The Whisper Man

Looking at the house again now on my screen, I thought that, in a strange way, it suited Jake and me. That, like us, it was an outsider that found it hard to fit in. That we would go together well. Even the name of the village was warm and comforting.

Featherbank.

It sounded like a place where we would be safe.

Six

Like Pete Willis, DI Amanda Beck knew very well the importance of the first forty-eight hours. She had her team spend the next twelve of them continuing to search the various routes that Neil Spencer might have taken, along with interviewing family members and beginning to build a profile of the missing boy. Photos were acquired. Histories were probed. And then at nine the next morning, a press conference was held and a description of Neil and his clothing was released to the media.

Neil’s parents sat mutely on either side of Amanda while she made the requisite appeals and encouraged witnesses to come forward. Cameras flashed intermittently across the three of them. Amanda did her best to ignore them, but she could sense Neil’s parents registering each one, flinching a little as though the photographers were jabbing at them.

“We encourage people to check any garages and sheds on their property,” she told the room.

It was all kept as calm and low-key as possible. Her main aim right now, besides locating Neil Spencer, was to assuage people’s fears, and while she could hardly claim outright that Neil had absolutely not been abducted, she could at least make it clear where the focus of the investigation rested for the moment.

“The most likely explanation is that Neil has had an accident of some kind,” she said. “While he has been missing for fifteen hours, we are holding out every hope of finding him, safe and well and soon.”

Inside herself, she was not so confident. One of her first actions back in the operations room afterward was to arrange for the handful of known sex offenders in the area to be brought in quietly, and then questioned more loudly.

Over the course of the day, the search area was expanded. Sections of the canal—an unlikely proposition—began to be dredged, and extensive door-to-door inquiries were carried out. CCTV footage was analyzed. She studied the latter herself; it showed the beginning of Neil’s journey, but lost him before he reached the waste ground and failed to pick him up again afterward. Somewhere between those two points, the little boy had vanished.

Exhausted, she tried to rub some life into her face.

Officers went over the waste ground again, this time in full daylight, and the exploration of the quarry continued.

There was still no sign of Neil Spencer.

The boy did make an appearance of sorts, though, and increasingly so as the day wore on: photographs were circulated on the news, particularly the one of Neil smiling shyly in a football jersey—one of the few pictures his parents had of him looking happy. Reports showed simple maps with key locations marked with red circles and possible routes dotted in yellow.

Video of the press conference was also aired. Amanda watched it on her tablet in bed at home that evening, and thought that Neil’s parents seemed even more beaten down on camera than it had felt at the time. They looked guilty. And if they weren’t feeling guilty yet, then they would soon; they would be made to. At the briefing that afternoon, she had cautioned her officers, many of whom were parents themselves, that while the circumstances around Neil Spencer’s disappearance might be controversial, his mother and father were to be treated with sensitivity. It went without saying that they were hardly model parents, but Amanda didn’t suspect them of any direct involvement. The father had some minor offenses on his record—drunk-and-disorderlies; fighting—but nothing that raised any warning flags. The mother’s record was clean. More to the point, they both appeared genuinely devastated by events. There hadn’t even been any recrimination between the two of them, as hard as that was to imagine. They both just wanted their boy home.

She slept poorly and was back at the department early. With over thirty-six hours behind her, only a bare handful of them spent resting, she sat in her office, thinking about the five categories of child disappearance, forced increasingly toward an uncomfortable conclusion. She did not believe that Neil had been abandoned or disposed of by his parents. If he had suffered an accident on his route, then he would have been found by now. Abduction by a different family member seemed unlikely. And while it was not impossible he’d run away, she refused to believe that she’d been outwitted for this long by a six-year-old boy with no money or supplies.

She gazed at the photo of Neil Spencer on the wall, considering the nightmare scenario.

Nonfamily abduction.

The public at large might generally have thought of it as stranger abduction, but precision was important. Children in this category were rarely abducted by people who were completely unknown to them. More often, they were befriended—groomed by people on the periphery of their lives. So the focus of the investigation that day shifted, with the strands that had formed a more subtle part of the last day and a half now brought front and center. Friends of the family. Families of friends. An even closer look at known offenders. Internet activity in the home. Amanda loaded up the available CCTV footage again and began examining it from different mental angles, concentrating less on the prey now than on potential predators in the background.

Neil’s parents were interviewed again.

“Did your son express any concerns about unwanted attention from other adults?” Amanda said. “Did he mention being approached by anyone?”

“No.” Neil’s father looked affronted by the very idea of it. “I’d have fucking well done something about that, wouldn’t I? And for fuck’s sake, don’t you think I’d also have mentioned it before now?”

Amanda smiled politely.

“No,” Neil’s mother said.

But less firmly.

When Amanda pressed her, the woman said that actually she did recall something. It hadn’t occurred to her to report it at the time, or even when Neil went missing, because it had been so strange, so stupid—and anyway, she’d been half asleep at the time, so she hardly even remembered it.

Amanda smiled politely again, while also resisting the urge to rip the woman’s head off.

Ten minutes later she was in the upstairs office of her superior, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons. Whether from the tiredness or the nerves, she was having to stop her leg from jittering slightly. Lyons himself just looked pained. He had been closely involved in the investigation and understood as well as Amanda did the situation they were now likely to be facing. Even so, this recent development was not one he’d wanted to hear.

“This doesn’t go to the media,” Lyons said quietly.

“No, sir.”

“And the mother?” He looked at her suddenly, alarmed. “You’ve told her not to mention this in public? At all?”

“Yes, sir.”

Of fucking course, sir. Although Amanda doubted it had been necessary. The tone of some of the press was already judgmental and accusatory, and Neil’s parents had enough culpability to deal with already without deliberately copping to more.

“Good,” Lyons said. “Because Jesus Christ.”

“I know, sir.”

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathing deeply. “Do you know the case?”