Page 42

Thirty-Seven

A knuckle rapped on the car window.

I looked up quickly from the newspaper clipping. The glass was dappled with rain. Beyond that, one of the security guards at the prison was leaning down next to the car, sheltering under an umbrella.

I put the window down.

“Hi, Eric.”

“Hey there, Dr. Garvie.” He gestured behind him with his thumb. “I buzzed you in at the gate, but I wanted to check. You’re not listed on the rota I was given as being at work today. Did someone make a mistake?”

I looked ahead, out through the windscreen. With its old brick walls and blocky towers, the prison was a forbidding sight at the best of times. Today, the weather made the building look even more washed-out and forlorn. A hopeless place. One that was perhaps best left obscured by the rain, assuming you couldn’t avoid it altogether. And today, I couldn’t.

“No,” I said. “I’m not on call. I’m here to see someone.”

He smiled. “Just can’t stay away, right?”

I did my best to smile back.

“Not a patient,” I said. “Not today.”

I walked around the perimeter and saw the queue of people waiting at the main entrance. They were all here to visit husbands, friends, loved ones. I’d seen them hundreds of times before in the past, and had always been oddly touched by the everyday sense of humanity their presence here suggested. Whatever the prisoners inside here might have done, they were just human beings. They had connections to ordinary lives that continued outside the prison’s walls. And maybe one day they would rejoin them.

My own appointment today was very different.

After I signed in, I was searched, and then a guard led me down an endless series of corridors, buzzing us through one door after another as he went. Eventually, we stopped outside one without a handle.

“You ready?” he said.

“Yes.”

He scanned his card. The door opened.

I stepped inside.

Craig Aspinall had been brought in before me. He was handcuffed and dressed in prison overalls, seated on the far side of a table in the middle of the room. There was a chair across from him, and I walked over and sat down.

The door closed behind me.

Silence for a moment as we stared at each other.

Despite everything he had done, I found it almost painful to look at him. I still remembered how he had seemed on the island: sun-worn and strong; a man who walked the trails and fixed things that other people had broken. But that man was gone now. His skin was pale, and the operations he’d undergone while awaiting trial had only been half successful. The surgeons had managed to reattach his lower jaw, but it remained misaligned, and his face below the nose was a mess of angry scar tissue. As a consequence of his injuries, it had been difficult for him to eat solid food, and his body appeared thin and weak beneath the overalls.

But appearances could be deceptive.

Because the rage that I knew consumed him inside was still burning softly in his eyes. If anything, he probably hated me even more now than he had before. And perhaps I should have hated him in return, but I didn’t. I was detached; I was calm. There was no such thing as monsters. Aspinall was only a man. He was the product of his environment and experiences: the focal point of the damage done to him, and the damage he had passed onto others because of it.

And I knew a lot more about that damage now.

I knew about the abusive childhood he had suffered while growing up on the island—common to many men his age there—and I knew that the demons he’d acquired had followed him when he escaped in his early twenties. I knew about his history of drug use and petty criminality after he moved to the mainland. The violence. The periods of incarceration as his offenses gathered momentum and became more serious.

I knew a lot less about his relationship with Abigail Palmer, but enough to understand that it had been a fractured and volatile one. My father told me that, when he first found Abigail’s file, it had given him the impression of a drowning woman who kept coming up for air. Having read it since, I agreed with him. And while I imagined Craig Aspinall believed he had loved her in his own way, I was equally sure that he had been one of the things that kept emerging from the depths to pull her down again.

Had he been James’s father? That wasn’t clear—no father’s name was recorded on the birth certificate—but I suspected so. Regardless, he had been an intermittent presence in the boy’s early life: sometimes there; more often not. At the time of James’s disappearance, Aspinall had been estranged from both of them, beginning a five-year sentence for robbery and assault.

