The Shadows: A Novel (15 page)

It was midmorning when the autopsy results for Billy Roberts finally came through, and Amanda already felt dead on her feet. Hotels did not agree with her. Or was it the other way around? The thought momentarily baffled her. Then she shook her head, took a sip of cheap coffee, and tried to concentrate on the screen in front of her.

It wasn’t easy. One of the many things she had learned from this case was that dreams occurred in the shallowest part of sleep. Last night, the uncomfortable mattress had done its best to keep her there and had helped to supply a wealth of them.

The nightmare, of course.

Given some of the horrors Amanda had witnessed in her career, she might have expected any bad dreams to be grim and visceral, but the most common one she had was superficially benign. Everything around her was pitch-black, and there was a feeling of vast space on every side, as though the whole world had been swept empty and clean. There was no sound. There was no real sensation at all, in fact, beyond the tight knot of awareness in her mind that somewhere out there in the darkness a child was lost. That he was going to die if she didn’t find him. And that she was not going to do so in time.

She always woke from the dream in a state of profound distress,
with an ache in her chest. It was not a pain so much as an absence: a feeling of hopelessness and despair. This morning, that feeling had been compounded by panic. The bedroom around her was almost as dark as the world in the nightmare, and what little she could see in the gloom was unfamiliar and threatening.

She had sat up quickly.

Where was she? For a few seconds, she hadn’t been able to think. In that time, she had felt like a child again herself, the despair heightened by the dim knowledge that her father was dead, and if she cried out nobody would come.

At least she knew where she was right now. The Gritten Police Department cafeteria. It was a classic of its kind: a small room with beige chairs and old folding tables with the Formica chipped at the edges. The catering arrangements amounted to a vending machine in one corner. She took another sip of the shit coffee she’d gotten from it and thought,
Focus, woman
. Then she opened the autopsy report on her laptop.

There were photos attached, but she avoided them for the moment. It turned out there was more than enough devil in the details themselves, and she scanned them as dispassionately as she could. Time of death was estimated to be late morning yesterday. That information made her shiver. She had been sure the killer was still in the house when she arrived, and the forensics report all but confirmed it. When she had knocked, there had been a monster on the other side of that door, staring back out at her.

Christ, if she’d tried the handle right then …

She did her best to shake the thought away and read on. The cause of death appeared to be a savage knife wound to Roberts’s throat, but as she’d observed at the scene itself, there were numerous other injuries listed in the report: cuts to his face and arms; extensive bruising to the head and body; bones that had been methodically broken.
Billy Roberts had been badly tortured prior to his actual death, and marks around his wrists suggested he’d been handcuffed for much of his ordeal.

Amanda steeled herself and opened one of the photos.

It showed a close-up of what was left of his face. She leaned back slightly, recoiling from the image. Over the course of her research she had seen photographs of Billy Roberts as a teenager, and the one that had stuck with her was from the press coverage: the surly face staring back at the camera, somewhere in that nebulous state between boy and man. The discrepancy between the teenage photograph and the sight before her now was stark in every possible way.

Who did this to you, Billy?
she thought.

But, as always, another question pressed at her. Right now it seemed more important than ever.

And why?

Detective Graham Dwyer was fairly sure he had the answer to both questions.

“Walt Barnaby, Jimmy Till, and Stephen Hyde,” he said. “They’re fucking scumbags.”

Amanda followed him down one of the Gritten department’s ancient corridors, caught between the need to keep up and the desire not to. Dwyer was a large man. The back of his barely tucked-in shirt was stained with sweat, and his thin gray hair was damp with it; she could smell him even from a distance, and it was obvious he didn’t care in the slightest. It was equally clear that he was tolerating her presence here rather than welcoming it—that whatever strings Lyons had pulled higher up in Gritten had become a little more tangled on the way down.

Which was understandable, she supposed; she would probably
have been the same if their situations had been reversed. But then she considered that. Maybe it wasn’t true anymore. She remembered the investigation into the little boy’s disappearance, and how she had initially resented another officer being drafted in to assist her, whereas now all she did was miss him.

