Page 21

Nineteen

So there was no reason to stay.

I drove Sarah back to her house. The whole time, there was a thrum of anxiety inside me. On one level, I recognized that it was a kind of homeless emotion: the unresolved tension between the horror I’d been building myself up to encounter at the cliff edge and what had happened there instead. But it was more than that.

Because I couldn’t shake the memory of Darren Field’s wife.

He’s your husband, right? I’d asked her yesterday.

She’d held up her hand in answer, showing me her wedding ring.

I don’t know if he’s still wearing his.

I parked outside Sarah’s house. We hadn’t discussed what was going to happen next, but she turned to me now.

“You’re coming in, by the way,” she said. “That’s an order.”

“Is it?”

“It is.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “I intend to feed you.”

It was strange to be inside her house again after all these years. I wasn’t sure the last time I’d been here; I supposed at some point as a teenager. But as we walked inside, I felt an immediate rush of familiarity, threads of childhood memory catching fire and coming alight in my mind .

The two of us had spent so much of our lives together as kids. There had been a time when we had practically lived in each other’s pockets, and when we weren’t out in the woods, one of us was usually at the other’s house. Being in the kitchen again now was like stepping back into the past, and I had the same sensation I’d had two days ago outside the police station. The feeling that, if I turned around, I might see the ghosts of Sarah and me as children, running through a doorway.

That was exacerbated by the fact that nothing seemed to have changed. The oak table and chairs; the floor tiles and cabinets. Everything was exactly as I remembered. There was even the old cuckoo clock, still nailed at a lopsided angle on the wall by the fridge. It had never worked, even back then. You had to open the door and pull the little wooden bird out by hand on its broken spring.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.

Sarah hung her coat over the back of a chair.

“What, you mean fuck all? ”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well.” She opened the fridge and peered inside. “The plan was always to get out of here as quickly as possible. So at first, I figured: why do anything? Obviously that didn’t quite work out. So these days, it’s more a reminder of that idea. Every morning, I come downstairs, and I remember that I’m actually just visiting this place, not staying forever. Ah—here we go.”

She took a Tupperware tub out of the fridge and turned to me.

“Bolognese okay?”

“Great.”

“Then make yourself useful for once in your life.”

I boiled the kettle and got pasta out of the cupboard, while Sarah set the leftover sauce warming on the stove. As we prepared the meal, I realized how strange it was for us both to be here like this. Our lives had diverged and gone in different directions, and we hadn’t seen each other for so long. Perhaps we would lose touch again soon. It was possible that this moment was its own kind of liminal space, and the thought made me feel sad. The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that we just intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.

Which brought the memory of the rest area to the surface.

That thrum inside me intensified, and my chest tightened. It was the same sensation you get when you’re about to cry, which immediately made things worse. I didn’t cry in front of other people. Not ever. And yet, as I put the pasta into the boiling water, I realized my hand was shaking. The tears were there.

“You okay?” Sarah said.

“I’m fine. I’m—”

“Detached?” she said. “Calm?”

“Yes.”

She pulled a face but let it go. She probably imagined it was residual anxiety from the cliff top, and it was partly that. But it was everything behind that as well. Just a couple of days ago, my life had been controlled and contained, the ground beneath me stable, but now I felt unbalanced and lost. There were too many questions I had no answers for right now, and every way forward frightened me on a level I found hard to articulate.

What had happened? What was happening?

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do.

When the food was ready, we sat at the kitchen table together, but the emotions had tightened a knot in my throat, and I found it harder and harder to swallow with every mouthful. Something was building. I was bracing myself—determined to keep myself under control—but when everything did finally burst out, it arrived not as tears but as a question.

“Do you ever think about that day?” I said quickly.

There was a moment of silence.

Sarah continued to chew her food slowly, but I noticed the subtle change to her body language. A stiffening of the shoulders; a tension in the way she held her knife and fork. There was no need to specify what day I was asking about. Of all the times as kids that she and I had spent together, the afternoon at the rest area cast the longest shadow.

