Pete Willis

Pete Willis is a Detective Inspector whose professional investigation and private recovery become inseparable. He begins by searching for Neil Spencer across waste ground, but the case soon links itself to the earlier crimes of Frank Carter and to Pete’s own unresolved memories. As the investigation widens—from a newly murdered child to an older set of remains and a suspect living under a stolen identity—Pete’s judgment remains central. At the same time, the bottle and photograph he keeps returning to reveal a second struggle: whether grief and guilt will drive him back to drinking, or whether responsibility toward the living can help him remain sober.

Identity and Introduction

Pete is introduced as a careful, experienced police officer working through a night search for Neil Spencer. Around him, officers repeatedly call the missing boy’s name, and the intervals of speech are swallowed by silence. Pete listens while moving across the waste ground, imagining the words vanishing into the black sky as completely as Neil has vanished from the earth below. His attention is practical and exact: he sweeps a flashlight over the dusty ground, checks his footing, and keeps in mind the boy’s identifying details—blue tracksuit pants, a Minecraft T-shirt, black trainers, an army-style backpack, and a water bottle.

The search interrupts the ordinary domestic routine Pete had prepared for himself. He had been sitting down to eat a dinner he had labored over, but the plate is left untouched and growing cold. The contrast establishes the principle governing his character: private comfort is immediately displaced by the fact that a child is missing and needs to be found. His sense of duty is not presented as abstract heroism; it appears as a bodily interruption, a hungry stomach, a darkened home, and a decision to keep searching.

Professional Investigation and Forensic Reasoning

Pete’s work is defined by his ability to read physical evidence without allowing its horror to overwhelm his procedure. When Neil’s body is found near an old television, he deliberately takes in the scene with as much dispassion as possible. The boy’s Minecraft T-shirt has been pulled over his face, turning its front design inside out, and Pete immediately recognizes that a detail at the scene was never made public. For him, that fact creates another connection to Frank Carter rather than merely adding atmosphere to the discovery.

He also identifies what the scene does not show. Pete observes that there is no real blood, or not enough blood to correspond to the injuries, and concludes that Neil was killed elsewhere. He distinguishes this new crime from Frank Carter’s known practice: Carter killed children where Pete found them and kept their remains in his house, whereas the new killer has transported and dumped the body. Pete’s reasoning therefore depends on contrast as much as resemblance. The details that echo Carter point toward a connection, while the altered method suggests a different perpetrator or a changed pattern.

A second discovery broadens the investigation beyond Neil’s disappearance. Amanda Beck tells Pete that another body has been found at a house on Garholt Street, and that the remains are much older, apparently hidden for a long time. At the later examination, the bones are arranged in the shape of a small child, although age has separated many of them and no flesh remains. Dale identifies them as the remains of a male child who was around six years old at the time of death; the cause cannot yet be determined and may never be known, but the child has been dead for a considerable period, possibly twenty years. The box in which the remains were recovered and the clothes beneath the bones turn the case into a chain of material questions: what happened, when, where, and why were the remains preserved and concealed?

Pete’s investigative world also includes evidence that reaches beyond the bodies themselves. Amanda’s work on a school employee produces a decisive identity discrepancy: George Saunders appears to be an approximate age match for Francis Carter, but the real George Saunders died three years earlier. The earlier interview had seemed convincing and had raised no warning signs; the man had no alibi for the precise period of Neil’s abduction, but nothing in the record had seemed sufficiently suspicious to pursue. The discovery that Saunders is dead transforms an apparently ordinary witness into a possible false identity and gives the investigation a new direction.

Alcohol, Ritual, and Relapse Risk

Pete’s private ritual is organized around a bottle of vodka and a photograph. After returning home, he imagines making a meal and watching television before sleep, the familiar structure of gym work, paperwork, administration, and ordinary life waiting for the next day. Before that routine can begin, however, he opens the kitchen cabinet and takes out the vodka. He turns the bottle in his hands, weighs it, and feels the thickness of the glass as though the bottle itself forms a solid protective barrier between him and the liquid inside. The remembered comfort of breaking the seal remains physically available even after a long period without opening such a bottle.

The photograph carries the absent person and the alcohol carries the threatened escape. Pete has been staring at both for a long time when a later call arrives. Seeing Frank Carter has already taken a heavy toll, but the killer’s account of a dream about Tony Smith has brought Neil Spencer back to the surface as well. Pete realizes that the cases are connected and that he is involved. The investigation therefore activates more than professional concern: it pulls older grief, memory, and fear into the present.