“That’s three people,” she said.

Dwyer didn’t break stride. “Well counted.”

“I only saw one set of footprints at the scene,” she said.

“One set of
bloody
footprints.”

“Indicating one
bloody
killer.”

“Who will be one of the three men I mentioned.”

Dwyer led her into his office. It was tidier than she’d been expecting, the shelves lined with carefully labeled box files, the desk clear aside from his computer and some neatly stacked brown folders. The window behind the desk—mercifully—was open.

Dwyer sat down heavily in his chair and sighed.

“You have to understand, you don’t know these people. Barnaby, Till, and Hyde. Like I said—complete scumbags. If you don’t believe me, the files are right there.” He gestured at the pile of folders without making any effort to pass them to her. “Be my guest.”

“Thank you.”

She flicked through them, thinking that Dwyer’s definition of
fucking scumbag
differed slightly from hers. Maybe she was mellowing as she aged, but she found herself feeling slightly sorry for the three men. They were all in their forties, but looked much older in the mug shots that had been taken. Sallow skin. Bedraggled hair. Wild eyes. She recognized the type, of course, and could read between the lines of the various arrests and charges. These were the type of men who had drifted to the edge of society, or fallen through its cracks. You found them everywhere: drinking in the daytime in cheap, rough pubs; sitting with cans in the park; passing out in each other’s houses and flats, the days and nights blurring into one. A
volatile network of friends where the threat of violence was always humming away below the surface. All it took was one wrong word or perceived slight. One falling-out.

Dwyer was staring at her.

“We have all three in custody,” he said. “We have numerous witnesses who say they were drinking with Billy Roberts in the house on the day before his murder.”

Amanda remembered the raised voices she’d heard in the brief phone call she’d made to Roberts.

“And what else?”

“They all say they left at some point.” Dwyer spread his hands. “Except none of them can corroborate that. And their stories all conflict.”

“Maybe they were drunk.”

Dwyer laughed. “Oh, they were certainly that.”

“Okay,” she said. “Was anything taken from the house?”

“Who can tell? And before you ask, we’re waiting on forensics. My guess is we’re going to find tons of that.”

“Well, you already said they were all in the house.”

Dwyer ignored her.

“We’re searching what passes for their properties. We’re also talking to them—or trying to. Two of them are still plastered. But trust me. I know from experience that one of them will turn out to be the
bloody killer
.”

Amanda put the files back down on the desk, torn between the instinct she had to disagree with Dwyer and the knowledge that he was probably right. There was no reason to believe Billy Roberts’s murder was in any way connected to what had happened in Featherbank, and more often than not the most obvious solution turned out to be the correct one. Dwyer was placing his bet in exactly the same way she would probably have if she’d been in his shoes. Not everything had to have a deeper meaning; sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.

And yet.

The ferocity of what had been done to Roberts had stayed with her. Yes, the level of violence fit with a perpetrator whose mind had been ravaged by years of drink and drugs and God only knew what else. But it still felt like there had been more
control
to what had happened in his house than that, and that there was something here they were missing.

“You look worried,” Dwyer said.

“I am.”

“About what?”

“I’m worried this has something to do with why I’m here.”

Dwyer rolled his eyes.

“Detective Beck,” he said, “I know why you’re here. And let me tell you, places like this one have long memories. Nobody has forgotten what happened. But the thing is, nobody likes to think about it either. It’s done. It’s the past. Life moves on.”

“Someone left blood on Paul Adams’s door.”

“Apparently so. I said people don’t like to think about it. But maybe they don’t mind
other people
thinking about it.”

She leaned on the desk. “Charlie Crabtree was never found.”

There was silence in the room for a moment. Dwyer’s gaze settled on her, and there was stone in it, as though she’d transgressed, crossed a boundary.

She didn’t care.

“If you’re wrong,” she said quietly, “the killer is still out there. And what I’m
worried
about is what he might do next.”

She was about to say more when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She stood back from the desk, and took it out to find a message from Theo:

CALL ME ASAP.

Dwyer raised an eyebrow sarcastically.

“What have you got there?” he said. “A confession?”

