Page 121 of The Man Made of Smoke

Where Aspinall must have found it upon his own yearly visit.

“Did you see him at the grave?” I asked. “My father?”

He nodded. “Every year. I watched him.”

I flicked through the book to the photographs in the middle. Past the pictures of Sean Loughlin, Paul Deacon, and Charlie French, to the pages dedicated to Robbie Garforth. The portrait that had been taken at his school. The photograph I had found at the rest area.

And the sketch I had helped the police to draw. Which because of my persistence back then, had turned out to be an almost perfect likeness of James Palmer.

“And is this when you realized?” I said.

He nodded again.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Don’t you fucking dare apologize.”

Before I had a chance to react, Aspinall was out of his seat. He smashed his hands down on the table and stared across at me, the hatred and rage burning brightly in his eyes now.

“It’s your fault that he’s dead.”

Equally quickly, the door opened behind me, and I sensed a guard stepping into the room. But I didn’t turn around. I just stared back at Aspinall, and held up my hand as a signal to the man behind me.

It’s okay.

After a moment, Aspinall settled back down in his chair, breathing heavily as much as he could manage. Then I heard the sound of the guard retreating, and the door closing again.

I looked down at the book.

It’s your fault that he’s dead.

I had spent so long believing that. At first, I had allowed the guilt to consume and suffocate me. And then, in the years afterward, I had forcedmyself to feel far too little of anything. It wasn’t that I had locked what happened away behind a door. It was more like it had been in the room with me ever since, filling the air around me, and I had spent my whole life too afraid to breathe in.

What a waste.

Because looking back now, I realized how much compassion I felt for the boy I had been. The encounter with the Pied Piper had happened at the worst possible time for me: no longer a child, allowed to be scared of monsters; not yet a man, capable of taking responsibility. I remembered thinking of the rest area as a liminal space—a crossing-over spot between different worlds—but the truth is that I had been in one of those that entire summer.

And I could forgive myself for that.

“I’m not apologizing, Craig,” I said. “Because it’s not my fault. I said that I was sorry, and that’s not the same thing.”

He stared at me for a few seconds, still breathing heavily.

“But youareright,” I told him. “This belongs to you now.”

I put the book on the table and slid it across to him. He picked it up quickly and began thumbing through its pages as best he could. But I knew that it wasn’t the book he was interested in so much as what he had kept in it, and when he didn’t find it, he looked up at me.

“Where is it?”

“Maybe we’ll get to that. There’s something else I want to know first.”

I leaned forward.

“I know that you worked on your farm for months,” I said. “It was important to you to duplicate what you imagined in your mind’s eye.”

“Yes. Because it had to be right.”

“But what interests me more,” I said, “is how you found that location to begin with. In your statement, you said you spent a lot of your free time driving along country roads, searching for somewhere. You’d stop in a place and check, and it wouldn’t feel right, so you’d move on again. Over and over again. Three years of this?”

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