The Whisper Man

He had been staring at them for a long time.

The day had taken a heavy toll on him. Seeing Carter always did, but this was much worse than usual. Despite the fact that Pete had waved away Amanda’s comment, the killer’s description of his dream about Tony Smith had gotten to Pete. Last night he had been determined to forget about Neil Spencer, but that wasn’t possible now. The cases were connected. He was involved.

But what use was he? An afternoon spent investigating visitors to friends of Carter’s inside had proved fruitless—so far, at least. There were still several to look at. The sad truth was that the bastard had more friends in prison than Pete had out of it.

So drink, then.

You’re worthless. You’re useless. Just do it.

The urge was stronger than ever, but he could survive this. After all, he had resisted the voice in the past. And yet the idea of returning the bottle unopened to the kitchen cabinet brought a sense of despair. It felt like there was an inevitability to him drinking.

He pressed his hand to his chin, slowly rubbing the skin around his mouth, and looked at the photograph of him and Sally.

Many years ago, in an effort to combat the self-hatred that plagued him, Sally had encouraged him to make a list: two columns, one for his positive attributes, one for negative, so that he could see for himself how well they balanced out. It hadn’t helped. The feeling of failure was too ingrained to be dispelled with a list. She had tried so hard to help him, but in the end it had always been the drink he’d turned to instead.

And he could see that in the photograph. Although they both looked happy, the signs were there. The way Sally’s eyes were wide open to the sun, her skin luminescent, whereas he seemed unsure of it, as though a part of him were reluctant to allow the light in. He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language with foreign grammar to him. And because he believed he was undeserving of such love, he had slowly drunk himself into a man who was. As with his memories of his father, distance had helped him understand all that. Battles often make more sense from the sky.

Too late.

It had been so many years now, but he wondered where Sally was and what she was doing. The only consolation was that he knew she must be happy somewhere, and that their separation had saved her from a life with him. The idea that she was out there, living the life she had always deserved, sustained him.

This is what you lose by drinking.

This is why it’s not worth it.

But, of course, the voice had an answer to that, just as it had an answer to everything. If he’d already lost the most amazing thing he’d ever have in his life, why put himself through this torment?

What did it matter?

He stared at the bottle. And then he felt his phone vibrating against his hip.

* * *

It always comes back to me for you, doesn’t it? It always ends where it starts.

Frank Carter’s words returned to him as he swept the beam of his flashlight over the waste ground, walking slowly and carefully into its pitch-black heart. The sense of sickness and foreboding in his chest was matched only by the feeling of failure. The certainty of it. Carter’s words had seemed casual and throwaway at the time, but Pete should have known better. Nothing Carter said or did was meaningless. He should have recognized the subtle deployment of a message, one deliberately intended to be understood only in hindsight.

He saw the tent and floodlights up ahead of him, with the silhouettes of officers moving cautiously around it. The sickness intensified, and he almost stumbled. One foot in front of the other. Two months earlier, he had been here searching for a little boy who had gone missing. Tonight, he was here because a little boy had been found.

He remembered how, that night in July, he’d left a dinner going cold on the dining room table. Tonight, the bottle was there. If he found what he was expecting to here, then he would be opening it when he got home.

He reached the canopy and clicked off his flashlight. The beam was redundant under the strength of the floodlights positioned around it. Seeing what was lying in the center, in fact, there was altogether too much light. He wasn’t ready for that yet. Glancing away, he spotted DCI Lyons standing at the side of the tent, staring back at him, the man’s expression blank. For a moment Pete imagined he saw a flash of contempt there—you should have stopped this—and he looked away again quickly, his gaze falling on the television with the pockmarked screen. It was a moment before he realized Amanda was standing beside him.

“This is where he was taken from,” Pete said.

“We can’t know that for sure.”

“I’m sure of it,” he said.

She looked away into the darkness. The brightness and intensity of activity in front of them only emphasized the blackness of the waste ground surrounding them.

“It always ends where it starts,” Amanda said. “That’s what Carter told you, right?”

“Yes. I should have picked up on that.”

“Or I should have. It’s not your fault.”

“Then it’s not yours either.”

“Maybe.” She smiled sadly. “But you look like you need to hear it more than I do.”

He could tell that wasn’t true. She looked pale and sick. Over the past couple of months, he’d noticed how efficient and capable she was, and he’d suspected she was ambitious too—that she’d imagined a case like this might help her career without fully understanding what else it might do. He felt a strange kind of kinship with her now. Finding the dead boys in Carter’s house had broken him for a time. He knew that Amanda had worked—and hoped—just as hard as he had twenty years ago, and that right now, whatever her expectations, she must be feeling like an open wound.

But it wasn’t a kinship that could be spoken of out loud. You walked the road alone. You got through it or you didn’t.

Amanda breathed out slowly.

“The fucker knew,” she said. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So the question then is how did he know?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got nothing on that level so far. But there’s still a long list of friends inside to look at.”

She hesitated.

“Do you want to see the body?”

You can have a drink when you get home.

I’ll let you.

“Yes,” he said.

Together, they moved under the canopy to where the boy was lying spread-eagled, close to the old television. His backpack was on the ground beside him. Pete did his best to take in the details as dispassionately as possible. The clothes, obviously: the blue tracksuit pants; the Minecraft T-shirt that had been pulled up over the boy’s face, turning the design on the front inside out.

“That was never made public,” he said.

Another connection to Carter.

“No real blood.” He peered around the body. “Not enough, anyway—not for those injuries. He was killed elsewhere.”

“Looks that way.”

“That’s a difference between our new man and Carter. Carter killed those children where I found them, and he kept them in his house. He never made any attempt to dump the remains.”

“Apart from Tony Smith.”

“That was down to circumstances. And also, this is public.” He gestured around. “Whoever did this, they wanted the body to be found. And not just anywhere either. Back where it started, just like Carter told me.”