Page 26

Twenty-Three

Michael Johnson lived in a tower block not far from the canal where Rose Saunders had moored her boat. Aside from a handful of miles at the end, in fact, the route I drove us on was almost exactly the same as I’d taken yesterday, and passing the exit for the rest area brought the same frisson of panic it had then.

But it also occurred to me how close most of us had stayed to the scene of our encounter with the Pied Piper. Darren Field and Rose Saunders had both lived nearby; Michael Johnson still appeared to. Oliver Hunter had moved a little farther afield, but the stretch of canal on which he had vanished was part of the same system where Rose had made her home. And while Sarah and I had moved away, circumstances had brought the two of us back again. It was as though we were all tethered to the place by a cord that could never be broken, only stretched for a while until eventually it pulled us back.

After leaving the motorway, I didn’t drive directly to Johnson’s address. When I estimated that we were ten minutes away, I pulled in and parked on a residential road.

“What are you doing?” Sarah said.

“Nothing. ”

I eyed the rearview mirror. When she realized what I was doing, she craned her neck and looked back over her shoulder.

“You think we’re being followed?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just being careful.”

Ever since the ferry, I’d had the sensation that we were being shadowed. A tingle of attention was itching between my shoulder blades. Which made sense, of course; the photograph I’d received proved that someone really had been watching me. But I hadn’t noticed anything suspicious on the ferry, and I’d kept a constant eye on the traffic around us after we disembarked and drove away. There had been nothing. Even so, I was still watching carefully now, making a mental note of the color and model of the cars around us. I tried to catch glimpses of the people driving them and remember parts of the license plates.

Five minutes later, I was satisfied.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “Let’s go.”

Michael Johnson had a flat in a tower block. It turned out to be one of three, angled so that the blank windows and empty balconies twenty stories above faced each other across a forlorn spread of dirty tarmac. We parked outside Johnson’s block. There were large gray bins in a wire-mesh cage by the entrance, but one of them had been tipped over onto its side, and litter was skittering aimlessly across the ground in the breeze. An old set of double doors led inside, the glass there dark.

Sarah leaned forward and peered up dubiously.

“I’m guessing eight twelve means he’s on the eighth floor?”

“Probably,” I said. “The lift might be working.”

“If not, at least we’ll get our steps in.”

I turned the engine off, and we sat there for a few seconds in silence. Outside the car, there didn’t seem to be anybody else around at all. The world was so quiet that the tower block in front of us now felt eerie and deserted.

“You realize we might be doing something very stupid?” Sarah said.

“I’ve been thinking that ever since we left the house.”

She nodded to herself. “As long as we’re on the same page.”

Then she leaned back and clicked her seat belt off .

We walked across to the block. The entrance doors opened onto a drab corridor that led down to a claustrophobic hall, with narrow stairwells disappearing up on three sides. There were two lifts, one of them working. I pressed the call button and we waited, the half reflection on the swirled metal of the doors turning us into a pair of distorted ghosts. The interior was small and cramped, with torn linoleum on the floor and undecipherable graffiti daubed across the misty mirror. The elevator lurched as it set off and then juddered more alarmingly with every floor we passed.

“We’re going to die,” Sarah said.

“It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t want to die in a lift.”

We reached the eighth floor and then followed the corridor around. There was no natural light, and a number of the strips above us weren’t working, so we passed through pockets of shadow. All the doors were shut, but I could hear television programs and music through the thin wood. A couple arguing. A baby crying.

We reached flat 812.

I knocked on the flimsy door. There was no immediate response from inside the flat, and Sarah and I shared an uneasy glance. There could have been a hundred reasons why Michael Johnson wasn’t home right now, and most of them were innocent. But I could tell that we were both focusing on the one that was not.

Then I heard careful movement on the other side of the door.

A few seconds later it opened a crack, a chain holding it in place, and a man peered out at us. Assuming this was Michael Johnson, he was only six or seven years older than us, but time had not been kind to him. Even from the little I could see through the gap, his eyes were bleary and his face was pale and drawn. He was wearing a dirty, baggy T-shirt, and a sagging gray beanie in which his head appeared almost lost.

“Michael Johnson?” I said.

“Who are you?”

He sounded suspicious. But I thought there was also an undertone of fear. Once again, there were many possible reasons for that, but I couldn’t help imagining the worst .

“My name’s Daniel,” I said. “This is my friend, Sarah.”

“Are you police?”

“No. I’m a doctor. Sarah’s a… singer.”

He looked at Sarah then back at me.

“What do you want?”

How would my father approach this? As far as he had taken his own investigation, I didn’t imagine he would have found his way here. Michael Johnson was too common a name to pin down, and I was sure that the method Sarah had used to find this address would never have occurred to him. But if he had done, what would he say? What words would he have used to persuade a frightened man to unchain the door and talk to him?

I decided to settle the matter quickly.

“We’re here because we want to talk about what happened to you,” I said. “About what you were forced to watch.”

That got an immediate reaction, if not quite the one I had hoped for. The man’s eyes widened in panic and he made to shut the door. But he was slower than I was, and I got there first, sliding my foot quickly into the gap. The wood was so thin that it barely hurt when the door slammed into it.

And then did so again and again.

“Get out,” he spat at me. “Get out. Leave me alone. ”

“Michael—”

“Go fucking away! Get the fuck out!”

“Michael.”

I placed my hand on the door. Even with me adding just that small extra pressure, he wasn’t strong enough to slam the door against my foot anymore. He struggled for a moment anyway, and then stopped trying.

Which left us at an impasse.

“Michael,” I said. “It’s okay.”

He looked at me. More obviously frightened now.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I do. I—”

“You don’t know how fucking dangerous it is for you to be here.”

A surge of anger threatened to rise up inside me. I wasn’t sure where it came from, just that it was suddenly there: the desire to shove a little harder, force the door off its hinges, send him sprawling backward…

Detached , I reminded myself.

Calm.

“Listen to me, Michael,” I said quietly. “This is really important. I understand because I was there that day too. All those years ago at the rest area. You know what day I’m talking about, right? Because you wrote about it. You made a website about the Pied Piper.”

That made him hesitate. While the terror remained in his eyes, it was obvious that what I’d said had thrown him.

“You were there too?” he said.

“Yes.”

He blinked rapidly. Then he made the connection in his head.

“Daniel?” he said. “You’re Daniel Garvie ?”

“That’s right. Sarah and I were both there that afternoon.”

He looked at Sarah for a second. Then back to me.

Then he shook his head. His voice dropped to a whisper.

“Have you seen him too?”

The question made a shiver run through me. Even without telling us anything else, I knew he’d just confirmed the worst of what I’d been imagining.

“Seen him?” I said. “No, I don’t think so. But I think I do know what you mean by that, and how awful it must have been if I’m right. And if so, I think we really, really need to talk.”

For a long moment, he didn’t reply, and I began to wonder whether I’d said too little or too much. It had been enough to knock him off-balance, but for those few seconds it wasn’t clear in which direction he was going to fall.

But then he looked away from me, down at the floor.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

And he undid the chain.