Page 14

Thirteen

THE PIED PIPER

The house around me was silent. There was nothing but the gentle hum of my father’s computer, and the menace of those words, right there in front of me in red capital letters on the screen.

The website itself was clearly a relic from the early days of the internet. The background was a repeating beige tile, so badly designed that the patterns were misaligned at every edge, and most of the black text beneath the title was small and hard to read. A primitive animated icon of a man was digging beside the title. Site under construction. Given how old and out of date the page appeared, I wondered how many years that animation had been mindlessly playing for. The site had the feel of a place that had been abandoned a long time ago.

I scrolled down.

Even if the website had been forgotten now, it was immediately apparent that at some point it had been obsessed over. The whole thing was a single page: a wall of text running down one column on the left of the screen, with occasional photographs and document scans on the right-hand side, each of those encased in white, window-like frames. As I scrolled down, the slow progress of the bar at the side of the screen suggested the page was very long indeed. And the text itself was densely written.

But it was at least arranged roughly into sections. The page began by describing the discovery of the crashed camper van, and the fruitless attempts to identify the killer found dead behind the wheel. Then there were lengthy sections devoted to each of the four victims. I leaned down carefully on the desk, as though the surface might burn my hands, and scanned the screen to see if whoever had compiled the website had done their homework.

—the age of 9, he was already showing an aptitude—

I leaned back.

They had.

But it wasn’t necessary for me to read the on-screen text too carefully. Just as I didn’t need to look at any of the photographs of the boys that ran down the right-hand side of the screen.

Because I knew everything that had been written here already.

Even after all this time, I still knew it by heart.

A memory.

I was sixteen years old. I was in my room in the attic, lying on my back on the bed, with a book held open awkwardly over my face.

It wasn’t a heavy book, but for some reason my arms still ached from the effort. Which was silly, really. I didn’t need to lie down; there was a chair I could sit in. And yet I always chose to read the book that way. Perhaps a part of me believed that it should be an uncomfortable experience.

That I deserved to suffer.

Robbie was something of a child prodigy , I read.

At the age of 9, he was already showing an aptitude for chess and had started a club at his primary school .

The book was The Man Made of Smoke by Terrence O’Hare, and I had read it more times than I could count. The front cover showed a man’s face composed roughly of misty jigsaw pieces. The blurb on the back gave a lurid account of the contents, teasing atrocities that were provided in several of the more speculative chapters inside. But in some ways, it was the sections focusing on the victims in life that were the hardest for me to read.

Following his disappearance, Robbie’s friends and family joined the—

I was distracted by the noise from downstairs. My father was shut away in his room, hitting the punch bag, and the sound of his blows reverberated up through the floorboards.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Heavy. Repetitive. Mindlessly angry.

I kept reading.

Following his disappearance, Robbie’s friends and family joined the local community in searching the woods for the boy. They were committed and remained hopeful. For a day or two, it was almost as though the game of hide-and-seek begun by Robbie and his friend was still being played.

The photographs in the book were all in the middle, printed on slightly thicker pages. I held my place but flicked through to one of the pictures of Robbie. It was a portrait from school: one of those ones taken close to Christmas so that your family can order a print for a frame or a keyring. Robbie had a side-part and a sweet smile. He appeared very young, like a little brother you wanted to protect. But there was nothing distinctive about him. He looked like any child, or every one.

I returned to the previous passage.

Like many boys his age, Robbie was fascinated by dinosaurs. He would have his parents test him, asking them to question him on the pictures. Which dinosaur is this? He would always answer without hesitation.

Reading about Robbie helped me to visualize him as a person, which was also a way of punishing myself for what I had failed to do. The two of us would always be connected—we all would be. Because in a strange way, the victims of the Pied Piper had become more real to me at that point than the boys I walked past in the corridors at school. There were even times when I might have thought of them as brothers. Except that I had been in a position to save one of them and I had failed, and my cowardice in the face of their killer would mean that they would surely have rejected me.

The dinosaur names were often long and obscure. They were creatures—monsters in a sense—that Robbie’s parents might also have recognized when they were children, but whose names they had forgotten since. The nature of adulthood, after all, is to leave childish things behind.

But it was an interest that Robbie would not be allowed to grow old enough to grow out of.

There was a creak on the staircase outside my bedroom door.

I flipped over quickly, closing the book and sliding it under my pillow in one smooth moment.

