The Whisper Man

The story begins on a July evening as an unnamed man (later revealed as Francis Carter) follows a young boy, Neil Spencer, as he walks across a waste ground near an abandoned quarry. Neil spent the day at his father’s house, and the man following him knows his parents are both alcoholics who largely let Neil fend for himself; he’s walking home because his father is too drunk to drive him.

The man has prepared a room for Neil in his home, and he watches Neil as he stops and throws rocks at an old television. As Neil puts holes in the old television screen, the man steps toward him and whispers his name.

Detective Inspector Pete Willis is at the waste ground helping the police search for Neil Spencer. He’s not on duty, but when he got the call, he abandoned his home-cooked dinner and joined the effort. Pete is familiar with working on missing children cases, having captured Frank Carter two decades earlier. Known as the Whisper Man, Carter was convicted of serially abducting and murdering several children in Featherbank. An officer approaches Pete as though he’s the lead detective on the case, and he directs the officer to Detective Amanda Beck, who is overseeing the search. As Pete searches the waste ground and peers into the quarry, he worries that Neil won’t be found.

Jake Kennedy is at the 567 Club, an after-school program. He sits inside, working on a drawing, while the other kids play outside, and his imaginary friend—a young girl around his age—is with him. While he works, she forces him to recite the beginning of an old saying that she says is from her childhood: “If you leave a door half open…” (13). The girl tells him that it’s a warning to protect him from bad people.

This leads Jake to think about Carl, a classmate who has been making fun of him, particularly for discovering his mother’s body after she died of a heart attack. As he thinks of this, he draws a battle scene and puts force fields around the figures to protect them, but then changes them to portals and erases the figures. He and the imaginary girl continue talking, revealing that Jake’s father, Tom, is buying a house in Featherbank for the two of them. The girl says that she’ll see him there at the new home and makes him promise that he’ll remember her warning.

Tom Kennedy, a novelist, arrives to pick up his son. (Notably, Tom’s chapters are the only ones narrated in first person.) Seeing his son inside working on a drawing makes him reflect on how much they’ve struggled to connect since Rebecca’s death, especially as Tom feels that he must always remain strong for his son. Tom sees Jake’s drawing and doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to be—but he appreciates that they share a creative side, even though Tom hasn’t written since his wife died.

Jake asks if they got the house, and Tom says yes. They begin talking about moving, and Tom suggests that Jake might want to get rid of some things, which draws attention to Jake’s Packet of Special Things: a battered leather pouch that Jake takes everywhere full of items significant to him. The pouch came from Rebecca’s possessions, and Jake asked if he could have it when they went through some of her things after her death. It contains some things from her childhood as well as new things he’s found that matter to him.

Jake and Tom gather up everything to leave the 567 Club, and when Tom suggests that Jake say goodbye, he says goodbye to his imaginary friend (instead of to any classmates or caretakers), telling her that he won’t forget what she said.

Tom recounts the day of Rebecca’s death. He went to pick Jake up from school on Rebecca’s request even though he was annoyed and stressed about an upcoming book deadline. When the two arrived back home, Tom took his time, feeling bad about himself, which meant that Jake was the one who discovered Rebecca collapsed in the living room.

In the present, the two arrive home again, and Tom fixes Jake a snack while Jake works on his drawing some more. Tom worries about Jake’s imaginary friend; he thinks that Jake should be more normal, but Rebecca always cautioned him to let Jake be himself. Just then, he hears Jake arguing with someone, but Jake claims he wasn’t talking to anyone and refuses to stop drawing and discuss it. Tom feels angry at his inability to reach his son.

After Jake is in bed, Tom looks at the listing for the house he’s bought. It’s an odd-looking house, even creepy, but Jake picked it out and was adamant that it was the house they should buy. Tom is terrified of leaving everything behind and moving to Featherbank but hopes that making a fresh start will do them both good.

Detective Amanda Beck meets with Neil’s parents about their missing son, walking them through the police efforts to find him. She’s reassuring but privately thinks that finding Neil is becoming less likely. That night, she reviews the case and the press conference, during which the parents look guilty; she knows that they aren’t ideal parents but doesn’t suspect them.

The next day, Amanda and her team must start treating the case as a nonfamily abduction, which she sees as a nightmare scenario. She re-interviews the family, and a new fact leads her to go to her Chief Inspector, Colin Lyons: Though it isn’t revealed until the next chapter, someone was whispering to Neil through his window, and his mother dismissed it as a nightmare. The detail is reminiscent of the case of the Whisper Man, the serial kidnapper that Pete Willis caught. This leads Amanda and Colin to bring Pete back into the case.

Pete has been trying to ignore the Neil Spencer case, going about his usual routine of working out in the morning and focusing his workday on minor, unexciting cases. However, he hasn’t been able to keep his mind off the Spencer case entirely, and he has had a recurring nightmare about the old Whisper Man case. In addition, he has been struggling to stay sober: His nightly ritual of looking at a photo of his ex-wife before deciding whether to open a bottle of alcohol has grown more difficult.

While Pete is in this headspace, Colin Lyons and Amanda Beck bring him into the office to talk about the Spencer case. Pete has a long history with Lyons, who distrusts Pete’s lack of ambition despite his having solved a star-making case. Pete knows that they want him because Frank Carter, the Whisper Man, will speak with him, though Carter only does so to taunt Pete about a child, Tony Smith, who was never found. This unsolved part of the case, the fifth victim, haunts Pete and led him to suspect that Carter may have had an accomplice in his crimes. Lyons and Beck reveal what they learned from Neil Spencer’s mother, drawing Pete back into the case he’s been trying to avoid.