let me tell you, places like this one have long memories. Nobody has forgotten what happened. But the thing is, nobody likes to think about it either. It’s done. It’s the past. Life moves on.”
“Someone left blood on Paul Adams’s door.”
“Apparently so. I said people don’t like to think about it. But maybe they don’t mind other people thinking about it.”
She leaned on the desk. “Charlie Crabtree was never found.”
There was silence in the room for a moment. Dwyer’s gaze settled on her, and there was stone in it, as though she’d transgressed, crossed a boundary.
She didn’t care.
“If you’re wrong,” she said quietly, “the killer is still out there. And what I’m worried about is what he might do next.”
She was about to say more when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She stood back from the desk, and took it out to find a message from Theo:
CALL ME ASAP.
Dwyer raised an eyebrow sarcastically.
“What have you got there?” he said. “A confession?”
She looked back at him.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
* * *
She went out into the corridor to phone Theo back, leaning against the wall as she waited for him to answer the call. When he did, she could hear the low thrum of activity in the hard drives he spent his working life surrounded by. Or at least imagined she could.
“It’s Amanda here,” she said. “What have we got?”
“We’ve not had an actual reply from CC666,” he said. “But there was a hit on the link I sent. I could bore you with all the information it’s given me about the user’s computer, but I won’t for now. The important thing is that the IP address turned out to be easy to pin down. I’ve got it to within a couple of streets. A place called Brenfield. It’s about a hundred miles from Gritten.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Last night. Sorry, I missed it until now.”
“That’s okay.”
Whoever was behind the CC666 account, it obviously wasn’t Billy Roberts. The place name nagged at her though. Brenfield. She’d seen it in the files somewhere. But she was so tired it was difficult to trawl through the sheer amount of information she’d absorbed over the past few days.
The sound on the line altered slightly, and she pictured Theo moving about in his dark room, shifting between screens.
“You recognize the place name, right?” he said.
“I’ve had a busy couple of days.”
“Fair enough.”
So he told her. And Amanda remembered. And even as she listened, she was already heading off quickly down the corridor.
TWENTY-SIX
Sitting on the edge of the bed in my hotel room, I picked up my cell phone and made a call. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to ask, or what I was going to do with whatever I learned afterward, but I knew I had to do something.
It took a few seconds for her to answer.
“Sally Longfellow speaking.”
“Hi, Sally,” I said. “It’s Paul Adams here.”
“Paul, hello. I’m at home right now. How is Daphne today?”
“I haven’t gone in to see her yet.”
“I know it’s hard. Well, I imagine she’s sleeping.” She lowered her voice slightly. “As sad as it is, that’s really the best you can hope for at this stage, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t in the mood and decided to cut to the chase.
“I suppose so,” I said. “What I actually wanted to do was ask a little more about the circumstances of my mother’s accident.”
“Of course. What would you like to know?”
“She fell, right?”
“Yes.”
I waited, staring out of the window at the street below, but it seemed that Sally was unwilling to add more without being prompted. If it was possible to hear defensiveness in silence, then the call seemed full of it. Maybe she thought I was planning to blame her for what had happened—for being negligent in some way.
“Was she going up- or downstairs when she fell?”
“I really don’t know. Does that matter?”
“I’m not sure.” I shook my head. The question had come from nowhere, and yet it suddenly felt important, for some reason. “Did she say anything afterward about what happened?”
“No. She was quite badly hurt. And you know what your mother is like, Mr. Adams. I’m not sure she understood anything had happened at all.”
“How long was she lying there?”
“Again, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I got there as quickly as possible.”
I paused. I’d assumed it had been a scheduled visit.
“Hang on. So … you knew she’d fallen?”
“Not that she’d fallen, but Daphne had an alert. We call them a bat signal—meant in a nice way, of course. It’s basically a pager that patients carry with them that sends a signal through to our phones. I got an alert from Daphne, so I tried to call the house. When there was no answer, I drove straight over.”
