The Whisper Man

And was it wrong that I quite liked it?

Thirty-seven

“Are you finished with that, love?”

The man shook his head, momentarily unsure where he was and what was being asked of him. Then he saw the waitress smiling at him, looked down at the table, and realized he’d finished his coffee.

“Yes.” He leaned back. “Sorry, I was miles away, there.”

She smiled again as she picked up his empty cup.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Maybe in a minute.”

He had no intention of ordering anything, but even though the shop was only half full it made sense to be polite and observe social mores. He didn’t want to be remembered as someone who overstayed his welcome. He didn’t want to be remembered at all.

And he was good at that—although it was true that people made it easy for him. So many of them seemed to be lost in the noise of existence, all but sleepwalking through their lives, oblivious to the world around them. Hypnotized by their cell phones. Ignoring the others they passed. People were self-centered and uncaring, and they paid little attention to things on their periphery. If you didn’t stand out, you vanished as quickly from their minds as a dream.

He stared at Tom Kennedy, sitting two tables away.

Kennedy had his back to him, and now that the woman had left, the man could stare if he wanted. When she had been there, facing him, he had sipped his coffee and pretended to study his phone, making himself an unremarkable part of the shop’s scenery. But listening carefully the whole time, of course. Conversations mingled around you if you let them, becoming an impenetrable background hum, but if you focused you could pull one out and follow it easily. All it required was concentration, like delicately tuning a radio until the static disappeared and you were left with a clear signal.

How right he had been, he thought now.

We sometimes find it hard to talk to each other.

He’s not the easiest of kids.

Well, the man was sure that Jake would flourish under his care. He would give the boy the home he deserved and provide the love and care he needed. And then he himself would feel healed and whole as well.

And if not …

Time had a way of dulling sensations. He found it much easier now to think about what he had done to Neil Spencer. The shivers he’d experienced afterward had long since faded, and he could handle the memories more dispassionately now—in fact, there was almost pleasure in doing so. Because that boy had deserved it, hadn’t he? And if there had been moments of tranquility and happiness in the two months beforehand, when everything had seemed good, there had also been a sense of calm and rightness in the aftermath of that final day that had been comforting in its own way too.

But no.

It wouldn’t come to that.

Tom Kennedy stood up and made his way to the door. The man stared down at his phone, idly tapping the screen as Kennedy passed him.

The man sat for a few seconds more, thinking about the other things he’d heard. Who was Norman Collins? The name was completely unfamiliar to him. One of the others, he supposed, but he had no idea why this Collins had been arrested now. It suited him well enough, though. The police would be distracted. Kennedy might be less on edge. Which meant that he just needed to pick his moment, and everything would be well.

He stood up.

The greater the noise, the easier it was to slip silently in without being noticed.

Thirty-eight

I’ve been looking for you for so long.

Pete got out of the car and made his way into the hospital, then took the elevator down to the basement, where the city’s pathology unit was based. One wall of the elevator was mirrored, though, and he looked fine. Calm, even. The pieces within might be broken, but from the outside he was like a carefully wrapped present that would only rattle if you shook it.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling this apprehensive.

He’d been searching for Tony Smith for twenty years. On some level, he wondered if the boy’s absence had even sustained him—if it had given him a sense of purpose and a reason to continue, albeit one that had always been kept occluded in the background of his thoughts. Regardless, however much he had tried not to think about it, the case had never been closed for him.

So he had to be present when it was.

He hated the autopsy suites in here, and always had. The smell of antiseptic never quite masked the underlying stench, and the harsh light and polished metallic surfaces only served to emphasize the mottled bodies on display. Death was tangible here—laid out and made prosaic. These rooms were about weights and angles, and clipboards scribbled with spare details of chemistry and biology, all of it so cold and clinical. Every time he visited, he realized that the most important parts of a human life—the emotions; the character; the experiences—were conspicuous by their absence.

The pathologist, Chris Dale, walked Pete over to a gurney at the far side of the suite. As he followed the man, Pete felt light and faint, and had to fight the urge to turn around.

“Here’s our boy.”

Dale spoke quietly. He was famed throughout the department for his brusque and dismissive manner when it came to dealing with the police, saving his respect for those he always referred to as his patients. Our boy. The way Dale said it made it clear that the remains were now under his protection. That the indignities they’d been subjected to were over, and that they would be looked after now.

Our boy, Pete thought.

The bones were laid out in the shape of a small child, but age had separated many of them, and not a scrap of flesh remained. Pete had seen a number of skeletons over the years. In some ways, they were easier to look at than more recently deceased victims, who looked like human beings but, in their eerie stillness, somehow not. A skeleton was so far removed from everyday experience that it could be viewed more dispassionately. And yet the reality always hit home. The fact that people die, and after a short amount of time only objects remain, the bones little more than a scattering of possessions abandoned where they fall.

“We’ve yet to do a full postmortem,” Dale said. “That’s scheduled for later. What I can tell you in the meantime is that these are the remains of a male child who was around six years of age at the time of his death. I can’t even guess at the cause of death for the moment, and we might never know, but he’s been deceased for some time.”

“Twenty years?”

“Possibly.” Dale hesitated, knowing what Pete was asking, then gestured at a second gurney beside them. “We also have these additional items, which were recovered from the scene. There’s the box itself, of course—the remains were brought here in it to help preserve them. The clothes were underneath the bones.”

Pete took a step closer. The clothes were old and matted with cobwebs, but Dale and his team had extracted them carefully, and they rested now in the same intact, neatly folded pile they had been stored in. He didn’t need to move them to see what they were.

Blue jogging pants. Little black polo shirt.

He turned and looked again at the remains. The case had exerted such a hold on him all these years, and yet this was the first time he’d ever seen Tony Smith in real life. Until now there had only ever been the photographs of a little boy frozen forever in time. With just the slightest of differences in circumstances, Pete might have passed a twenty-six-year-old Tony Smith on the street today without ever having heard the name. He stared down at the small, broken frame that had once supported and held a human being, along with all the inherent possibilities of what it might become.