The Whisper Man

You can drink later. As much as you want.

He accepted that he would. Whatever works—it was that simple. In a war, you used any weapon at hand to win an individual battle, and then you regrouped and fought the next one. And the next. And all the ones that followed.

Whatever works.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Collins insisted.

“Shut up.”

Pete clicked on the tablet. There was no avoiding this: he needed to figure out what he had missed all those years ago and why, and the house on Garholt Street where Tony’s remains had been found was the place to start.

He scanned through the details. Until recently the house had been owned by a woman named Anne Shearing. She had inherited it from her parents, but hadn’t lived in it for decades, instead renting it out over the years to numerous individuals.

There was a long list of those on record, but Pete presumed he could discount occupants from before 1997, when Frank Carter had committed his murders. The tenant at that time had been a man named Julian Simpson. Simpson had been renting the property for four years beforehand, and his residency continued until 2008. Opening a new tab on-screen, Pete ran a search and discovered Simpson had died of cancer that year, at the age of seventy. He clicked back. The house’s next tenant was a man named Dominic Barnett, who had occupied the house until earlier this year.

Dominic Barnett.

Pete frowned. The name rang a bell. He ran another search, and the details came back to him, even though he hadn’t worked the case himself. Barnett had been a minor underworld figure involved in drugs and extortion, known to police but considered small fry in the grand scheme of things. There were no convictions on file for the last ten years—but, of course, that didn’t mean he’d gone straight, and nobody had been remotely surprised when he turned up dead. The murder weapon—a hammer—had been recovered with partial prints, but there had been no match on the database. Subsequent inquiries had failed to turn up a credible suspect. But the public, at least, had been reassured. Despite the lack of an arrest, the police believed it to be an isolated, targeted incident, and anybody reading between the lines of that could probably have intuited what lay behind it.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

To the extent that Pete had paid attention, he had assumed the same. But he wondered about it now. Drugs remained the most likely motive for the murder, but Barnett had lived in a house where human remains had been kept hidden, and it seemed impossible that he would have been unaware of it. Did that suggest a different motive?

He looked up and watched Norman Collins in the rearview mirror for a moment. Collins was staring blankly out of the window at his house.

There were three men to think about: Julian Simpson and Dominic Barnett, who had both lived at the property, and Norman, who seemed to be aware of what had been stored there. What was the connection between the three? What had happened twenty years ago, and in the time since?

Pete loaded up a map of Featherbank.

Garholt Street was on a natural route between the scene of Tony Smith’s abduction and the direction in which Frank Carter had fled. At the time, forensic evidence had established Tony had been in the killer’s vehicle—but if Carter had somehow been tipped off that his house was being searched, he could have dropped the boy’s body there before going on the run. Julian Simpson had been living there at the time.

Pete didn’t need to consult the case file to know that Simpson hadn’t come up in the investigation at the time. All of Carter’s known acquaintances had been investigated carefully. Simpson’s name had not been among them.

And yet.

Simpson would have been around fifty at the time of the abductions, and that age would match the conflicting description given in one of the witness statements. Perhaps he had been Carter’s accomplice. If so, there had to have been some connection between the two men, however oblique, which Pete hadn’t discovered.

The sense of failure hit hard.

You should have found him sooner.

Whatever he had or hadn’t done, it would still be his fault. He knew he would find a way to twist it around so that the blame rested with him. But the feeling remained.

Worthless.

Useless.

You can drink later.

His phone rang—Amanda again.

“Willis,” he answered. “I’m still at Collins’s house. I’m on my way back in a minute.”

“How’s the search going?”

“It’s going.”

He glanced at the house, knowing that was where his focus needed to be. The priority right now was nailing Collins for his involvement, not working out what Pete himself had and hadn’t missed twenty years ago. That dissection could come later.

“Okay,” Amanda told him. “I’ve got the home owner and his son here, and I need someone to help me with them. Sort out accommodation for them for the night. That kind of thing.”

Pete frowned to himself. That was grunt work at best, and he knew the implications: Amanda would be the one handling the interview with Norman Collins. But perhaps that was better. Cleaner. They didn’t want to risk his past history with the man coloring the investigation now. The answers to his questions would come in time, but it didn’t need to be him who asked them. He started the engine.

“On my way.”

“The guy’s called Tom Kennedy,” Amanda said. “His son is Jake. Book Collins in first, and then they’re in one of the comfort suites.”

For a moment Pete didn’t respond. His free hand was on the steering wheel. He stared at it, and noticed it begin to tremble.

“Pete?” Amanda said. “You there?”

“Yes. I’m on my way.”

He hung up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. But rather than driving away, he turned the engine off and picked up the tablet again. He’d been too lost in the past to think about the present. He hadn’t even considered the man who owned the property now.

Failing, as always.

He clicked through to the report, wondering if he’d misheard what Amanda had said. But there it was.

Tom Kennedy.

Finally. A name he recognized.

Thirty-one

“Did they find him, Daddy?” Jake said.

I had been pacing back and forth across the room in the police station, waiting for DI Amanda Beck to bring the statement for me to sign, but my son’s words brought me to a halt.

He was sitting on a chair that was far too big for him, kicking his legs slightly, an untouched orange juice box on the table beside him. The latter had been a gift from DS Dyson after we’d arrived. Allegedly there was coffee on its way for me, but we’d been here for twenty minutes now, and it showed about as much sign of imminent arrival as Beck did. Jake and I hadn’t really spoken the whole time. I didn’t know what to say to him right now, and my pacing had been as much about filling the silence in the room as the space.

Did they find him, Daddy?

I walked over now and knelt down in front of him.

“Yes. They found the man who came to our house.”

“That’s not who I meant.”

The boy in the floor.

I stared at my son for a second, but he looked back at me without any apparent fear or concern. It was astounding that he could take everything that was happening in stride, as though it were all perfectly normal—as though we were talking about a boy who had been playing hide-and-seek, not human remains that had been in the floor of our garage for God knew how many years, and which it was impossible for him to have known about.