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Sixteen

Dawn was breaking as I arrived at the ferry terminal the next morning.

I stood out on the deck, watching the gulls wheeling above, like calligraphy etched onto the rose-gold sky. The sea air was freezing, and within minutes I was shivering from the cold. Bracing , I reminded myself. And God knew, I needed that this morning. I had slept badly, and the takeaway coffee I was holding was barely warming my hands, never mind taking the edge off my tiredness.

When we reached the mainland, I followed the instructions on the GPS as I drove. The journey took me down a stretch of motorway that I had always been able to avoid until now, but half an hour later, I found myself driving along it for the first time in decades.

My heart began beating harder as I approached the exit to the Rampton rest area. The site was occluded by trees but my skin started to crawl as I reached it, and then a sick feeling settled inside me as I looked up and watched it disappear behind in the rearview mirror.

Because it felt like I’d picked up a passenger.

Please help me.

The voice from the back seat was not the same one I’d imagined last night. That had been the voice of a killer, whereas this was that of a child, scared and desperate. I made sure to keep a careful grip on the steering wheel. The presence behind me wasn’t real.

Please help me.

I kept up with the traffic in front.

If you’d helped me then none of this would be happening.

Concentrate, I told myself. It was just the old guilt surfacing: the idea that if I’d only acted differently then everything would be better. And that wouldn’t help me right now.

A woman had been murdered. Leaving aside the identity of the killer for the moment, the circumstances around her death allowed me to make a handful of tentative deductions.

Killers could be categorized in a number of different ways, one of which referenced the level of planning that went into the crime. A murderer might be organized or disorganized, for example, or some mixture of the two. Disorganized killers acted on impulse, made mistakes, and were generally easier to catch. But if the body had been left in the woods for my father to find, and the killer had arranged to take a photograph and deliver it to him, that suggested the opposite: an intelligent and highly organized offender. A man who had done precisely what he set out to do, made no mistakes, and left behind only the evidence that he wanted to be found.

The hardest to catch.

Rampton.

I took the exit and then followed the directions through a series of ever-winnowing residential roads. The presence behind me disappeared. And a short while later, I parked on a dusty spread of land at the edge of the canal. Newland Lock. It was a few ramshackle buildings clustered in a circle, all of them shuttered up and closed.

I got out of the car.

Nobody in sight. Everything silent. A crooked wooden lock spanned the water, the sides adorned by blackened cogs that reminded me of rusted clockwork. I crossed it carefully, the wood soft and fragile beneath my feet, a trickle of water spattering out quietly far below.

All the barges here were moored a little way ahead, tethered to iron rings in the ground by thick ropes, and lined up bow to stern along the bank like rides in an out-of-season fairground attraction. Most of them were weathered and ancient, their small gray windows cracked and webbed. But when I reached plot nineteen, I saw that the vessel moored there was in better repair than its neighbors. The sides had been decorated with painted flowers, but also with ornaments glued to the wood: dried flowers pressed behind glass in frames; plastic boxes of seashells; a battered acoustic guitar. The barge looked rickety but cozy, resting in the water like some decades-old arts-and-crafts project.

A man was sitting on a chair outside on the deck.

He was in his fifties, long white hair swept back in a ponytail, and he was wearing a black waistcoat dappled with paint, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Apparently, he was oblivious to the cold morning air. Or perhaps to everything, I thought. Because even though he was holding a cup, the expression on his face as he stared down at the water suggested he might have forgotten it was there.

I stopped on the bank.

“Excuse me,” I called up.

The man turned his head to look at me, but his blank expression didn’t alter. As his gaze settled on me, it was like he wasn’t really seeing me, and when he spoke he sounded weary.

“What do you want?”

“I was looking for Rose Saunders,” I said. “Does she live here?”

The name focused him slightly, bringing him back into his own head a little. While he didn’t answer me immediately, it was obvious it meant something to him.

“Rose,” he said finally.

“Or Rosemary?”

“No. Always just Rose. That’s important .” He frowned to himself. “And what exactly do you want with my Rose?”

I hadn’t prepared an elaborate story in advance, because I hadn’t known what I would find here. But given that the address had been in my father’s search history, it felt safe to make at least one assumption.

“Because I think my father might have come to see her,” I said .

The man said nothing for a few seconds. His gaze moved steadily over my face. Trying to focus. Trying to remember.

“The policeman?” he said.

I hesitated. But my father would have needed a way in. And if that was what he had decided to tell this man then I supposed it had been close enough to the truth.

“Yes,” I said. “He was a policeman.”

“You look like him, you know.”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

But the man nodded slowly anyway, then looked away. The focus he had briefly gained was already drifting a little, and as the silence panned out I wondered if there was something stronger in his cup than tea or coffee.

I was about to prompt him when he finally spoke.

“My Rose is gone,” he said.

Then he sighed and eased himself carefully to his feet.

