The Whisper Man

I deleted the words I’d written yesterday and then typed three new sentences.

I miss you. I feel like I’m failing our son and I don’t know what to do.

I’m sorry.

I stared at the screen for a moment.

Enough.

Enough wallowing. As difficult as everything might be, it was my job to look after my son, and if my best wasn’t sufficient, then I’d have to get better.

I walked back to the front door. It had a lock and a chain, but that clearly wasn’t good enough. So I would install a bolt as well, too high for Jake to reach on his own. Motion detectors at the bottom of the stairs. It could all be done. None of this was insurmountable, whatever my self-doubt was telling me.

But there was something else I could do first, and so I turned my attention to the pile of mail on the stairs behind me. There had been another two letters for Dominic Barnett, both of them debt collection notices. I took them to my office, closed down Word on the laptop, and opened the Web browser instead.

Let’s see who you are, Dominic Barnett.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to discover about him online. A Facebook page, perhaps—something with a photo that would tell me whether he was the man who’d called around yesterday—or if not that, maybe a forwarding address of some kind that I could follow up in the real world. Anything that might help me to protect Jake and work out what the hell was going on with my house.

I found a photograph on the very first search. Dominic Barnett was not my mysterious visitor. He was younger, with a full head of jet-black hair. But the picture wasn’t on a social media site.

Instead, it was beside a news item at the top of the search page:

POLICE TREAT DEATH OF LOCAL MAN AS MURDER

The room receded around me. I stared at the words until they began to lose their meaning. The house had gone silent, and all I could hear was the thud of my heartbeat.

And then—

Creak.

I glanced at the ceiling. That noise again, the same as before, as though someone had taken a single step in Jake’s bedroom. My skin tingled as I remembered what had happened last night—the figure I’d imagined standing at the base of my bed, its hair splayed out like the little girl that Jake had drawn. The sensation of my foot being shaken.

Wake up, Tom.

But unlike the man at the door, that had been my imagination. I’d been half asleep, after all. It had been nothing more than a remnant of a nightmare of the past, shaped by fears from the present.

There was nothing in my house.

Determined to take my mind off the noise, I forced myself to click on the article.

POLICE TREAT DEATH OF LOCAL MAN AS MURDER

Police have revealed that they are treating the death of Dominic Barnett, whose body was found in woodland on Tuesday, as murder.

Barnett, 42, of Garholt Street, Featherbank, was discovered at the edge of a stream by children playing in Hollingbeck Wood. Today, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons revealed to the press that Barnett had died as a result of “significant” head injuries. A number of possible motives for the attack were being explored, but items recovered at the scene suggested that robbery was not among them.

“I would like to take this opportunity to reassure the public at large,” Lyons said. “Mr. Barnett was known to officers, and we believe this to be an isolated incident. However, we have increased patrols in the area, and we encourage anyone with any information to come forward immediately.”

I read it through again, the panic inside me intensifying. From the street name, there was no doubt that this was the right Dominic Barnett. He had lived in this house. Maybe sat exactly where I was right now, or slept in what had become Jake’s bedroom.

And he had been murdered in April this year.

Trying to keep calm, I clicked back and searched for more articles. The facts, such as they were, emerged piecemeal, and many of them from between the lines. Mr. Barnett was known to officers. Careful phrasing, but the implication appeared to be that he’d been involved with drugs in some way, and that this was presumed to be the motive for his murder. Hollingbeck Wood was south of Featherbank, on the other side of the river. Why Barnett had been there was unclear. A murder weapon was recovered a week later, and the reports tailed off shortly afterward. From what I could find online, his killer had never been caught.

Which meant that they were still out there.

The realization brought an awful crawling sensation with it. I didn’t know what to do. Call the police again? What I’d discovered didn’t seem to add much to what I’d already told them. I would call them, I decided, because I had to do something. But I needed more information first.

After some deliberation, and with my hands shaking, I searched through the paperwork I’d kept on the house purchase, found the address I needed, then picked up my keys. The extra security would have to wait, for the moment. There was one person who would be able to tell me more about Dominic Barnett, and I figured it was time to talk to her.

Twenty-five

It always ends where it starts, Amanda thought.

She was looking through the CCTV footage that had been retrieved from the area around the waste ground, and couldn’t help remembering that, two months ago, she’d been examining images of these exact same streets. Back then it had been in the hope of seeing someone taking Neil Spencer away. Now she was searching for someone returning the boy’s body. But so far the result was the same.

Nothing.

Early days, she told herself—but that thought was like ash in her head. It was actually far too fucking late, not least for Neil Spencer himself. Her mind kept flashing back to the sight of his body, even though dwelling on the horrors she’d seen last night—on her failure to find Neil in time—wasn’t going to help. What she needed to do instead was concentrate on the work. One foot in front of the other. One detail at a time. That was the way they’d eventually get the bastard who’d done those things to that little boy.

Another flash.

She shook her head, then looked toward the back of the room, where Pete Willis was working quietly at the desk he’d been allocated. After she’d had the chance to sit down herself, she’d found herself keeping a surreptitious eye on him. Occasionally he picked up the phone and made a call; the rest of the time his attention was totally focused on the photographs and paperwork before him. Frank Carter knew something, and Pete was working through the visits received by the man’s friends and associates in the prison, trying to figure out if one of them might be responsible for passing Carter information from the outside world. But it was Pete himself who fascinated her now.

How could he be so calm?

Except that she knew he was suffering too, below the surface. She remembered how he’d been yesterday, after visiting Frank Carter, and then on the waste ground last night. If he seemed detached now, it was only because he was distracting himself in the exact same way she was trying to. And if he was succeeding, it was simply because he’d had so much more practice.

Amanda wanted to ask him the secret.

Instead, she forced her attention back to the CCTV files, already knowing deep down that it would yield nothing, just like two months ago, when her team had slowly identified and eliminated the individuals caught on the village’s meager selection of cameras. It was frustrating work. The more you accomplished, the worse it felt like you were doing. But it was necessary.