The Whisper Man

Sixty-five

“I’m sorry. I’m going now.”

I wasn’t even sure who I was apologizing to. Saunders, I supposed, for arriving on his doorstep and accusing him, frightening him, without any real evidence. But the apology also went deeper than that. It was to Jake. To Rebecca. To myself, even. In some way or other, I’d let all of us down.

I looked back at Karen. She was still holding the phone to her ear, but she shook her head at me again.

“Look,” Saunders said carefully. “It’s okay. Like I said, I know you’re upset. And I can’t imagine what you must be going through right now. But…”

He trailed off.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m happy to talk to the police. And I hope you find him. Your son. I hope this is all some kind of mistake.”

“Thank you.”

I nodded, and I was about to head back to the car when I heard a noise coming from somewhere in the house behind me. I stopped. Then turned back to Saunders. It was a distant hammering sound, and someone was shouting, but so indistinct that it was barely audible.

Saunders had heard it too. The expression on his face had changed while my back had been turned, and he no longer looked quite so ill or soft or harmless. It was as though the humanity had only ever been a disguise, and now it had fallen away and I was facing something entirely alien.

He closed the door quickly.

“Jake!”

I got up the step just in time to wedge my leg in. The door slammed agonizingly on the sides of my knee, but I ignored the pain and pushed against it, bracing one hand inside the jamb, and then my back against the wood, heaving as hard as I could. Saunders was grunting on the other side, pressing back against me. But I was bigger than him, and the sudden burst of adrenaline was adding to my weight. Jake was somewhere inside this house, and if I didn’t reach him, then Saunders was going to kill him. He couldn’t escape from this. He wouldn’t try. But if he managed to keep me out, he could still hurt my son.

“Jake!”

Suddenly the resistance was gone.

Saunders must have stepped away. The door shot open, and I barreled into the living room, half barging into him, half falling. He hit me half-heartedly in the side as I collided with him, and then he tumbled backward and we landed hard, me on top of him, his head tilted to one side against the floorboards, my right forearm across his jaw. My left hand was pinning his right arm to the floor at the elbow. His body shook upward, trying to fight me off, but I was heavier than him and I was suddenly sure that I could hold him.

But then he lurched up against me again and I felt his hand at my side, where he’d hit me so ineffectively, and I registered the pain there. Not overwhelming in itself, but sickening and awful. Deep, internal, wrong. I glanced down and saw the ball of his fist still pressed against me, and then the blood that was beginning to soak into the white robe he was wearing.

The knife he was holding was somewhere inside me, and when he flopped up against me, screaming in rage, my whole world shrieked with him.

Jake!

I wasn’t sure if I shouted it or simply thought it. Saunders was baring his teeth inches from my face, spitting and trying to bite me. I pressed down on him, my vision beginning to star at the edges. And then, when he lurched up again, the blade moved with him, and those stars exploded. If I let him up now, he would kill me and then kill Jake, so I pressed down harder on him, and the knife moved again, and that explosion of stars blurred into white light that gradually filled my vision. But I couldn’t let him up. I would hold him down as he killed me.

Jake.

The hammering and shouting was still coming from somewhere above me. I could make out the words now. My son was up there, and he was calling for me.

Jake.

The stars disappeared as the light overwhelmed me.

I’m sorry.

Sixty-six

Adrenaline had a way of waking you up.

Francis Carter, Amanda thought.

Or David Parker, or whatever he’s calling himself.

Back at the department, she’d worked her way through the school’s employees, looking for a male in his late twenties. There were four men working there, including the groundskeeper, and only one of them was an approximate age match. George Saunders was twenty-four years old, while Francis Carter would be twenty-seven by now, but when it came to buying a fake identity, the age only needed to be approximate.

Saunders had been spoken to after Neil Spencer went missing, and the interview hadn’t sounded any alarm bells. She had read the transcript. Saunders had been erudite and convincing. He had no alibi for the exact period of the abduction, but that wasn’t so surprising. No record. No warning signs at all. Nothing to pursue.

Except that a new search now revealed that the real George Saunders had died three years earlier.

Reality felt heightened as Amanda drove into the street. She parked at the top, outside a property that appeared to be derelict, a little way back from the target house, and then a van pulled in behind her, with two more approaching from the opposite direction and coming to a stop a short distance down the hill. All of them kept away from the eyeline of the house, so that if Saunders were to look out of his window right now, he would see nothing. That was important. The last thing they needed was for him to barricade himself in and for them to end up dealing with a hostage situation.

Not that it would come to that, she thought. If he was cornered, Saunders would simply kill Jake Kennedy.

Her phone had been buzzing the whole way. She took it out now. Four missed calls. The first three were all from an unknown number. The fourth was from the hospital. Which meant there was news about Pete.

Something fell away inside her. She remembered how determined she had been last night—that she would not lose Pete, that she would find Jake Kennedy. How stupid to think like that. But she put those feelings away for now, gathering herself together, because there was only one of those things she could do something about right now.

I’m not losing another child on my watch.

She got out of the car.

The street was silent. It felt almost wholly deserted here, an area of the city that was slowly dying in its sleep. She heard the side of the van behind her rumbling open, and then the scuff of shoes on the driveway. Down the hill, officers were congregating. The plan had been that she would go first, ostensibly alone, and try to get Francis to open the door and allow her inside the property. At that point, there would be a flurry of activity, and he would be taken down in seconds.

But then Amanda noticed a car parked outside, its driver’s door open. And as she walked down the street, she realized the door to George Saunders’s house was ajar as well, and she began running.

“Everybody move.”

Through the front garden, up the path, and then through the open door into what turned out to be a living room. There was a mess of bodies on the floor, blood everywhere, but it wasn’t immediately obvious who was hurt and who wasn’t.

“Help me, please.”

That was Karen Shaw. Amanda moved over. Shaw was kneeling on one of Francis Carter’s arms, trying to hold it still. Between them, Tom Kennedy was pressing onto Francis Carter. Carter himself was pinned in place, eyes shut tight, concentrating on moving even though the weight of the two of them together was enough to keep him in place.