“We need to find him.”

“So you say.”

There were a few seconds of silence, as Dwyer swallowed and wiped his lips delicately with a napkin she hadn’t noticed. Then his manner shifted a little.

“I was there, you know,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I was the attending officer that day. I was at the playground when the girl’s body was found. And then there were two of us that went to Adams’s house afterward. I got to have a look around while we were waiting for his mother to get back. At that point, me and my partner, we both thought he did it.”

“Obvious, right?” Amanda said.

“Exactly.”

Dwyer took another bite of his sandwich. She waited for him to chew and swallow it.

“In hindsight, that was unfair of me.” He shrugged. “You play the odds, right? There was something weird about Adams—about all of them—but my hunch that day was wrong. Maybe what I’ve been thinking now is too. You think this guy—Carl Dawson—is involved?”

Amanda leaned back.

“In some capacity?” she said. “Sure. I mean, his family are dead and he’s gone missing. In a situation like this, it’s a natural assumption to make.”

“Like I said, you play the odds.”

“You do. But whether he’s responsible, I have no idea. And we can’t place him at the scene for Billy Roberts yet.”

“We can’t be sure that’s even the same perp.”

But if Dwyer was still half clinging to his original theory, he no longer seemed as convinced by it as he had been yesterday. It was just too much of a coincidence. Billy Roberts and James Dawson—two boys who had been involved in the killing here twenty-five years ago—had been tortured and murdered. And however much he might not have wanted to rake up the past, she could tell he was just as concerned as she was.

“Dawson knew all three victims,” he said. “I like him for it.”

She was about to answer when her cell phone started ringing. The screen told her it was Theo.

“Hang on.”

She answered the call and pressed the phone to her ear. As always, the soft sound of his computers and their ghosts was humming the background.

“Hey, Theo,” she said. “Amanda here.”

“Hello there. You wanted the phone number for Paul Adams, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s actually on a pay-as-you-go, but I got it from his card details. Don’t ask me how, but here you go.”

She made a note of the number he gave her.

“Thanks, Theo.”

“There’s something else. I’m going to have to pass this on to the relevant authorities but I figured I’d tell you first. I’ve got a number for Carl Dawson too.”

Her heart leaped. And as she noted it down, something else occurred to her.

“Can you tell me where Dawson is?” she said.

“You want the moon on a stick, Amanda. But yes, probably. Just give me a second. The more towers it pings, the easier it is.” She heard him typing in the background. “Ah—bingo.”

“You’ve got him? Where is he?”

“About two miles away from you,” Theo said. “In Gritten Wood.”

THIRTY-FIVE

After the murder, the old playground had been demolished and paved over. When I left Gritten, nothing had been added to the empty stretch of stone there, as though nobody had known what to do with it and it had been enough just to cover it up for the moment. But now there were benches there, circling a tree in the center.

And yet, as I approached, I could still picture it just as it had been back then. And the figure waiting for me on one of the benches reminded me so much of James that day, so fragile and scared, that it was easy to imagine I’d slipped backward in time.

I stopped in front of him.

“Mr. Dawson.”

James’s stepfather was staring down at his hands. I took in the mottled skin of his bald skull, and the gnarled, ancient roughness of his hands. When he finally raised his head, his face was thin and drawn, his eyes sunken into the sockets. He looked impossibly sad. I could sense waves of grief beating off him, and it felt like something more profound than loss, as though now that he was facing down the final days of his life, he was grieving for all the things he’d done with it, and all the things he hadn’t.

How old everyone has got, I thought.

And how strange that a generation I remembered as being strong and sturdy and reliable was now vanishing away into old age.

“Paul.” He gestured to the bench. “Sit down, please.”

I sat at the far end, leaving a comfortable space between us. There was no sense of physical threat from him; if anything, age had only enhanced the gentle, harmless feeling he’d always exuded. But I suspected that he had been behind the events of the last few days, and now that he had finally decided to show himself to me I wanted to maintain a degree of distance between us until I understood why.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry about Daphne.”

“Thank you.”

He sounded utterly broken. But then I remembered that the man sitting next to me now had been friends with my mother since childhood—that he had known her far longer than I had. And I remembered the photograph I’d seen of the two of them, both looking so young, Carl whispering something to my mother that had made her laugh wildly.

“I’m sorry for your loss too,” I said.

He nodded once.

“Did you manage to see her?” I said.

“Not after the accident.”

There was the slightest of breezes. I turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes for a moment.

“I’m guessing I have you to thank for the doll?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“How did you get it?”

“It was James’s.”

I opened my eyes. So not mine at all. I wondered what had happened to it. Perhaps I would never know. The box of belongings in the house contained many things from that year, but not everything deserved to be kept.

“James held on to it all this time?”

“He hasn’t lived the most stable life,” Carl said. “But yes. He always kept that, for some reason.”

“We all carry so much with us, don’t we?”

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

I hadn’t given much thought to what James’s life had been like after we left Gritten, but I supposed I’d always imagined he’d been happy. It made me sad to know he hadn’t. That the guilt he felt had trailed him too, and he’d been unable to put it down and leave it behind.

“The knocks at the door?” I said. “That was you?”

“Yes.”

“And it was you I saw in the woods that day?”

Carl nodded.

“Why?” I said.

“I was trying to frighten you away.”

Which had nearly worked. But, of course, Carl had been there when it had all happened. He knew what buttons to push.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I honestly never thought you’d come back here. Daphne always told me you wouldn’t. But then you arrived at the house, and I knew it was only a matter of time before you found it.”