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Because what kind of monster was that?
Paul was staring off into space, looking helpless and almost overloaded by the information she’d given him.
“I’m sorry for dredging up bad memories,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Believe me, they were all already being dredged.”
“Your mother … isn’t well?”
“She’s dying.”
“Well, I was trying to be circumspect about things.”
“There’s really no need.”
She nodded, remembering what it had been like when her father was dying. The endless visits; the smell of the hospital; the way he seemed diminished by every passing day, shrinking into a figure that didn’t fit with the size of the man who filled her memories. It had seemed impossible. But everything is okay until it isn’t. People are there, large as life and taken for granted, and then they aren’t.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be very hard for you right now.”
“I think it’s probably harder for her.”
Paul picked up his beer and downed half of it in one gulp.
Amanda waited.
“I hadn’t seen her in a long time,” he said. “Not been back here. You know how it can feel like you put something away and forget about it, and it’s like it’s gone? But then you realize it’s actually been there the whole time.”
“Like a box that won’t stay shut?” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Believe me, I know that one every day. You’re staying at your mother’s house, right?”
He nodded.
“I’m surprised you didn’t opt for a hotel,” she said.
“Lecturers don’t get paid that much.”
“Even so.”
He didn’t answer, and she found herself trying to imagine how it must feel, returning to a childhood home with so much sour history in its walls and floorboards. Especially when, unlike Billy Roberts, Paul probably hadn’t needed to. But looking at him now, Amanda recognized that a lot of the weight he was carrying was guilt, and she wondered if, despite not wanting to think about what had happened here, a part of him had decided that maybe, deep down, he needed to.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually, speaking slowly as though he were working out the same thing for himself. “As difficult as it’s been, I think I owe my mother. She looked after me when I was a kid. Protected me. Raised me. Maybe it’s the least I can do. Although, obviously, it’s too late now.”
“Not necessarily.”
Her phone buzzed. She checked it and found a message from Lyons requesting an update on what the hell was going on. It was worded so politely she could tell he was furious at being kept in the dark. Well, he could wait. She scrolled back up, hoping there might be an update from Theo, but there was nothing. The mysterious user behind the CC666 account clearly hadn’t taken the bait yet. And, of course, if it turned out to have been Billy Roberts, now they never would.
A flash of the scene earlier.
She pushed it away and drained her glass.
“Okay,” she said. “I need to go.”
“Well, thanks for the drink.”
“That’s okay. Now that I know that lecturers don’t earn much, I’m relieved I could help out. I’ll probably be in touch. It might be handy to talk about what happened here, even if it’s just to give me an idea of what I’m looking for.”
“I don’t know how much help I can be.”
“Me neither. But we’ll see.” She stood up. “In the meantime, is there anyone else in the area it’s worth me talking to?”
At that, Paul looked past her toward the door of the pub.
Up until then, he’d come across as so unguarded that she hadn’t doubted a single thing he’d said. But there was something different about his manner now. He didn’t look like someone scanning his memory for a name, so much as someone who already had one in mind and was deciding whether or not to say it.
“No,” he said eventually. “Nobody.”
TWENTY-ONE
When I drove back to Gritten Wood later, I didn’t go straight to my mother’s house.
As I turned off the main road, I could see the wall of the Shadows in the distance: a black and solid presence at the base of the sky. Soon it would be night, and I felt nervous about sleeping in my old room after everything that had happened today. With everything I’d learned churning in my head. With the house ticking and creaking around me, and the trees at the end of the yard full of darkness and ghosts.
Of course, there were ghosts everywhere here.
I parked in front of a different property and stared out of the car window. The yard was enormously overgrown, with brambles arching over the lawn like rolls of barbed wire. The undergrowth closest to the house rose high enough to reach the dirty black glass of the ground-floor windows. The place was little more than a shell. I had the sense that the woods behind had spread their fingers down the backyard and were slowly clenching their fist, reclaiming the building for the wilds.
James’s old house.
I had a dim memory of my mother telling me Carl and Eileen had moved away years ago. Perhaps they had tried to sell this place beforehand, but who was going to buy a home in Gritten Wood? The town was slowly dying, the houses like lights going off one by one, the old bulbs never replaced. The building beside me now had clearly been abandoned for years, and the heart had gone out of it long before.
Billy is dead, I thought.
The words signified something clear, but still didn’t seem to map onto the world in a way that I could grasp. It seemed like it should be important to me—that I should be feeling something. Perhaps I should be glad. Pleased that, after what he did, the bastard had finally gotten what he deserved. That would be the natural reaction to have, wouldn’t it? But every time I searched inside myself for a reaction to the news, I couldn’t find it.
The truth was that, in every way that mattered, Billy had been dead to me for twenty-five years. He was just an old photograph I had long since stopped looking at. Back then I would have been happy to kill him myself for what he’d done, but the time since had tempered that. Looking back, I could see that Billy had always been easily manipulated. He’d had a difficult childhood, and I could only imagine his adult life had been hard too. The only emotion his death raised in me now was an odd kind of sadness. A sense of how many lives had been ruined by what happened here, and what a waste it had all been.
And now another boy had been killed.
Charlie’s dead.
That was what I’d said to Amanda, but the words had come out of instinct. It was what I’d told myself over the years, because I had to. I looked past the house now, toward the woods. The most likely explanation for Charlie’s disappearance remained that he was out there in the Shadows somewhere—that after what he and Billy did, he’d woken up and wandered off, and that his bones were moldering away somewhere deep between the trees, pulled apart by tangles of grass and lost in the undergrowth.
And yet my skin was crawling.
As the evening darkened around me, I thought about knocks in the night, and figures in the woods, and what my mother had said about seeing Charlie flickering in the trees.
