The Whisper Man(39)

And I hadn’t imagined what had happened last night.

That brought on a flash of panic. If the police weren’t going to help us, that meant that I had to. Walking through the empty rooms, I felt a sense of desperation—an urgent need to do something, even though I had no idea what. I ended up in my office. The laptop had been left on standby overnight. I nudged the trackpad and the screen came to life, revealing the words there.

Rebecca …

She would know what to do right now; she always had. I pictured her sitting cross-legged on the floor with Jake, playing enthusiastically with whatever toys were between them. And curled up on our old couch, reading to him, his head underneath her chin and their two bodies so close that they looked like a single person. Whenever he’d called out in the night, Rebecca would have already been padding through to him as I was still waking up. And it had always been her he called for.

I deleted the words I’d written yesterday and then typed three new sentences.

I miss you. I feel like I’m failing our son and I don’t know what to do.

I’m sorry.

I stared at the screen for a moment.

Enough.

Enough wallowing. As difficult as everything might be, it was my job to look after my son, and if my best wasn’t sufficient, then I’d have to get better.

I walked back to the front door. It had a lock and a chain, but that clearly wasn’t good enough. So I would install a bolt as well, too high for Jake to reach on his own. Motion detectors at the bottom of the stairs. It could all be done. None of this was insurmountable, whatever my self-doubt was telling me.

But there was something else I could do first, and so I turned my attention to the pile of mail on the stairs behind me. There had been another two letters for Dominic Barnett, both of them debt collection notices. I took them to my office, closed down Word on the laptop, and opened the Web browser instead.

Let’s see who you are, Dominic Barnett.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to discover about him online. A Facebook page, perhaps—something with a photo that would tell me whether he was the man who’d called around yesterday—or if not that, maybe a forwarding address of some kind that I could follow up in the real world. Anything that might help me to protect Jake and work out what the hell was going on with my house.

I found a photograph on the very first search. Dominic Barnett was not my mysterious visitor. He was younger, with a full head of jet-black hair. But the picture wasn’t on a social media site.

Instead, it was beside a news item at the top of the search page:

POLICE TREAT DEATH OF LOCAL MAN AS MURDER



The room receded around me. I stared at the words until they began to lose their meaning. The house had gone silent, and all I could hear was the thud of my heartbeat.

And then—

Creak.

I glanced at the ceiling. That noise again, the same as before, as though someone had taken a single step in Jake’s bedroom. My skin tingled as I remembered what had happened last night—the figure I’d imagined standing at the base of my bed, its hair splayed out like the little girl that Jake had drawn. The sensation of my foot being shaken.

Wake up, Tom.

But unlike the man at the door, that had been my imagination. I’d been half asleep, after all. It had been nothing more than a remnant of a nightmare of the past, shaped by fears from the present.

There was nothing in my house.

Determined to take my mind off the noise, I forced myself to click on the article.

POLICE TREAT DEATH OF LOCAL MAN AS MURDER

Police have revealed that they are treating the death of Dominic Barnett, whose body was found in woodland on Tuesday, as murder.

Barnett, 42, of Garholt Street, Featherbank, was discovered at the edge of a stream by children playing in Hollingbeck Wood. Today, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons revealed to the press that Barnett had died as a result of “significant” head injuries. A number of possible motives for the attack were being explored, but items recovered at the scene suggested that robbery was not among them.

“I would like to take this opportunity to reassure the public at large,” Lyons said. “Mr. Barnett was known to officers, and we believe this to be an isolated incident. However, we have increased patrols in the area, and we encourage anyone with any information to come forward immediately.”



I read it through again, the panic inside me intensifying. From the street name, there was no doubt that this was the right Dominic Barnett. He had lived in this house. Maybe sat exactly where I was right now, or slept in what had become Jake’s bedroom.

And he had been murdered in April this year.

Trying to keep calm, I clicked back and searched for more articles. The facts, such as they were, emerged piecemeal, and many of them from between the lines. Mr. Barnett was known to officers. Careful phrasing, but the implication appeared to be that he’d been involved with drugs in some way, and that this was presumed to be the motive for his murder. Hollingbeck Wood was south of Featherbank, on the other side of the river. Why Barnett had been there was unclear. A murder weapon was recovered a week later, and the reports tailed off shortly afterward. From what I could find online, his killer had never been caught.

Which meant that they were still out there.

The realization brought an awful crawling sensation with it. I didn’t know what to do. Call the police again? What I’d discovered didn’t seem to add much to what I’d already told them. I would call them, I decided, because I had to do something. But I needed more information first.