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Fourteen

John is hitting the heavy bag. The mindless repetition is sending a percussion of thuds through the house and shaking his muscles and joints. A bit of brute force. Sometimes that’s what you need. And that turns out to be the case right now, because it’s when the answer finally comes to him.

Not the answer to the question of what to do. It has been two days since he visited Darren Field’s house and listened to the man’s story, and John is no clearer now on how to deal with what he was told than he was at the time.

Why wouldn’t Field tell the police what he’d been through?

Because of what the man told me would happen next.

And as Field explained, John had understood. He still does now, however much it frustrates him. Field is never going to report what happened to the police: not a chance in hell. And while John could take matters into his own hands and talk to Liam Fleming, he is sure that Field would deny every word of it, assuming it even got as far as him being interviewed. John can easily imagine the pleasure Fleming would take in mocking him. The derision would be obvious on his face. Look at the old man. Taken in by a wild story. Still trying to play policeman.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud .

But there’s another important consideration, and that’s the danger he might be placing Field in by bringing the man to the attention of the police. John has weighed the risk of that against the memory of finding the dead woman in the woods—balanced it against the suffering she endured, the justice she’s owed, and the duty he feels to her—and he’s still not sure which way the scales tip. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is. And that’s left him adrift and angry, punching the bag a little bit harder every night, but with none of the release that usually brings.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud—

But then he stops.

When he met Darren Field, he had been convinced that there was some kind of connection between the two of them. The sensation has not left him. It has been nagging at him ever since. He knows Field from somewhere , but the link between them is too obscure for him to put his finger on.

But suddenly a possible answer has come to him.

For a moment, it seems too ridiculous to be true. But there’s also a feeling of rightness to it, like a puzzle piece clicking into place. It was even there in Field’s choice of words, when the man had said his abductor was a man that other people didn’t notice.

The punch bag creaks back and forth on its chain.

Nobody sees , John thinks.

And nobody cares.

Even though John knew the world did not work that way, it often seemed to him over the years that the encounter with that man at the rest area changed everything. The Pied Piper had driven away that day and disappeared. And then he had been found dead. The rational part of his mind knew those things. But it still felt as though the killer had come home with them that day instead, and been haunting the shadows in the corners of the rooms ever since. Whenever John thought back to the months and years that followed that afternoon, he pictured the man’s grubby, broken fingernails reaching into the cracks in his family’s life and prying everything apart.

It was later that year that Maggie left the island.

John doesn’t blame her for leaving him. He’s not sure that he even did back then. If she’d stuck around, her life would have been as small as his has been. But a part of him hated her for leaving him to raise Daniel alone, especially in the aftermath of what their son had gone through.

Because Daniel changed that year. What happened at the rest area affected him so badly. There were times when John could almost smell it in the air, as though his son had been wounded that day, and the injury left untreated, and now an infection was spreading that John had no idea how to treat.

That fucking book , for one thing.

When he first found Daniel reading it, John followed his instincts and threw it out. Then he sat his son down and tried to talk to him. Obsessing like that wasn’t healthy, he told him. It wouldn’t help anyone or change anything. It wasn’t his fault . A part of John knew that he was talking to himself too, because out of everyone present that day, surely he should have noticed something? But he took those thoughts out on the punch bag, along with the rest of his failures. He didn’t dwell on it the way that Daniel did.

Days passed.

Then the book reappeared—the same copy; his son had retrieved it from the bin outside—and John was furious. Daniel wouldn’t talk to him about what had happened; he wouldn’t talk to a therapist; he wouldn’t work his feelings out on the bag the way John encouraged him to. He just tortured himself by going over the crimes, again and again. It made John furious. Why wasn’t his son listening to him? But all his anger and frustration did was close doors between them: metaphorically at first, and then literally as time passed. John’s failure to help his son became yet another weight for him to bear. One more source of pain to take out on the punch bag.

The day that Daniel left for university, John went up to the attic.

As he looked around his son’s empty bedroom, he began to cry. He didn’t realize he was doing so at first, and it shocked and then shamed him when he did. He prided himself on bearing up to things: taking the disappointments of life on the chin without flinching or folding. The harder the world tried to beat you down, the more resolute you needed to be; whatever happened, you had to keep going . But Daniel’s bedroom was so strange and unfamiliar to him right then that it might have belonged in a different house. John had the terrible feeling that he had lost something that could never be recovered, and he was crying like a child.

He walked across to Daniel’s desk and opened the drawer.

The book was there.

He had long since stopped telling Daniel not to read it, just as he had given up attempting to understand the young man his son had grown into. John picked it up now, noting the tattered cover and well-thumbed pages as he flicked through it.

