The hall light clicked on, and I found myself staring at a pair of combat boots.
They kept swimming in and out of focus. I was lying curled up on the polished floor, trying desperately to breathe through a pain in my lungs that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It seemed like the man had barely moved, but he’d somehow hit me in the stomach with such force that he’d knocked the air from me and made it impossible to draw in more.
“Shallow breaths,” he told me. “You’ll live.”
His voice was blank and emotionless: stating the facts without really caring about the outcome. But it turned out he was right. The effect of the impact subsided gradually, and I managed to draw in small mouthfuls of air, the pain flaring less with each one.
The whole time, the man stood there waiting as I recovered, entirely motionless. Somehow I knew better than to attempt to stand up—that he wanted me on the floor, and that I’d simply be knocked down again if I resisted—but after a moment I risked looking up at him. He was standing in the doorway to the front room, dressed in dark combat trousers and a black sweater. His body seemed thin and wiry, and built for violence. His hair was close-cropped. I didn’t recognize his face, but the expression there was as implacable as his voice had been.
In one gloved hand he was holding a hunting knife.
Terror began humming in my chest.
“What do you want?” I managed to say, each word making the pain in my chest flare.
The man ignored me, shrugging off a backpack I hadn’t even noticed until then. With his free hand, he reached inside and then tossed something in my direction. I flinched as it landed on the floor beside me with a clatter.
Handcuffs.
“Put them on,” he said.
Every instinct in my body told me not to. But even if he hadn’t had the knife, and I hadn’t been lying powerless on the floor, I could tell I was no match for him physically. That he would simply put them on me himself, and it would hurt a lot more if I made him do it.
He took a step closer, turning the knife in his hand.
“I won’t tell you again.”
“All right.”
I picked up the handcuffs. They were solid and professional, with little distance between the cuffs. Police-issue, I thought—or military, perhaps. And there was that air of authority to the man, as though controlling and hurting people came naturally to him.
I slipped one cuff over my left wrist and clicked it shut.
“A bit tighter,” he said.
I did as I was told.
“Now the other.”
I repeated the action with the other wrist. The action rendered me helpless, but I had been already. Maybe there was even some comfort in the knowledge that he felt the need to restrain me. If he wanted to kill me, I would surely be dead by now.
“What do you want?” I said again.
And again, there was no answer.
Instead, he squatted down and looked me over dispassionately. The knife was much closer now, and I could see it was serrated on one side, thin and wicked on the other. The way the man looked at me, it was like he was examining a carcass he had been given the task of butchering, and a chill ran through me as I realized there might be other reasons to restrain me, and that there were worse fates than simply being dead.
I felt a buzzing against my thigh.
My phone ringing.
The man heard it too and reached into my pocket. He examined the screen for a moment, then placed the phone casually on the floor and sent it spinning away into the dark front room.
He held up the knife.
“Do you see this?” he said.
“Yes.”
“This means you and I are going to have a talk.”
“About what?”
“Be quiet. The talk will go on for as long as it needs to. If you don’t give me the answers I want, I will hurt you very badly until you do. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Because I know you have those answers. I know you know what happened to Charlie Crabtree and where he disappeared to.”
I blinked.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been thinking this was—a robbery, perhaps. But I remembered Billy Roberts now, and how shaken Amanda had seemed after coming from the scene.
The talk will go on for as long as it needs to.
The man placed his knee on my side, leaning down and pinning me to the floor, then traced the tip of the knife over my shoulder.
“I have no idea what happened to Charlie,” I said.
“Really? Why were you planning to burn the evidence, then?”
I tried to think.
“I just wanted to be done with it all. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
That seemed to anger him. The pressure of his knee on my side increased, and he moved the knife to my cheek. I felt the tip of it pierce the skin there, a fingertip away from my right eye.
“You know what happened to him,” he said.
I could tell him the truth, but I didn’t want to, and from the expression on his face I thought he was planning to hurt me whatever I said. Despite the situation, I felt anger flaring up inside me. Fury that, even after all these years, Charlie still had the capacity to get to me, and determination that it was going to stop.
“Tell me where Charlie is.”
The tip of the knife suddenly went in deeper, and I winced as the man turned his hand, needling the blade against my cheekbone. The pain wasn’t terrible, not yet, but the glinting metal filled my right eye, and the anticipation was worse.
You need to tell him a story.
“Hague,” I said.
The name came from nowhere, arriving in my head as suddenly and violently as the van that had taken Hague’s life.
The beginning of a story.
Now I just needed to find the rest.
But for now, the blade stopped turning as the man considered my answer. It was taking him a second to place the name, but I could tell it was familiar to him. He must have read through the same online forums as I had.
A moment later, the knife moved away from my face.
“The boy who was killed in the accident,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not him. His older brother. Rob Hague—that was his name.”
I had no idea if that was true.
“What about him?”
“He was in prison, but he got out that year. There were rumors circulating about what Charlie had said on the rugby field that day. Some people thought that Charlie really had caused the accident, and Rob Hague was one of them. He blamed Charlie for killing his brother.”
It was a complete fabrication, of course, but now that I’d started to tell it, I realized I could see it unfolding in my head, the way I had on rare occasions as a teenager when I sat and planned out my stories. Rob Hague and his friends cruising around in their car. Looking for an opportunity to deal with Charlie, and finding him wandering alone near Gritten Wood after he woke up and abandoned Billy among the trees.
Dragging him into the car.
A beating that got out of hand.
“There were three of them,” I said. “I can’t remember the other names. After Charlie died, they panicked. They kept his body wrapped up in a roll of carpet in the trunk of the car. Later on, they got rid of the body in the woods and burned the car.”
“Where in the woods?”
“There’s an old well.”
“The wells were all searched.”
“Beforehand. So where better to hide a body?”
I held my breath as the man thought about that. I needed him to believe the story enough to buy me some time. I had no idea what I was going to do with that time, but I did know I didn’t want him to start hurting me. That whatever happened, it was going to be on my terms.
Eventually he moved the knife.
“How do you know about that?”
“Hague showed me.”
“Why would he do that?”
A good question.
“This was a couple of months later,” I said. “He knew I hated Charlie, and he thought I might want to know that justice had been done. Maybe he figured he could trust me not to tell. And he was right about that.”
The man looked at me.
Not quite believing yet. But nearly.
“Hague gave me something,” I said.
I nodded toward Charlie’s dream diary, which I’d dropped by the door when I was first hit. The man stared at it for a moment, then reached out and picked it up, flicking through the pages. Whoever he was, he had clearly learned enough about the case to understand what he was seeing.
“And I’m glad,” I said. “I’m fucking glad he told me.”
Even if the rest of what I’d said was fiction, there was nothing pretend about the venom in my voice then. If my story had been true—if Hague’s brother really had turned up on my doorstep—I’d have gone into those woods with him in a heartbeat. And when he looked at me, the man could see I was telling the truth.
A few seconds later, he tossed the diary into the front room.
“You’re going to take me there,” he said.