Page 99 of The Man Made of Smoke

I held still for a moment. Then I thought: Yes. It does.

You’ve got pretty good, my father said.

Thank you.

I wish you’d told me. I understand why you didn’t. But honestly, it would have been fine. We all have our own ways of coping with things, don’t we? And if mine was brute force, then what the hell. It worked for me.

There’s no shame in that.

No, I thought.

There isn’t.

I undid the straps on the gloves with my teeth and then pulled them off one by one. My hands were still trembling a little, but I could see blood beneath the skin between my knuckles.

It reminded me of the time when I came back at the end of my first year at university: the night when my father had collapsed, and I’d had to help him into bed. That was the moment when I’d realized how much the encounter at the rest area had affected him. That what happened to us all there haunted him too.

Robbie? Was that you?

I’d been staring over at his desk when he said that. The computer had been open on a website; I’d been distracted by the empty bottles beside it, and hadn’t bothered to look more closely. But I remembered seeing a box file on the otherwise empty shelves above.

Still holding the gloves, I turned around and looked at the desk.

In the years since, my father had filled the shelves above with his out-of-hours research material. The unsolved murders and disappearances he’d become intrigued by; the cold cases that were far more exciting than the mundane crimes he dealt with every day. I’d diminished his hobby when he’d first mentioned it to me a few years ago. Because what did heimagine he could bring to the table that all the more experienced investigators who had worked on them could not?

Brute force.

Most of the box files on the shelves were labeled. I even recognized some of the cases from my father’s handwriting on the spines. But that oldest one was not. And there were another seven old boxes next to it that had been left blank too.

You know what?I imagined my father saying now.

Sometimes a bit of brute force isexactlywhat you need.

I put the gloves down carefully and walked across the room.

Twenty-Eight

Two hours later, I arrived at the police station.

What I had found shouldn’t have surprised me. For all his faults, my father had always been tenacious. A man who, once he started something, kept going.

Brute force.

Having worked through his files, I knew that my father hadn’t just gone one step further than everyone else involved in the Pied Piper investigation, he had walked a whole marathon more. Stubborn; persistent; refusing to stop. It was difficult for me to imagine what had compelled him to research the case the way that he had. He had always been so adamant that I forget about it. It had been his disapproval that had led me to accept it was Robbie Garforth I’d seen that day—or at least, that was how it had seemed at the time. But whatever his motivation for pursuing it, his efforts had brought him a name.

And a face.

The shock I’d felt when I’d seen the photograph of James Palmer remained with me now. The boy might have been a few years younger in the image than he’d been when I saw him in the rest area, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was him. He matched the sketch I’d contributed to almost perfectly. More importantly, he fit with my memory. As I’d stared at the photograph, I might as well have been looking back in time.

Why didn’t you tell everyone you’d found him, Dad? I thought.

Maybe because I didn’t need to.

The voice my subconscious gave him now was stronger than before.

What would it have achieved if I’d gone to the police?he asked me.I assumed James Palmer was dead. And there was no family left to care about him. I didn’t think it would make any difference.

People would have known how much work you put in, I thought.

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