The Whisper Man

“Age had brought with it an understanding that his father had been a small man, disappointed with everything in his life, and that his son had just been a convenient target to vent his many frustrations on. But that understanding had come too late. By then the message had been absorbed and become part of his programming. Objectively, he knew it wasn’t true that he was worthless and a failure. But it always felt true. The trick, explained, still convinced.”

Pete’s explanation of his childhood provides context for the decision he makes to leave his son, Tom, when his alcoholism became a problem; Pete’s father did so much emotional damage to him that he’s afraid he’ll do the same to young Tom. This lack of self-worth influences Pete’s decision to remain isolated and confront his alcoholism through a private ritual.

“Glass smashing.

My mother screaming.

A man shouting.”

Dreams are a recurring motif throughout the story, and it often depicts them in this exact style: three repeated images punctuating a dream’s referential, imagistic reality. This one is Tom’s, and it illustrates the immediacy of the emotional memory of Pete leaving Tom’s mother, which had a profound effect on Tom.

“Outside, I clicked the padlock back in place, sealing the butterflies within. IT seemed remarkable that they’d survived in there for so long in such fruitless and insubstantial conditions. But as a I walked back up the drive to the front of the house, I thought about Jake and me, and I realized that was just what happens. The butterflies didn’t have a choice, after all. That’s what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.”

The butterflies are a beautiful element of a tragic situation, so it’s fitting that Tom would compare them to his tragedy in losing Rebecca. The central question of Tom’s story is how to go on without her, especially as a father to Jake.

“But it always comes back to me for you, doesn’t it? It always ends where it starts.”

Frank Carter is toying with Pete in his interview, but he’s providing clues to the identity of Neil Spencer’s kidnapper. Here, Carter is referring to his son, Francis, and suggesting that he knows the underlying motivation: that Francis is trying to reconnect with his father and atone for the vicious things he’s witnessed. This leads Pete down the wrong path, as he thinks that Carter is referring to the waste ground where Neil was taken.

“Mummy would have told him it didn’t matter, and she would have made him believe it too. But Jake thought that it did matter to Daddy. Jake was aware that he could be very disappointing sometimes.”

Jake’s fear that his father worries about his social skills is legitimate, but like his father, he misreads the intentions of their relationship. Tom’s worry is based on his desire for Jake to thrive and be happy, whereas Jake sees it as a sign of his inadequacy.

“I also couldn’t deny the ugly kernel of resentment I felt, the frustration at being left alone with Jake, the loneliness of that empty bed.”

Tom grapples with some difficult truths about grief as he writes to his deceased wife. He’s in a difficult situation, and he believes that he can “will” his way out of it through writing. His son will misread his attempt to face down the ugliest parts of grief, leading to further conflict between them. It’s only when Tom realizes that he needs to focus on his son that he can heal and let go of some of the uglier parts of his feelings of loss.

“I sat there for a moment, unable to think of what to say. The boy in the floor. I remembered the raspy voice that Jake had been talking to himself with. And, of course, that was the only explanation for what I’d heard. But even so, I felt a chill run through me. It hadn’t sounded like him at all.”

Without Tom’s knowledge, Jake has been talking to Francis Carter and has learned about Tony Smith’s body in the garage. Tom sees this as another instance of his son’s strange imagination and misreads it as an outgrowth of the difficulty they’re having adjusting to their new life without Rebecca.

“And Pete could tell that she believed what she was saying just as passionately as he had all those years ago. Because you had to. Something awful had happened on your watch, and the only way to ease the pain was to do everything you could to put it right.”

Amanda Beck’s central conflict in the story is rooted in her desire to be successful in her work without it ruining her as it has Pete, but it becomes clear early on that they’re more alike than not. Pete’s belief here is typical of detective characters, as they often commit to their work in a way that blinds them to outside sources of comfort or help. Amanda’s character presents a counterpoint to that blinkered determination, and whether she’ll fall into that pattern is a standing question in the novel.

“I frowned. A memory suddenly came back to me.

‘Mister Night,’ I said […] ‘God, I haven’t thought about that in years […] I did have an imaginary friend. When I was younger, I used to tell my mother that someone came into my room at night and hugged me. Mister Night. That’s what I called him.”

Echoes from one generation to the next fill the story, and Mister Night is one of these echoes: Tom learns that his imagination was processing the loss of his father, Pete, through Mister Night, who was really Pete visiting him. He later realizes that Jake’s imaginary friend represents the same strategy, as his son’s friend is a young version of Rebecca.

“‘One man was prepared to pay far more than the asking price.’ She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. ‘But I didn’t like him at all. He reminded me a little of the others. He was very persistent, as well, which put me off even more.’”

While Norman Collins’s perverse interest in the Kennedy house is a point of misdirection, it leads Tom to discovering Tony Smith. This shows that even seemingly unrelated events and decisions figure in solving the case, as they eventually lead to saving Jake and capturing the younger Carter.

“The police were a capable, powerful resource to have behind me, and yet it still felt as if Jake wouldn’t be safe until he was right next to me. Someplace where I could look after him.”

This moment foreshadows Tom’s determination to find his son when he’s taken yet mirrors Francis Carter’s belief that Jake will be safe only with him, so the two views convey an ironic undercurrent. Despite Tom’s fears and concerns, his intentions as a father are always clear.

“‘Do you have any family you’d prefer to stay with?’

‘No,’ Daddy said. ‘Both of my parents are dead.’”

