The Last Walk-Back

In this town, doors are the honest government, and Willem knows every hinge. When winter pins the county in place, women vanish without sirens or headlines, just rumours exhaled into the cold. Willem is always nearby: soft-spoken farmer, tireless pillar at Piggy’s Palace, the truck that passes at the right time. His fields are immaculate. His favours come free. His smile fits the weather. A young constable starts lists; a seasoned sergeant listens through a one-inch window. Searches turn up almost nothing—a ring, a locket, a few teeth that could be anyone’s. Meanwhile, charity nights bloom and good deeds become perfect cover. Forgetting turns into a civic duty. Doors turn strategic. Every favour has a receipt. And Willem—courteous, unreadable—keeps opening the right ones. A slow-burn seep of domestic dread; lamplight, porch steps, a friendly truck. The town stays tidy; the story doesn’t.

I don’t treat harm as entertainment. What you won’t find here: names of the harmed, rehearsals of cruelty, or scenes written to make you flinch on cue. The book keeps its distance from spectacle and closes ranks around the people who deserve privacy.

Instead, the camera points at systems—the everyday machinery that turns without anyone watching: doors and who controls them; roads and who gets seen on them; schedules, favours, habits, weather. That’s where communities make choices, and where those choices can be changed.

The pages move by ordinary means: rosters on a wall, a truck that passes at the right time, a walk-back list in tidy handwriting. If dread rises, it rises from what’s plausible. If you feel implicated, that’s the point—complicity lives in the routines we call neighbourly.

Care guided the writing. I spoke with people whose experience exceeds my own and followed their lead on what should stay off the page. Where a detail would feed curiosity but not understanding, it’s omitted. Where a description risks turning a person into an exhibit, it’s refused. Restraint is not vague; it’s deliberate.

This book asks you to look at how harm is organised rather than how it is staged. It favours aftermath over spectacle, patterns over headlines, the doorframe over the room beyond. If you come away checking which doors open for whom—and why—that’s the story doing its work.

Read with curiosity. Read with care. Some debts are tallied quietly; some tithes are taken at the threshold. The town stays tidy; the story doesn’t.