By all accounts, he had been determined to turn his life around. Perhaps he had even imagined there might be a family waiting for him outside when he did. But given he had no official connection to Abigail and James, he hadn’t been contacted when James drowned, or when Abigail took her life later that year. He only learned of both events upon his release. By which point, the media coverage of the Pied Piper was long over.

In the meantime, his father had died. Aspinall inherited a ramshackle house on the island. His childhood home probably had monsters in every room, ghosts in all the shadows, but there was nowhere else for him to go by then .

I remembered the look of bitterness on his face when I’d spoken to him while collecting my father’s car.

That’s the thing about this island, right?

You think you’ve got away, but the place keeps dragging you back.

“Did you bring it?” he asked me now.

The injuries made it as difficult for him to speak as they did for him to eat. But even though I had to concentrate, I would have understood what he was asking regardless. The need in his body language was clear. He was like an addict. As much as he hated me, he was willing to endure my presence here in order to get what he wanted.

Did you bring it?

I glanced down at the folder in my lap.

“We’ll get to that, Craig. But there are a couple of questions I want to ask you first. And then maybe I can help you.”

I took the first item out of my folder.

My old, battered copy of The Man Made of Smoke , by Terrence O’Hare.

It felt strange to touch it again after all these years. I ran my fingers down the edge of its weathered and faded pages, and then across a cover that was now only barely attached. The book was secondhand in every way. I had spent so much time reading it when I was younger: lost for a while in the trauma it contained. When I left it behind me, I had passed it on to my father without realizing.

I thumbed through it now, recognizing the passages I had underlined and the notes I had made in the margins. My father had added his own annotations and asterisks too. A different hand and a different pen. And then finally—and again, without realizing—he had passed it on to someone else.

“That’s mine,” Aspinall said.

“Where did you get it?”

“You know where.”

I supposed that was answer enough. My father had pursued his investigation over the years—as obsessed, in his own way, as I had been—and when he finally solved it, he had made a choice. The world had moved on, he decided, and there was nothing to be gained from unearthing the past. It was better to draw a line and move on. His first visit to Abigail Palmer’s grave had been on what would have been James’s birthday, and he had left the book there.

Where Aspinall must have found it upon his own yearly visit.

“Did you see him at the grave?” I asked. “My father?”

He nodded. “Every year. I watched him.”

I flicked through the book to the photographs in the middle. Past the pictures of Sean Loughlin, Paul Deacon, and Charlie French, to the pages dedicated to Robbie Garforth. The portrait that had been taken at his school. The photograph I had found at the rest area.

And the sketch I had helped the police to draw. Which because of my persistence back then, had turned out to be an almost perfect likeness of James Palmer.

“And is this when you realized?” I said.

He nodded again.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Don’t you fucking dare apologize.”

Before I had a chance to react, Aspinall was out of his seat. He smashed his hands down on the table and stared across at me, the hatred and rage burning brightly in his eyes now.

“It’s your fault that he’s dead.”

Equally quickly, the door opened behind me, and I sensed a guard stepping into the room. But I didn’t turn around. I just stared back at Aspinall, and held up my hand as a signal to the man behind me.

It’s okay.

After a moment, Aspinall settled back down in his chair, breathing heavily as much as he could manage. Then I heard the sound of the guard retreating, and the door closing again.

I looked down at the book.

It’s your fault that he’s dead.

I had spent so long believing that. At first, I had allowed the guilt to consume and suffocate me. And then, in the years afterward, I had forced myself to feel far too little of anything. It wasn’t that I had locked what happened away behind a door. It was more like it had been in the room with me ever since, filling the air around me, and I had spent my whole life too afraid to breathe in.

What a waste.

Because looking back now, I realized how much compassion I felt for the boy I had been. The encounter with the Pied Piper had happened at the worst possible time for me: no longer a child, allowed to be scared of monsters; not yet a man, capable of taking responsibility. I remembered thinking of the rest area as a liminal space—a crossing-over spot between different worlds—but the truth is that I had been in one of those that entire summer.

