The Whisper Man(18)

“Daddy?” he said. “Were you having a nightmare before?”

Glass smashing.

My mother screaming.

A man shouting.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“What was it about?”

The dream itself had faded a little now, but it had been a memory as much as a nightmare. Me as a child, walking toward the doorway to the small kitchen of the house I had grown up in. In the dream, it was late, and a noise from downstairs had woken me. I had stayed in bed with the covers pulled over my head and the dread thick in my heart, trying to pretend that everything was okay, even though I knew it wasn’t. Eventually I had tiptoed quietly down the stairs, not wanting to see whatever was happening, but drawn to it all the same, feeling small and terrified and powerless.

I remembered approaching the bright kitchen along the dark hall, hearing the noises coming from in there. My mother’s voice was angry but quiet, as though she thought I was still asleep and she was trying to keep me safe from this, but the man’s voice was loud and uncaring. All their words overlapped. I couldn’t make out what either of them was saying, only that it was ugly, and that it was building toward a crescendo—accelerating toward something awful.

The kitchen doorway.

I reached it just in time to see the man’s red face contorted in rage and hatred as he threw the glass at my mother as hard as he could. To see her flinch away, far too late, and to hear her scream.

The last time I’d ever seen my father.

It was such a long time ago, but the memory still surfaced every now and then. Still clawed its way up out of the dirt.

“Grown-up stuff,” I told Jake. “Maybe I’ll tell you one day, but it was just a dream. And it’s fine. It all had a happy ending.”

“What happened in the end?”

“Well, you did, eventually.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” I ruffled his hair. “And then you went to sleep.”

I closed my eyes, and the two of us lay there in silence for so long that I assumed he’d dropped back off to sleep. At one point, I stretched my arm out to one side and rested my hand gently on top of the covers over him, as though to reassure myself he was still there. The two of us together. My small, wounded family.

“Whispering,” Jake said quietly.

“What?”

“Whispering.”

His voice sounded so far away that I thought he was already dreaming.

“It was whispering at my window.”





Twelve


You have to hurry.

In the dream, Jane Carter was whispering down the phone to Pete. Her voice was quiet and urgent, as though what she was saying were the most frightening thing in the world.

But she was doing it anyway. Finally.

Pete had sat at his office desk, his heart thumping in his chest. He had spoken to Frank Carter’s wife numerous times during the investigation. He had appeared outside her place of work, or arranged to find himself walking alongside her on busy pavements, always careful not to be seen with her anyplace her husband might hear of. It had been as though he had been making covert attempts to turn a spy, which he supposed wasn’t far from the truth.

Jane had provided alibis for her husband. She had defended him. But it had been obvious to Pete from his first encounter with her that she was terrified of Frank—he thought with good reason—and he had worked hard to convert her: to convince her it was safe for her to talk to him. To take back what she had said and tell the truth about her husband. Talk to me, Jane. I’ll make sure that Frank can’t hurt you and your son anymore.

And now it seemed like she was going to. Such fear had been beaten into Jane Carter over the years that even now, phoning him without the bastard in the house, she could still only bring herself to whisper. Courage is not the absence of fear, Pete knew. Courage requires fear. And so, even as the adrenaline hit—even as he felt the case beginning to close ahead of him—he also recognized the bravery of this call.

I’ll let you in, she whispered, but you have to hurry. I’ve no idea how long he’ll be.

In reality, Frank Carter would never return to the house. Within an hour it would be crawling with police and CSIs, and an alert would be out to locate Carter and the van he was driving. But at the time, Pete hurried. The journey to her house only took ten minutes, but they were the longest of his life. Even with backup on standby, he felt alone and scared when he arrived, like someone in a fairy tale where a monster was absent but might return at any moment.

Inside, he watched Jane Carter’s trembling hands as she unlocked the door to the extension with the key she’d stolen. The whole house was silent, and he felt a shadow looming over them.

The lock came undone.

Step back now, please, both of you.

Jane Carter stood in the middle of the kitchen, her son hiding behind her legs, as Pete pushed open the door with one gloved hand.

No.

At once, there was the hot smell of rotting meat. He shone his flashlight inside—and then came the pictures, appearing to him one by one in swift succession, the sights and sensations illuminated as if by camera flashes.

No.

Not yet.

For the moment, he lifted his hand, moving the flashlight over the walls instead. They were painted white, but Carter had decorated them, drawing crude green blades of grass at the bases and childlike butterflies fluttering above. Close to the ceiling, there was the skewed yellow approximation of a sun. A face had been sketched on it, the dead black eyes staring down at the floor below.