The Shadows

by Alex North

  I turned around and locked the door.

  And then, moving slowly myself now, I began to follow.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  For the second morning in a row, Amanda found herself sitting in the Gritten Police Department cafeteria, hunched over her laptop. Depressingly, it seemed to have become her office for the time being. She took a sip of the coffee. It hadn’t improved.

  Nor had the overall situation.

  They had three murders so far, with each of the victims connected to the original Red Hands killing. While Amanda didn’t understand what was happening yet, she didn’t believe that was likely to be the end of it.

  They needed to find Paul Adams.

  Officers first thing had found a booking for him at a hotel in Gritten. There was an irony there, she supposed. She hadn’t been able to find him last night because he’d taken her advice to get out of the house. But according to the hotel, he wasn’t in his room and his vehicle wasn’t in the parking lot. She figured that meant he was most likely at his mother’s house, and after discussing matters with a still-reluctant Detective Graham Dwyer, Holder had been sent out to Gritten Wood to see if Paul was there.

  She glanced at her phone now, resting on the table beside the laptop.

  Nothing.

  Attempting to distract herself, she turned her attention to her laptop. The scene in Brenfield was still being processed, but the family’s history was on file.

  Carl and Eileen Dawson had moved to Brenfield just over ten years ago. The reason for the relocation seemed to be so they could be closer to their son, James. Reading between the lines, it appeared that James Dawson had struggled badly in the aftermath of the murder in Gritten. He had left for college, but then dropped out after two terms, and most of his life since had been itinerant. There were minor drug convictions on his record, as well as a few for low-level antisocial behavior. There was also a long list of addresses on file, with gaps between them suggesting he had been homeless at times.

  All in all, it reminded Amanda of how Billy Roberts had lived following his release from prison. Except that James Dawson had people who cared about him. Ten years ago, Carl Dawson inherited money after the death of his mother. He and Eileen had bought the house in Brenfield, which was where their son was loosely based at the time, and James had lived with them from then on.

  The sacrifices parents make for their children.

  And yet, from the details on-screen, there was evidence this particular garden had not been entirely rosy. Police had been called to the address on several occasions by concerned neighbors, and one time Eileen Dawson had actually been arrested and removed from the property. No charges were pressed, and the woman eventually returned. Amanda was more used to the scenario being the opposite way around gender-wise, but that did nothing to make it any less depressing. Not least because it was one reason why those same concerned neighbors had not immediately called the police in the early hours of yesterday, when they had heard shouts and screams from inside the Dawson house.

  Curtains had still twitched, of course. Shortly before dawn, one of the neighbors heard the Dawsons’ front door open, and they had seen a man dressed in black emerge from the property. The neighbor assumed it had been Carl Dawson, but it was dark and they had no real description to go on. At any rate, there had been something disturbing enough about the whole scenario for her to pick up the phone. Attending officers found two bodies in the front room. While the scene was still being processed, it appeared that Eileen Dawson had been dispatched quickly. And then the killer had taken more time with James.

  Amanda’s heart broke a little at that.

  From everything she’d read online about the history of the case, she found it hard to picture James Dawson as anything other than a small, vulnerable child, and learning what had become of his life in the years since only increased that impression. He was a boy who had never fully recovered from what had happened. The supposed friends he had embraced had groomed him, intending to kill him, and as an adult he had clearly struggled to find a niche for himself in the world. It was as though he had been stuck in a nascent state, never growing or flourishing, just remaining frozen forever, his existence defined by a moment of trauma.

  If you tried, Amanda thought, perhaps you could make an argument that what had happened to Billy Roberts amounted to some kind of justice. But there could be no attempt to do so here. Whatever the damaged furniture of his life, James Dawson had not deserved an ending like this.

  Was he the person behind the CC666 account?

  It seemed likely; a computer had been recovered from the house and was being analyzed. But if so, she didn’t understand why.

  Regardless, the most important question right now was where Carl Dawson was.

  The door to the cafeteria opened. Amanda looked around to see Dwyer walk in, bringing the smell of cooked food wafting in along with him. He moved over to her table and sat down opposite, landing so heavily that she wasn’t sure the furniture would stand the impact, then put a greasy wrapper down on the table and began extracting a sandwich from it.

  “Holder just checked in,” he said. “He told me there’s no sign of Adams at his mother’s house. His car’s there, though.”

  “That’s sort of a sign.”

  “Holder’s not very bright.”

  “Has he checked inside?”

  “House is locked. He did look through a few of the windows and nothing was obviously out of place. No probable cause to break in. Maybe Adams just went to the shops.”

  “We need to find him.”

  “So you say.”

  There were a few seconds of silence, as Dwyer swallowed and wiped his lips delicately with a napkin she hadn’t noticed. Then his manner shifted a little.