She looked back at him.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

She went out into the corridor to phone Theo back, leaning against the wall as she waited for him to answer the call. When he did, she could hear the low thrum of activity in the hard drives he spent his working life surrounded by. Or at least imagined she could.

“It’s Amanda here,” she said. “What have we got?”

“We’ve not had an actual reply from CC666,” he said. “But there was a hit on the link I sent. I could bore you with all the information it’s given me about the user’s computer, but I won’t for now. The important thing is that the IP address turned out to be easy to pin down. I’ve got it to within a couple of streets. A place called Brenfield. It’s about a hundred miles from Gritten.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Last night. Sorry, I missed it until now.”

“That’s okay.”

Whoever was behind the CC666 account, it obviously wasn’t Billy Roberts. The place name nagged at her though.
Brenfield
. She’d seen it in the files somewhere. But she was so tired it was difficult to trawl through the sheer amount of information she’d absorbed over the past few days.

The sound on the line altered slightly, and she pictured Theo moving about in his dark room, shifting between screens.

“You recognize the place name, right?” he said.

“I’ve had a busy couple of days.”

“Fair enough.”

So he told her. And Amanda remembered. And even as she listened, she was already heading off quickly down the corridor.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in my hotel room, I picked up my cell phone and made a call. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to ask, or what I was going to do with whatever I learned afterward, but I knew I had to do something.

It took a few seconds for her to answer.

“Sally Longfellow speaking.”

“Hi, Sally,” I said. “It’s Paul Adams here.”

“Paul, hello. I’m at home right now. How is Daphne today?”

“I haven’t gone in to see her yet.”

“I know it’s hard. Well, I imagine she’s sleeping.” She lowered her voice slightly. “As sad as it is, that’s really the best you can hope for at this stage, isn’t it?”

I wasn’t in the mood and decided to cut to the chase.

“I suppose so,” I said. “What I actually wanted to do was ask a little more about the circumstances of my mother’s accident.”

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“She fell, right?”

“Yes.”

I waited, staring out of the window at the street below, but
it seemed that Sally was unwilling to add more without being prompted. If it was possible to hear defensiveness in silence, then the call seemed full of it. Maybe she thought I was planning to blame her for what had happened—for being negligent in some way.

“Was she going up- or downstairs when she fell?”

“I really don’t know. Does that matter?”

“I’m not sure.” I shook my head. The question had come from nowhere, and yet it suddenly felt important, for some reason. “Did she say anything afterward about what happened?”

“No. She was quite badly hurt. And you know what your mother is like, Mr. Adams. I’m not sure she understood anything had happened at all.”

“How long was she lying there?”

“Again, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I got there as quickly as possible.”

I paused. I’d assumed it had been a scheduled visit.

“Hang on. So … you
knew
she’d fallen?”

“Not that she’d fallen, but Daphne had an alert. We call them a bat signal—meant
in a nice way,
of course. It’s basically a pager that patients carry with them that sends a signal through to our phones. I got an alert from Daphne, so I tried to call the house. When there was no answer, I drove straight over.”

I thought about that.

“She was conscious after the fall?”

“She wasn’t when I arrived, but obviously, she must have been. All I can tell you, Mr. Adams, is that I was on the premises within half an hour. It would have been sooner, but it was late in the evening.”

She must have been.

Unless for some reason she had pressed it
before
the fall. Maybe because something or someone in the house had frightened her.

“Mr. Adams? Is there anything else?”

“Yes, sorry.” I shook my head. “There is just one more thing, actually. Was the door unlocked when you arrived?”

Silence for a moment.

“I have a set of keys. Well—you have them now.”

“Yes. But did you use them that night?”

More silence as she tried to remember.

“Now that you say it, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t
think
I did. I knocked, and when there was no response I went straight inside. But I don’t think I had to use the key.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“But what—”

I ended the call. Which was intolerably rude, of course, but given the circumstances I figured the universe would forgive me even if Sally didn’t.

I stared out of the window at the street and the shops opposite the hotel, the people going about their business, and tried to balance what I knew already with what I’d just learned.

