The Whisper Man(43)

Another moment of silence. Then she sighed, as though we were talking about aspects of the world that were wholly alien to her.

“There was never any evidence he was selling them from my property. But yes. It was a very sad business. And I suppose I could have searched for another tenant after he died, but I’m old now, and I decided not to. I thought it was time to sell it and draw a line. That way I could give my old house a new chance with someone else. Someone who would make a better go of it than I had recently.”

“Jake and me.”

“Yes!” She brightened at the thought. “You and your lovely little boy! I had better offers, but money doesn’t matter to me these days, and the two of you seemed right. I liked to think of my old house going to a young family, so that there’d be another small child playing there again. I wanted to feel it might end up full of light and love again. Full of color, like it was when I was a little girl. I’m so pleased to hear that both of you are happy there.”

I leaned back.

Jake and I weren’t happy there, of course, and a part of me was very angry with Mrs. Shearing. It felt like the history of the house was something she should really have told me at the time. But she also seemed genuinely pleased, as though she thought she really had done a good thing, and I could understand her motivation for choosing me and Jake to sell the property to, instead of …

And then I frowned.

“You said you had better offers on the house?”

“Oh, yes—very much so, actually. One man was prepared to pay far more than the asking price.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “But I didn’t like him at all. He reminded me a little of the others. He was very persistent, as well, which put me off even more. I dislike being pestered.”

I leaned forward again.

Someone had been prepared to offer way over the asking price for the house, and Mrs. Shearing had refused him. He had been persistent and pushy. There had been something off about him.

“This man,” I said carefully. “What did he look like? Was he quite short? Gray hair round here?”

I gestured to my head, but she was already nodding.

“That’s him, yes. Always impeccably dressed.”

And she pulled another face, as though she had been no more fooled by that veneer of respectability than I had.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “Norman Collins.”





Twenty-seven


Back home, I parked and stared down the driveway.

I was thinking—or trying to, at least. It felt like facts and ideas and explanations were all whirling in my head like birds, slow enough to glimpse but too swift to catch.

The man who had been snooping around here was called Norman Collins. Despite his claims, he had not grown up in this house, and yet for some reason he had been prepared to pay well over the asking price to purchase it. Which meant the property obviously meant something to him.

But what?

I stared down the driveway at the garage.

That was where Collins had been skulking when I first spotted him. The garage, filled with the debris removed from the house before I moved in, some of which had presumably belonged to Dominic Barnett. Had it been Collins at the door last night, trying to persuade Jake to open it? If so, maybe it wasn’t that Jake himself had been in danger, just that Collins had wanted something.

The key to the garage, perhaps.

But thought could only take me so far. I got out of the car and headed to the garage, unlocking it and then pulling one of the doors and wedging it open with the can of paint from yesterday.

I stepped inside.

All the junk remained, of course: the old furniture; the dirty mattress; the haphazard piles of damp cardboard boxes in the center. Looking down to my right, the spider was still spanning its thick web, surrounded now by a few more remnants than before. Butterflies, presumably, chewed into small, pale knots of string.

I glanced around. One of the butterflies remained perched delicately on the window. Another was resting on the side of the box of Christmas decorations, its wings lifting and lowering gently. They reminded me of Jake’s picture, along with the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen them in here. But that was a mystery I couldn’t solve for now.

What about you, Norman?

What were you looking for in here?

I scraped some dry leaves away with my foot to clear a space, then took the box of decorations down and began sifting through it.

It took half an hour to work my way through all the cardboard boxes, emptying each in turn and spreading the contents around. While I was kneeling down among it all, the stone floor of the garage felt cold, as though the knees of my jeans were gathering ovals of damp.

The garage door rattled behind me, and I turned around quickly, startled by the noise. But the driveway was sunlit and empty. Just the warm breeze, knocking the door against the can of paint.

I turned back to what I’d found.

Which was nothing. The boxes all contained the kind of random debris you had no immediate use for but were still unwilling to throw away. There were the decorations, of course; ropes of tinsel were strewn around me now, their colors dulled and lifeless with age. There were magazines and newspapers, with nothing obvious to unite the dates and editions. Clothes that had been folded and stored away and smelled of mold. Dusty old extension cords. None of it looked to have been deliberately hidden so much as casually packed away and forgotten about.