Page 1 of The Man Made of Smoke

It could be anywhere, this place.

A rest area in the countryside, just off the motorway. There’s a low-budget hotel on one side of the car park, gas pumps on the other. Inside the single-story building at the far end, there is a food counter, a shabby amusement arcade, and a shop with snacks and newspapers and a selection of bestselling books. Outside the entrance, a van is selling flowers. The bunches rest in battered metal buckets, wilting in the afternoon heat.

After parking, the man sits in the darkness of his van for a time.

Then he gets out and walks slowly toward the main building.

The first witness to see him is a teenager dressed in creased kitchen whites, who is leaning against the wall of the hotel, smoking a cigarette. Hours later, he will give the police the same vague description as others who are present here this afternoon. The man is tall. Long green coat; dirty jeans; work boots thick with dried mud. The teenager will mention brown tufty hair, and a sun-weathered face. But the main thing he will remember is a sense of threat that he can’t quite put into words.

“He was someone you don’t want to look at,” he tells the police.

The man stops briefly at the flower van. A young woman is working inside. From behind the counter, she can really see only the man’s upper body, and so she wouldn’t be able to describe his face even if, like the young man outside the hotel, she had been prepared to look at him for long enough.

She will be clear about the words, at least.

“Nobody sees,” the man says. “And nobody cares.”

Inside the main building, the man approaches the food counter and stands there for a moment without ordering. Another teenager is working there, but he’s too busy and distracted to pay the man much attention.He’s scanning the racks of burgers and hot dogs wrapped in greasy paper, making a mental count. A smart kid, this one. He’s only been there for two weeks, but he knows what sells and when, and has been trying to get the guy working the grills in the back up to speed.

“Nobody sees,” the man says. “And nobody cares.”

The middle-aged man in charge of the arcade catches only a glimpse of him, because he’s concentrating on a boy who wants to come in and play on the machines. It’s gambling, so adults only. If you ask him, it’s stupid to have an amusement arcade when you know there are going to be families coming in and kids running loose, but nobody asks him. He seems to spend half his life telling children that they can’t come in. That’s something he’ll think about a lot after today.

The man enters the shop next, loitering in the aisles for a minute before leaving. The teenage boy behind the counter barely notices him; he’s keeping an eye on a kid he suspects of being a potential shoplifter. At home, this teenager is obsessed with true crime, and spends a lot of his time reading lurid accounts of serial killers, the more violent the better. In the years to come, this afternoon will loom large in his memory.

“Nobody sees,” the man says. “And nobody cares.”

It’s not really true. After today, a great many people will care. They will watch the television coverage, read the newspaper reports, and scan the websites. A few years from now, they will buy copies ofThe Man Made of Smokeby Terrence O’Hare, billed as the definitive account of the Pied Piper killer and the children he took away.

But right now, I suppose, the man is correct.

Finally, he walks down the concourse toward the back of the rest area, where the crowd is sparse and the lights are flickering.

And he waits.

“Why are we stopping?” my mother said as the car slowed.

“Snack situation evaluation.”

My father craned his neck to look back at us.

“Plus, I feel like stretching my legs a little. That okay with the troops?”

“Fine by me,” I called.

“Me too,” Sarah said.

Sarah was sitting beside me on the back seat of the car. We were both twelve, and my dad and hers had been friends once, before he left the island for somewhere better. While my family didn’t have much money, Sarah’s mother had next to nothing, and my parents often brought her with us on days out like this. We had been friends for a long time. When we were eight or nine, I remembered she’d knock excitedly on the door every morning in the summer holidays.

Want to go on an adventure, Dan?

Which I always did. Sarah was pretty cool for a girl, I thought. We both liked the same superhero comics and TV shows, and exploring the woods on the island, and we insulted each other horribly, even though we’d never let anyone else get away with it. But in the last six months or so, I’d started to feel a little awkward around her. I wasn’t sure how to describe it. It was as though the two of us had spent years playing a game for fun, whereas it was beginning to feel like it was developing new rules I didn’t understand. That there were things I wanted to say that I didn’t have the words for yet.

My father took the turnoff for the rest area.

My mother said nothing. Which meant that she didn’t approve. She probably figured we were only an hour away from the island, so why not keep going? My mother was a woman who was always impatient to be somewhere else, even when she’d just arrived. When I think back to those times, it felt like she never knew what to make of me, as though a family had formed around her by accident. When she was frustrated with me, she’d tell me that I wasjust like my father, and I wouldn’t know how to take that. It wasn’t true, for one thing. But it also seemed like it should have been a good thing if it was, and yet she never seemed to mean it that way.

We parked.

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