She watched his reaction to that closely. If Paul Adams was behind the CC666 account, the place name would surely be familiar to him. But his face didn’t show a flicker of recognition.
She put the ID away. “I’m here because of a crime that occurred there last weekend. A murder. Two boys killed one of their classmates.”
That got a reaction. Paul closed his eyes and began rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. Again, she watched him. He would be forty or so now, she estimated, but had the kind of appealing face she imagined under normal circumstances could pass for much younger. Right now he seemed weighed down by the world, every single one of those years etched on his features. It seemed like she’d just added more.
“Another one,” he said quietly.
“Another?”
“There have been two others over the years. At least.”
Shit. Amanda took out her phone. “Do you have the names?”
She typed the details he gave her into her notes app. She would need to look into those later. Was it possible CC666 was involved there too?
“I didn’t know about those,” she admitted.
“I only found out about them yesterday. Until then, I had no idea. I assumed all that … that it had been forgotten about.”
“Not online.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I saw. I don’t understand it.”
“Well, you know.” Amanda shrugged, and dropped her next reference as casually as possible. “People are always interested in the unsolved and the unknown.”
He shook his head. “But it wasn’t unsolved.”
“No, that’s true.” If he had ever heard of the forum before, he was a good actor. She made a calculation. “That’s actually the name of a website. The Unsolved and the Unknown. You ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“Me neither until a few days ago. The thing is, the boys in Featherbank were both members on there. They were obsessed with the Charlie Crabtree case. And there was another user who seemed to be encouraging them. This person knew a lot about what happened here in Gritten.”
“Yeah, I noticed a lot of people do.”
“This particular one was implying they were Charlie Crabtree.”
That worked like a magic spell. For a moment, Paul’s whole body was totally still. Then an expression of disbelief appeared on his face: a mixture of disgust and confusion and grief. Nobody was that good an actor, Amanda decided. Whatever else Paul Adams might be, and whatever troubles were going on in his life, she was sure he wasn’t behind the CC666 account.
Which was almost disappointing.
“Why would anyone do that?” he said.
“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “I mean, do you think it’s possible they were telling the truth?”
“No. Charlie’s dead.”
But he said it too quickly, in a way that seemed to be a magic spell of its own: an incantation that, if you repeated it often enough, would become true.
“How can you be sure?” she said. “From what I can tell, the police searched those woods extensively.”
Paul thought about that for a while.
“I remember that,” he said finally. “I remember hearing the dogs barking from my bedroom window. Every now and then, I’d spot an officer in the tree line. But the thing is, the way it reads online, Charlie vanished without a trace. And that’s just not true.”
“It’s not?”
“No. He and the others had been in those woods so often that there were traces of him everywhere. The dogs would find a trail that would lead them back to another, and they’d end up going in circles. Literally chasing their tails. So, yeah, the search was extensive, but unless you’ve been in there, it’s really not obvious how big those woods are. How easy it is to get lost in there.”
All of which might be true, but she could still sense the doubt there. He wasn’t as certain as he wanted to sound. Even in the face of the evidence and the weight of probability, there was a part of him that wasn’t quite so sure. And she could tell the idea scared him.
“Did you know Billy Roberts was living in Gritten?” she said.
“No.” He blinked. “Fuck. I had no idea.”
“He was living in his parents’ old house.”
“I didn’t even know he’d been released.”
“Really?” Another truth, she thought, but this one surprised her. “Given what happened, I’d have thought you’d have been following the case over the years.”
“The opposite. I’ve done my best not to think about it at all. After I left here, I just wanted to forget about it. Pretend it never happened.”
Jesus, Amanda thought. Everyone has a fucking box in their head to hide things in. Apart from her, of course. She didn’t need to close her eyes right now to recall the sight of Billy Roberts on his blood-soaked couch. The image kept pressing at the edge of her mind, and it was all she could do to keep it out. There were going to be nightmares later.
“Was living?” Paul said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You said Billy was living there.”
That was sharp of him. Amanda picked up her drink and took another sip, wondering how much to tell him. But it wasn’t like the news wouldn’t spread quickly.
“He was found dead today,” she said.
I found him dead.
“How?”
“I don’t want to go into that right now. And I just want to stress this: I’m not officially involved in that investigation. The Gritten police already have several suspects they want to talk to. I was visiting him on a completely unrelated matter.”
Paul considered that.
“You think he might be the person behind the online messages?”
Sharper still.
“I don’t know. It’s one line of inquiry. Do you think that’s the kind of thing he would do?”
“Billy? I don’t know anything about him.”
Present tense. Even though Paul had just been told Roberts was dead, the information hadn’t sunk in far enough yet for him to correct his speech. She had already been confident Paul wasn’t behind the CC666 account. She was sure now he hadn’t been involved in killing Billy Roberts.
So who had been?
An unrelated matter, she’d just told Paul, and that was likely true. While she wasn’t involved in the murder investigation itself, she had been on the scene, given a detailed statement, and talked to Detective Graham Dwyer afterward. Dwyer already had a list of people he wanted to bring in and talk to. Billy Roberts had been a loose part of a local circle of drinkers who enjoyed an often volatile relationship: men who were borderline homeless, and who fell out and fought viciously within the space of half a bottle, all the suppressed anger and resentment exploding out of them. In advance of forensics, those connections would be the natural focus of the investigation, and Amanda figured the odds were good Dwyer would turn out to be right.
But she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling she’d had outside Roberts’s door earlier—the sensation that someone had been standing on the other side of that flimsy wood, staring out at her. If that was the case, it suggested a killer far more in control of themselves than the working theory supported. And Amanda didn’t like to believe that whoever had done the terrible things she’d seen inside that house had been cool and collected while they did it.