of Frank Carter’s murders. Perhaps it was the kind of thing that would have caught the attention of a girl that age.
But that didn’t explain where she had heard it.
I put the note to one side.
There were a number of photographs in the Packet, all of them so old that they must have been taken with a physical camera. I remembered doing the same as a child on holidays, and my mother and I had also done what Rebecca and her parents apparently had with these, writing a date and description on the back.
August 2, 1983—two days old.
I turned the photograph over, and saw a woman sitting on a couch, cradling a baby against her. Rebecca’s mother. I had known her briefly: an enthusiastic woman, with a sense of adventure she’d passed on to her daughter. Here, she looked desperately tired but excited. The baby was asleep, swaddled in a yellow woolen blanket. From the date, I knew it had to be Rebecca, even if it was impossible to believe she had ever been so small.
April 21, 1987—playing Poohsticks.
This one showed Rebecca’s father standing on a slatted wooden bridge with lush green foliage in the background, holding her up so she could dangle a stick over the water rushing past below. She was facing the camera, grinning. Not yet four years old, but I could already see the woman she would become. Even back then she had the smile that I could still picture so clearly in my head.
September 3, 1988—first day at school.
Here was Rebecca as a little girl, dressed in a blue jumper and pleated gray skirt, standing proudly in front of …
Rose Terrace Primary School.
I stared at the photograph for several seconds.
The school was familiar by now, and the photograph was certainly of Rebecca—but those two things did not go together. And yet there was no mistaking either of them. Those were the same railings, the same steps. The word GIRLS was carved into the black stone above the door. And that was my wife, as a child, standing outside.
First day at school.
Rebecca had lived here in Featherbank.
I was stunned by the discovery. How had I not known that? We had visited her parents on the south coast several times before they died, and while I was dimly aware they’d moved when she was younger, that had certainly been home for her: where she had thought of herself being from. All her friends at our wedding had been from there, and they’d seemed to share so much history that I’d assumed they’d grown up together. But then, maybe that was simply where, as a teenager, her life had flowered—where the friends she made and the stories she gathered were the vivid kind that people carry into adulthood. Because the evidence was right in front of me. Even if Featherbank had felt of little consequence to her as an adult, Rebecca had lived here as a child—or at least close enough to attend the school.
Close enough to have heard the Whisper Man rhyme.
I thought about how focused Jake had been on our new house when he’d seen it on my iPad—how all the others in the search results had become invisible to him after viewing the photographs of it online. It couldn’t be a coincidence. I quickly flicked through the other photographs that he had kept. Most were snaps that had been taken on holiday, but a few of the locations were more familiar: Rebecca eating an ice cream on New Road Side. High up on a swing in the local park. Riding a tricycle on the pavement by the main road.
And then—
And then our house.
The sight of it was as incongruous as the school photograph had been. Rebecca in a place where she simply shouldn’t and couldn’t be. Here, she was standing on the pavement outside our new home, one foot placed backward on the driveway. The building behind, with its odd angles and misplaced windows, looked frightening, looming over the little girl who was just far enough over the threshold of the property to get the kudos for daring.
The local scary house.
The kids would dare each other to go near it.
Take photographs and things.
That was why the house had leaped out at Jake when he had seen it. Because he’d seen it before, with his mother standing in front of it.
And then I looked properly at Rebecca in the photograph. She appeared to be about seven or eight years old, and was wearing a blue-and-white-checked dress