The beam of his flashlight passed over something gray.
Pete stopped immediately, then played it back to where it had been. There was an old television set lodged at the base of one of the bushes, its screen broken in several places, as though someone had used it for target practice. He stared at it for a moment.
“Anything?”
An anonymous voice calling from one side.
“No,” he shouted back.
He reached the far side of the waste ground at the same time as the other officers, the search having turned up nothing. After the relative darkness behind him, Pete found the bleached brightness of the streetlights here made him feel oddly queasy. There was a quiet hum of life in the air that had been absent in the silence of the waste ground.
A few moments later, stuck for anything better to do right now, he turned around and walked back the way he’d come.
He wasn’t really sure where he was going, but found himself heading off to the side, in the direction of the old quarry that ran along one edge. It was dangerous ground in the dark, so he headed toward the cluster of flashlights where the quarry search team were about to start work. While other officers were working their way along the edge, shining their beams down the steep sides and calling Neil’s name, the ones here were consulting maps and preparing to pick their way down the rough path that led into the area below. A couple of them looked up as he reached them.
“Sir?” One of them recognized him. “I didn’t know you were on duty tonight.”
“I’m not.” Pete bent the wire of the fence up and ducked under to join them, even more careful of his footing now. “I live locally.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer sounded dubious. It was unusual for a DI to turn up for what was ostensibly grunt work like this. DI Amanda Beck was coordinating the burgeoning investigation from back at the department, and the search team here was comprised mainly of rank and file. Pete figured he had more years on the clock than any of them, but tonight he was just part of the crowd. A child was missing, which meant that a child needed to be found. The officer was maybe too young to remember what had happened with Frank Carter two decades earlier, and to understand why it was no surprise to find Pete Willis out in circumstances like this.
“Watch yourself, sir. The ground’s a bit shaky here.”
“I’m fine.”
Young enough to discount him as some old man as well, apparently. Presumably he’d never seen Pete in the department’s gym, which he visited every morning before heading upstairs to work. Despite the disparity in their ages, Pete would have bet he could outlift the younger man on every machine. He was watching the ground, all right. Watching everything—including himself—was second nature to him.
“Okay, sir, well, we’re about to head down. Just coordinating.”
“I’m not in charge here.” Pete pointed his flashlight down the path, scanning the rough terrain. The beam of light only penetrated a short distance. The bed of the quarry below was nothing but an enormous black hole. “You report to DI Beck, not to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pete continued staring down, thinking about Neil Spencer. The most likely routes the boy would have taken had been identified. The streets had been searched. Most of his friends had already been contacted, all to no avail. And the waste ground was clear. If the boy’s disappearance really was the result of an accident or misadventure, then the quarry was the only remaining place that made sense for him to be found.
And yet the black world below felt entirely empty.
He couldn’t know for sure—not through reason. But his instinct was telling him that Neil Spencer wasn’t going to be found here.
That maybe he wasn’t going to be found at all.
Three
“Do you remember what I told you?” the little girl said.
He did, but right now Jake was doing his best to ignore her. All the other children in the 567 Club were outside playing in the sun. He could hear the shouting and the sound of the soccer ball skittering back and forth. Whereas he was sitting inside, working on his drawing. He would much rather have been left alone to finish it.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like playing with the little girl. Of course he did. Most of the time she was the only one who wanted to play with him, and normally he was more than happy to see her. But she wasn’t acting particularly playful this afternoon. In fact, she was being all serious, and he didn’t like that one bit.
“Do you remember?”
“I guess.”
“Say it, then.”
He sighed, put the pencil down, and looked at her. As always, she was wearing a blue-and-white-checked dress, and he could see the hash of a graze on her right knee that never seemed to heal. While the other girls here had neat hair, cut level at the shoulders or tied back in a tight ponytail, the little girl’s was spread out messily to one side and looked like she hadn’t brushed it in a long time.
From the expression on her face now, it was obvious she wasn’t going to give up, so he repeated what she’d told him.
“If you leave a door half open…”
It should have been surprising that he did remember it all, really, because he hadn’t made any special effort to make the words stick. But for some reason, they had. It was something about the rhythm. Sometimes he’d hear a song on the radio and it would end up going around and around in his brain for hours. Daddy had called it an earworm, which had made Jake imagine the sounds burrowing into the side of his head and squirming around in his mind.
When he was finished, the little girl nodded to herself, satisfied. Jake picked up his pencil again.
“What does it mean, anyway?” he said.
“It’s a warning.” She wrinkled her nose. “Well—kind of, anyway. Children used to say it when I was little.”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“It’s just good advice,” she said. “There are a lot of bad people in the world, after all. A lot of bad things. So it’s good to remember.”
Jake frowned, and then started drawing again. Bad people. There was a slightly older boy called Carl here at the 567 Club who Jake thought was bad. Last week, Carl had cornered him while he was building a LEGO fortress, and then stood too close, looming over him like a big shadow.
Why’s it always your dad who picks you up? Carl had demanded, even though he already knew the answer. Is it because your mum’s dead?
Jake hadn’t answered.
What did she look like when you found her?
Again, he hadn’t answered. Apart from in nightmares, he didn’t think about what it was like to find Mummy that day. It made his breath go funny and not work properly. But one thing he couldn’t escape was the knowledge that she wasn’t here anymore.
It reminded him of a time long gone when he had peered around the kitchen door and seen her chopping a big red pepper in half and pulling out the middle. Hey, gorgeous boy. That was what she’d said when she’d seen him. She always called him that. The feeling inside when he remembered she was dead had the kind of sound the pepper had, like something ripping with a pock and leaving a hollow.
I really like seeing you cry like a baby, Carl had declared, and then walked away like Jake didn’t even exist. It wasn’t nice to imagine the world was full of people like that, and Jake didn’t want to believe it. He drew circles on the sheet of paper now. Force fields around the little stick figures battling there.