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Twenty-Seven

It was midafternoon when Sarah and I arrived back at the island.

We didn’t talk much on the drive home. For most of the journey, I was trying to process the thoughts I’d had back at the rest area, and Sarah either sensed that I wanted some space to do so, or else just needed some of her own.

On the ferry, I kept an eye on the other passengers.

Were we being watched? If so, I couldn’t tell.

Nobody sees , I thought. And nobody cares.

When the ferry reached the island, I drove us to her mother’s home and parked. When she got out, I followed her up the path and waited as she unlocked the front door. Then I went into the front room and rattled the latch on the window.

She looked at me. “What are you—?”

“Making sure the house is secure.”

For a second, it seemed like she wanted to argue with me. But then she stared down the dimly lit corridor ahead of us and shrugged.

“Maybe do the kitchen first?” she said. “I need coffee.”

“On it.”

The kitchen window was locked, the back door bolted. Sarah set the kettle boiling as I headed upstairs, and I heard it rumbling away below me as I did a tour of the other rooms in the house. Everything was locked and safe. The kettle clicked off as I walked back through into the kitchen.

We sat down at the table.

“So,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

I warmed my hands on the cup as I told her my theory: that I thought the killer might be driven by a deep sense of self-hatred, and that his crimes now were an attempt to deal with that. That in some ways, he was performing an experiment. If the people who failed him as a child turned a blind eye again now, that meant they were bad people, and that allowed him to accept himself for a while. If they didn’t, he exploded into violence.

The coffee was hot enough that my fingers were burning by the time I finished. But I didn’t move them.

“Accept himself for what?” Sarah said.

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe for things he saw and was made to do. We don’t know what his relationship with the Pied Piper was. If he was abducted, we don’t even know when. It’s possible he ended up playing a part in the murders.”

“Jesus.”

“The point is, I think he hates himself more than you or I could imagine,” I said. “And what do we do when we’re angry with ourselves? We lash out. Have you ever done something wrong, but you were so annoyed with yourself that you couldn’t admit it?”

“More often than I’d like to say.”

“And maybe you took it out on someone else instead?”

“No comment.”

“It’s a defense mechanism,” I said. “It’s what the mind does when it feels under attack. Obviously, this is an extreme example of that, but ultimately it’s the same thing. Underneath it all, it’s a little boy protecting himself.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Okay,” she said finally. “So does that mean Johnson was right? If he keeps quiet about what happened, that gives the killer what he wants. The end.”

I shook my head .

“No, because it’s never going to be a permanent solution for him. The source of the anger—the damage—remains unresolved. It’s all still there inside him. And I think there’s a part of him that enjoys it too. Do you remember what you said yesterday? There’s a pleasure in dwelling .”

“Yeah. But this is—”

“An extreme example,” I said again. “But it’s the same thing. And Darren Field didn’t go to the police, did he? That didn’t make him safe. The killer basically sent my father to his front door. Because I think he wanted an excuse to do it.”

“Which means?”

“That he’s escalating. It’s a mistake to think of his rules as being absolute. He’s not a robot following a program. He’s a mess. His rules are there to serve a purpose, but he’ll bend them if they don’t suit him. And I think he’s started to like the killing more than the peace he imagined it would give to him.”

She hesitated. And then sighed.

“So what do we do now?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I know you’re worried that talking to Liam might put Michael Johnson in danger,” she said. “But from what you’ve just told me, he might be in danger whether you talk to the police or not?”

“It’s still not my decision to make.”

“Okay. So leave him out of it for now. Leave me out of it. Just tell Liam everything else.”

She leaned forward and looked at me.

“You can make the police believe it. I know you can.”

“Maybe.”

I wanted what she’d said to be true. I wanted to believe that the insight I’d gleaned at the rest area was useful, and that a concerted police investigation, along with the expertise I could bring to the table, would be able to find him. That I was good enough .

But I wasn’t sure that I did.

I moved my fingers from the burning hot cup.

“Maybe,” I repeated, finally sipping the coffee. “But I need to think.”

Sarah had a shift at the bar in a couple of hours, and we agreed that I’d meet her there later. In the meantime, I drove back to my father’s house.

After parking, I stood by the side of the car and looked around. There was no sign of movement on the sun-dappled lane. Even so, I stood there for a few seconds, not just to make sure the street was clear but, if I was being watched right then, to send a signal to whoever was out there that I wasn’t afraid.

Then I unlocked the door.

Just as I had done at Sarah’s house, I did a thorough search of the property, checking every door and window. There were no signs of disturbance; the building was secure. Whatever else the man might have been doing today, he hadn’t attempted to force entry here. That was reassuring on one level, but it was unnerving not to know what he had been doing instead.

I went upstairs to my father’s room.

His old leather boxing gloves were still on the floor by the punch bag. I picked them up and turned them over in my hands, looking down at the map of cracked texture that the endless blows had worn into the fabric. It was strange to remember how huge they had seemed to me when I was young. So large that it had been hard to believe my hands would ever be big enough to fill them. When I slipped them on now, they fit me perfectly.

I turned to the bag.

Then started off with left jabs, slow and steady.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

One of the first things I’d done when I left the island and arrived at university was join the boxing club there. I never told my father. To begin with, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I kept remembering how he’d tried to encourage me, and how I’d pushed back against it because that was his way of handling life, not mine. It seemed stupid all these years later, but at the time it had felt important not to admit that he might have had anything to teach me at all .

After I’d warmed up with the jabs, I moved onto combinations, gradually increasing the strength of the blows.

Thud.

Thud, thud.

Thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

But I had soon found a different reason not to discuss training with my father. It had quickly become obvious that, despite him trying to teach me to box when I was younger, he had never had any real idea how. He hit the bag every day, but that was all he was doing. The bag was a stand-in for all the frustrations and disappointments of his life, and he spent his evenings pounding it as hard as he could, lashing out with brute force rather than skill or technique. My father knew how to punch, but not how to box, and in a fight he would always be taking as many blows as he landed.

When I had understood that, I had felt sorry for him.

That was one the first times that I saw him not simply as my father but as a man in his own right: one who was struggling to deal with the challenges of life in his own complicated way. There were occasions when I returned to the island afterward that I considered slipping on the gloves and showing him what I could do. But I never did. I understood enough by then to know it would mean showing him yet another thing that he could not.

Thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud.

As I worked the bag now, I found myself slipping into a kind of gentle trance. I was often at my most relaxed at times like this, with my body performing movements that ticked thoughtlessly, like clockwork, leaving my mind free to wander.

There were things I thought I knew about the killer.

He was organized and intelligent, and even if he was escalating and beginning to change the rules of the game he’d set up, deep down he would still be motivated by the same underlying mission: to ease the guilt and pain and self-disgust inside him. But that was all interior. How would he present to the world on the outside? The nature of the murders suggested that he was physically capable and socially adroit. He had the time to research and plan. He traveled freely, where and when he pleased, without attracting attention. Despite the deep-rooted psychological instability inside him, he had managed to integrate into the world and maintain a veneer of acceptability.

How had the boy I had seen back then become this man now?

There were obvious practicalities to consider. He had been roughly my age, perhaps a little older, when I met him at the rest area, and the Pied Piper had died only a couple of weeks later. At that point, he would effectively have been free.

So why had he never come forward?

He had been unable to run from the man when he had the opportunity, which suggested that he had been indoctrinated. As I’d said to Sarah, perhaps he had been involved in the man’s murders. An apprentice. In which case, it was possible that he had even been upset when the Pied Piper died and made a conscious decision to stay wherever it was that he was being held, assuming that held was even the right word by then.

I hit the bag harder.

That idea suggested a degree of self-sufficiency. If the boy had made it to adulthood without being detected, there had clearly been little need for interaction with the outside world. He had been able to grow into the man he was now in private, presumably living most of his life off-grid, at least when he was younger. Which also fit with the fact that nobody had ever identified the Pied Piper.

I remembered the muddy boots and filthy van.

A working farm of some kind?

Perhaps. I was well aware that I might be overreaching here, and that it was dangerous to make assumptions without evidence. And yet the thoughts were beginning to come as fast as the punches.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, THUD .

I held the bag for a second, catching my breath. Then pushed it away and started again.

Thud, thud, THUD.

Why hadn’t he reconnected with his real family?

Perhaps they were dead, or there was nobody he wanted to return to. It was possible that after everything he’d been through, he no longer felt any connection to the real world. After all, his photograph had been widely circulated and nobody had come forward. No child matching his description had ever been reported missing. And if nobody had cared about him before he was taken, why would he have assumed anyone would do so afterward?

Especially if he had done something terrible.

I stopped again. The bag creaked back and forth on its chain for a second before I stilled it. My arms were shaky, my breath coming hard and fast.

I tried to conjure up a presence behind me.

Who are you? I thought.

No answer.

Where are you?

No answer.

I pushed the bag away again. As I started hitting it now, the punches began to come quicker and harder.

Thud, thud, thud, THUD.

Thud, thud, thud, THUD.

The Zen-like state of a few minutes earlier had deserted me. My subconscious had gone silent, which meant that there must be some detail I wasn’t seeing, and that angered me. All the other emotions that had been building up over the last few days were close to the surface too. I could feel them brimming over. And then I lost any sense of technique. I just gritted my teeth and punched the bag with all my force, the blows reverberating through my arms and shoulders. Harder and harder—

THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD.

—until I couldn’t hit the bag anymore.

I rested my forearm against the leather, and then my head on my arm, my heart pounding and my whole body trembling. After taking a minute to get my breath back, I opened my eyes. It had been stupid to lose control like that, and I was lucky not to have hurt myself.

I had not been detached. I had not been calm.

Even so, I felt exhilarated.

Feels good, doesn’t it, my son?

I held still for a moment. Then I thought: Yes. It does.

You’ve got pretty good , my father said.

Thank you.

I wish you’d told me. I understand why you didn’t. But honestly, it would have been fine. We all have our own ways of coping with things, don’t we? And if mine was brute force, then what the hell. It worked for me.

There’s no shame in that.

No, I thought.

There isn’t.

I undid the straps on the gloves with my teeth and then pulled them off one by one. My hands were still trembling a little, but I could see blood beneath the skin between my knuckles.

It reminded me of the time when I came back at the end of my first year at university: the night when my father had collapsed, and I’d had to help him into bed. That was the moment when I’d realized how much the encounter at the rest area had affected him. That what happened to us all there haunted him too.

Robbie? Was that you?

I’d been staring over at his desk when he said that. The computer had been open on a website; I’d been distracted by the empty bottles beside it, and hadn’t bothered to look more closely. But I remembered seeing a box file on the otherwise empty shelves above.

Still holding the gloves, I turned around and looked at the desk.

In the years since, my father had filled the shelves above with his out-of-hours research material. The unsolved murders and disappearances he’d become intrigued by; the cold cases that were far more exciting than the mundane crimes he dealt with every day. I’d diminished his hobby when he’d first mentioned it to me a few years ago. Because what did he imagine he could bring to the table that all the more experienced investigators who had worked on them could not?

Brute force.

Most of the box files on the shelves were labeled. I even recognized some of the cases from my father’s handwriting on the spines. But that oldest one was not. And there were another seven old boxes next to it that had been left blank too.

You know what? I imagined my father saying now.

Sometimes a bit of brute force is exactly what you need.

I put the gloves down carefully and walked across the room.