She swallowed carefully .

“Sometimes,” she said.

“When?”

“When I’m feeling bad, I suppose.” She shrugged. “When you’re down about yourself, you think about things to make yourself feel even worse, don’t you? It’s weirdly comfortable to dwell. Maybe it means you’re right about something at least. Even if it’s just the fact that you’re a shit person.”

“You’re not a shit person.”

“Thank you.” She pointed her fork at me. “But also. Do you find telling someone that generally makes the slightest bit of difference?”

“No.”

She gestured with the fork again—point proved—then looked down and absently poked at her food instead.

“Honestly,” she said, “I don’t think I even saw Robbie Garforth that day. I can picture his face, but maybe that’s because I saw the photograph afterward and then my mind edited him into my memories.”

“That’s how I feel too,” I said.

She shook her head. “But you did see him.”

I hesitated.

“I saw someone ,” I said. “But I didn’t think it was Robbie Garforth at first. It took me a long time to accept that it was. My father wanted me to. The police did too—they wanted it to be him. And I think that, in the end, one of the only reasons I agreed was because I just couldn’t bear it anymore. It was too much. I needed it all to end.”

“Nobody wanted it to be him,” Sarah said. “Robbie was abducted, what, a week or so beforehand? There were no other missing children.”

“There are always missing children.”

“Not like that.”

“But what if it wasn’t him?” I said. “What if it was another child?”

She stared at me for a few seconds. Then she sighed and put down her knife and fork.

“Why are we talking about this, Dan?”

I didn’t reply.

“Because it’s not healthy,” she said. “I do know that much. Whatever happened that day, none of it was our fault. Not mine, not yours. We were just kids too, for fuck’s sake.”

“I know that.”

“So what could we have done?”

“Nothing.”

The obvious answer.

It was what I’d been told as a teenager, but I’d never been able to accept it then. I had always felt deep down that there must have been something—that there should have been. Now there was the sickening possibility that my failure was worse than I had ever realized, and that perhaps everything happening now was my fault too.

“Seriously,” Sarah said. “Why are you asking?”

I took a long, slow breath.

Everything inside me told me to keep this to myself. To keep it all locked down. To remain detached and calm. But it also felt like I needed to unburden myself. That—just for once—it might help to let someone in and share the story, even if it was just so I could hear that it was ridiculous. And Sarah was my friend. Even if she hadn’t seen the boy at the rest area that day, she had at least been there.

“Dan?” she prompted.

So I made my decision. I pushed my plate to one side.

“Do you have a laptop?” I said.

Half an hour later, I had told her everything.

Sarah’s computer was on the kitchen table between us now, the screen open on the website about the Pied Piper. She kept scrolling up and down the page, as though there was something there that would help her make sense of what I had said but she couldn’t see it yet.

“Let’s start with this woman,” she said. “Rose Saunders. She has a history of mental illness, and she has gone off on her own before. So it’s possible she’s done that again for some reason?”

“Yes.”

“And from what you’ve told me, her partner doesn’t sound like the most reliable of witnesses. So his whole story could just be a load of bullshit?”

“Yes,” I said. “But then there’s the wallet I found.”

“Darren Field, right. Do you know where I’d guess he is right now? Balls deep in some other woman. I mean, I’m sorry to be blunt, but I know the type.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s possible.”

Sarah waited.

Then she sighed.

“ But if not ,” she said. “Then what exactly are you thinking? Darren Field can’t be the man Rose Saunders watched being murdered.”

“No.” I shook my head. “The timings of the disappearances are wrong for that. Rose saw someone else die. And then, because she went to the police, the killer took her again, and that time she was the victim. Darren Field was forced to watch her being killed. And now he’s vanished too.”

“Because he went to the police?”

“I don’t think he did,” I said. “All I know is that he spoke to my father, and maybe that counted. Perhaps in the killer’s mind, that was enough.”

“And so this might be why your father did what he did?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you think the killer might be… the boy you saw that day?”

