The Whisper Man

Amanda shrugged. Everybody knew the case. That wasn’t the same thing as knowing it.

“Not everything,” she said.

Lyons opened his eyes and sat there staring at the ceiling.

“Then we’re going to need some help,” he said.

Amanda’s heart sank a little at that. For one thing, she’d worked herself to the brink these last two days, and she didn’t relish the thought of having to share any spoils of the case now. For another, there was also the specter that was being acknowledged here. Frank Carter. The Whisper Man. Assuaging fear among the public was going to get harder now. Impossible, even, if this new detail got out.

They would have to be very careful indeed.

“Yes, sir.”

Lyons picked up the phone on his desk.

Which was how, as the time of Neil Spencer’s disappearance ticked close to the end of that crucial forty-eight-hour period, DI Pete Willis became involved in the investigation again.

Seven

Not that he wanted to.

Pete’s philosophy was a relatively simple one, ingrained in him over so many years that it was now more implicit than consciously considered: a blueprint on which his life was built. The devil finds work for idle hands.

Bad thoughts find empty heads.

So he kept his hands busy and his mind occupied. Discipline and structure were important to him, and after the nonresult at the waste ground he had spent most of the last forty-odd hours doing exactly what he always did.

Early that morning had found him in the gym in the basement of the department: overhead presses; side laterals; rear deltoids. He worked on a different body part each day. It wasn’t a matter of vanity or health, more that he found the solitude and concentration involved in physical exercise a comforting distraction. After three-quarters of an hour, he was often surprised to discover his mind had been mercifully empty for most of it.

That morning, he had managed not to think about Neil Spencer at all.

He had then spent most of the day upstairs in his office, where the multitude of minor cases piled on his desk provided ample distraction. As a younger, more impetuous man, he would probably have yearned for greater excitement than the trivial crimes he was dealing with, but today he appreciated the calm to be found in boring minutiae. Excitement was not only rare in police work, it was a bad thing; usually it meant someone’s life had been damaged. Wishing for excitement was wishing for hurt, and Pete had had more than enough of both. There was comfort to be had in the car thefts, the shoplifting, the court appearances for endless banal offenses. They spoke of a city ticking quietly along, never quite perfect, perhaps, but never falling apart either.

But while he’d had no direct involvement with the Neil Spencer investigation, it was impossible to avoid it entirely. A small boy, when missing, cast a large shadow, and it had become the most prominent case in the department. He heard officers talking about it in the corridors: where Neil might be; what might have happened to him; and the parents, of course. The latter was quieter speculation, and had been officially discouraged, but he kept hearing it anyway—the irresponsibility of letting a little boy walk home alone. He remembered similar talk from twenty years ago and walked on quickly, no more disposed to entertain it now than he had been back then.

Just before five o’clock that evening, he was sitting quietly at his desk, already considering what he would do that evening. He lived alone and socialized rarely, so his habit was to work his way through cookbooks, often making elaborate meals before eating them alone at the dinner table. Afterward, he would watch a film or read a book.

And the ritual, of course.

The bottle and the photograph.

And yet, as he gathered his things together, almost ready to leave, he realized his pulse was racing. Last night, the nightmare had returned for the first time in months: Jane Carter whispering, You have to hurry, down the phone to him. Despite himself, it had been impossible to escape from Neil Spencer completely, which meant the darker thoughts and memories were a little closer to the surface than he preferred to keep them. And so, as he pulled his jacket on, he was not entirely surprised when the phone on his desk began ringing. There was no way of knowing for sure, and yet somehow he already did.

His hand trembled a little as he picked it up.

“Pete,” DCI Colin Lyons said down the line. “Glad to catch you. I was hoping I could have a quick word upstairs.”

* * *

His suspicions were confirmed as soon as he entered Lyons’s office. The DCI had revealed nothing in the call, but DI Amanda Beck was there too, sitting with her back to him on the side of the desk nearest the door. There was only one investigation she was working on right now, which meant there was only one reason his presence could have been requested.

He tried to keep calm as he closed the door. Tried—especially—not to think about the scene that had awaited him twenty years ago when he had finally gained access to the extension Frank Carter had built on his house.

Lyons smiled broadly. The DCI had a smile that could power a room.

“Good of you to come up. Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” Pete sat down beside Beck. “Amanda.”

Beck nodded a greeting, and gave him the flicker of a smile—an exceedingly low-wattage equivalent of Lyons’s that barely even powered her face. Pete didn’t know her well. She was twenty years younger than him, but right now looked much older than her years. Blatantly exhausted—and nervous too, he thought. Maybe she was worried her authority was being undermined and that the case was about to be taken away from her; he’d heard she was ambitious. He could have set her mind at rest on that score. While Lyons was probably ruthless enough to remove her from the investigation if it suited him, he was never going to pass it on to Pete instead.

They were relative contemporaries, he and Lyons, but despite the disparity in their ranks Pete had actually joined the department a year earlier, and in many ways his career had been the more decorated. In a different world, the two of them would have been sitting on opposite sides of the desk right now, and perhaps even should have been. But Lyons had always been ambitious, whereas Pete, aware that promotion brought conflict and drama of its own, had little desire to climb the professional ladder any further than he already had. That had always rankled with Lyons, Pete knew. When you go after something as hard as he had, there were few things as irritating as someone who could have had it more easily but never seemed to want it.

“You’re aware of the investigation into the disappearance of Neil Spencer?” Lyons said.

“Yes. I was involved in the search of the waste ground on the first evening.”

Lyons stared at him for a moment, perhaps evaluating that as a criticism.

“I live close to there,” Pete added.

But then, Lyons lived in the area as well, and he hadn’t been out there trawling the streets that night. A second later, though, the DCI nodded to himself. He knew that Pete had his own reasons to be interested in missing children.

“You’re aware of developments since?”

I’m aware of the lack of them. But that would come across as a rebuke to Beck, and she didn’t deserve that. From the little he’d seen, she’d handled the investigation well and done everything she could. More to the point, she’d been the one to direct her officers not to criticize the parents, and he liked that.