The Whisper Man(101)

I stared at the screen.

Rebecca.

Only one word, and even that was wrong. Jake and I had moved to this house for a fresh start, and as much as Rebecca was an integral part of the story, I realized it shouldn’t be about her. That was the whole point. My focus needed to be elsewhere now.

I deleted her name.

Jake, I typed.

There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?

I hesitated.

So I’ll have to write to you instead.

That was when I heard Jake whispering.

I sat completely still, listening to the silence that followed the noise, and which now seemed to fill the house more ominously than before. Seconds ticked by—long enough for me to begin to believe I had imagined the sound. But then it came again.

In his room on the other side of the hall, Jake was talking very quietly to someone.

I put the laptop to one side and stood up carefully, then made my way out into the hall as silently as I could. My heart was sinking a little. Over the last two weeks, there had been no sign at all of the little girl or the boy in the floor, and although I was happy to let Jake be himself, I had been relieved about that. I didn’t relish the possibility of them returning now.

I stood in the hallway, listening.

“Okay,” Jake whispered. “Good night.”

And then nothing.

I waited a little longer, but it was clear that the conversation was over. After a few more seconds, I walked across the hall and stepped into his room. There was enough light from behind me to see that Jake was lying very still in his bed, entirely alone in the room.

I moved over to the bed.

“Jake?” I whispered.

“Yes, Daddy?”

He sounded barely there.

“Who were you talking to just now?”

But there was no reply, beyond the gentle rise and fall of the covers over him, and the steady sound of his breathing. Perhaps he had just been half asleep, I thought, and talking to himself.

I tucked the covers over him a little better, and was about to head back to the door when he spoke again.

“Your daddy read that book to you when you were young,” he said.

For a moment I said nothing. I just stared down at Jake, lying there with his back to me. The silence was ringing now. The room suddenly felt colder than it had before, and a shiver ran through me. Yes, I thought. He probably did. It hadn’t been a question, though, and there was no way Jake could have known. I didn’t even remember it happening myself. But, of course, I’d told Jake the book was a childhood favorite of mine, so I supposed it was a natural assumption for him to make. It didn’t mean anything.

“He did,” I told Jake quietly. “Why did you say that?”

But my son was already dreaming.





Sixty-nine


The letter was waiting for Amanda when she got home, but she didn’t open it straightaway.

It was obvious from the HMP Whitrow stamping who it was going to be from, and she was unwilling to face that right now. Frank Carter had haunted Pete for twenty years—taunting him; playing with him—and she was damned if she was going to read him gloating about that on the day Pete died. Not that Carter could have known about that when he sent this, of course—but then, the man seemed to know everything somehow.

Fuck him, though. She had better, more important things to do.

She left the letter on the dining room table, poured herself a large measure of wine, and then raised the glass.

“Here’s to you, Pete,” she said quietly. “Safe journey.”

And then, despite herself, she started crying—which was ridiculous. She’d never been prone to tears. Had always taken pride in being calm and dispassionate. But the investigation had changed her. And there was nobody here to see it right now, she supposed, so she decided it was fine to let herself go. It felt good. She wasn’t even crying for Pete, she realized after a while, so much as allowing all the emotion of the past few months to come pouring out. Pete, yes. But also Neil Spencer. Tom and Jake Kennedy. All of it. It was as though she had been holding her breath for weeks, and the sobbing now was a deep exhalation she had desperately needed.

She drank the wine and poured another.

Having spoken to Tom, and knowing what she did now, she imagined getting drunk probably wasn’t what Pete would have wanted. But he would also have understood. In fact, she could imagine the understanding look he would be giving her if he could see her right now—it would be just like some of the others he’d given her. One that said: I’ve been there, and I get it, but it’s not something we can talk about, can we?

He’d understand, all right. The Whisper Man case had taken up the last twenty years of his life. After everything that had happened, she imagined it might end up doing the same to her if she wasn’t careful. Perhaps that was all right, though—maybe that was the way it was even meant to be. Some investigations stayed with you, sinking their claws in and hanging on, so that you would always have to drag them behind you no matter how hard you tried to dislodge them. Before this, she had always imagined she would be impervious to that—that she would be a climber like Lyons, not weighed down the way Pete had been—but she knew herself a little better now. This was something she was going to be carrying for a long time. That was the kind of cop it had turned out she was. Not the sensible kind at all.