“I don’t know.”

Sarah stared at me for a moment. I could tell that she was thinking things over, and there was something about the expression on her face that made me feel uneasy. It reminded me a little too closely of the one I’d learned to hide whenever I was guiding a vulnerable client toward an obvious conclusion they were trying to avoid.

“Or maybe ,” she said, “if Field really has been murdered, that would mean someone else was abducted and made to watch him die. And if that person was your father, he might still be alive. You might be able to save him.”

“I don’t know.”

“And if the kid you saw wasn’t Robbie then maybe you can— ”

“I don’t know.”

There was a moment in which it felt like I could hear dust in the air.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.

“It’s fine.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to think.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Sarah leaned back in her chair. “And I don’t know exactly what I was going to say anyway. That you can make amends? Or maybe that you can blame yourself even harder for what you didn’t do? Look at me, Dan. Please.”

I had to force myself to.

“Even though we haven’t seen each other in years,” she said, “I do know you. You haven’t changed all that much, you know? You’re still carrying a shitload of baggage from what happened back then. And just because you don’t think about it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

I didn’t reply.

“I know you’re feeling guilty right now,” she said quietly. “About your father’s death. About everything. When something horrible happens, it’s natural to look for answers, and to try to make connections and figure out a way to make things right. Because we want everything to make sense. But sometimes… things are just fucking shit.”

She gestured around.

“They don’t make sense. You search for answers, and when you don’t find them outside of you, you look for them inside instead. And there are always going to be answers there, trust me. Those answers will line up one after a fucking other to make their presence felt.”

She looked at the laptop screen.

“But that doesn’t mean they’re right,” she said.

And again, I didn’t reply.

But as I drove home, I felt more stupid than ever.

Worthless. Ridiculous. Weak.

And the worst thing was that I should have known better. I had taken a chance and opened myself up, and the outcome of doing that was always predictable. I had not remained detached; I had not been calm. And Sarah had seen a part of me that I should have kept hidden. I was disgusted with myself for that.

But what she had implied made sense on one level. My father had taken his life, which of course had knocked my own off-balance. The grief aside, I felt responsible for that: guilty that I had not done enough to help him; ashamed and hurt that he hadn’t reached out to me. Negative emotions are like magnets. It shouldn’t have surprised me to find that my mind was trying to make connections to an event in my past that had made me feel exactly the same.

There could be some other explanation for my father having the photograph, and for Field’s wallet being in the tent. I didn’t know if Brian Gill’s story was what had really happened. I didn’t know what my father had talked to Darren Field about. There were gaps there. And I was a long way from having enough information to justify the conclusions my subconscious had been starting to leap to.

So your father might still be alive.

You might be able to save him.

Night had fallen as I parked.

The house in front of me had a sad, abandoned air to it. It reminded me of how Sarah hadn’t changed anything in her mother’s home as a reminder to herself that she wasn’t going to stay. I opened the front door and turned on the light. The post had been delivered after I left that morning, and there was a spread of junk mail on the mat. I stepped over, but something about it made me pause and look back. There was a thin white envelope lying face up on top of the flyers. No stamp or address. Just my own name, written there in block capitals.

I closed the front door, then knelt down and picked up the envelope carefully. It wasn’t even sealed. The end with the sticker was unfolded and rigid, as if it had arrived here straight from a stationery shop.

I reached inside.

There was a single sheet of paper on which a photograph had been printed. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at, but then a shiver of horror ran through me. I turned my head slowly, looking down the corridor toward the kitchen, and the door to the garden .

And then back down at the photograph.

The image was mostly black, but there was just enough detail visible for me to understand what I was seeing. The photograph had been taken two nights ago, on the evening I had returned to the island. When in a moment of weakness, I had imagined I was alone, and that it was safe to let my guard down and my emotions loose where nobody would see.

It showed me crouched down on the deck in my father’s back garden.

My body arched with grief.

And my face a smeared mask of tears.