“I’m just doing what I’m told.”
Gaunt looked a little helpless, as though he wanted to have a better and more authoritative answer, but didn’t.
Laurence angled his body slightly.
“When were these requirements given to your company?”
“A few weeks ago, I think.”
“You think or you know?”
Gaunt thought about it.
“Actually, perhaps more recently than that,” he said.
“Interesting.”
“Well, you have to remember that Mr. Hobbes was very old. He was in poor health. It isn’t strange that he was making those kinds of plans.”
Laurence nodded to himself, resisting the urge to point out to Gaunt that it was not for him to suggest to a police officer what was strange or needed to be remembered. But it was possible the lawyer was correct.
“I have an understanding of Mr. Hobbes’s work and finances now,” he said. “But I know very little about his private life. For example, I had the impression he had no family.”
“He didn’t.”
“Except he did.” Laurence pivoted at the waist and gestured at the graves. “And here they are.”
Gaunt looked past him at the two plots.
“Well, yes. But that was a long time ago.”
“Even so. Do you know what happened to Professor Hobbes’s family?”
“I know that his wife died in childbirth.” Gaunt smiled. “Hard to believe in this day and age, right?”
“No,” Laurence said.
Gaunt put the smile away quickly.
“What happened to the child?” Laurence said.
“There was a fire. Mr. Hobbes was away from the estate at a conference. The fire broke out in the room his son was sleeping in. There was staff there at the time, and they managed to raise the alarm and contain the blaze, but not in time to save Mr. Hobbes’s son. You might have noticed the damage it caused when you visited yesterday?”
Laurence thought back to arriving at Hobbes’s house and recalled the charred, collapsed section he’d seen at the center of the building.
“What was the cause of the fire?” he said.
Gaunt hesitated. “I can imagine what you might be thinking,” he said. “But my understanding is the incident was fully investigated at the time. It was an electrical fault. It’s an old building, and parts of it have been in a state of neglect for quite some time.”
“Why would I be thinking anything else?” Laurence wondered.
“Sorry?”
“It just seems odd you would say that.”
“I—I’m not sure.” Gaunt shook his head. “What does the fire have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I’m sure.”
Which was most likely the truth, and yet Laurence realized his thoughts kept running off on these strange tangents. Perhaps that was just a result of his natural curiosity, but whatever might be most likely here, he couldn’t quite shake the sensation of there being a complicated network of cogs turning below the surface of this case.
But again, he stored the information away for now.
“You told us yesterday that you had some knowledge of Professor Hobbes’s possessions?”
“Yes. He had an extensive library. Some of the philosophical texts he’d collected over the years are intensely valuable. Your chief has kindly allowed us to begin removing them for safekeeping.”
“Yes, Chief Barnes is renowned for his kindness. Is anything missing?”
“Not from there.”
“From where, then?”
“Mr. Hobbes was a very rich man.” Gaunt looked awkward. “Over the years, he had amassed an additional collection of … I don’t know how to describe it. Shall we say artwork?”
“I don’t know. Shall we?”
“Well, it’s all just money in another form, isn’t it? Some of the items in this collection were also valuable. Very valuable indeed. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of it’s there. But there might be a couple of things missing. Although one of them in particular—potentially the most expensive—there’s no way of knowing if it’s actually missing, or if it’s stored elsewhere, or if it even—”
Laurence lost patience. “What is this item?”
Gaunt gave a humorless laugh.
“A book,” he said.
Laurence was quiet for a moment. He thought back to the footage he had watched, picturing the object that Christopher Shaw had brought out from the archway. It was about the right size and shape for a book. It had glinted in the light, but he presumed a valuable book would need to be wrapped in something to protect it.
He was about to press Gaunt for more information when his phone rang. He held up a hand to signal their conversation was far from over and the lawyer must wait, and then stepped away and took the call.
It was Pettifer with an update on the search for Christopher Shaw. She and another officer had gone to Shaw’s mother’s house and spoken to her, but the woman insisted she hadn’t seen her son in two years. Laurence detected in his partner’s frustrated tone that the woman had not been particularly easy to deal with. Regardless, Pettifer had managed to excuse herself for the bathroom, at which point she had ducked her head quickly into the various rooms and found no evidence of Shaw’s presence.
“Did you believe her?” Laurence said.
“I don’t know,” Pettifer said. “But given what happened, it wouldn’t surprise me if Shaw hadn’t been in touch.”
“Anything else?”
“Postmortem’s just finished; we’ll be getting a provisional result from that shortly. And we might have visuals on Shaw. I’ve found a bank account registered to him, and he’s made various withdrawals from cash machines over the last few months. The most recent was yesterday. I’m waiting on security footage from that now.”
“That’s something,” he said.
Silence on the line.
“Sorry,” he said. “Of course what I meant was that’s excellent work.”
“That’s better. And how are you doing?”
Laurence glanced at Gaunt.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I’ll let you know shortly.”
He ended the call and then stepped back over, joining the lawyer by the graves and staring down at them for a moment. Two were filled with the victims of terrible tragedies. One was waiting to be with the victim of an equally horrific murder.
And all because of what?
Laurence looked up at Gaunt.
“Tell me about this book,” he said.
Sixteen
Katie had time to kill after she left James Alderson’s art studio.
She couldn’t go home without letting Sam know she hadn’t been at work that day, and yet she had no further leads to follow in terms of finding Chris. All she could do now was hope he would see the message she’d left and call her. Unable to think of anywhere else to go, she drove at random, ending up in an area of the city she didn’t know well and then found an anonymous café, in which she did her best to make a sandwich and two cups of coffee last as long as she could.
It gave her an opportunity to think.