“So I suppose you’d better come inside.”

The man’s name was Brian Gill, and he was Rose Saunders’s partner.

Or at least, he had been.

There was a clock mounted to the wall of the barge, and I found myself staring at it as he spoke. The clock had stopped at 8:34, although I had no idea on what day. But the second hand was stuttering in place, and there was something mesmerizing about each little flicker.

“It was a couple of months ago,” Gill said. “That was the first time Rose disappeared.”

“What happened?” I said.

“She went out one morning, the way she always did. The library in town. The park. But she didn’t come back. Rose had always been a free spirit. She liked her space. But it had been a few years since she’d gone off on her own, and it wasn’t like her not to let me know where she was.”

“Did you talk to the police?”

“Yes, the next morning. But they didn’t take it seriously. And then she came back that evening. Except that she was… different from before. ”

Droplets of white paint had congealed and dried on the edge of the table between us. I glanced down the galley. The remains of old flowers were scattered on a makeshift counter there. They had probably been fresh when Rose first gathered them, but they were dark and brittle now, like leaves blown into the corner of an abandoned garage.

I looked back at Gill.

“Where had she been?” I said.

Gill explained it falteringly. When Rose returned to him after that first disappearance, she was shaken and disturbed. She had been kidnapped the day before, she told him. She couldn’t remember the details; just that there had been a bench and a man whose face she couldn’t recall, and then everything had gone misty. The next thing she knew, she was in the woodland somewhere.

Tied down and unable to move.

Facing a makeshift animal pen.

“There was a man in there,” Gill told me. “He was chained to a post.”

“Did she describe him?”

“No.” Gill shook his head. “She couldn’t because of what happened next. And she couldn’t tell me much about that either. But the man who had taken her killed the other man. That was all she was sure of. He made her watch it, and whatever happened was so horrible that she couldn’t remember it afterward.”

I waited.

“And then,” Gill said. “He let her go.”

The next thing she recalled, he told me, she was back on a bench in the park. Disorientated and a little disheveled, but otherwise unharmed. It was as though she had blinked out of the world for thirty-six hours and then reappeared. Everything was the same as it had been apart from the visceral images—the trauma—that her abductor had left her with.

And the decision that she remembered he had given her.

“The man told her that if she kept what had happened to herself then she would never see him again,” Gill said. “Her life would continue as it always had. She’d be safe. But if she went to the police and reported what she’d seen, he would come for her. He would take her back to that place again. And she would be the one to die next.”

I thought about my next question carefully. There was something obvious I wanted to ask, given the nature of what I’d just been told, but it seemed better to approach it from a respectful angle.

“Did you believe her story?” I said.

He nodded to himself. Not to say that he did, but acknowledging what I was actually asking.

“I told you that Rose was eccentric,” he said. “The truth is that she was ill a number of times over the years. She was sectioned by the authorities on four different occasions that I know of, each time because she suffered a break with reality. When Rose was ill, she said a lot of things that weren’t true. So when she told me this… I thought it might be the same thing. That she was getting sick again and needed help.”

“That’s understandable.”

“No, it isn’t. Because the thing is, she was never lying to me. All those times over the years, it was always real to her . And if you imagine that you’re scared or in pain, then… you really are, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”

“So even if I didn’t believe her,” he said, “I had to believe in her. I had to try to support her and do what was best.”

“And she wanted to go to the police?”

“Yes. Because that was the right thing to do.”

Despite the threat, she had been adamant that she had to report what happened to her. Rose—Gill told me—had been a woman who felt things deeply. That the murdered man deserved justice. That the killer had to be caught and punished. That the system would protect her.

And that if the police didn’t believe her, she would make them.

“I drove her to the police station,” Gill said. “I waited in the car. Not long after, an officer came out and tapped on the window. He wanted me to go inside to help them calm her down. Which I tried to. She was raging. Desperate. Panicked. It was touch and go whether they were going to call a doctor there and then. ”

Having dealt with patients with similar histories in the past, I had a degree of sympathy for the authorities for their response. You could only work with the facts available to you. The story Rose had given them was extraordinary, she had a documented history of mental illness, and her behavior in that moment would have led them to a conclusion that was perfectly reasonable. Especially given that the alternative explanation—that her story was true—seemed so wild and unlikely.

“They didn’t believe her,” I said. “And then she disappeared again?”

“A couple of weeks afterward. She went out for a walk and didn’t come back. I went to the police again, of course, but they didn’t take her story any more seriously than they had before. They assumed she would come back, like she had other times. And then, when she didn’t, they made certain assumptions.”

“Yes.”

“There was an appeal. Did you see it?”

I shook my head.

“No,” Gill said. “Of course you didn’t. There hasn’t been much coverage, and most of it was down south. She lived there for a while, you see. The police think she’s left me and is staying somewhere with friends.”

“Maybe that’s true.”

