1997

1997 is the pivotal year in the novel’s buried criminal history: Frank Carter committed his murders, Tony Smith disappeared, and the house at 13 Garholt Street became entangled with the disposal and concealment of the boy’s remains. The year does not close the past; it establishes the long interval during which Tony remains missing, the evidence remains incomplete, and the consequences of Carter’s crimes continue to shape Featherbank and the people investigating them.

The Year of the Murders

1997 is used as the chronological dividing line for identifying which occupants of 13 Garholt Street might be connected to Frank Carter’s crimes. Pete Willis assumes that tenants who lived there before 1997 can be discounted, because Carter committed the murders in that year. The property’s tenant at the time was Julian Simpson, who had already been renting it for four years and continued to live there until 2008. That continuity places Simpson inside the house during the precise period when the investigation later suggests that Tony Smith may have been brought there.

Tony Smith’s disappearance is the most enduring unresolved consequence of 1997. When Miranda Smith and Alan Smith were seen exhausted in the police reception, their son was missing; twenty years later, he was still missing. Frank Carter was arrested after spending a day and a half on the run, when his van was stopped on a country road nearly a hundred miles from Featherbank. Forensic evidence established that Tony had been held in the back of the van, and Carter admitted killing him, but he refused to say where he had discarded the boy’s remains. The year therefore fixes the crime while leaving its most important physical fact—the location of Tony’s body—unresolved.

Garholt Street and the Missing Body

The geography of 1997 becomes newly significant when Pete examines a map of Featherbank. Garholt Street lay on a natural route between the scene of Tony’s abduction and the direction in which Frank Carter fled. Pete considers the possibility that Carter, if warned that his house was being searched, could have left Tony’s body at the property before beginning his escape. Julian Simpson was living there at the time, yet his name had not appeared in the original investigation, despite the careful scrutiny given to Carter’s known acquaintances.

This possibility changes the meaning of the house. Its oddly placed windows and slightly misaligned roof had already made it seem watchful, hostile, and somehow not fully habitable. Later details intensify that unease: Carter’s walls are decorated with crude grass, butterflies, and a yellow sun whose black eyes stare down at the floor; a garage floor conceals an old mechanic’s pit beneath irregularly arranged bricks; and a child’s attic room is made uncanny by bright painted scenery, a bare bulb, worn Transformers sheets, and the sense that it was never meant to be lived in by a real boy. These spaces turn 1997 from a date in a case file into a material history embedded in rooms, walls, floors, and concealed compartments.

Evidence Across Two Decades

The twenty-year distance from 1997 creates a contrast between legal resolution and human incompletion. Carter’s arrest and admission established his guilt, but imprisonment did not return Tony to his family. Pete’s commitment to finding the missing boy is expressed through the belief that everybody should get to go home. That principle gives the old case an ethical dimension beyond identifying or punishing the killer: justice requires recovering the child and restoring a name and a body to the family that has been left waiting.

The later discovery of Tony’s remains supplies the confirmation that 1997 could not provide. Norman Collins recounts going to the house on Garholt Street after paying Simpson more money and being kept waiting in a downstairs room. Simpson eventually returned with a sealed cardboard box, opened it carefully, and showed him Tony Smith. Norman describes the experience as like standing in hell. The testimony links the boy’s remains to the house and to Simpson’s long occupancy, transforming a twenty-year disappearance into a recoverable chain of concealment, exploitation, and knowledge.

The physical evidence also distinguishes Carter’s original conduct from the later handling of the body. At another discovery, Pete observes a boy lying near an old television, wearing blue tracksuit pants and a Minecraft T-shirt pulled over his face. The absence of sufficient blood indicates that the boy was killed elsewhere. Pete recognizes this as a difference between the new offender and Carter: Carter killed the children where he found them and kept them in his house, whereas the later crime involved moving a body. That contrast makes 1997 a baseline against which subsequent crimes are interpreted, while also showing how the old case supplies patterns that can both illuminate and mislead.

The Year’s Afterlife

1997 continues to govern the present through memory, property records, and inherited fear. Anne Shearing inherited the house from her parents and did not live there for decades, instead renting it to successive occupants. Simpson’s tenancy lasted from before the murders until 2008; Dominic Barnett followed him and remained until earlier in the current year. Barnett, a minor underworld figure associated with drugs and extortion, was later killed with a hammer in an apparently targeted attack, although no credible suspect was identified. The succession of tenants turns the house into a repository of overlapping criminal histories rather than a setting that belongs securely to any one period.

The past also persists in the families and investigators who remain exposed to its consequences. Amanda Beck promises Tom Kennedy that the police will find Jake Kennedy, linking the new abduction to Neil Spencer’s earlier disappearance, Pete Willis’s assault, and the unresolved damage left by earlier crimes. Her determination not to lose another child on her watch is shaped by the accumulated history that began, for the novel’s central criminal pattern, in 1997. The year thus functions not merely as background chronology but as the origin point of a repeated threat, a measure of investigative failure, and a reminder that time alone does not end a disappearance.