the incident room. Pete was leaning on his desk, staring intently down at the CCTV photographs of the people who had visited Victor Tyler in prison over the years. Her own gaze moved across them. There were men and women here. The young and the old. A mixture of types, Collins had told them. You’d be surprised, honestly.
“I believe Collins didn’t kill Neil Spencer.” Pete waved his hand over the photographs. “But as to this…”
And then he fell silent, expressing the same disbelief that she was feeling herself. In the course of her career, she had witnessed enough horror that people’s capacity for cruelty was no longer shocking. She had stood at crime scenes and accidents and watched the crowds gather or the passing vehicles slow down for a glimpse of the carnage. She understood the pull of death. But not this.
“Do you know why they called him the Whisper Man?” Pete said quietly.
“Because of Roger Hill.”
“That’s right.” He nodded slowly. “Roger was Carter’s first victim. The family home was being renovated at the time, and Roger told his parents he’d heard someone whispering outside his window before he was abducted. Carter owned the scaffolding firm that was working on the place. That was what first brought him to our attention.”
“Grooming his victim.”
“Yes. Carter had the opportunity there, but the strange thing is, the parents of the other boys all claimed their children heard whispers too. There was no obvious connection to Carter, but they heard it all the same.”
“Maybe they did.”
“Maybe so. Or perhaps it’s just that the name was in the newspaper by then, and it planted ideas in people’s heads. Who knows? Whatever, it stuck. The Whisper Man. I’ve always hated that name.”
She waited.
“Because I wanted him to be forgotten, you see? I didn’t want him to have a title. But right now it seems to fit him perfectly. Because the whole time he’s been whispering. And people—these people—have been listening.” He spread the photographs out with his hand. “And I think one of them more closely than the others.”
Amanda looked at the photographs again. He was right, she thought. From everything Collins had said, it was clear that many of the individuals in front of her now had walked a fair distance down a path toward outright evil. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that one of them—drawn ever onward by Frank Carter’s whispers—had walked further down that path than others. The best of these people were evil sycophants, but one of them was something worse.
A student.
Somewhere among these people, she thought, they would find Neil Spencer’s killer.
Forty
After Jake had gone to bed that night, I sat in the living room of the safe house with a glass of white wine and my laptop.
Even though I was still attempting to process the events of the last few days, I was also aware that I did need to write. That seemed impossible under the present circumstances, but the money I had left wouldn’t last forever. Even more than that, it felt important to be working on something, not just to distract myself from what was happening, but because it had always been that way. That was who I was. That was what I needed to reclaim.
Rebecca.
I deleted the rest of what I’d written and stared at her name. My idea the other day had been to begin to write down my feelings and trust that some kind of narrative would eventually emerge from the fog. But it was difficult to pin down my feelings right now, never mind attempt to translate them into something as simple as words.
My mind drifted back to what Karen had said in the café this morning. Perhaps it’s something you can write about in one of your books. And the fact that she’d looked me up online. I knew how I felt about that now, because it brought a small flash of excitement. She was interested in me. Was I attracted to her? Yes. I just wasn’t sure I was allowed to be. I looked at Rebecca’s name on the screen. The excitement dissipated, replaced by guilt.
Rebecca.
I typed quickly.
I know exactly what you’d think about that, because you were always so much more practical than me. You’d want me to get on with my life. You’d want me to be happy. You’d be sad, of course, but you’d tell me that’s the way life works. In fact, you’d more than likely tell me not to be so fucking stupid.