Page 85 of The Man Made of Smoke

For a long moment, he didn’t reply, and I began to wonder whether I’d said too little or too much. It had been enough to knock him off-balance, but for those few seconds it wasn’t clear in which direction he was going to fall.

But then he looked away from me, down at the floor.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

And he undid the chain.

Twenty-Four

“I don’t know why, but it’s the lights in the trees I remember most,” Johnson said. “Maybe because everything else is too horrible. But it’s also because they seemed so out of place—like a fairy tale. Like I was being taken away into a wood by a monster.”

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” I said.

“Fucking hell,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to a word I said?”

The three of us sat in silence for a moment.

His question was reasonable. The account he had just given us matched what had happened to Rose Saunders. He had been abducted last week, late one night, after drinking in a pub: a quiet, out of the way place, because the ones nearby were always busy and threatening. He had left his drink at one point to go to the toilet. He remembered leaving the pub, and that the cold air had made him feel woozy and sick, and then nothing until the forest and the fairy lights.

Until he had been forced to watch a man die.

I looked around now.

His living room was small and sparsely furnished. There was just a settee and chairs, and a plywood table with a portable television. Johnson was sitting at the end of the settee, Sarah and I on a chair each. A window took up most of one wall, and we were high enough up that it hadfelt like being in the sky when we first walked in: bright and airy despite the claustrophobia of the room. But everything seemed darker now.

I glanced over at Sarah. She was staring down at the floor.

“And you’re sure it was Darren Field?” I said.

“I’m sure.” He nodded miserably. “I knew Darren back then. We were the same age, so we hung about a bit. I hadn’t seen him in a few years, but he hadn’t changed that much. As soon as I set eyes on him, there was this jolt of recognition. And somehow I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That it was about that day. That the man behind me washim.”

“But the man never said anything?”

“Just what I told you already. What he said afterward: that if I went to the police, then I’d be next. But he didn’t need to say anything for me to know who he was. Because think about it: who else could it be?”

“You saw the boy that day.”

“Yeah. The same as you did. I thought he was just some little shit looking to shoplift. I didn’t realize he needed help.”

Not the same as me, I thought. Johnson might have felt culpable for doing nothing that day, but he was only a bystander. I had known for certain the boy needed help, and I had been too scared to give it.

“You told the police it was Robbie Garforth you saw,” I said.

“Because they showed me a photograph. It looked like him, so I figured it had to be. And you know what? I think I evenwantedit to be. That’s a horrible thing to admit, but it’s true.”

“Why did you want it to be Robbie?”

“Because that meant the man was the Pied Piper—that he’d beenright there. I know that sounds sick, but I was obsessed with serial killers back then. And if it hadn’t been Robbie I saw, then it wasn’t such a big deal, was it? Not as much of astoryto tell people.”

He shook his head.

On the face of it, he seemed disgusted with himself for having thought that way, but I wondered if that was really true, or if he was attempting to put psychological distance between the past and the present. If he wasn’t that person anymore then it was unfair to be heldresponsible for his actions.I didn’t do it; it wasn’t me.But not only had he created the website, he had maintained it. If his obsession back then really was a source of shame to him, he had done little to hide it since.

I leaned forward and spoke as gently as I could.

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