Page 93 of The Man Made of Smoke

But he is not visiting a loved one today.

After about five minutes, he stops. This particular grave is tucked away down a small side road of the cemetery, and has only a cheap, simplestone marking the plot. No flowers rest on this patch of grass. The ones he brought in July have been removed. He always brings a small bouquet: a meager offering, he knows, but it feels like something.

John puts his hands in his pockets and reads the inscription on the stone before him.

ABIGAIL PALMER

6 MARCH 1970–AUGUST 1998

The breeze sets the leaves rustling in the small grove of trees to his right. He glances over. The grove is empty for the moment, but while he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, there have been times standing here in the past when he has imagined a presence there. Brief moments when he has pictured a woman watching him from the shadows between the trees.

It’s possible she resents him for keeping her story, and James’s, to himself, but he’s always hoped that Abigail Palmer, otherwise forgotten by the world, might appreciate that at least one person remembers them.

As he looks at those trees now, though, he can feel a different presence building there. Given everything that has happened—everything he has done, and everything he has learned—a shiver runs through him at the thought of what other ghosts might appear there today.

All the people he has failed.

And he wonders what they might scream at him.

One person a night.

It was fourteen years after he first began his search—four years ago now—when John finally found her. A storm was lashing the island that night. Rain was pelting the windows and wind was rattling in the eaves. And John was sitting in the darkness, dog-tired and thinking he should go to bed.

One person a night, though.

He opened the file and it was Abigail Palmer.

He read the details cautiously. Abigail had been found dead in her flaton August 28, 1998, a few days after neighbors first reported a smell of decomposition gathering in the corridors of the tower block. When police broke down the door, they discovered the body of the young woman lying in bed, the air in the room thick with flies. The coroner’s report concluded that Abigail had taken a deliberate overdose of pills, and that she had been dead for over a week before she was found.

Nobody had even realized she was missing.

Abigail’s family history was volatile, and she had long been estranged from her parents. Her life had been a difficult one. Periods of employment and stability were brief punctuation marks in much longer and darker passages. Mental illness. Domestic violence. Drug use. Reading about Abigail broke John’s heart a little. The file gave the impression of a drowning woman who kept coming up for air, and who might have been saved if someone had noticed her in time. But nobody had seen Abigail. At the time of her death, she was out of work. She had no friends to speak of. None of the other residents on her floor had even known her name.

Only one person vaguely recalled that, when she had first moved into the tower block, there had been a little boy living with her.

It was impossible to be sure of Abigail’s motivation for taking her own life, but the coroner remarked upon the close relationship she had previously had with her son, James. By all accounts, she had loved the boy deeply, and he had always been her reason to drag herself back from the blacker places she was drawn to. James had been eleven years old. Like his mother, he was quiet and anonymous. Small for his age, and frequently bullied because he insisted on carrying a stuffed toy lion with him to school. The two of them were each other’s best friend.

And then James had died in an accident earlier that year.

To compound the loss, Abigail had blamed herself for his death. The two of them had been on holiday, staying out of season at a cheap campsite on the coast. There were few amenities, but the weather was half decent and they had the place to themselves. The small beach at the site was all shingle and stone, but they played Frisbee there and skimmed stones, enjoying the quiet. Abigail warned James to keep away from thesea, because the currents were strong and he had never learned to swim. But at some point, lulled by the pills she had promised herself she would stop taking, she had fallen asleep on the beach.

When Abigail woke up an hour later, the sun had gone in and the air was cold, and James was nowhere to be seen. Still groggy, she had stood up and called his name. Her feet had crunched in the shingle as she stumbled down toward the edge of the water, and from there along to the next little cove, where she found James’s shorts folded up on the rocks by the water.

There was only one phone at the campsite, five minutes back up a footpath. It was over half an hour before the police arrived. A little longer than that before the coastguards began their search.

The next day, James’s stuffed toy lion was discovered washed up a short distance along the shore. The coroner’s report noted that it was the last evidence of James that was ever found, although that was not unusual for that particular stretch of coastline.

In the meantime, police had looked at Abigail and seen what they wanted to see: a negligent mother, yes, but one who had also been franticallyhonestwith them. Consumed by guilt, she had told them exactly what drugs they would find both in her system and in the car. At the time of her death, there were still a number of potential charges hanging over her.

John read the report through several times.

One line in particular resonated with him, although he wasn’t quite sure why. Abigail Palmer, the coroner suggested, had been a woman who felt things very deeply.

The file also included the single surviving photograph of James that anyone had been able to find. It had been taken years before his death, when he was still in primary school, but the sight of it took John’s breath away. When he compared it with the sketch that Daniel had contributed to, he might have been looking at the same person.

The next weekend, he took the ferry and drove to the campsite where James was believed to have drowned. He walked down to that sad, stony little beach and stood there in the cold wind for a time, looking out overthe sea. It was a desolate place. Lonely. Isolated. Itfeltright. And as he walked back, an old camper van drove in down the entrance trail and parked in a dusty bay by the side.

John sat in his car, watching it, and eventually a young family got out.

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