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Twenty-Six

John parks on the road by the cemetery.

When he turns the car engine off, the world is silent apart from the gentle rush of the breeze outside the car. There is a grand arch of stone beside him, through which he can see leafy trees and neatly tended grass illuminated by the midmorning sun. He has come to this place twice a year for the last four years, and every time has been struck by how tranquil it is here. Walking into the cemetery always feels like you’re stepping out of the busy outside world and into a quieter, more restful one, the atmosphere settling on your skin like soft spring dew.

He follows the wide path between the old and ornate headstones that are closest to the entrance. As the main path curls around, smaller ones begin to lead away to the sides. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason to the design; the cemetery is its own little city. Over the years, he has come to think of the paths through it as streets and the plots where people are buried as homes. It’s a comforting idea, he supposes. It suggests that your loved ones haven’t left you entirely, just moved, and that there will always be an address you can find them at when you want to.

But he is not visiting a loved one today.

After about five minutes, he stops. This particular grave is tucked away down a small side road of the cemetery, and has only a cheap, simple stone marking the plot. No flowers rest on this patch of grass. The ones he brought in July have been removed. He always brings a small bouquet: a meager offering, he knows, but it feels like something.

John puts his hands in his pockets and reads the inscription on the stone before him.

ABIGAIL PALMER

6 MARCH 1970–AUGUST 1998

The breeze sets the leaves rustling in the small grove of trees to his right. He glances over. The grove is empty for the moment, but while he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, there have been times standing here in the past when he has imagined a presence there. Brief moments when he has pictured a woman watching him from the shadows between the trees.

It’s possible she resents him for keeping her story, and James’s, to himself, but he’s always hoped that Abigail Palmer, otherwise forgotten by the world, might appreciate that at least one person remembers them.

As he looks at those trees now, though, he can feel a different presence building there. Given everything that has happened—everything he has done, and everything he has learned—a shiver runs through him at the thought of what other ghosts might appear there today.

All the people he has failed.

And he wonders what they might scream at him.

One person a night.

It was fourteen years after he first began his search—four years ago now—when John finally found her. A storm was lashing the island that night. Rain was pelting the windows and wind was rattling in the eaves. And John was sitting in the darkness, dog-tired and thinking he should go to bed.

One person a night , though.

He opened the file and it was Abigail Palmer.

He read the details cautiously. Abigail had been found dead in her flat on August 28, 1998, a few days after neighbors first reported a smell of decomposition gathering in the corridors of the tower block. When police broke down the door, they discovered the body of the young woman lying in bed, the air in the room thick with flies. The coroner’s report concluded that Abigail had taken a deliberate overdose of pills, and that she had been dead for over a week before she was found.

Nobody had even realized she was missing.

Abigail’s family history was volatile, and she had long been estranged from her parents. Her life had been a difficult one. Periods of employment and stability were brief punctuation marks in much longer and darker passages. Mental illness. Domestic violence. Drug use. Reading about Abigail broke John’s heart a little. The file gave the impression of a drowning woman who kept coming up for air, and who might have been saved if someone had noticed her in time. But nobody had seen Abigail. At the time of her death, she was out of work. She had no friends to speak of. None of the other residents on her floor had even known her name.

Only one person vaguely recalled that, when she had first moved into the tower block, there had been a little boy living with her.

It was impossible to be sure of Abigail’s motivation for taking her own life, but the coroner remarked upon the close relationship she had previously had with her son, James. By all accounts, she had loved the boy deeply, and he had always been her reason to drag herself back from the blacker places she was drawn to. James had been eleven years old. Like his mother, he was quiet and anonymous. Small for his age, and frequently bullied because he insisted on carrying a stuffed toy lion with him to school. The two of them were each other’s best friend.

And then James had died in an accident earlier that year.

To compound the loss, Abigail had blamed herself for his death. The two of them had been on holiday, staying out of season at a cheap campsite on the coast. There were few amenities, but the weather was half decent and they had the place to themselves. The small beach at the site was all shingle and stone, but they played Frisbee there and skimmed stones, enjoying the quiet. Abigail warned James to keep away from the sea, because the currents were strong and he had never learned to swim. But at some point, lulled by the pills she had promised herself she would stop taking, she had fallen asleep on the beach.

When Abigail woke up an hour later, the sun had gone in and the air was cold, and James was nowhere to be seen. Still groggy, she had stood up and called his name. Her feet had crunched in the shingle as she stumbled down toward the edge of the water, and from there along to the next little cove, where she found James’s shorts folded up on the rocks by the water.

There was only one phone at the campsite, five minutes back up a footpath. It was over half an hour before the police arrived. A little longer than that before the coastguards began their search.

The next day, James’s stuffed toy lion was discovered washed up a short distance along the shore. The coroner’s report noted that it was the last evidence of James that was ever found, although that was not unusual for that particular stretch of coastline.

In the meantime, police had looked at Abigail and seen what they wanted to see: a negligent mother, yes, but one who had also been frantically honest with them. Consumed by guilt, she had told them exactly what drugs they would find both in her system and in the car. At the time of her death, there were still a number of potential charges hanging over her.

John read the report through several times.

One line in particular resonated with him, although he wasn’t quite sure why. Abigail Palmer, the coroner suggested, had been a woman who felt things very deeply.