My father had already made me throw the book away once, and he would be angry to discover me with it again now. He hated the fact that I tortured myself by reading it. He knew how much it hurt me to do so, and he wanted to rescue me from it—protect me from what had happened—but he could no more do that than I could bring myself to throw the book away myself.

The stairs creaked softly again.

I stood up and walked quietly across the room to the closed door.

After a moment, I could sense my father there, standing on the other side. We were deep in the trenches at that point, he and I. It wasn’t just the book. It felt like we were sharing a house but living separate existences that were diverging more and more by the day. We had nothing to say to each other, and whenever we tried it went wrong.

And yet a part of me yearned for him to knock and ask to come in. I would ignore him or say no, of course… except that, right then, it felt possible that I might say yes. That I would open the door. And perhaps the two of us could talk in a way that the words actually met in the middle rather than drifting past or drowning each other out.

I waited.

And then I heard the soft creaks on the stairs as he went back down.

I stood there for a moment longer, until I heard his door close on the floor below and the sound of thudding return. Then I went back to my bed and lay down with the book again.

But it was an interest that Robbie would not be allowed to grow old enough to grow out of.

I flipped through to the photographs in the center of the book.

Past the portrait shots of Sean Loughlin, Paul Deacon, and Charlie French—the other victims of the Pied Piper—to the sheets dedicated to Robbie Garforth.

To the picture that had been taken at his school.

To the sketch that I had helped the police to draw.

And then, bracing myself, to the photograph reproduced below.

Standing in my father’s room now, I scrolled down to the bottom of the web page he’d left open and read the headline of the section there.

The Sighting at Rampton Rest Area

The infamous photograph of Robbie Garforth was posted to the side.

It was a low-resolution, black-and-white image—perhaps even scanned from O’Hare’s book—but it still had the power to shock, because anyone who saw it knew that it had been taken by Robbie’s killer. It showed a close-up of the boy’s face, as he turned his head to one side to look back over his shoulder. The image had been captured in a moment of motion that smeared almost everything apart from the fear in his eyes.

The picture had been cropped, but it was still desperately upsetting to look at. And of course, I was the one who had found the original photograph at the rest area that day. The picture here might have been gray and faded, but I had seen the full image in color—vivid and real—and as I looked at the image again now, my mind filled in the details that were hidden outside the edges of the frame. The floor where a section of boards had been removed to create a pit; the hammers and screwdrivers and lengths of cable arranged around the sides, surrounding the terrified little boy.

And for a moment, I was back there. I could smell the stale air of the toilets. Hear the nasal hum of the flickering green lights. See my hands shaking as I stared down at the photograph I was holding and realized what it showed.

I looked away, at the text on the screen, reading this section of the website more closely than I had the ones above.

The photograph (R) of this little boy was found by 12-year-old Daniel Garvie and his father, John. The image was left in the bathroom at Rampton rest area and the boy has been identified as Robbie Garforth, the final victim of the Pied Piper.

Seeing my name there made my heart beat a little faster.

The cropped version of the photograph had featured heavily in the media at the time, along with the details of my encounter with the killer and the boy. I had seen my father’s name mentioned in print occasionally, but I supposed that was understandable: he was a policeman, after all, even if he had never been involved in the investigation itself. There was a lengthy section in O’Hare’s book describing the incident. But this was the first time I had ever seen my own name published in the public domain.

A feeling of unease crept through me. Once again, there was the u nsettling sensation that I had left a door unlocked and something had snuck in without me realizing.

I forced myself to read on.

Daniel Garvie encountered the killer and Robbie Garforth in the rest area toilets that day. He was probably lucky to escape with his life!

My heart rate went up again, this time because reading even a bland description threatened to take me back there again. Back into that toilet, with its flickering lights and alien atmosphere, and the man standing outside the flimsy door of the cubicle as I cowered inside. I felt faint, my mind momentarily unable to differentiate between the past and present.

I focused on the screen.

The words there.

Daniel Garvie encountered the killer and Robbie Garforth in the rest area toilets that day.

I remembered being interviewed by the police at the time. They had been careful with me at first, and then become a little more belligerent as the days passed. They were always professional, but it was obvious that their impatience with me was growing with every meeting. Because there was no doubt that the boy in the photograph was Robbie Garforth. And almost all the witnesses who had seen the boy at the rest area that day were sure it had been him.

