Page 120 of The Man Made of Smoke

He scanned his card. The door opened.

I stepped inside.

Craig Aspinall had been brought in before me. He was handcuffed and dressed in prison overalls, seated on the far side of a table in the middle of the room. There was a chair across from him, and I walked over and sat down.

The door closed behind me.

Silence for a moment as we stared at each other.

Despite everything he had done, I found it almost painful to look at him. I still remembered how he had seemed on the island: sun-worn and strong; a man who walked the trails and fixed things that other people had broken. But that man was gone now. His skin was pale, and the operations he’d undergone while awaiting trial had only been half successful. The surgeons had managed to reattach his lower jaw, but it remained misaligned, and his face below the nose was a mess of angry scar tissue. As a consequence of his injuries, it had been difficult for him to eat solid food, and his body appeared thin and weak beneath the overalls.

But appearances could be deceptive.

Because the rage that I knew consumed him inside was still burning softly in his eyes. If anything, he probably hated me even more now than he had before. And perhaps I should have hated him in return, but I didn’t. I was detached; I was calm. There was no such thing as monsters.Aspinall was only a man. He was the product of his environment and experiences: the focal point of the damage done to him, and the damage he had passed onto others because of it.

And I knew a lot more about that damage now.

I knew about the abusive childhood he had suffered while growing up on the island—common to many men his age there—and I knew that the demons he’d acquired had followed him when he escaped in his early twenties. I knew about his history of drug use and petty criminality after he moved to the mainland. The violence. The periods of incarceration as his offenses gathered momentum and became more serious.

I knew a lot less about his relationship with Abigail Palmer, but enough to understand that it had been a fractured and volatile one. My father told me that, when he first found Abigail’s file, it had given him the impression of a drowning woman who kept coming up for air. Having read it since, I agreed with him. And while I imagined Craig Aspinall believed he had loved her in his own way, I was equally sure that he had been one of the things that kept emerging from the depths to pull her down again.

Had he been James’s father? That wasn’t clear—no father’s name was recorded on the birth certificate—but I suspected so. Regardless, he had been an intermittent presence in the boy’s early life: sometimes there; more often not. At the time of James’s disappearance, Aspinall had been estranged from both of them, beginning a five-year sentence for robbery and assault.

By all accounts, he had been determined to turn his life around. Perhaps he had even imagined there might be a family waiting for him outside when he did. But given he had no official connection to Abigail and James, he hadn’t been contacted when James drowned, or when Abigail took her life later that year. He only learned of both events upon his release. By which point, the media coverage of the Pied Piper was long over.

In the meantime, his father had died. Aspinall inherited a ramshackle house on the island. His childhood home probably had monsters in every room, ghosts in all the shadows, but there was nowhere else for him to go by then.

I remembered the look of bitterness on his face when I’d spoken to him while collecting my father’s car.

That’s the thing about this island, right?

You think you’ve got away, but the place keeps dragging you back.

“Did you bring it?” he asked me now.

The injuries made it as difficult for him to speak as they did for him to eat. But even though I had to concentrate, I would have understood what he was asking regardless. The need in his body language was clear. He was like an addict. As much as he hated me, he was willing to endure my presence here in order to get what he wanted.

Did you bring it?

I glanced down at the folder in my lap.

“We’ll get to that, Craig. But there are a couple of questions I want to ask you first. And then maybe I can help you.”

I took the first item out of my folder.

My old, battered copy ofThe Man Made of Smoke, by Terrence O’Hare.

It felt strange to touch it again after all these years. I ran my fingers down the edge of its weathered and faded pages, and then across a cover that was now only barely attached. The book was secondhand in every way. I had spent so much time reading it when I was younger: lost for a while in the trauma it contained. When I left it behind me, I had passed it on to my father without realizing.

I thumbed through it now, recognizing the passages I had underlined and the notes I had made in the margins. My father had added his own annotations and asterisks too. A different hand and a different pen. And then finally—and again, without realizing—he had passed it on to someone else.

“That’s mine,” Aspinall said.

“Where did you get it?”

“You know where.”

I supposed that was answer enough. My father had pursued his investigation over the years—as obsessed, in his own way, as I had been—and when he finally solved it, he had made a choice. The world had movedon, he decided, and there was nothing to be gained from unearthing the past. It was better to draw a line and move on. His first visit to Abigail Palmer’s grave had been on what would have been James’s birthday, and he had left the book there.

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