days. This picture, assuming it had any relevance at all, could have come from anywhere.
“But you’re not sure?”
“No,” Tom said. “But there’s something else too. That evening, Jake was talking to someone who wasn’t there. He does that, right? He has imaginary friends. Only this time he said it was the boy in the floor. So how can he have known about that, along with the butterflies, unless someone talked to him about it?”
“I don’t know.”
She resisted the urge to point out that it could simply be a coincidence, and that even if it wasn’t, there was still no reason to focus on the school. Instead, she turned to what seemed to her a far more fucking pertinent issue right now.
“You didn’t think to mention this before?”
The phone went silent. Maybe it was a low blow to have delivered: the man’s son was missing, after all, and some things only made sense in hindsight. Pictures and imaginary friends. Monsters whispering outside windows. Adults didn’t always listen hard enough to children. But if Tom Kennedy had told them about this earlier, and if she had listened to him, then things might be different right now. She wouldn’t be sitting here exhausted, with Pete in hospital and Jake Kennedy missing. It was impossible to keep the accusation out of her voice.
“Tom? Why?”
“I didn’t know what it meant,” he said.
“Well, maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but … oh, for fuck’s sake, hang on a second.”
An alert had come through on her screen. Amanda opened the message. Sharon Bamber, the family liaison officer, had arrived at Karen Shaw’s home but nobody was answering the door. Amanda frowned and pushed the phone against her ear. Now that Tom had stopped talking, she could hear traffic in the background.
“Where are you?” she asked him.
“I’m on my way to the school.”
Christ. She leaned forward urgently.
“Don’t do that, please.”
“But—”
“But nothing. It won’t help.”
She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. What the hell was he thinking? Except, of course, his son was missing and so he wasn’t thinking properly at all.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Listen right now. I need you to go back to Karen Shaw’s house. There’s an officer—Sergeant Bamber—waiting for you there. I’m going to ask her to bring you to the department. We can discuss this picture then. Okay?”
He didn’t reply. She could imagine him thinking it over. Torn between his determination to help Jake and the authority in her voice.
“Tom? Let’s not make this any worse.”
“Okay.”
He hung up.
Damn it. She wasn’t sure whether she believed him or not, but she supposed there was nothing she could do about it for now. In the meantime, she pinged a message back to Sharon, relaying her instructions, and then leaned back in her chair and tried to rub some life into her face.
Another report was delivered to her desk. She opened her eyes again to find more useless witness statements. None of the neighbors had seen or heard anything. Somehow, Francis Carter—or David Parker, or whatever he was calling himself—had walked into a house, committed the attempted murder of an experienced officer, abducted a child, and disappeared without attracting any attention whatsoever. The luck of the devil. Literally.
But not just luck, of course. Twenty years ago, he might have been a fragile, vulnerable little boy, but it was clear that the years since had seen him grow into a disturbed and dangerous man. One who was good at moving unnoticed and undetected.
She sighed.
The school, then, for what it was worth.
Let’s take another look.
Sixty
Go back to Karen Shaw’s house.
For a moment, it had felt like I might. DI Beck was police, after all, and my instinct was to do what the police told me. And her words had stung me. On top of every other way I’d failed, there was too much that I hadn’t told the police, and the fact I’d held back on information at the time to protect Jake didn’t change the fact that I could have prevented this.
Which meant he was missing because of me.
I couldn’t blame Beck for not taking me seriously in light of that, but she hadn’t seen what Jake had drawn. Someone had made that picture for him to copy, and they had done so recently.
And why had Jake kept it?
What was so special about it?
I remembered what had happened after that first day. The argument we’d had. The words he’d read on my computer screen. The distance between us. I could only think of one explanation for why