moment, the monster finally had a name—a real one, not the one the papers had given him—and four victims would be the end of it.
In that moment, he had believed it was nearly over.
But then he had seen Miranda and Alan Smith sitting in the reception. Even now he could still picture them clearly. Alan had been wearing a suit and sitting bolt upright, staring into space, his hands forming a heart between his knees. Miranda’s hands had been pressed between her thighs, and she had been leaning against her husband, resting her head on his shoulder with her long brown hair trailing down his chest. It was late afternoon, but they had both looked exhausted, like long-distance travelers who were trying and failing to sleep where they sat.
Their son Tony was missing.
And twenty years on from that afternoon, he still was.
Frank Carter had managed a day and a half on the run before he was finally arrested, his van pulled over on a country road nearly a hundred miles from Featherbank. There was forensic evidence that Tony Smith had been held in the back of his van, but no sign of the boy’s body. And while Carter had admitted killing Tony, he refused to reveal where he had discarded his remains.
The weeks that followed had seen extensive searches along the myriad possible routes Carter could have taken, all of them to no avail. Pete had attended several. The number of searchers had dwindled over time until, two decades later, he was the only one still out searching. Even Miranda and Alan Smith had moved on. They lived far away from Featherbank now. If Tony had been alive, he would be twenty-seven years old. Pete knew that Miranda and Alan’s daughter, Claire, born in the tumultuous years that followed, had just turned sixteen. He attached no blame to the Smiths for rebuilding their lives after the murder of their son, but the fact remained that he himself could not let it go.
A little boy was missing.
A little boy needed to be found and brought home.
As he drove back into Featherbank now, the homes he passed looked comfortable. Their windows were illuminated in the darkness, and he could imagine whispers of laughter and conversation drifting out from within.
People together, as people should be.
He felt a degree of loneliness at that, but you could find pleasure where you looked for it, even in as solitary a life as his. The road was lined with enormous trees, their leaves lost in the darkness except for where the streetlights touched them, scattering the street with intricate yellow-green explosions that undulated in the soft breeze. It was so quiet and peaceful in Featherbank that it was almost impossible to believe it had once played host to atrocities as terrible as Frank Carter’s.
A flyer was attached to the lamppost at the end of his street—one of the many MISSING posters that had been put up in the previous weeks by Neil Spencer’s family. There was a photograph of the boy, details of his clothing, and an appeal for witnesses to come forward with information. Both the image and the text had faded under the incessant beat of the summer sun, so that, as he drove past it now, it reminded him of wrinkled flowers left at the scene of an old accident. A little boy who had disappeared was beginning to disappear for a second time.
Nearly two months had passed since Neil Spencer went missing, and despite the resources, heart, and soul that had been poured into the investigation, the police knew little more now than they had on the evening he’d vanished. As far as Pete could tell, Amanda Beck had done everything right. It was a reflection of her efficiency, in fact, that even DCI Lyons, a man with a constant eye on his own reputation, had stood by her and left her in charge of the case. Although the last time Pete had passed Amanda in the corridor, she had looked so worn out that he had wondered if that wasn’t its own kind of punishment.
He wished he could tell her that it would get easier.
After being summoned to Lyons’s office, Pete had talked Amanda through the original investigation, but his involvement in the case had turned out to be cursory. There had been the familiar feeling of dread when he made the request to visit Frank Carter. He had imagined himself sitting across from the monster, being treated like a plaything, and,