From the bestselling author of The Ghost House
Sophie was afraid of the man in the shadows. He terrified her. But he would always disappear when someone else came. One day in June 1984, she didn’t escape.
He took her.
When a young woman is found draped over a gravestone in a chilling murder, police officer Annie Graham experiences a familiar sense of dread. The terror isn’t over - a new killer is out there, and her senses tell her there is something eerily different about this case.
When she spots the little girl standing outside her window, she knows that the past is about to catch up with all of them. But can she help right the wrongs of thirty years ago, and uncover the chilling secrets lurking in the shadows…?
Also available by Helen Phifer
The Ghost House
The Secrets of the Shadows
Helen Phifer
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014
Copyright © Helen Phifer 2014
Helen Phifer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9781472091000
Version date: 2018-06-27
HELEN PHIFER
lives in a small town called Barrow-in-Furness with her husband and five children and has done since she was born. It gets some bad press but really is a lovely place to live. Surrounded by coastline and not far from the Lake District where she likes to spend at least one of her days off from work. She has always loved writing and reading and loves reading books which make the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Unable to find enough scary stories to read she decided to write her own.
You can contact follow Helen on her blog at http://helenphiferblog.wordpress.com, her website at www.helenphifer.co.uk and on Twitter, @helenphifer1.
For Mum & Dad, thank you for everything
Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
About the Publisher
June 30th 1984
Six year old Sean Black didn’t like this house, it smelled funny and all the furniture was dark and old. He didn’t like the man who walked around wearing the long, black dress either. He knew that he was a priest because his mum had told him that he was, she also told him that they had to live in the presbytery next to the church but he didn’t know exactly what that meant. They had their own house two doors down from this one, it was much smaller with three bedrooms and a tiny garden but it was big enough to play in with his A-Team action figures. He wanted to go and dig out B A Baracus from underneath the rose bush in the front garden where he had buried him last week, before he got eaten by worms or went mouldy. His mum wouldn’t let him, he had asked her this morning when he had finished his bowl of Snap Crackle and Pop. She had gone mad with him when