At the same time, she was reluctant to rely entirely on the judgments of strangers when it came to that. She read the reports on the screen again. Roberts may well have presented himself as thoughtful and repentant on the surface, but who knew what unseen damage the murder and subsequent incarceration had done to him on a deeper level?

Especially when he knew that Charlie had gotten away with it.

Amanda opened a new tab on the computer and started typing. She was prepared to attempt to trace Billy Roberts through the parole system—albeit gritting her teeth at the contortions that might involve—but it turned out that would not be necessary. As unbelievable as she found it, his address and phone number were publicly listed.

At least, she assumed it was him. It had to be. The address on the system was only a couple of miles away from the center of Gritten, and a quick sideways check to the original file told her it had been where Roberts’s parents had lived at the time. Digging a little deeper, she found herself blinking at what she discovered. Roberts’s mother had died while he was in prison. Upon his release, it seemed he had returned home and lived with his father, who had then died a couple of years afterward. Roberts had remained in the family home ever since.

Jesus, she thought.

Presumably, given his background, he’d had little choice, but it was still hard to imagine a man committing such a crime and then returning to the town where it had happened. Living there—or at least attempting to. She wondered how many of his neighbors had remembered or learned what Roberts had done, and whether his continuing presence in the area had been more difficult for them or for him.

Amanda picked up the phone.

It rang for a while.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice. It somehow managed to sound both gruff and empty at the same time, as though he were annoyed to be disturbed by something he knew couldn’t possibly matter. There were other voices in the background. She could hear swearing and shouting, but it was all distant, as though coming from another room.

“Hello,” Amanda said. “Is this William Roberts?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Detective Amanda Beck. I’m trying—”

Roberts hung up.

Amanda tried calling the number again. This time, as she had more or less expected, there was no answer.

She frowned.

Why don’t you want to talk to me, Billy?

There were a million possible answers to the question, of course. But the fact remained that there was someone out there who claimed to have been present on the day of the killing in Gritten, who had access to what looked like Charlie Crabtree’s missing dream diary, and who had helped to incite a murder. While the sting Theo had set up might give her a result, Roberts seemed a decent candidate to be looking at in the meantime.

She closed down the computer and went to see Lyons.

THIRTEEN

I wanted to see Jenny again, and I had an idea of the best way to find her. The way the white wine had appeared without her ordering suggested she was a regular at the pub when she was in town, and I could imagine a routine that saw her escaping her mother’s house to get some time by herself in the afternoons.

And sure enough, as I walked into the pub, I spotted her immediately, sitting at the same table as before, a glass of wine in front of her. I got a drink and made my way over. She looked up a little guiltily as I approached.

“You caught me,” she said. “I don’t have a problem, honestly.”

“Hey—I’m here too. Mind if I sit?”

“By all means.”

I sat down across from her, then began picking at a beer mat to give my hands something to do. The two of us sat in silence for a moment, until finally she leaned back in her chair.

“I was thinking about what you told me yesterday.”

“What was that?”

“Stuff about your life. I always thought you’d be married with kids by now. Writing your stories. And also, the way you didn’t want to look into what your mother said. It’s just so different from how you used to be. Let’s just say that I remember you being a little more … proactive.”

She raised a knowing eyebrow. I realized that even after all this time she still had the ability to make me blush, and I ran my finger over the condensation on the bottle of beer to distract myself.

She was right, of course. But rather than thinking about me and her back then, I found myself remembering that day at rugby instead—the day Hague died—and how I’d been so determined to get through the boy opposite me on the field. About the way it had always been me who stuck up for James and protected him. And the focus I’d had back then, working on my ideas for stories late into the night, the house dark and silent around me.

“I guess so,” I said.

“So what changed?”

I looked at her. “You know what changed.”

“But it’s been twenty-five years.” She gave me a pointed look in return. “That seems a long time to be dwelling.”

I didn’t reply. Again, I supposed she was right. While I had spent most of my life trying not to think about what had happened in Gritten, the truth was you didn’t need to think about something for it to affect you. I had been knocked off course, and by keeping my eyes closed, I had never been able to correct that trajectory.

“Well,” I said finally. “I did look into what my mother said. I searched the house. You’d have been proud of me.”

“So you searched. And?”

“And I found.”

I told her about the boxes of newspapers my mother had collected—the coverage not only of what Charlie and Billy had done here in Gritten, but of the murders that had been committed since. How it appeared that, over the years, other teenagers had read about Charlie and sought to emulate what some of them believed he’d managed to achieve.

“Copycat cases,” I said. “I checked online. All the details are there. Charlie thought a sacrifice to Red Hands would allow him to live in the dream world forever, and because he actually did vanish, there are some people who think he managed it.”

Jenny shook her head. “But that’s…”

“Ridiculous? Yeah, I know. But there are all these websites.” I started to reach for my phone, but then thought better of it. “It’s nuts. These websleuths—I mean, that’s literally what they call themselves—they’re poring over every little detail, trying to figure out how Charlie disappeared.”

“People like a good mystery,” Jenny said.

“But nobody’s ever going to solve it. For all anybody knows, Charlie could even be alive.”

Immediately I wished I could take the words back. The thought of him escaping justice after what he’d done was unbearable in itself, but it was also unnerving to imagine he might be somewhere out there. Even after all this time, the idea of him being close by scared me.

There was a beat of silence.

“I suppose he might as well be,” I said. “Because people are still listening to him, aren’t they? Still learning from him.”

“Why do you think your mother kept it all?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think she didn’t want me to know about it or have to deal with it. There’s a whole lot of guilt there, and it feels like she was taking it on so I didn’t have to.”