Page 22

Twenty

I slept downstairs that night.

Even with all the doors and windows locked and bolted, the room in the attic felt too isolated for safety. The house below offered too much empty space, and I knew my mind would transform every slight creak into the steady approach of a ghost or worse. And if someone did attempt to break in, I wouldn’t hear it from all the way up there.

It made little difference; I found it almost impossible to sleep after receiving that photograph. I drifted a little, but mostly just lay on the settee in the darkness, my skin crawling from the knowledge that someone had been watching me. That I had been in such close proximity to danger without even realizing.

But most of all, because of the moment that had been captured.

The circumstances amplified the sense of violation. It was almost unbearable to me. I had allowed myself to be vulnerable in a way I would never have wanted anyone to witness, and the fact that someone had made my throat tighten up with anxiety. It made me feel helpless and exposed. And the timing of the image seemed deliberate to me.

Mocking me .

The night seemed to go on forever.

But at some point, I became aware that the darkness outside was starting to lighten. Ever so gradually, the shadows in the front room began to shake off their cloaks and reveal themselves as objects of furniture. And the blackness of the night eventually resolved into the dismal, dark gray of morning.

I yawned and stretched. Rubbed my face.

Then went through to make coffee.

While the kettle boiled, I clicked open the blinds on the kitchen window. The back garden stretched out behind the house, the grass there ashen in the dull morning light. The hedge down at the far end was solid. Impenetrable. There was no way anyone could take a photograph through the foliage there, which meant that whoever had done it must have been standing right there . Just meters away from me. Invisible in the darkness.

Nobody sees , a voice said in my head.

And nobody—

Someone knocked hard on the front door.

I turned around quickly. For a moment, the door at the end of the corridor seemed to be receding from me, but then I shook my head and it steadied. I walked slowly down, unhooked the chain, and slid the bolt back.

Braced myself and opened it.

Sarah was standing on the doorstep.

“You’re up!” she said. “That’s good. I was worried I was going to have to keep knocking.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t sleep too well.”

That was probably obvious enough from the state of me, but she didn’t make the usual wisecrack. In fact, she looked tired too, as though her night hadn’t been any more restful than mine.

I frowned. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… okay-ish,” she said. “Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

She stepped in past me.

“So this is going to sound weird,” she said. “But after you left last night, I kept thinking about what you told me, and I decided to do a little bit of digging. And I found something really strange.”

“Something strange happened here too.”

“Oh?”

I closed the front door.

And then, after hesitating for a moment, I slid the bolt across.

“Yes,” I said.

The kettle clicked off in the kitchen.

“But I think that maybe we both need some coffee.”

Whatever Sarah had discovered had clearly changed her mind about what might be happening, but I still felt the need to offer some fresh evidence of my own in advance. So I went first, showing her the photograph I’d received. Because even if I had been letting my imagination run away with me and making connections where they might not exist, the photograph proved that something was happening.

She stared down at it for a while, her body still. We had spent a great deal of time in each other’s houses as kids, and she knew this one well enough not to have to look out of the kitchen window in order to understand what the picture implied.

“Someone was in your garden,” she said.

“My father’s garden,” I said. “But yes. He must have just been standing there the whole time. Watching me.”

She looked up. “He?”

I pictured the little boy in the rest area.

“I think so,” I said.

“But you didn’t see him?”

“No.”

“Fucking hell.” She shook her head and looked down again. “Maybe you need to go to the police.”

“Maybe.”

Except that, even with the photograph, I still wasn’t sure exactly what I could say to them. The picture was evidence of trespass, but it was also meaningless out of context. I could start at the beginning and attempt to convince them, but it felt like I had accumulated disparate parts of a story that was difficult and complicated to tell.

But there was more to it than that. The presence of an intruder in the garden was disturbing and frightening, and the photograph made things personal. But it had already been personal. Over two decades ago, I had failed to help that little boy, and I might have compounded my weakness afterward by agreeing it had been Robbie Garforth. If that was true, then what was happening in the present was my fault. And my responsibility to deal with.

“This arrived yesterday, right?” Sarah said.

“It was waiting for me when I got back from yours.” I sipped my coffee. “Sitting there on top of the ordinary post, so it must have been delivered sometime during the day. There’s no stamp or address on the envelope, so whoever left it had to have been here in person.”

“Have you got a doorbell cam?”

I almost laughed. There was as much chance of that as my father having secretly constructed a space shuttle in his bedroom.

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

A beat of silence in the kitchen.

“What about you?” I said.

“Okay. Let me show you what I found.”

She pulled a couple of sheets of paper from her bag and passed one of them to me. It was a printout of a news article, dated a few months ago.

I read it carefully.

SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING ACCOUNTANT

As the search for Oliver Hunter enters its second week, police divers today resumed their search of Bridgewater Canal in the hope of finding evidence pointing to the whereabouts of the missing Whitrow man.

Hunter, 45, was last seen drinking with colleagues in the Red Lion pub, Gildersome Lane, on the 9th June, before lea ving alone at approximately 10 p.m. Examination of CCTV footage has suggested he may have taken a shortcut home along the Bridgewater towpath, a route he is known to have used frequently, but searches of the water and surrounding fields have yet to shed light on his disappearance.