  “I was there, you know,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. I was the attending officer that day. I was at the playground when the girl’s body was found. And then there were two of us that went to Adams’s house afterward. I got to have a look around while we were waiting for his mother to get back. At that point, me and my partner, we both thought he did it.”

  “Obvious, right?” Amanda said.

  “Exactly.”

  Dwyer took another bite of his sandwich. She waited for him to chew and swallow it.

  “In hindsight, that was unfair of me.” He shrugged. “You play the odds, right? There was something weird about Adams—about all of them—but my hunch that day was wrong. Maybe what I’ve been thinking now is too. You think this guy—Carl Dawson—is involved?”

  Amanda leaned back.

  “In some capacity?” she said. “Sure. I mean, his family are dead and he’s gone missing. In a situation like this, it’s a natural assumption to make.”

  “Like I said, you play the odds.”

  “You do. But whether he’s responsible, I have no idea. And we can’t place him at the scene for Billy Roberts yet.”

  “We can’t be sure that’s even the same perp.”

  But if Dwyer was still half clinging to his original theory, he no longer seemed as convinced by it as he had been yesterday. It was just too much of a coincidence. Billy Roberts and James Dawson—two boys who had been involved in the killing here twenty-five years ago—had been tortured and murdered. And however much he might not have wanted to rake up the past, she could tell he was just as concerned as she was.

  “Dawson knew all three victims,” he said. “I like him for it.”

  She was about to answer when her cell phone started ringing. The screen told her it was Theo.

  “Hang on.”

  She answered the call and pressed the phone to her ear. As always, the soft sound of his computers and their ghosts was humming the background.

  “Hey, Theo,” she said. “Amanda here.”

  “Hello there. You wanted the phone number for Paul Adams, right?”

  “Right.”

  “He’s actually on a pay-as-you-go, but I got it from his
card details. Don’t ask me how, but here you go.”

  She made a note of the number he gave her.

  “Thanks, Theo.”

  “There’s something else. I’m going to have to pass this on to the relevant authorities but I figured I’d tell you first. I’ve got a number for Carl Dawson too.”

  Her heart leaped. And as she noted it down, something else occurred to her.

  “Can you tell me where Dawson is?” she said.

  “You want the moon on a stick, Amanda. But yes, probably. Just give me a second. The more towers it pings, the easier it is.” She heard him typing in the background. “Ah—bingo.”

  “You’ve got him? Where is he?”

  “About two miles away from you,” Theo said. “In Gritten Wood.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  After the murder, the old playground had been demolished and paved over. When I left Gritten, nothing had been added to the empty stretch of stone there, as though nobody had known what to do with it and it had been enough just to cover it up for the moment. But now there were benches there, circling a tree in the center.

  And yet, as I approached, I could still picture it just as it had been back then. And the figure waiting for me on one of the benches reminded me so much of James that day, so fragile and scared, that it was easy to imagine I’d slipped backward in time.

  I stopped in front of him.

  “Mr. Dawson.”

  James’s stepfather was staring down at his hands. I took in the mottled skin of his bald skull, and the gnarled, ancient roughness of his hands. When he finally raised his head, his face was thin and drawn, his eyes sunken into the sockets. He looked impossibly sad. I could sense waves of grief beating off him, and it felt like something more profound than loss, as though now that he was facing down the final days of his life, he was grieving for all the things he’d done with it, and all the things he hadn’t.

  How old everyone has got, I thought.

  And how strange that a generation I remembered as being strong and sturdy and reliable was now vanishing away into old age.

  “Paul.” He gestured to the bench. “Sit down, please.”

  I sat at the far end, leaving a comfortable space between us. There was no sense of physical threat from him; if anything, age had only enhanced the gentle, harmless feeling he’d always exuded. But I suspected that he had been behind the events of the last few days, and now that he had finally decided to show himself to me I wanted to maintain a degree of distance between us until I understood why.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry about Daphne.”

  “Thank you.”

  He sounded utterly broken. But then I remembered that the man sitting next to me now had been friends with my mother since childhood—that he had known her far longer than I had. And I remembered the photograph I’d seen of the two of them, both looking so young, Carl whispering something to my mother that had made her laugh wildly.

  “I’m sorry for your loss too,” I said.

  He nodded once.

  “Did you manage to see her?” I said.

  “Not after the accident.”

  There was the slightest of breezes. I turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes for a moment.

  “I’m guessing I have you to thank for the doll?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “It was James’s.”

  I opened my eyes. So not mine at all. I wondered what had happened to it. Perhaps I would never know. The box of belongings in the house contained many things from that year, but not everything deserved to be kept.

  “James held on to it all this time?”

  “He hasn’t lived the most stable life,” Carl said. “But yes. He always kept that, for some reason.”

  “We all carry so much with us, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We do.”