The file also included the single surviving photograph of James that anyone had been able to find. It had been taken years before his death, when he was still in primary school, but the sight of it took John’s breath away. When he compared it with the sketch that Daniel had contributed to, he might have been looking at the same person.

The next weekend, he took the ferry and drove to the campsite where James was believed to have drowned. He walked down to that sad, stony little beach and stood there in the cold wind for a time, looking out over the sea. It was a desolate place. Lonely. Isolated. It felt right. And as he walked back, an old camper van drove in down the entrance trail and parked in a dusty bay by the side.

John sat in his car, watching it, and eventually a young family got out.

But the vehicle was the same make and model as the one he remembered from the rest area, and he couldn’t help seeing its arrival right then as a sign. A small nod of acknowledgment from the universe that he was right.

That this was the place.

That James Palmer was the boy his son saw that day.

That through sheer force of will, after a decade and a half of bloody-minded searching, John had done what nobody else could.

The weeks afterward were ones of careful consideration. It felt like he should report what he had discovered. And yet for some reason, he found himself hesitating.

What would it achieve, he wondered?

Justice.

That was the obvious answer. Except what did justice amount to in this case? The Pied Piper was long dead, and surely so was James Palmer. There were no grieving relatives or friends awaiting a resolution. The world had forgotten Abigail and James almost before they were gone. And knowing the boy’s name would not bring the police any closer to identifying who the Pied Piper had been, or where the bodies of his missing victims might be buried.

Validation , then.

For some people, that would have been reason enough to come forward. Assuming John was right, he knew that what he had found would make a mark on the world. He would become known as the police officer who had refused to give up, who had gone the extra mile, who had pulled off what others might have considered impossible. He would get the recognition that had eluded him all his life.

The idea was appealing, but it also left him feeling strangely empty. If you took the bad on the chin without flinching then the same should be true of the good. Whatever anyone else thinks of you, it should be enough for you to know that you’re enough.

The final reason, then.

His son.

And in the end, it was Daniel who made the decision for him. It was a few years ago, not long after John identified James Palmer, and Daniel had returned home for a visit. They were sharing a drink outside one evening, and John mentioned his hobby—the research he did into cold cases to keep him occupied—and Daniel asked what he thought he could contribute to the investigations.

John had stared down the garden for a time.

“Brute force,” he said.

Daniel had made a joke about it— you just want to be like the characters in the books you read —and there had been a moment when John had felt an urge to shake his head and tell his son everything. To justify himself.

To make Daniel proud of him.

But he had begun his investigation in the hope of healing his boy and bringing the two of them closer together, and that all seemed so long ago now. They were closer. The boy his son had been back then was gone. Daniel was a grown man now, accomplished and impressive. What possible good could it do for him to learn that he had been right all those years ago? The ground had settled, and the idea of John turning that soil over now and unearthing the past seemed selfish and wrong.

So he had forced himself to laugh gently.

The conversation had moved on.

And he had told nobody what he had found.

There was just those twice-yearly visits since, once on Abigail’s birthday in March, and once again on James’s in July. The very first time he went, he had brought a book with him. His son’s tattered old copy of The Man Made of Smoke —or his own now, he supposed—and he had left it on the grave with the flowers.

Let that be the end of it, he thought.

Because he had never believed that any of it could possibly matter.

John stares at the cluster of trees now.

There is nobody there, of course, but he can almost see Abigail Palmer’s ghost standing among them. On past occasions, he has imagined James there too. Even if he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, he has always liked to believe that, if the boy’s ghost were capable of finding its way anywhere, it would have been back to his mother’s side.

Because he assumed James was dead.

He can’t sense James there today, but it does feel like other ghosts have joined Abigail in the trees. Oliver Hunter and Graham Lloyd; Rose Saunders and Darren Field. He hasn’t been able to track down Michael Johnson, but perhaps he is there too. Regardless, the mingled voices John hears in his head are loud enough already.

We might be alive if it wasn’t for you.

You fucked up again, didn’t you?

You failed us just like you fail at everything.

There’s no answer to those accusations. John feels the truth of them in his bones. He’d imagined he could draw a line and move on. That it was all history and wasn’t important. But all these people might still be alive if he’d reported what he’d found. He used to think that he and Daniel’s encounter with the Pied Piper had poisoned everything, but the reality seems starker than that right now. It’s not what happened at the rest area. It’s John himself. That afternoon was just another moment in a life spent slipping, falling, and failing.

I’m sorry , he thinks.

But the voices are too angry. There is no possibility of forgiveness there. And how could there be, when the voices are coming from inside him? As they grow in volume and fury, he turns and heads quickly back down the path, moving faster, until, by the time he reaches the car, he is running, his heart pounding hard in his chest. And yet the voices behind him seem to have kept pace, even grown louder with every step.

It’s all your fault.

John leans on the side of the vehicle, breathing slowly and steadily, trying to calm himself down. But just as his pulse begins to settle, he registers a buzzing at his hip .

His mobile ringing.

He leans away from the car and takes his phone out of his pocket. The screen shows an unknown number, and he stares down at it for a few seconds before accepting the call and lifting the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” he says.

No reply.

John shifts his body slightly, looking around him. He has the sensation of being watched, even though the world is serene and silent, and there is nobody in sight.

He turns back, pressing the mobile more tightly against his face.

“Hello?” he says again.

Silence.

And then the man speaks.