And I could forgive myself for that.

“I’m not apologizing, Craig,” I said. “Because it’s not my fault. I said that I was sorry, and that’s not the same thing.”

He stared at me for a few seconds, still breathing heavily.

“But you are right,” I told him. “This belongs to you now.”

I put the book on the table and slid it across to him. He picked it up quickly and began thumbing through its pages as best he could. But I knew that it wasn’t the book he was interested in so much as what he had kept in it, and when he didn’t find it, he looked up at me.

“Where is it?”

“Maybe we’ll get to that. There’s something else I want to know first.”

I leaned forward.

“I know that you worked on your farm for months,” I said. “It was important to you to duplicate what you imagined in your mind’s eye.”

“Yes. Because it had to be right.”

“But what interests me more,” I said, “is how you found that location to begin with. In your statement, you said you spent a lot of your free time driving along country roads, searching for somewhere. You’d stop in a place and check, and it wouldn’t feel right, so you’d move on again. Over and over again. Three years of this?”

He nodded.

I thought about the newspaper article I’d read in the car .

DCI Smith declined to comment on reports that further remains had been discovered following Aspinall’s arrest.

When the police arrived at the compound that night, the whole area had been immediately cordoned off. The searches they made were thorough and comprehensive. And on the third day, while investigating a patch of land in one of the pens, they found four sets of human remains buried in the ground there. Initial examination of the bones recovered suggested that they belonged to males between the ages of five and fifteen, and that the bodies had been there for a long time, possibly decades. The information had yet to be released to the public, but I knew that recent DNA tests had finally established the identities of all four boys.

Sean Loughlin. Paul Deacon. Charlie French.

And James Palmer.

The farm had obviously been abandoned and derelict for years before Aspinall chanced upon it, and the precise chain of ownership was murky and unclear. The most recent entry on the land registry suggested it belonged to a man named William MacGuire, who had inherited it from his father. But that had been many years ago, and there were no other surviving records of MacGuire. There were no photographs of the man. No available DNA. Beyond the farm, and the bodies left there, he appeared to have left no trace on the world at all. It might never be proved beyond doubt that he was the Pied Piper, but it seemed likely to me. Never a monster at all. Just a man.

But none of that explained what had led Aspinall there.

“Years of searching,” I said. “What happened on the day you found it?”

He didn’t reply.

“Craig?” I prompted.

Nothing.

I stood up, making it clear I was going to leave—

“I heard him.”

—and then I sat back down again slowly.

“Heard who?” I said.

“My boy. ”

I waited.

“It was like I was lost that day,” he said. “I was driving down all these roads and had no idea where I was. It was the middle of nowhere, everything overgrown. I was looking for him, but I was ready to give up. And then I heard him calling out to me. It was only for a second, but his voice was clear as day. He was shouting out for help. That’s when I saw the path in the trees.”

“Which you followed.”

“I did.”

Aspinall nodded.

“And when I got there, it felt like I was home.”

As I looked at him now, I saw that the rage had faded from his eyes. He seemed helpless, haunted, and for a moment, I could see the little boy in him. His expression reminded me of James Palmer’s that day at the rest area.

“Did you bring it?” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

I reached into my file and produced a piece of paper. The best I could offer Aspinall was a color photocopy. The original had been discovered in his house, tucked away inside The Man Made of Smoke , but it was something that Aspinall had kept and lived with for far longer than he’d had the book.

I slid it over the table to him.

It was a letter that he had received many years ago, during that final spell in prison. As he rested his hands on it now, they obscured most of the page, but I could see the awkward handwriting at the top.

To Dad.

The picture that James Palmer had drawn for his father was visible at the bottom. Three stick figures standing side by side. The smallest one was holding what looked like an orange smudge. And beside the three of them, a Christmas tree, with little colored fairy lights dotted everywhere in the branches.