On the night of my mother’s fall, she had sent an alert signaling she needed help, and the door had been unlocked when Sally arrived. There was an obvious, innocent narrative you could construct from that, which was clearly what people had done.

Except that my mother was disoriented and scared of something. She claimed to have seen Charlie in the woods. And if it had been my doll that was mailed to me, then someone else must have been in the house at some point. I wondered now if there might have been more to my mother’s fall than everyone thought. That maybe she hadn’t been alone that night.

That perhaps she hadn’t fallen at all.

And as I sat there in the hotel room, feeling lost and frightened, the thought kept returning to me.

The game isn’t finished with you yet.

And so I made a decision.

That did not, however, mean that my determination would survive an encounter with reality, and I began to feel foolish before I’d even arrived at the police station. The sensation was compounded when I walked inside. The reception had barely changed over the years, and for a moment I remembered walking in here beside my mother, lost and numb, and with her arm around me, guiding me behind the two officers who had led us there.

But I wasn’t a teenager anymore.

At the desk, I asked for Amanda first, but after some initial confusion it turned out she wasn’t on the premises. So then I asked for Officer Owen Holder, the man who had seen the blood left on my mother’s door, and then I waited in the reception for a while.

“Mr. Adams?” When he arrived, Holder looked distinctly nonplussed to see me but did his best to hide it. “Follow me.”

He led me through to a small room on one side of reception. It was more of a storeroom than an office, but it had a computer, and he sat down on the far side of the desk and tapped at the keyboard. I sat across from him and waited. From the changing expressions on his face, I thought he was worried he hadn’t logged the door-pounding incident as I’d asked him to, and then he seemed suddenly relieved to discover he had.

“Has there been more … damage to your property?”

“It’s not my property,” I said. “It’s my mother’s house.”

“Yes, of course.”

“My mother had an accident—a fall down the stairs. Except I’m not sure that’s what really happened.”

“Oh?”

“I think that someone else might have been in the house.”

Holder had been peering at the computer, but he looked up at me
now. On the way here, I’d been imagining that might sound ridiculous spoken out loud, and perhaps it did, but it also felt right. Holder leaned back from the screen and stared at me thoughtfully.

“Go on.”

I told him everything that had happened. To begin with he simply nodded along, but then he leaned forward again, searched out a pen and paper on the desk, and began making notes. He seemed skeptical about the man I’d seen in the woods.

But then I put the doll of Red Hands on the desk.

Holder looked up from his writing and froze.

“What in God’s name is that?” he said.

“It’s a doll,” I said. “Someone put it through my mother’s mail slot. Charlie Crabtree made it a long time ago. Charlie was—”

“I know who Charlie Crabtree was.”

Holder picked up the doll tentatively and examined it. He was too young to recall the case itself, but perhaps I’d underestimated the memory that places can have: the way stories are retold over the years. And Gritten, in particular, had always been like that. It held close to its people and tales, even if nobody wanted to talk about them outright.

“It’s … disgusting,” Holder said finally.

“Yes. It is.”

He put it down, then moved his hands below the desk. I wondered if, without even realizing it, he was rubbing his fingers against his trousers, trying to remove the invisible stain he felt the doll carried with it.

“And you say someone pushed this through your mail slot?”

“My mother’s door,” I said. “But yes.”

Holder’s gaze remained fixed on the doll. It was as though he were seeing something in real life that before now he’d only ever read about in history books. I could tell he was troubled by what I’d told him, but that he was also struggling to work out what to do about it.

But at least he was listening to me.

“You know who Charlie Crabtree was,” I said.

“Of course. Everybody around here does.”

“So you know what happened. You know
what
this is.”

“Yes. And I know who you are. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Adams. That’s the only reason I took the marks on your door—your mother’s door, I mean—as seriously as I did. And…”

He looked off to one side, suddenly awkward.

“And?” I prompted.

“And so I also understand that coming back here must be very difficult for you, especially after all this time.”

I waited.

