Page 48 of The Man Made of Smoke

I stared at it for a long time. There was a superficial resemblance there, but the boy’s face was still seared into my mind at that point.

No, I told them. It wasn’t Robbie I saw.

They showed me pictures of Sean Loughlin, Paul Deacon, and Charlie French, the other known victims.

And I told them again: no.

The boy I had seen was someone else.

The next day, they came back with that same photograph of Robbie. They’d interviewed the other people at the rest area, they told me, and they all disagreed with me. It was strange, in hindsight, how they flipped the logic of the situation. All these other people had only glimpsed the boy, they said, and yettheycould manage to be sure. So why couldn’t I?

But I am sure, I said.

It wasn’t him.

That was when they brought the sketch artist in. I worked with her to produce an image of the boy I’d seen. And I kept insisting on changes, because it had to be right. The end result was as faithful a likeness as I could manage, and while it bore a passing resemblance to Robbie Garforth, it was a different boy.

A few days later, the police returned and told me that, despite an extensive investigation, and my sketch being circulated in the media, they had found no evidence of a missing child in the country matching the description. They showed me the photograph of Robbie Garforth again, and asked me to think back over what happened as carefully as I could.

Because memory was often so unreliable, wasn’t it?

And the thing is, my memory reallywasbecoming unreliable by then. I had seen that photo of Robbie a number of times, not only in the police interviews, but in the media as well, and his face had begun to merge in my mind with that of the boy I had seen. When I looked at the sketch again, it was the similarities I saw to Robbie now, rather than the differences.

But.

No, I told the police.

I still don’t think it was him.

Close to two weeks later, they came back one final time. This was shortly after Andrew Sanderson had found the Pied Piper dead, withRobbie’s remains in the back of the camper van. My heart had broken when I heard the news. I hadn’t realized how much I had been holding on to the hope that he was alive—how much itmatteredto me that he was. In a single moment, that hope was extinguished, like a tiny light blown out inside me. I was flooded with the contempt I felt for myself: for my cowardice, my weakness, my failure.

Because of my age, my father had sat in on all the interviews. I looked at him, and his expression was difficult to read.

“Just tell them the truth, Daniel,” he said.

He kept his tone even and his face blank, but his arms were folded, and it felt like he was annoyed with me. After everything else I’d done, I was embarrassing him in front of these officers.

In that moment, I had an overwhelming urge to do anything I could to make amends. To dosomethingright. Even if that was just going along with a narrative that would win everyone’s approval and bring the pressure—the horror of all this—to an end.

It might have been Robbie, I told them.

Might have been?

It was, I said.

It was him.

Daniel was probably lucky to escape with his life!

I read those words again now. Perhaps it was true. And yet in the years after the encounter, I had lived with the guilt of doing nothing. I had wallowed in it to the point that it almost drowned me. Because if I had been braver then that boy—Robbie Garforth, I had to keep telling myself at the time,it was Robbie Garforth—might still be alive.

I could have saved him. I should have done.

In the years since leaving home, I had worked hard to push such thoughts away. Detachment and calm had become my watchwords, my defense mechanisms. But the old guilt returned now, along with the self-disgust that had filled me back then.

I shook my head.

Assuming my father had left the note as a clue for me to follow after his death, why had he led me to a web page about this trauma from my past? He must have known how much it would hurt me to revisit this. And he had always been so adamant in the past that I didn’t, to the point I’d had to hide O’Hare’s book from him until I finally made the decision to leave it behind myself.

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