In this telling exchange, Tom declares that his father is dead—directly to Pete, who he doesn’t realize is his father. Jake, who is the point-of-view character here, can see that something is amiss between the two of them but is unaware of the full context. Throughout the novel, Jake’s point of view is used to show the disconnect between a child’s understanding and the complex adult world around the child.

“[…] his failure toward Tom had been absolute, and Pete had done his best never to think about that. It was better to have nothing to do with his son’s life, and whenever he had found himself imagining what kind of man Tom might have become, he had quickly shoved those thoughts away. They were too hot to touch.”

Pete’s thinking is rooted in the shame his own father instilled in him, and this passage explains why Tom was left out of Pete’s ritual of thinking about what he’s lost to drinking. For Pete, some losses are too much to face.

“Well, the man was sure that Jake would flourish under his care. He would give the boy the home he deserved and provide the love and care he needed. And then he himself would feel healed and whole as well.

And if not…”

Francis Carter’s motivations become clear as he draws closer to abducting Jake. He sees Jake as a child in danger due to Tom’s neglect and abuse because he misreads Tom’s natural fears as something more sinister. What he really wants is to heal the trauma he experienced at the hands of his father, whose actions were sinister, even horrific.

“My first instinct was that my father was lying—that he had to be, because I remembered that night so clearly. And that I hadn’t had any friends. But was that really true back then? And whatever my father had once been, it didn’t strike me that he was a liar now. In fact, as much as I didn’t want to allow it, he had the air of somebody who had become scrupulously honest with himself about his faults. That perhaps, over the years, he’d needed to.”

This passage reveals that Tom’s dream of his father being violent toward his mother isn’t an actual memory but rather a recreation of the emotions that Tom felt, which stories his mother told him about that time likely influenced. Tom’s willingness to question his own memory is admirable, and his keen understanding of his father’s present-day personality helps him see that he may have been wrong about the faceless monster he’s been living with all these years.

“But instead of answering, Carter stared down at the photograph again for a few more seconds, studying it. It was as though he were looking at someone he’d heard a great deal about and was now curious to see him finally. But then he sniffed loudly, suddenly uninterested in whatever he saw, and pushed the photo back across the table.”

The image that Carter is looking at here is of his adult son, Francis, and he clearly isn’t in control of the interview in this moment as usual. This passage belies an unspoken parallel between Frank and Pete have an unspoken parallel, as each confronts the son he’s abandoned.

“How sad that was, I thought. Both of us feeling the same. Both of us trying to meet in the middle but somehow always missing each other.”

Tom’s character growth is based on his relationship with Jake, and this moment is a key part of that growth. He learns here to empathize with his son instead of trying to understand him through his own lens, and in doing so he starts to see their similarities as an asset instead of a burden.

“‘Sometimes really bad things happen to us, and we don’t like to think about them, so they get buried really deep in our heads.’

‘Like earworms?’

‘I suppose so, yes. But they have to come out eventually. And bad dreams can be our brain’s way of dealing with that. Breaking it all down into smaller and smaller pieces, until eventually there’s nothing left anymore.’”

Pete explores the key theme of processing trauma and its representation in dreams, as he explains it to Jake. Notably, Pete is wrong about the role of dreams in his own life, as they’ve grown more powerful for him, fueling his desire to close the case on Tony Smith. For Pete, the past that his dreams represent is more powerful than the present, and only in meeting Jake can he revise his thinking.

“He couldn’t save the boys he’d seen murdered all those years ago, just as he couldn’t help or comfort the child he had once been. But he could make amends. Because there were so many children like him in the world, and it wasn’t too late to rescue and protect them.”

The narrative more explicitly states Francis’s motivation in this passage: He sees his actions as corrective. He wants to save his own younger self from his father, and he acts that out through his kidnappings while struggling to contain his own violent urges.

“I had to allow myself to believe her. Because if not—if he was dead—then there was nothing beyond that. It would be the end of the world: a hammer blow to the head of life, scrambling all coherent thought. After that, there would only ever be static.”

This thinking is part of what drives Tom to go after the killer himself. He can’t fathom losing his son in addition to his wife, and one thing that sets him apart from the other fathers in the story is his dogged refusal to let go of his son.

“Was it possible that Jake was loved, after all? That his father cared about him so much that his abduction had driven him to such extremes? The idea sent an explosion of loss and hopelessness through Francis. It wouldn’t be fair if that was true.”

Francis’s conception of fairness is twisted and warped, but it allows a bit of sympathy to enter the story. The trauma that defined him drives him, and he can’t fathom other kinds of fatherly interaction.

“‘Will you go with me?’ he said.

She smiled.

‘Of course I will. Always, my gorgeous boy.’

Then she stood up, and reached out, and took his hands, pulling him to his feet.

‘What are we being?’ she said.”

Jake’s imaginary friend represents his mother, so a double meaning is at play here when she says that she’ll always go with him. The unspoken answer to her question—being brave—recurs throughout the story and has often reminded Jake that he has inner strength. His imaginary friend steps into the role of parent here, driving him toward safety.

“When he was a child, his father had been a language he was unable to speak, but he was fluent now. The man wanted him to be someone else, and that had been confusing. But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been.”

Pete returns to thoughts of his father at the story’s end with a new understanding. What he allowed to define him has faded as he proved his worth as a man, and his interactions with Tom showed him that he was wrong to think that his struggle with alcohol or his career—the failures that his father’s voice would remind him of—defined his worth.