I was there. DM me.

“Did Michael ever mention a place called Gritten to you?”

Mary thought about it, her face blank. But after a moment, Dean leaned forward. He was a man made of hard angles, Amanda noticed, and there was something almost threatening about the way he had turned his attention to her now.

“No,” he said. “Where’s that?”

“A town a little way north of here.” She hesitated. “What about Charlie Crabtree? Or someone called Red Hands?”

Dean just shook his head.

“Who’s Red Hands?”

A myth, Amanda thought.

Except not even that, of course. Myth was too grand a term for a fantasy figure conjured up by a group of teenage boys from twenty-five years ago. But as absurd as it might be, and as sad and pointless as it felt to Amanda, it appeared that really was what lay behind Michael Price’s murder that weekend. The original crime predated the modern internet, but the mystery of Charlie Crabtree’s disappearance had been taken up and passed on like a baton over the years: researched, analyzed, discussed—and worse. Taken as inspiration.

Which on one level was hard to believe. Except that, even now, in her late thirties, she could still recall the inherent horror of her teenage years. The way she had struggled with negotiating a world that seemed to be constantly shifting; the confusion and doubts about the best way to behave in order to fit in; the web of competing tensions and pressures. Most of all, she remembered the desire to escape from it all—to be anywhere apart from where she was, and to find the person she was meant to be, as though the real her were already out there somewhere, and one day they would meet and shake hands. Teenagers were not rational, was the point, and the world was not always kind to them.

She did her best to explain to Mary and Dean Price what had happened in Gritten twenty-five years ago. Dean listened intently now, his expression growing darker the whole time.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Are you saying my son was murdered because of a ghost?”

“I’m not saying it makes sense. I’m saying that his killers appear to have really believed in all this. They genuinely imagined it would happen. They thought they would disappear.”

“How did they even know about any of this?”

Amanda hesitated again. She didn’t want to mention what CC666 had told Hick and Foster on that forum. That was one detail she really didn’t want to get out to the public right now—especially as she’d now seen the content of the proof he or she had provided by direct message.

“There is a lot of information about the case online,” she said.

But fortunately, Dean was still focused on everything she’d just told him. He seemed both furious and confused, and unsure how to negotiate his path between the two.

“But why would anyone believe such rubbish?”

“As I said, this murder occurred twenty-five years ago. And afterward, Charlie Crabtree really did disappear. He vanished into thin air.”

“What do you mean, vanished?”

“Literally that,” Amanda said. “From what I can gather, there was an extensive search, but he was never seen again. So some people—”

She was about to say believe he really did it, but Dean Price interrupted her again—this time simply holding his palm out to stop her. It was too much for him. He stood up and walked out of the room without another word. Amanda and Mary listened to the noise of his footsteps on the stairs, and then the sound of a door closing, surprisingly gently, in the hallway above.

A beat of silence.

“I’m sorry about my husband,” Mary said.

“Neither of you have anything to apologize for.”

Mary stood up slowly and walked over to the table. She started adjusting the precarious pile of hoodies over the back of the chair, neatening them out.

“It’s just very hard for him,” she said. “Dean used to be in the army, and Michael was always such a soft, quiet boy. They didn’t understand each other. When Michael was younger, he used to be scared of the dark and he’d call out to us. Dean would get frustrated—tell him there was no such thing as ghosts or monsters. So in the end, it was always me that went.”

“I was the same as a kid,” Amanda said.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

Except, of course, it had always been her father who came through to her: calm, kind, and patient when it came to looking after his daughter and reassuring her. Her father who would surely have been frowning at her right now, explaining that wasn’t the kind of personal detail a police officer should be giving away in the course of their work.

“It’s only since Dean left the army that the two of them started to bond,” Mary said. “They were very close. And Dean’s always been practical. A problem-solver.”

“But this isn’t a problem he can solve, right?” Amanda said.

Mary smiled sadly.

“No. It’s not a problem anybody can solve, is it? It’s just something you have to live with.”

She finished adjusting the pile of clothes, and sighed to herself.

“What do you think happened to him? This boy, I mean.”

“Charlie Crabtree?”

“Yes. Do you think he’s still alive?”

Amanda considered that.

Over the last couple of days, she had researched as much as she could about the murder in Gritten, and she still didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, the search for Crabtree had been exhaustive: hundreds of officers involved; local search-and-rescue teams; tracker dogs. These were individuals with tremendous experience in the land and terrain, and all of them had been focused on finding a teenager who surely couldn’t have gotten that far.

But on the other hand, he had never been found.

And there was also CC666 to think about. Whoever was behind the account appeared to be implying they were Charlie Crabtree, and the information they had given to Foster and Hick had resulted in Michael Price’s murder.

She thought about [entry.jpg], the file that had been sent as proof of the user’s identity. When she had opened it, the sight of what was on the screen had sent a shiver down her spine. A photograph of a notebook, held open at two pages dated from a quarter of a century ago and filled with lines of neat black writing.

I am sitting with him in the woods.

Charlie Crabtree’s dream diary, which was supposed to have disappeared from the world when he did.

Amanda looked at Mary, but it was actually Dean’s words that came back to her now, and his question that she answered instead.

Are you saying my son was murdered because of a ghost?

“I don’t know,” she said.

ELEVEN

The attic was almost entirely empty apart from a stack of three cardboard boxes. They were piled neatly and were clearly the focus of the whole space, like a shrine. An open pot of congealed red paint rested beside them, and there were scrunches of rolled-up paper towels dotted about, so soaked in the paint they appeared drenched with blood.

My mother, I assumed, wiping her hands after creating what was plastered around me.

I approached the boxes tentatively, the corners of my vision filled with those mad red hands. I had the uncomfortable sensation they were moving when I wasn’t looking at them—that the whole time I had been in the house the past few days, they had been up here, fluttering silently across the eaves in the darkness.