The Whisper Man(41)

Pete wrote on the back of the photo, then put it to one side and reached for another.

“And Carter is friends with this guy?” she said.

“Carter was his best man.”

“Well, that must have been quite a lovely ceremony. Who married them? Satan himself?”

But Pete didn’t answer. Rather than looking at the screen, he was focused entirely on the photograph he’d just picked up. Another of Tyler’s visitors, she assumed, except this one had caught his attention completely.

“Who’s that?”

“Norman Collins.” Pete looked up at her. “I know him.”

“Tell me.”

Pete ran through the basics. Norman Collins was a local man who had been questioned during the investigation twenty years ago, not because of any concrete evidence against him, but because of his behavior. From Pete’s description, he sounded like one of those creepy fuckers who sometimes insinuated themselves into ongoing investigations. You were trained to watch out for them. The ones who hung around at the back of press conferences and funerals. The ones who seemed to be eavesdropping or asking too many questions. The ones who appeared too interested or just felt off in some way. Because, while it could simply be sick or ghoulish behavior, it was also the way killers sometimes acted.

But not Collins, apparently.

“We had nothing on him,” Pete said. “Less than nothing, in fact. He had solid alibis for all the abductions. No connection to the kids or the families. No sheet to him at all. In the end, he was just a footnote in the case.”

“And yet you remember him.”

Pete stared at the photograph again.

“I never liked him,” he said.

It was likely nothing, and Amanda didn’t want to get her hopes up, but while you had to be methodical and sensible, there was also something to be said for gut instinct. If Pete remembered this man, there must have been something to cause that.

“And now he turns up again,” she said. “Got an address?”

Pete tapped on his keyboard.

“Yeah. He still lives in the same place as before.”

“Okay. Go and have the conversation. It’s probably nothing, but let’s find out why he was visiting Victor Tyler.”

Pete stared at the screen for a moment longer, then nodded and stood up.

Amanda walked back across the room. DS Stephanie Johnson caught her before she could reach her own desk.

“Ma’am?”

“Please don’t call me that, Steph. It makes me sound like someone’s grandmother. Anything from the door-to-doors yet?”

“Nothing so far. But you wanted to know if anything had come in from concerned parents? Reports of prowlers—things like that?”

Amanda nodded. Neil’s mother had missed that at first, and Amanda didn’t want them to repeat the mistake.

“We had one come in early hours this morning,” Steph said. “A man called us saying somebody had been outside the house, talking to his son.”

Amanda reached across Steph’s desk and turned the screen around so that she could read the details. The boy in question was seven. Rose Terrace School. A man outside the front door, supposedly speaking to him. But the report also mentioned the boy had been behaving strangely, and reading between the lines it was clear the attending officers hadn’t been sure the account was genuine.

She might have words with them about that.

Amanda stepped back, then walked across the room, glancing around angrily. She spotted DS John Dyson. He would do—the lazy bastard was sitting behind a pile of paperwork and messing around on his cell phone. When she walked over and clicked her fingers in front of his face, he actually dropped it into his lap.

“Come with me,” she told him.





Twenty-six


It was a ten-minute drive to the house of Mrs. Shearing, the woman who had sold me our new home.

I parked outside a detached two-story house with a peaked roof and a large paved driveway, gated off from the pavement by metal railings with a black mailbox on a post outside. This was a much more prestigious area of Featherbank than the one where Jake and I now lived, in the house that Mrs. Shearing had owned and rented out for years.

Most recently, presumably, to Dominic Barnett.

I reached through the railings of the gate and undid the clasp there. As I pushed the gate open, a dog began barking furiously inside the house, and the noise intensified as I reached the front door, pressed the buzzer, and waited. Mrs. Shearing opened it on the second ring, but kept the chain on, peering out through the gap. The dog was behind her: a small Yorkshire terrier yapping angrily at me. Its fur was tipped with gray and it looked almost as old and fragile as she did.

“Yes?”

“Hello,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, Mrs. Shearing. My name’s Tom Kennedy. I bought your house off you a few weeks ago? We met a couple of times when I came to view it. My son and I.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. Shoo, Morris. Get back.” The latter was to the dog. She brushed down her dress and turned back to me. “I’m sorry, he’s very excitable. What can I do for you?”

“It’s about the house. I was wondering if I could talk to you about one of the previous tenants?”

“I see.”

She looked a little awkward at that, as though she had a good inkling of which one I meant and would rather not. I decided to wait her out. After a few seconds of silence, civility got the better of any reservations she had, and she undid the chain.