She picked her way through the fuzzy images. Freeze-frames of men, women, and children. All of them would have to be interviewed, even though none of them would have witnessed anything significant. The man they were looking for was too careful for that. And it would be the same with the vehicles. Her conviction during the briefing had been real, and a part of her was still cultivating that now, but she knew deep down the feeling was impotent. The fact remained that it wasn’t difficult to drive around Featherbank and avoid CCTV. Not if you knew what you were doing.

On the pad beside her, she jotted that thought down.

Knowledge of camera position?

But again, she’d made the same note two months earlier. History repeating itself.

It always ends where it starts.

She threw the pen down in frustration, then stood up and walked over to where Pete was working, so engrossed that he didn’t even notice her. The printer on his desk was releasing a steady stream of photographs—CCTV stills of visitors to the prison. Pete was cross-referencing them with details on the screen and writing notes on the back. There was also an old newspaper printout on the desk. She tilted her head to read the headline.

“‘Prison Marriage for Coxton Cannibal’?” she said.

Pete jumped. “What?”

“The news article.” She read it out again. “The world never stops surprising me. Generally in terrible ways.”

“Oh. Yes.” Pete gestured at the photographs he was accumulating. “And these are all his visitors. His real name’s Victor Tyler. Twenty-five years ago he abducted a little girl. Mary Fisher?”

“I remember her,” Amanda said.

They had been roughly the same age. While Amanda couldn’t picture the girl’s face, her mind immediately associated the name with scary stories and grainy images in old newspapers. Twenty-five years. Hard to believe it had been that long, and how quickly people faded away into the past and were forgotten by the world.

“She’d probably have been married by now, maybe with a family,” Amanda said. “Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

“No.” Pete took another photograph from the printer and peered at the screen for a second. “Tyler got married fifteen years ago. Louise Dixon. Unbelievably, they’re still together. They’ve never spent a night together, of course. But you know how it can be sometimes. The allure men like this can have.”

Amanda nodded to herself. Criminals, even the worst of them, often weren’t short of correspondents in the outside world. For a certain type of woman, they were like catnip. He didn’t do it, they’d convince themselves. Or else that he’d changed—or if not, that they’d be the one to redeem him. Maybe some of them even liked the danger. It had never made the slightest bit of sense to her, but it was true.

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.