All of them except for me.

On the very first day, the police showed me the same school photograph of Robbie that would eventually be printed in O’Hare’s book.

This is Robbie Garforth, they told me. He was abducted from the woodland last week. Is this the boy you saw in the toilets?

I stared at it for a long time. There was a superficial resemblance there, but the boy’s face was still seared into my mind at that point .

No, I told them. It wasn’t Robbie I saw.

They showed me pictures of Sean Loughlin, Paul Deacon, and Charlie French, the other known victims.

And I told them again: no.

The boy I had seen was someone else.

The next day, they came back with that same photograph of Robbie. They’d interviewed the other people at the rest area, they told me, and they all disagreed with me. It was strange, in hindsight, how they flipped the logic of the situation. All these other people had only glimpsed the boy, they said, and yet they could manage to be sure. So why couldn’t I?

But I am sure, I said.

It wasn’t him.

That was when they brought the sketch artist in. I worked with her to produce an image of the boy I’d seen. And I kept insisting on changes, because it had to be right. The end result was as faithful a likeness as I could manage, and while it bore a passing resemblance to Robbie Garforth, it was a different boy.

A few days later, the police returned and told me that, despite an extensive investigation, and my sketch being circulated in the media, they had found no evidence of a missing child in the country matching the description. They showed me the photograph of Robbie Garforth again, and asked me to think back over what happened as carefully as I could.

Because memory was often so unreliable, wasn’t it?

And the thing is, my memory really was becoming unreliable by then. I had seen that photo of Robbie a number of times, not only in the police interviews, but in the media as well, and his face had begun to merge in my mind with that of the boy I had seen. When I looked at the sketch again, it was the similarities I saw to Robbie now, rather than the differences.

But.

No, I told the police.

I still don’t think it was him.

Close to two weeks later, they came back one final time. This was shortly after Andrew Sanderson had found the Pied Piper dead, with Robbie’s remains in the back of the camper van. My heart had broken when I heard the news. I hadn’t realized how much I had been holding on to the hope that he was alive—how much it mattered to me that he was. In a single moment, that hope was extinguished, like a tiny light blown out inside me. I was flooded with the contempt I felt for myself: for my cowardice, my weakness, my failure.

Because of my age, my father had sat in on all the interviews. I looked at him, and his expression was difficult to read.

“Just tell them the truth, Daniel,” he said.

He kept his tone even and his face blank, but his arms were folded, and it felt like he was annoyed with me. After everything else I’d done, I was embarrassing him in front of these officers.

In that moment, I had an overwhelming urge to do anything I could to make amends. To do something right. Even if that was just going along with a narrative that would win everyone’s approval and bring the pressure—the horror of all this—to an end.

It might have been Robbie, I told them.

Might have been?

It was, I said.

It was him.

Daniel was probably lucky to escape with his life!

I read those words again now. Perhaps it was true. And yet in the years after the encounter, I had lived with the guilt of doing nothing. I had wallowed in it to the point that it almost drowned me. Because if I had been braver then that boy— Robbie Garforth , I had to keep telling myself at the time, it was Robbie Garforth —might still be alive.

I could have saved him. I should have done.

In the years since leaving home, I had worked hard to push such thoughts away. Detachment and calm had become my watchwords, my defense mechanisms. But the old guilt returned now, along with the self-disgust that had filled me back then.

I shook my head .

Assuming my father had left the note as a clue for me to follow after his death, why had he led me to a web page about this trauma from my past? He must have known how much it would hurt me to revisit this. And he had always been so adamant in the past that I didn’t, to the point I’d had to hide O’Hare’s book from him until I finally made the decision to leave it behind myself.

Why, Dad?

I forced myself to read on.

At the very least, I was relieved to find no further mentions of my name. The rest of that section was taken up by accounts given by some of the other people who had been at the rest area that day. They had all identified Robbie as the boy they saw. But beyond that, they had been unable to provide much information to the police.

And then I reached a paragraph that made my body go still.

We know exactly how long the Pied Piper and Robbie spent inside the rest area that day. They arrived at four p.m. in a camper van and departed exactly an hour later. This was confirmed by another witness: a teenager working in the hotel adjacent to the parking area.

The silence in the room began to ring.

“I go for a cigarette break every hour,” Darren Field (19) told police. “I watched them arrive, and I watched them leave.”