just stretched the likelihood somewhat. There were witness accounts that, while not definitive, described a different individual at certain scenes. The forensic evidence in Carter’s house was overwhelming, and they had witness statements that were far more concrete and reliable, but a doubt had always remained as to whether Carter had acted alone.
Pete wasn’t sure whether he shared that doubt or not, and most of the time he did his best to ignore the possibility. But that was clearly why he was here. And, like any horror that had to be faced, it was preferable to drag it out into the light and get it over with. So he decided to ignore Lyons’s question and get to the point.
“Can I ask what this is about, sir?”
The DCI hesitated.
“What we’re going to discuss goes no farther than the four walls of this office right now. Is that clear?”
“Of course.”
“The CCTV we have suggests Neil Spencer did walk in the direction of the waste ground, but somewhere in the vicinity he vanished. The search has drawn a blank so far. All the locations he’s likely to have wandered into by accident have been cleared. He’s not with friends or other family members. Naturally, we’re forced to consider other possibilities. DI Beck?”
Beside Pete, Amanda Beck came to life. When she spoke, she sounded a little defensive.
“Obviously, we considered those other possibilities from the beginning. We’ve done the door-to-doors. Interviewed all the usual candidates. That’s got us nowhere yet.”
There has to be more to it than that, Pete thought. “But?”
Beck took a deep breath. “But I interviewed the parents again an hour ago. Looking for anything that might have been missed. Any kind of lead. And his mother told me something. She hadn’t mentioned it before because she thought it was stupid.”
“What was it?”
But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. Perhaps not the exact form it would take, but close enough. Over the course of the meeting, the pieces of a new nightmare had been steadily coming together into a single picture.
A little boy missing.
Frank Carter.
An accomplice.
Beck added the final piece now.
“A few weeks ago, Neil woke his mother in the middle of the night. He said that he’d seen a monster outside his window. The curtains were open, like he really had been looking out, but there was nothing there.”
She paused.
“He said it had been whispering things to him.”
Part Two
September
Eight
Jake was excited when we collected the keys from the estate agent in Featherbank, whereas I just felt anxious as we drove to our new home. What if the house wasn’t how I remembered it from the viewings? What if I got inside and hated the place now—or, worse, that Jake did?
All of this would have been for nothing.
“Stop kicking the passenger seat, Jake.”
The drumming of his feet from behind me stopped, but then started up again almost immediately. I sighed to myself as I turned a corner. But then, he was excited, which was a rare enough occurrence in itself, so I decided to ignore it. At least one of us was happy.
It was a lovely day, though. And my nerves aside, it was impossible to deny that Featherbank was beautiful in the late summer sun. It was a suburb, and while it was only five miles away from a heaving city center, it felt more like the countryside here. Down by the river, on the southern edge of the village, there were cobbled roads and cottages. Farther north, away from a single row of shops, there were steep streets of pretty sandstone houses, and most of the pavements were lined with trees, the leaves thick and green overhead. With the window rolled down, the air outside smelled of cut grass, and I could hear music and children playing. It felt peaceful and tranquil here—as slow and warm as a lazy morning.
We reached our new street, which was a quiet residential road with a large field on one side. There were more trees around the edges, the sun cutting through the leaves and dappling the grass with light, and I tried to imagine Jake out there, running around just across from our house, his own T-shirt bright in the sun. Still as happy as he was now.
Our house.
We were here.
I pulled into the driveway. The house still looked the same, of course, but the building seemed to have different ways of staring out at the world. The first time I’d seen it, it had seemed forbidding and frightening—almost dangerous—and