The Shadows

But not Charlie’s dream diary.

I frowned.

Where was that?

It took me a moment to realize it must still be upstairs in my mother’s room. When I had seen Carl outside earlier, I had put it down on the bed before following him to the playground. I went back inside again and climbed the stairs slowly. The upstairs hallway was almost pitch-black, as though the house were gathering the night inside itself, and when I walked into my mother’s room, it was full of shapes and shadows. But the diary was obvious: a stark black rectangle on the stripped mattress.

I picked it up.

Am I doing the right thing, Mom?

What my mother would have wanted me to do had been foremost on my mind all afternoon. She had decided to steal the diary from Carl for a reason. After so many years of hoarding guilt, perhaps a part of her had wanted the truth to come out. But equally, at that point her mind had been slipping. She had kept Carl’s secret all this time. Because they had been friends, if not more.

Am I doing the right thing?

I wasn’t sure what she would say if she were here now, and the dark house offered no more answers than the night sky outside. Maybe there weren’t any, I thought. Perhaps life was just a matter of doing what you thought was best at the time and then living with the consequences as best you could afterward. What would my mother have said if she were here now? Probably that I was a grown man. That she’d raised me and protected me as best she could. And that she was gone now, which meant I had to decide what to do for myself.

A noise downstairs.

I stood still for a moment.

Listening.

Nothing more. It was just the house stretching out after the heat of the day, preparing to sleep. Maybe on some level it even knew what I was about to do, and was readying itself to be locked up and forgotten for a time.

I took the diary out into the upstairs hallway.

Then hesitated, looking down the stairs.

It was very dark down there now, and the house felt even more full than it had before. My spine started tingling. Since returning to Gritten, I had never felt entirely alone in here, but that had been because every corner and surface contained memories. Right now I was feeling a different kind of presence.

Someone is downstairs.

The thought came from nowhere.

There was no reason to believe it was true. Everything that had happened here had been down to Carl trying to frighten me away. And yet the silence was ringing in my ears, and some primal part of me was on edge.

I stared down at the front door. I’d put the chain on when I arrived. The back door was unlocked, though.

Could the sound I’d heard have been that door clicking open?

You need to get outside.

Once the thought came, it was suddenly urgent.

I went down the stairs, moving quickly but trying to stay as quiet as I could, wincing at every quiet creak. At the bottom, I glanced behind me along the dark corridor. The kitchen was dark and the back door was closed. There was nobody there.

But as I turned back and reached for the chain to unlock the front door, the ghost of a man stepped out from the shadows in the living room beside me. He moved so fast I hardly had time to register him before pain exploded in my lungs, the world spun about me, and the darkness in the hallway filled with stars.

THIRTY-EIGHT

“He’s lying about something,” Dwyer said.

Amanda stared down at the monitor on the desk and nodded. The screen was showing footage from the camera in the interview room. Carl Dawson was sitting at the desk there, his elbows on the surface and his face obscured by his hands. What was left of his hair was pushed up, splayed by his fingers. It had been ten minutes since they’d left him alone for a break, and as far as she could tell from watching the monitor he hadn’t moved at all.

He’s lying about something.

He was lying about a lot of things, she thought.

For one, Dawson claimed to have been back in Gritten for several days. To a certain degree, that fit with activity they’d found on his credit card, but it didn’t make sense in other ways. Why was he here? He’d come to see Daphne Adams, apparently, but that didn’t add up. He’d returned to Gritten on the day before her accident, and yet when they checked with the hospice, there was no record of him ever visiting her afterward. So what the hell had he been doing?

“He had no answer when it came to Daphne,” she said.

“Yeah, he clammed up. Because he’s lying.”

“Is he, though?”

“Of course he is,” Dwyer said. “If he came to see her, he failed pretty miserably. Let’s be honest, it’s not like she was doing a lot of running around.”

“No.”

Dwyer was right, and yet a flicker of doubt remained in her mind. For some reason, Dawson wasn’t telling them everything, but she thought there was a grain of truth in what he had said. It was like they had one picture and he had another, and some parts matched while others didn’t. Perhaps he really had come to see Daphne Adams, but there was more to it than that, and despite the hours of pressure they had put him under, he wouldn’t explain what it was.

There was something they were missing.

Dwyer said, “Don’t you like him for the killings?”

“I’m not sure.” She looked at him. “You still do, I can tell.”

He shrugged. “We can link him to all three victims. We know he was here in Gritten at the time Billy Roberts was murdered. And it’s not that long a drive back home. So, yeah, I like him quite a lot.”

“Motive, though?”

“Years of domestic abuse on file. Perhaps he finally snapped.”

Amanda looked at the screen.

Dawson still hadn’t moved.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Here’s what I think,” Dwyer said. “Dawson comes back here for some reason—let’s say it’s possible it really was to see Daphne Adams. She’s dying, he’s upset. He’s had a miserable fucking life, and he’s full of resentment. And there are all these bad memories in Gritten. So he stews for a while, then ends up tracking down Billy Roberts and it all explodes. Afterward, he goes home and loses his shit with his family.”

“Then comes back to have a chat with Paul Adams?”

Dwyer shrugged again. “If you believe that’s what they were really doing.”

Amanda had no answer to that. Paul had clearly been wrestling with something back at the playground. When she had first met him, she had been confident he was telling her the truth, which made it that much easier to notice the difference when he wasn’t. But she also had a feeling that whatever he wasn’t prepared to tell her, it was something separate from the murders. If he had known anything about the killings, she was sure he would have told her. Appearances could be deceptive, of course, but he struck her as too decent for that.

“I can’t see them being in it together,” she said.

“They’re in something together.”

“Paul had no motive to hurt Eileen and James.”

“He did for Billy Roberts, though.”

“Sure. But when I spoke to him, I really don’t think he even knew Billy was out of prison. Honestly, I think Paul has done his best to forget what happened here in Gritten. I read people well, and he was genuinely shocked when I told him.” She gestured at the monitor. “And, of course, that’s the other thing.”