Page 63 of The Man Made of Smoke

You’re stupid and small.

A failure. A fool.

As always, it doesn’t matter whether these things are true, only that it feels like they are. Before now, he’s always been able to deal with them, the shame and disgust like pieces of food stuck in his throat that just need to be fought down and swallowed. But this time the consequences of his failure are too much. By the time he gets home, they’re choking him.

He locks the front door and heads up to his room.

For a moment, he stands looking up at the shelves of box files above the desk. The cold cases he’s investigated over the years. All that research; all those scribbled notes.Playing policeman.If so, it had always seemed like a game without stakes: a harmless hobby for an old man to fill his time with. What damage could it do to investigate them? And people might laugh, but nobody really knew what he might end up achieving.

Because people underestimated him.

His very first box file is still open on the desk, all the old paperwork from the beginning of his investigation into the Pied Piper strewn around it. His original cold case, begun all those years ago. His and Daniel’s.

He leans on the desk, staring down at it.

Remembering.

In the first year that Daniel was away at university, it took John a while to get used to being in the house by himself. Even though he and his son had lived almost separate lives for the past few years, he felt Daniel’s absence keenly. The door to the attic might have always been closed, but it was different knowing there was no longer anyone behind it. That if he worked up the courage to go up those stairs and knock, there was nobody there to answer.

So he threw himself into his new project.

After coming home from work every day, he dedicated his evenings to his research. Over the course of that first year, he read every article he could find on the Pied Piper. He accessed all the available information on the police investigation, ordered copies of old newspapers, joined online forums, and made pages and pages of notes. He became gripped bythe idea that in solving the mysteries at the heart of the case, he might come to understand his son and heal the damage that had been done to them both.

If I do this, everything will be okay.

And the year had passed.

By the end, his research was an all-consuming mission, but one increasingly driven by a sense of panic: the feeling that time was running out. At the start, he had dared to hope he might find something that everyone else had missed, but all that year proved to him was how thorough the official investigation had been, and how ill-equipped he was to add anything to it.

There was no obvious way forward in identifying the Pied Piper. And if the boy at the rest area had not been Robbie Garforth then he was an enigma: a boy who appeared to have left no discernible trace on the world at all, either before that day or after it.

When Daniel returned for the summer holiday, there was no reconciliation between them. They spent that handful of weeks together much as they had in previous years: retreating to their separate spaces; closing their doors. Only now, it wasn’t a lack of courage that kept John from going up the stairs and knocking, but shame.

He had hoped that by identifying the boy Daniel had seen at the rest area that day he might be able to bridge the distance between himself and his son. And he had failed.

Worthless. Stupid. Old man.

At the end of the holiday, Daniel headed off back to university.

John, hungover, had given him an awkward hug at the dock, and noticed that Daniel seemed broader and stronger than he remembered. Away from home (and it was impossible for John to shake the thought: away fromhim), his son had begun to flourish. A part of him had understood that Daniel was leaving the island behind him in more ways than one.

At that point, John had turned his attention to other cases. Just as a hobby. He began to expand his collection of box files, focusing on one cold case after another, flitting between them whenever some new development offered a fresh angle. They were distractions; he never heldout real hope of solving any of them. Perhaps that was even part of the appeal. They were like stories in which he could just study chapters over and over, losing himself in the detail, never worrying about reaching the end. They didn’t matter to him. They weren’t personal.

But he always left that original box file apart from the others, with space beside it on the shelf. It was as though a part of him knew he wasn’t done with it just yet. That his worst crime after that first year hadn’t been failing during it, but giving up at the end.

Because that was not who he was. He was not a man who gave up.

He was a man who kept going.

What have you done?

John looks through the paperwork from that first file again now.

He remembers how it felt the other night as he was searching for the connection that was eluding him. But the butterflies in his stomach are long gone now. There is only guilt and self-disgust. What on earth had he been thinking? Had he really expected that he might be able to deal with this himself?

He puts the paperwork away and slides the box file back into place on the shelf. There is no gap beside it now. Over the years, that space has been taken up by the seven others he’s filled since, and as he stares at those, a different question occurs to him.

Not what he’s done.

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