Were there answers in here to the question of who Daniel had become? There must be, he thought; it felt like the book had raised his son more than he had. Perhaps there were clues as to what had gone wrong between them. Maybe even—the faintest of hopes, this—some hint as to how that damage might be repaired and begin to heal.

John stared down at the book for a long time. There was a lot within its pages that he had no desire to face up to: a lot of history that was best left undisturbed. But that was what he did, wasn’t it? And so after he had pulled himself together, he closed the drawer, left the room, and took the book downstairs with him.

He read it from beginning to end that same day. The first reading was a guilty one, as though he was observing his son surreptitiously from a distance. It also brought an ache of sadness. How could Daniel have immersed himself in this, and how much must it have hurt him to do so? John wanted to step backward in time and do more. Wrap him up. Save him in some way.

Days passed.

Daniel didn’t call.

John read the book over and over. In one sense, the story inside it was complete. It had ended when the Pied Piper had been found dead by the roadside. Even if the man remained unidentified, his crimes were over, and he couldn’t hurt anyone now. And yet John found himself returning to the section in the book that discussed his son’s sighting of Robbie Garforth at the rest area and the photograph that had been left behind.

He remembered how adamant Daniel had been when the police interviewed him back then: absolutely certain that the boy he saw had not been Robbie Garforth. He had been determined to make the police believe that, and John had sat there watching him, proud of the way his son stuck to his convictions in the face of that pressure. Keep going , he had thought. Don’t give in. And when Daniel had looked at him for support, John had done his best to reassure him.

Just tell them the truth, Daniel.

But the expression on his son’s face had changed at that, and John had realized he’d managed to say the wrong thing yet again—even if, as was so often the case, he couldn’t understand how. And Daniel had changed his story and agreed with the officers.

But then… surely it had to have been Robbie Garforth?

Robbie had been abducted a week before the encounter at the rest area. No other child matching his description had been reported missing, and nobody had come forward when Daniel’s sketch was circulated. If it really had been a different boy there that day, then it was as though they had never really been alive at all, or only ever existed in that short window of time. Which was impossible.

But John still found himself thinking: What if…?

Days passed.

His son didn’t call.

John started making notes. If he was going to work the case (and he barely allowed himself to think of it that way, at least to begin with), it felt important to have his own casework to refer to. He was tentative at first, but his efforts accelerated slightly every evening. By the end of the first week, the paperwork he’d accumulated was scattered chaotically across the desk .

Daniel phoned that evening.

His son said sorry for not being in touch before, but apparently there was only one pay phone in the hall of residence, and there was often a queue. He was settling in well though. Getting on well with his flatmates so far, and already enjoying the introductory lectures in his psychology degree. John had to put his hand over his other ear to make out what Daniel was saying. People were talking in the background, and there was music playing, and it was difficult to hear his son properly.

“What did you say?”

Daniel raised his voice a little. “I asked how you were, Dad.”

John looked over at the mess of papers.

“I’m good,” he said.

After the call, he stood with his hands on his hips for a minute, surveying his desk. The next day, he walked into town and bought his very first box file.

John pulls off the boxing gloves now, wipes his palms on his tracksuit bottoms, and walks over to that old desk.

His collection of box files has grown substantially since then. They are filled with information about the various unsolved crimes that have caught his attention over the years. Inside them are newspaper reports, and printouts, and the scribbled notes he’s made while poring over everything, sketching out his own theories.

He picks out that very first box file now—the one that started it all—and blows the dust off its cover. It creaks as he opens it. This first box file contains the core of his research into the Pied Paper case, including all the reports about the encounter at the rest area.

He takes the paperwork out and reads through it carefully.

There is no mention of Darren Field . But he did make records of the witness statements given at the time, and one of them calls to him.

“I go for a cigarette break on the hour, every hour,” a worker at the neighboring hotel told the police. “I watched them both arrive, and I watched them leave. ”

John frowns at that, working back through his memories.

He’s gone over what happened that day many times, and while much of it is little more than smoke in his mind after all these years, there are still patches of clarity. He recalls that teenager, standing outside the hotel. For some reason, he had caught John’s attention: leaning against the wall in his kitchen whites, smoking a cigarette. John can still remember an impression of his face, and when he superimposes it over Darren Field’s now, he feels something in his subconscious stir. When he had half recognized Field, he had wondered where it could be from.

Now he wonders if a better question might be when .

Those butterflies are back in his chest again: little flutters that tell him he’s onto something. Even if he hasn’t been able to establish a connection conclusively yet, it feels right. He just needs to relax and let the insight come, the way it does for the detectives in the books he reads.

Finally, he turns on the computer.

Follow those damn butterflies.