The pressure appears in his sleep. The nightmare returns after months of absence, with Jane Carter whispering to him over the phone that he has to hurry. When Pete receives the call from DCI Colin Lyons, his hand trembles because he somehow already knows what the call concerns. The scene links professional intuition to traumatic anticipation: before the facts are spoken, Pete’s body has recognized the return of the past.

Pete’s struggle is not a single decision but a repeated confrontation. One morning he wakes to find that the vodka bottle is present and its seal has been broken, yet the bottle remains full. He remembers bringing the bottle and a tumbler to bed while battling the urge from different angles. Later, he adds a glass to the established arrangement of table, bottle, and photograph, opens the bottle, and pours two fingers of vodka. The ritual advances toward consumption while still leaving room for refusal; the danger lies not only in the amount already drunk but in the possibility of reaching the end of the process.

Relationships and Moral Responsibility

Pete’s encounters with Tom Kennedy and Jake Kennedy alter the emotional direction of his recovery. When he is introduced to Tom and Jake at a property available for use as a safe house, Jake’s father recognizes Pete, and the recognition carries the force of buried childhood memories. Pete, however, later allows himself to think about Jake as a funny, creative, kind child who might be a handful, much as Tom had sometimes been. He imagines sitting down with Jake and playing with him in the way he might, and should, have played with Tom when Tom was young.

That comparison makes Jake more than a temporary police connection. Jake becomes a living counterpoint to the childhood Pete believes he failed to protect or properly share with Tom. Pete initially dismisses the possibility of lasting significance, telling himself that his involvement with the pair will be over in a few days and that he may never see them again. Yet the emotional effect does not depend on permanence. The boy’s presence awakens a form of care that Pete has not experienced in years.

The connection is tested through an ordinary act of attention. Pete reads to Jake, who listens quietly before taking over despite a faltering delivery. The boy’s impressive vocabulary and the peace of the room move Pete because they show him a child absorbed rather than endangered. When Jake falls asleep, Pete stands watching the boy’s tranquillity and measures it against the losses produced by his own drinking. He understands that sobriety has preserved the possibility of a future, even if that future remains uncertain.

Change and Ending

Pete’s decisive change is expressed through action rather than declaration. With the glass of vodka before him, he decides that he is not going to drink—not that night. Throwing the glass away would be easy, but he chooses a more deliberate act: he walks to the kitchen and pours the vodka slowly into the sink, watching the liquid trail down the drain. The physical disappearance of the drink gives form to a refusal that has previously remained an internal battle.

The choice is connected to Jake but not reduced to him. Pete feels something new when he thinks of the boy, without a rational explanation for its arrival. The feeling functions as a protective relationship and as evidence that his life is not exhausted by past failure. Looking at Jake asleep, Pete recalls how often he had told himself to consider what drinking makes him lose. This time, the thought is joined by its opposite: stopping has also made something possible. The future is uncertain, but it exists.

Pete’s recovery does not erase the bottle, the photograph, the nightmares, or the cases that trigger them. The unopened contents after the broken seal and the later glass of vodka show that temptation remains active. His achievement is therefore not a final cure but a meaningful interruption of the relapse cycle: he recognizes the trigger, delays the act, changes the setting, and removes the alcohol. His professional investigation likewise remains unfinished in the evidence presented, but his conduct shows a renewed capacity to stay present—to the dead, to the missing, and to the child sleeping in the next room.

Narrative Role and Significance

Pete serves as the point where criminal investigation, grief, and recovery meet. He is able to distinguish evidence from resemblance, as when he separates the new killer’s disposal of Neil from Frank Carter’s established method, yet he is also vulnerable to the emotional contamination of the cases. The body, the blood that is absent, the clothing, the old remains, and the stolen identity all demand controlled interpretation; the bottle and photograph demand an equally difficult interpretation of the self.

His importance lies in the refusal of a simple division between competent detective and damaged man. The same sensitivity that makes Frank Carter’s crimes personally destabilizing also makes Pete attentive to the details that might identify a victim and expose a killer. His care for Jake does not cancel his past failures, and sobriety does not make the nightmares disappear. Instead, the investigation gives him repeated opportunities to choose responsibility over avoidance. Pete’s final movement is consequently both forensic and moral: he keeps looking at what happened, and he refuses to let the pain of seeing it dictate what happens next.