Page 74 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Yeah, but as far as I can tell from the dates, Hunter was first,” Sarah said. “If you have a chain thensomeonehas to start it off, right? So perhaps Oliver Hunter was abducted and murdered, and Graham Lloyd was forced to watch that. Then it was one after another. Rose Saunders watches Graham Lloyd die. Darren Field watches Rose.”

I looked down at the news report, unsure what to think.

“What about the other people on the website?” I said.

“What—you mean, you and your father?”

I didn’t reply.

“Therewasone other named person,” Sarah said. “Michael Johnson. He was the kid working in the shop there. He clocked the little boy—suspected him of being a shoplifter—but he never saw the Pied Piper. I couldn’t find any news stories about him. So I was thinking…”

She trailed off, waiting for me to finish the thought.

“That maybe we need to find him?” I said. “And see if he’s okay?”

“Maybe.”

“But how would we track him down?” The name was so common. “There must be hundreds of people.”

“There are,” Sarah said. “Yes.”

But she had a glint in her eye. And a moment later, she passed me a third piece of paper—another printout, but this time not from an online newspaper article. I looked down at lines of text that appeared to becomputer code, most of it jargon that I couldn’t remotely understand. But close to the top was the name M. JOHNSON, and there was an address underneath.

“What is this?” I said.

“When you register a website,” Sarah said, “there are databases that record it. You can opt out and keep the details private, but it seems like this particularM. Johnsondidn’t bother.”

I looked up.

“This is—?”

“The WHOIS information for the website about the Pied Piper that your father was browsing.”

She smiled.

“Tell me what an amazing person I am.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t gothatfar. But pretty good, I think. Because this has to be him, right?”

I nodded. It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anyone else. It might have been macabre that he’d put so much effort into writing about the case, but I supposed that each of us who had been there that afternoon had been affected by it, and dealt with it in our own ways ever since.

“Yes,” I said. “It must be him.”

“So. What do you think?”

Sarah looked at me, her eyes still bright. It took me a moment to work out what she was suggesting, but then the expression on her face reminded me of how she used to look when she arrived at my doorstep as a kid.

Do you want to go on an adventure?

Twenty-One

The website was so old that I doubted Michael Johnson would still be at the same address, but Sarah had done her research. The domain name had been renewed last month. She’d also checked another online directory and found a current listing for him there too.

An hour later, we were on the ferry to the mainland.

I bought a coffee and a sandwich from the onboard shop, and then sat down inside on one of the sculpted plastic chairs, facing the glass doors to the outside deck. For some reason, I didn’t wantbracingthis morning. Sarah went outside to smoke in the drizzle. Her hair was in a ponytail, and I watched as loose strands of it whipped around in the wind. She seemed oblivious to the elements, just leaning on the railing and staring off toward the horizon as we left the island behind us.

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