I closed the diary.

“How did you get this, Mom?” I said quietly.

The house, of course, remained silent.

I walked through to my mother’s bedroom. I drew the curtains and stared out at the street. The sun was beating down so hard now that the air above my car was shimmering in the heat. There was still nobody in sight; the town was dead and silent.

At my side, the diary felt heavy in my hand.

How did you get this?

The question made me feel sick. Because, while there were numerous possible explanations for its presence in the house, they all ultimately came down to the same thing.

My mother had known more about Charlie’s disappearance than she had told me.

I looked up at the ceiling, picturing the red hands in the attic and the boxes of newspapers my mother had collected. When I’d first discovered them, I’d imagined she had hoarded them over the years, taking it upon herself to protect me from the knowledge and the guilt.

But now I wondered if that guilt had really been her own. If she knew what had happened to Charlie, then at least some of the blame for the copycat killings rested with her. She could have done something to stop them.

And yet, for some reason, she had not.

I looked down, out of the window again.

And the street was no longer empty.

A figure was standing at the far side of my car. They were slightly silhouetted by the sun behind, their features occluded by the haze above the vehicle, but I could tell they were staring back at me. I recognized them immediately, and twenty-five years fell away in the space of a single heartbeat.

The figure raised a hand.

After a moment of hesitation, I did the same.

I left the dream diary on the bed and then went downstairs. Outside the door, the warmth and brightness hit me. The figure was walking away now, heading slowly off up the street. But there was no need for me to chase them. I knew where they were going.

I turned around and locked the door.

And then, moving slowly myself now, I began to follow.

THIRTY-FOUR

For the second morning in a row, Amanda found herself sitting in the Gritten Police Department cafeteria, hunched over her laptop. Depressingly, it seemed to have become her office for the time being. She took a sip of the coffee. It hadn’t improved.

Nor had the overall situation.

They had three murders so far, with each of the victims connected to the original Red Hands killing. While Amanda didn’t understand what was happening yet, she didn’t believe that was likely to be the end of it.

They needed to find Paul Adams.

Officers first thing had found a booking for him at a hotel in Gritten. There was an irony there, she supposed. She hadn’t been able to find him last night because he’d taken her advice to get out of the house. But according to the hotel, he wasn’t in his room and his vehicle wasn’t in the parking lot. She figured that meant he was most likely at his mother’s house, and after discussing matters with a still-reluctant Detective Graham Dwyer, Holder had been sent out to Gritten Wood to see if Paul was there.

She glanced at her phone now, resting on the table beside the laptop.

Nothing.

Attempting to distract herself, she turned her attention to her laptop. The scene in Brenfield was still being processed, but the family’s history was on file.

Carl and Eileen Dawson had moved to Brenfield just over ten years ago. The reason for the relocation seemed to be so they could be closer to their son, James. Reading between the lines, it appeared that James Dawson had struggled badly in the aftermath of the murder in Gritten. He had left for college, but then dropped out after two terms, and most of his life since had been itinerant. There were minor drug convictions on his record, as well as a few for low-level antisocial behavior. There was also a long list of addresses on file, with gaps between them suggesting he had been homeless at times.

All in all, it reminded Amanda of how Billy Roberts had lived following his release from prison. Except that James Dawson had people who cared about him. Ten years ago, Carl Dawson inherited money after the death of his mother. He and Eileen had bought the house in Brenfield, which was where their son was loosely based at the time, and James had lived with them from then on.

The sacrifices parents make for their children.

And yet, from the details on-screen, there was evidence this particular garden had not been entirely rosy. Police had been called to the address on several occasions by concerned neighbors, and one time Eileen Dawson had actually been arrested and removed from the property. No charges were pressed, and the woman eventually returned. Amanda was more used to the scenario being the opposite way around gender-wise, but that did nothing to make it any less depressing. Not least because it was one reason why those same concerned neighbors had not immediately called the police in the early hours of yesterday, when they had heard shouts and screams from inside the Dawson house.

Curtains had still twitched, of course. Shortly before dawn, one of the neighbors heard the Dawsons’ front door open, and they had seen a man dressed in black emerge from the property. The neighbor assumed it had been Carl Dawson, but it was dark and they had no real description to go on. At any rate, there had been something disturbing enough about the whole scenario for her to pick up the phone. Attending officers found two bodies in the front room. While the scene was still being processed, it appeared that Eileen Dawson had been dispatched quickly. And then the killer had taken more time with James.

Amanda’s heart broke a little at that.

From everything she’d read online about the history of the case, she found it hard to picture James Dawson as anything other than a small, vulnerable child, and learning what had become of his life in the years since only increased that impression. He was a boy who had never fully recovered from what had happened. The supposed friends he had embraced had groomed him, intending to kill him, and as an adult he had clearly struggled to find a niche for himself in the world. It was as though he had been stuck in a nascent state, never growing or flourishing, just remaining frozen forever, his existence defined by a moment of trauma.

If you tried, Amanda thought, perhaps you could make an argument that what had happened to Billy Roberts amounted to some kind of justice. But there could be no attempt to do so here. Whatever the damaged furniture of his life, James Dawson had not deserved an ending like this.

Was he the person behind the CC666 account?

It seemed likely; a computer had been recovered from the house and was being analyzed. But if so, she didn’t understand why.

Regardless, the most important question right now was where Carl Dawson was.

The door to the cafeteria opened. Amanda looked around to see Dwyer walk in, bringing the smell of cooked food wafting in along with him. He moved over to her table and sat down opposite, landing so heavily that she wasn’t sure the furniture would stand the impact, then put a greasy wrapper down on the table and began extracting a sandwich from it.

“Holder just checked in,” he said. “He told me there’s no sign of Adams at his mother’s house. His car’s there, though.”

“That’s sort of a sign.”

“Holder’s not very bright.”

“Has he checked inside?”

“House is locked. He did look through a few of the windows and nothing was obviously out of place. No probable cause to break in. Maybe Adams just went to the shops.”