“No, they’re just sweeping her under the carpet. They’re not interested. Because of the type of woman she was. No steady employment; no real social network; just living here on this boat with me for years, as off the grid as we could manage. Someone like my Rose was never going to be front-page news. Never anyone’s priority.”

He grimaced and took a sip of whatever was in his mug.

Then he closed his eyes.

“Nobody cares,” he said.

The light in the barge seemed to darken at that. It was only my imagination, but it was as though someone had stepped into the galley behind me, and I felt a tickle at the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder. There was nobody there, of course.

Concentrate , I told myself .

Think.

However right Gill might have been about certain people slipping through the cracks, he was wrong about at least one thing.

“But my father came here,” I said quietly.

Gill’s breathing was growing shallow now. He was falling asleep in front of me.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

For some reason, it felt important to emphasize that point. Even though Gill couldn’t see me, I leaned forward, determined to press it.

“So he cared.”

“Suppose.”

“And you told him Rose’s story? Just as you’ve told it to me?”

Gill didn’t open his eyes, but frowned slightly.

“He already … knew.”

“He knew?”

“Working her case, wasn’t he?”

And then he started snoring.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “He was.”

Gill still had the mug clasped loosely against his solar plexus. I stood up and took it away from him, putting it on the small table between us. He grumbled, the way I imagined an infant might, but his eyes remained shut.

I went back outside into the sunlight.

The brightness and fresh air were a shock at first; I hadn’t realized how dismal and stale it had been back there in the barge. I looked down at one of the small gray windows on the side, and a swirl of grime on the glass threatened to resolve itself into a face.

I turned my head away quickly and made my way back toward the lock, imagining my father following a few steps behind me.

You told him you were police? I thought.

Well, I might have done. Or perhaps I hinted that I was to get him to talk to me. Or maybe he just assumed. Who knows?

I kicked at the dust on the path in frustration. But I did know one thing for certain. To the extent that there had been an investigation into Rose Saunders’s disappearance, my father had been nowhere near it. I also doubted he had any friendly local contacts to call on who would have provided him with the details.

And yet.

Gill told me you already knew Rose’s story, Dad.

He did, didn’t he.

But how could you have?

That’s a good question, isn’t it?

Maybe work through it from those first principles of yours.

Assuming what Rose Saunders had told Gill was true, she had been abducted and forced to watch a man being murdered. If she reported what had happened to the police then the same thing would happen to her. And when she did so anyway—because it was the right thing to do—she was not believed. Nobody had listened to her. Nobody had cared.

And the killer, true to his word, had returned and taken her.

My father prompted me, sounding impatient.

But what happened next?

A woman’s body was left by a trail in the woods, I thought. Apparently placed there for you to find. A photograph of that moment was delivered to you, which led you to Darren Field, and the two of you had a conversation of some kind. Then Field vanished too. It was after that—after you’d found the connection between Field and the Pied Piper—that you came here looking for Rose and talked to Brian Gill…

I stopped as I reached the lock.

Finish the thought, my son.

You knew because you’d already heard the same story from Darren Field, I thought. Hadn’t you, Dad? Field told you that he watched someone being killed—let’s assume it was Rose—and that he’d been given the same instruction afterward.

A moment of silence.

Maybe so , my father said quietly.

That sounds plausible, doesn’t it?

My subconscious had given my father different tones of voice over the past two days, but I was struck now by how sad he sounded. For a moment, that didn’t make sense; the revelation felt like a breakthrough. But then I realized what the implications of it might be. If Rose Saunders had been taken, it was because she had gone to the police of her own accord. But if Darren Field had chosen not to—if the police, in the form of my father, had come to his door instead—then it might have been my father’s visit that had caused his abductor to return a second time.

Which made his death my father’s fault.

It would have been inadvertent. Worse than that, my father would effectively have been tricked into doing so. But I still found it easy to imagine the effect that would have had on him. The guilt it would have caused. He had always been a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Like Rose, he had been someone who felt things very deeply indeed.

Dad, I thought—

But then quiet music broke the silence, and the spell along with it. I felt a vibration against my side. My phone ringing. I took it out of my jacket pocket and looked at the screen.

[island—police]

The same number that Fleming had originally called me from.

I took a deep breath now and accepted the call.

“Yes?”

“Is this Daniel Garvie?”

A man’s voice. Not one I recognized, and certainly not Fleming. But I imagined that after our encounter last night, he would be more than happy to palm off the task of updating me to one of his subordinates. But that didn’t change the fact that if someone was calling me then there must have been a development of some kind.

I braced myself.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “What’s happened?”

There was a faint crackle of static in the background. I imagined the officer reading whatever he was about to tell me from a computer screen, or possibly even just a hastily written note. To his credit, he at least managed to sound sympathetic when he spoke next.

“It’s your father, Dr. Garvie.”

“Yes.”

“I’m very sorry to have to tell you this,” he said. “But his body has been found.”