Page 53 of The Man Made of Smoke

I picked up the glass of wine and made my way upstairs to his room. The computer had gone into standby in my absence, so I reentered the password and was met by the browser window still open on the website about the Pied Piper.

You can’t just erase history like that, my son.

I opened a new tab and clicked on one of the menus at the top.

It’s always there.

My father’s internet history appeared before me now. There should have been a list of every site he’d visited recently, but aside from the website there was only one. I frowned to myself. Was that really all there was? Or had he manually deleted everything else for some reason? There was no way of knowing.

I clicked on the link to see what was left.

An address search opened on the screen.

Rosemary Saunders

The Blue Flower, Pitch 19, Newland Lock, Rampton

I stared at that for a moment. Rampton was the location of the rest area where I’d encountered the Pied Piper and Robbie Garforth. The address surely couldn’t be a coincidence. And a part of me recognized the woman’s name too, even though it took a few seconds for me to remember where from.

I clicked back to the tab about the Pied Piper and scrolled a little way down.

“I don’t know if he was talking to himself,” Rose Saunders (23) told the police afterward. “But he definitely wasn’t speaking to me. There was something scary about him. So I acted like I was busy, and I was just glad when I looked up and he was gone.”

I read through the rest of the page, searching out the details of the other people who had been present at the rest area that day. Rose Saunders was the only female name I could see listed.

I felt my father’s presence solidifying in the air again.

Like I told you, he said.A leap.

I stared at the address on the screen.

You thought this might be her? I thought. The woman in the woods?

Well, there were already two links to the Pied Piper, he said.And both of them were connected to the remains of a woman who nobody had been able to identify. It made sense to follow up on that, if only to rule out the possibility.

I nodded to myself. It did.

But then I realized what he’d just said.

There were alreadytwolinks? I thought.

Silence for a moment. The air was ringing.

Dad? I prompted.

Are you sure you want me to answer that, my son? You left all this behind you for a reason. I was glad that you did—and perhaps that’s why I made this trail hard for you to follow. So that you’d have to choose to do it. So you’d know what you were getting yourself into.

Because it might be dangerous.

Tell me, I thought.

He sighed quietly.

Do you remember what I said to Sarah?

The ringing in the air went up in pitch.

And then disappeared. Yes, I remembered. He had told her it was a good thing it had been him who found the woman’s remains in the woods. Better him than a tourist—that had been the rationale.

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