DCI Callum Griffiths told a press conference, “Our inquiries are ongoing, and we continue to keep an open mind as to what might have happened to Oliver, and where he might be. We ask anyone with information that might help the investigation to come forward. We also encourage Oliver to make contact with us to let us know he’s okay. In the meantime, we continue to offer support to his wife, and his three children, who all very much want their husband and their daddy home safe.”

Griffiths sought to downplay any connection with Adam Carlton, 22, who drowned in the canal last year and whose inquest returned an open verdict.

“I stress that, as of right now, this remains a missing persons inquiry,” he said. “There is presently no evidence to indicate either criminal involvement or any wider risk to the public.”

I looked up at Sarah.

“Oliver Hunter?” I said.

“He was working behind the food counter at the rest area that day.”

I looked back down.

“And … Adam Carlton?”

She shook her head. “No connection that I can see. I’m guessing that was just an accident the locals had started making a link to. But Adam Carlton ’s body ended up exactly where you’d expect it to be. That guy definitely drowned. But the police never found Oliver Hunter. The search was called off two weeks later. He’s still missing.”

I read the news report again.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Yep. And then there’s this.”

Sarah handed me a second sheet of paper. Another printout .

POLICE NAME MURDERED MAN

A man found dead in the woodland two weeks ago has been named by police today as Graham Lloyd. The body was discovered in an isolated corner of Carnegie Park by a couple walking on 3 July, but the condition of the remains had frustrated attempts to establish the victim’s identity.

Lloyd was last seen drinking in the town center eight days before the discovery, and was known to police.

DI Benjamin Joyce said, “This was a violent and sustained attack on an especially vulnerable member of the community. Our officers are committed to finding the people responsible for this crime and bringing them to justice.”

An autopsy established that Lloyd, 74 years old and of no fixed abode, died as the result of multiple blunt force trauma injuries. DI Joyce reported that several lines of inquiry were being followed, but made a special appeal for members of the town’s homeless population to come forward with information.

“We would like to speak to anyone who can shed light on the events leading up to this tragic attack,” he said. “Any information we receive will be treated in the strictest confidence.”

CAN YOU HELP? [Quote CRGS452 in contact]

“Graham Lloyd was there that day too,” Sarah said

I thought back.

“The man in charge of the amusement arcade?”

“That’s right.” She gestured at the piece of paper I was holding. “I found a few other articles about his murder, but all of them were from before this. All just small, local stuff, then nothing afterward. Either the investigation stalled or—and I’m just throwing out a vague idea here —maybe he wasn’t the kind of victim the police were going to put a huge amount of resources or effort into.”

I nodded .

Even with an article as short as this, it was easy to read between the lines. Known to the police; no fixed abode and drinking in the town center; the appeal to the homeless community. All the quotes from Joyce suggested that Graham Lloyd was not the kind of victim likely to end up on the front pages of the national newspapers, and who probably wouldn’t grace the pages of the local ones for long either.

“But there’s no way of knowing if anything happened to either of them,” I said. “If they were forced to watch someone else being killed, or if they reported it to the police.”

“Would the police have believed them if they did?”

“Maybe not Graham Lloyd,” I conceded. “Oliver Hunter, though.”

“Yeah, but as far as I can tell from the dates, Hunter was first,” Sarah said. “If you have a chain then someone has to start it off, right? So perhaps Oliver Hunter was abducted and murdered, and Graham Lloyd was forced to watch that. Then it was one after another. Rose Saunders watches Graham Lloyd die. Darren Field watches Rose.”

I looked down at the news report, unsure what to think.

“What about the other people on the website?” I said.

“What—you mean, you and your father?”

I didn’t reply.

“There was one other named person,” Sarah said. “Michael Johnson. He was the kid working in the shop there. He clocked the little boy—suspected him of being a shoplifter—but he never saw the Pied Piper. I couldn’t find any news stories about him. So I was thinking…”

She trailed off, waiting for me to finish the thought.

“That maybe we need to find him?” I said. “And see if he’s okay?”

“Maybe.”

“But how would we track him down?” The name was so common. “There must be hundreds of people.”

“There are,” Sarah said. “Yes.”

But she had a glint in her eye. And a moment later, she passed me a third piece of paper—another printout, but this time not from an online newspaper article. I looked down at lines of text that appeared to be computer code, most of it jargon that I couldn’t remotely understand. But close to the top was the name M. JOHNSON, and there was an address underneath.

“What is this?” I said.

“When you register a website,” Sarah said, “there are databases that record it. You can opt out and keep the details private, but it seems like this particular M. Johnson didn’t bother.”

I looked up.

“This is—?”

“The WHOIS information for the website about the Pied Piper that your father was browsing.”

She smiled.

“Tell me what an amazing person I am.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But pretty good, I think. Because this has to be him, right?”

I nodded. It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anyone else. It might have been macabre that he’d put so much effort into writing about the case, but I supposed that each of us who had been there that afternoon had been affected by it, and dealt with it in our own ways ever since.

“Yes,” I said. “It must be him.”

“So. What do you think?”

Sarah looked at me, her eyes still bright. It took me a moment to work out what she was suggesting, but then the expression on her face reminded me of how she used to look when she arrived at my doorstep as a kid.

Do you want to go on an adventure?