“What I
mean,
” he said, “is that grief can do strange things to a person. And I’m genuinely not meaning that rudely. But what I’m wondering is if maybe you’ve built all this up in your head a bit. Enough for it to seem like more than it is. To
make
more of it, even.”

Again, I said nothing.

I’d been prepared to feel foolish coming here, or to be told there wasn’t enough evidence for the police to do anything, but I hadn’t expected to be accused of lying—even indirectly—about what had happened. For a moment, I felt embarrassed, but then Jenny’s words came back to me.

You used to be more decisive.

“I’m not making this up,” I said.

“I’m
really
not saying that.”

“Yes, you are.”

My voice sounded cold. Holder was right in at least one way: all the emotions of the past few days were bubbling up, and I was in danger of saying something I shouldn’t. Losing control of myself wasn’t going to help.

“Where is Detective Amanda Beck?” I said.

“Who?” He shook his head. “That’s the officer from Featherbank, right? I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone.”

“What about Billy Roberts? You know that he’s dead?”

“Of course I do.” Holder looked at me, his face almost plaintive now. He gestured at the doll. “But that has nothing to do with
this
. We already have individuals in custody, and—”

“Who? Who do you have?”

Holder took a second to gather himself.

“I’m really not at liberty to divulge that information right now, Mr. Adams.”

“You think I’m lying.” I stood up and picked up the doll. “Or that I’ve lost my mind.”

“No, I’m just—”

“Thank you for absolutely fucking nothing.”

“Mr. Adams—”

But I wasn’t prepared to listen to whatever else he had to say. And by the time I got back to the car, I was even more furious. I felt exactly as powerless and frustrated as I had as a teenager. I opened the trunk and threw the doll in so hard it almost bounced out, then slammed the lid down loudly enough to attract glances from passersby.

Which I ignored.

Then I stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. The police station was on a busy main road, lined mostly by shops, and there were dozens of people wandering along in the sunshine, bags in hand. I found myself searching their faces, looking for anyone familiar, or who seemed to be watching me.

Are you here somewhere?

Was it really Charlie I was looking out for?

As I stood there in the sun, surrounded by the mundane activity of ordinary life, it seemed absurd to be thinking such a thing. And yet I realized I really was doing just that. Scanning the people around me for the face of a boy I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. Dyed black hair swept to one side. Empty eyes. Grown up now, but
not so far removed from what he had been that I wouldn’t recognize him.

A boy who nobody knew for sure was really gone.

The world carried on around me, apparently oblivious. Nobody appeared to be paying me even the slightest attention.

I started walking.

Partly it was because I didn’t know what else to do, but there was also the thought in the back of my mind that if someone really
was
following me, this might be the best way of spotting them. So I wandered along, doing my best to pretend to appear careless while keeping an eye on the people around me.

Nothing.

And then twenty minutes later, I realized what street I had found myself on. I looked around in wonder, hardly recognizing the bright new shops, the sidewalks that had been swept clear of trash. When I’d been a teenager, most of these units had been boarded up, and the ones that weren’t had been run-down. Now everything was taken and thriving. There were even trees planted neatly in little fenced-off plots along the road.

It can’t still be here.

I started walking a little more quickly now.

That first time I’d ever visited Jenny’s house, this was the street she’d brought me to, her carrying a bag full of books. She had taken me to a shop that—like so many here back then—had appeared derelict at first glance. The door had been old and flimsy, the windows had wire mesh across the outside, and the glass behind had been so misty with dust that it was difficult to see through.

It can’t still be here.…

And yet it was.

I stopped on the corner. The door was new, the wire mesh was gone, and the glass was clean. But in so many ways it felt like the place hadn’t changed at all. I looked up. The green sign had been
repainted, but it still stretched the length of the shop, the name written in an elaborate cursive script, like something from another age.

Johnson & Ross
.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the place. It was so familiar, and the world around me was suddenly so quiet, it was difficult to escape the sensation that I’d somehow traveled back in time.

I reached out and turned the handle slowly.

Pushed.

A bell tinkled within.

And then, feeling as nervous as I had twenty-five years ago on that first visit with Jenny, I stepped into the shop, out of the present and into the past.