Page 49 of The Man Made of Smoke

Why, Dad?

I forced myself to read on.

At the very least, I was relieved to find no further mentions of my name. The rest of that section was taken up by accounts given by some of the other people who had been at the rest area that day. They had all identified Robbie as the boy they saw. But beyond that, they had been unable to provide much information to the police.

And then I reached a paragraph that made my body go still.

We know exactly how long the Pied Piper and Robbie spent inside the rest area that day. They arrived at four p.m. in a camper van and departed exactly an hour later. This was confirmed by another witness: a teenager working in the hotel adjacent to the parking area.

The silence in the room began to ring.

“I go for a cigarette break every hour,” Darren Field (19) told police. “I watched them arrive, and I watched them leave.”

Fourteen

John is hitting the heavy bag. The mindless repetition is sending a percussion of thuds through the house and shaking his muscles and joints. A bit of brute force. Sometimes that’s what you need. And that turns out to be the case right now, because it’s when the answer finally comes to him.

Not the answer to the question of what to do. It has been two days since he visited Darren Field’s house and listened to the man’s story, and John is no clearer now on how to deal with what he was told than he was at the time.

Why wouldn’t Field tell the police what he’d been through?

Because of what the man told me would happen next.

And as Field explained, John had understood. He still does now, however much it frustrates him. Field is never going to report what happened to the police: not a chance in hell. And while John could take matters into his own hands and talk to Liam Fleming, he is sure that Field would deny every word of it, assuming it even got as far as him being interviewed. John can easily imagine the pleasure Fleming would take in mocking him. The derision would be obvious on his face.Look at the old man. Taken in by a wild story. Still trying to play policeman.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

But there’s another important consideration, and that’s the danger he might be placing Field in by bringing the man to the attention of the police. John has weighed the risk of that against the memory of finding the dead woman in the woods—balanced it against the suffering she endured, the justice she’s owed, and the duty he feels to her—and he’s still not sure which way the scales tip. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is. And that’s left him adrift and angry, punching the bag a little bit harder every night, but with none of the release that usually brings.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud, thud.

Thud, thud—

But then he stops.

When he met Darren Field, he had been convinced that there was some kind of connection between the two of them. The sensation has not left him. It has been nagging at him ever since. He knows Field fromsomewhere, but the link between them is too obscure for him to put his finger on.

But suddenly a possible answer has come to him.

For a moment, it seems too ridiculous to be true. But there’s also a feeling of rightness to it, like a puzzle piece clicking into place. It was even there in Field’s choice of words, when the man had said his abductor was a man that other people didn’t notice.

The punch bag creaks back and forth on its chain.

Nobody sees, John thinks.

And nobody cares.

Even though John knew the world did not work that way, it often seemed to him over the years that the encounter with that man at the rest area changed everything. The Pied Piper had driven away that day and disappeared. And then he had been found dead. The rational part of his mind knew those things. But it still felt as though the killer had come home with them that day instead, and been haunting the shadows in the corners of the rooms ever since. Whenever John thought back to the months and years that followed that afternoon, he pictured the man’sgrubby, broken fingernails reaching into the cracks in his family’s life and prying everything apart.

It was later that year that Maggie left the island.

John doesn’t blame her for leaving him. He’s not sure that he even did back then. If she’d stuck around, her life would have been as small as his has been. But a part of him hated her for leaving him to raise Daniel alone, especially in the aftermath of what their son had gone through.

Because Daniel changed that year. What happened at the rest area affected him so badly. There were times when John could almost smell it in the air, as though his son had been wounded that day, and the injury left untreated, and now an infection was spreading that John had no idea how to treat.

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