  I hadn’t given much thought to what James’s life had been like after we left Gritten, but I supposed I’d always imagined he’d been happy. It made me sad to know he hadn’t. That the guilt he felt had trailed him too, and he’d been unable to put it down and leave it behind.

  “The knocks at the door?” I said. “That was you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was you I saw in the woods that day?”

  Carl nodded.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I was trying to frighten you away.”

  Which had nearly worked. But, of course, Carl had been there when it had all happened. He knew what buttons to push.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I honestly never thought you’d come back here. Daphne always told me you wouldn’t. But then you arrived at the house, and I knew it was only a matter of time before you found it.”

  It’s in the house, Paul.

  “Charlie’s dream diary,” I said.

  “You found it, then?”

  “Yes. Why did my mother have it?”

  There was a long silence then. I stared across the old playground, watching the bushes at the far side wavering ever so slightly in the breeze.

  Waiting.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” he said.

  After everything that had happened, the anger flared.

  “Do you know,” I said, “people keep asking me that. And for a long time, maybe the answer was no. I didn’t want to know about any of it. But I’m here now, despite everybody’s predictions about me. And so, yes. I would fucking well like to know.”

  Carl looked up at the sky.

  “I just wanted to keep everybody safe,” he said. “But now that Daphne’s gone, perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe nothing does. And, God, I’m so fucking tired. So I’ll tell you, if that’s what you want. Then you can carry it all too. And you can decide what to do about it.”

  “Tell me how my mother got the diary.”

  He continued staring at the sky for a moment, lost in memory, and then looked down and rubbed his hands together.

  “First I need to tell you what happened that day.”

  * * *

  Carl and Eileen had both been home on the day Charlie and Billy murdered Jenny. Carl had been working upstairs, and, as always, he’d listened to James leaving the house with a heavy heart. There had been many days that year when he’d felt like that: watching Charlie lead us all down the backyard and into the woods, feeling powerless to intervene. He knew who Charlie was—the illegitimate son of Eileen’s former husband—and he didn’t trust his involvement in James’s life. But it had never felt like his place to say anything.

  As he told me this, I recalled the last day I’d gone into the woods with them. The way I’d seen Carl reluctantly raise his hand to the glass when I’d waved at him.

  “And, of course, by that point you weren’t with them,” Carl said. “But that day, you spoke to him here. You told him the truth. And instead of meeting Charlie and Billy, he came home.”

  He had heard the argument begin, walking out of his makeshift office and standing quietly at the top of the stairs for a time, listening to the furious words being exchanged between James and his mother. The fallout from what I’d done had been ugly. Eileen had been sobbing and shouting. For his part, James had seemed resolute. Determined to discover the truth about his father.

  “I always thought we should have told him sooner,” he said. “But Eileen was adamant. She didn’t want to think about what had happened; she just wanted to forget. At that point, I didn’t know how James had found out, but a part of me was glad he had. But it was a matter for them to sort out between them, so I went back to work.”

  The argument downstairs continued for a time, and then settled into a kind of silence. Carl carried on working, imagining he’d be able to help with the situation later. That was his role in the house: to calm things down; to look after everybody and keep things working. He had always been the peacemaker.

  He took a deep breath.

  �
�But then I heard screaming.”

  He could never be sure exactly what had happened, but it seemed that at some point Charlie had come in through the back door.

  “That boy was crazy. You know that, right?”

  I nodded, remembering. “Yeah. I know.”

  “He really did believe in that dream world he’d made up. He thought he would find his father by doing what he did. But, of course, the whole thing was ridiculous. I think when he woke up in the woods, he was so upset and frustrated and angry that he came to our house to take it out on Eileen.”

  Carl hadn’t seen it happen, but from what he could gather afterward, Charlie had begun screaming abuse at Eileen, and then attacked her, pushing her to the floor and starting to beat her. James had stood there for a moment, watching the boy he imagined had been his friend trying to kill his mother. Knowing that he had been betrayed. Understanding that the foundations of his existence had been undermined in a single afternoon.

  And as Charlie continued his attack on Eileen, James picked up a knife.

  * * *

  When Carl had finished, I sat there in silence for a moment.

  “James killed Charlie?”

  Carl nodded.

  “You could make an argument that he was acting in self-defense—or at least, protecting his mother. But it went way beyond that. He lost control of himself. I think that everything that had happened—everything he’d learned that day—it all came pouring out in that moment. He was still stabbing Charlie when I came downstairs. I had to wrestle the knife off him.”

  He blinked the memory away.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” I said.

  “I thought about it. But then … well. I made a decision. Standing there right then, I knew our lives had changed forever, and I wanted to limit the damage.” He looked at me suddenly. “I love James, you know.”

  I nodded, remembering.

  Like his own son.

  “And I knew that he was going to be in real trouble. I had no idea what I was doing, but someone needed to take charge. James was sobbing; Eileen was hysterical. Someone needed to look after them both. So it came down to me. Like it always did.”