“Yes.” Pete nodded. “The boy’s T-shirt was pulled up over his face, so he couldn’t see it properly. He said that was the way he liked it.”
“Just like Neil Spencer.”
“Yes.”
“None of which was ever made public.” Amanda shook her head in frustration. “And Carter was a sadist. Why wouldn’t he want to see the faces of his victims?”
Pete had no answer to that. Carter had always refused to discuss his motivations. But while there had never been any apparent sexual element to the murders, Amanda was right: he had hurt those children badly, and it was clear he was a sadist. As to why he covered their faces, there were countless possible explanations for that. If you asked five different profilers—and they had at the time—you got five different answers. Perhaps it was to make the victims physically easier to control. Or to muffle sound. To disorientate them. To scare them. To stop them from seeing him. To stop him from seeing them. One of the reasons profiling was such bullshit was that different offenders almost always had massively different reasons for the exact same behavior, and …
Pete hesitated.
“All these bastards are the same,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“That’s what Carter told me.” He frowned. “Something like that, anyway. When he was talking about which of the children it was in the dream. All these bastards are the same. Any one will do.”
“Go on.”
But he fell silent again, trying to think through the implications and feeling that some kind of understanding was suddenly within reach. It hadn’t mattered to Carter who he had been hurting. More than that, he hadn’t wanted to see the victims’ faces at all.
But why?
To stop him from seeing them.
Was that perhaps because he had wanted to imagine someone else in their place? Pete stared down at the photograph again—at the man who could be anyone—and recalled the strange look on Carter’s face. Despite himself, he had been curious about the man in the photo. Once again, it had been as though he were seeing someone he had been interested in for a long time but was only finally laying eyes on. It made Pete think of something else. How he had fought so hard not to think of Tom over the years, and yet had found it impossible not to evaluate him when they had met. How even though traces remained of the boy, the man was so different from the little boy he remembered.
Because children change so much.
I’ve told you everything I know.
And now Pete remembered a different child. Another little boy—small and scared and malnourished, hiding behind his mother’s legs as Pete unlocked the door to Frank Carter’s extension.
A little boy who would now be in his late twenties.
“Bring me my family,” Pete remembered. “That bitch and that little cunt.”
He looked up at Amanda, finally understanding.
“That’s what I didn’t listen to.”
Forty-three
Just before lunchtime, there was a knock at the door.
I looked up from my laptop. The first thing I’d done after dropping Jake at school that morning had been to google Karen. She’d been easy enough to find: Karen Shaw had bylines for dozens of online articles at the local paper, including pieces that covered the abduction and murder of Neil Spencer. I’d read each of them with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach: not just fear over what she might write next—all those private details I’d revealed to her yesterday in the coffee shop—but also a sense of betrayal. I’d allowed myself to imagine that she was genuinely interested in me, and now I felt stupid, as though I’d been conned in some way.
The knock came again: a quiet, tentative sound, as though whoever was outside was undecided if they wanted me to hear or not. And I thought I knew who I would find out there. I put the laptop to one side and went to the door.
Karen, standing on the front step.
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms.
“Are you bugged under that thing?”
I nodded at the big overcoat. She winced.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
“What for?”
“I just … want to explain. It won’t take long.”
“There’s no need.”
“I think there is.”
She looked contrite—ashamed, even—but I remembered my mother telling me that explanations and apologies were almost always for the person making them, and I felt an urge to tell Karen she could make herself feel better on her own time. But