“I heard a noise. Did something break downstairs?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is it okay?”
No, Katie thought. It’s not okay at all.
From somewhere outside, she heard a car revving its engine. A moment later, there was the screech of tires as a vehicle sped away too quickly down the street. She needed to call the police. But first of all she had to make sure her daughter was safe.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you up?”
“Moon.”
Siena smiled happily and turned to the window just as rain began pattering against the glass.
“Moon came to say hello again.”
Eighteen
It was raining heavily as Laurence and Pettifer drove north out of the city, retracing the journey they had made yesterday afternoon. This time, he was driving. When they left the department, Pettifer had moved straight to the passenger side without discussing the matter, which Laurence had taken as a subtle reflection of their respective levels of enthusiasm for the journey ahead.
Water lashed the windshield, growing in intensity as they went. By the time they were into the countryside, it felt like angry fistfuls of rain were being flung at the car, blearing the glass in front of him faster than the squeaking wipers could clear it away.
“We could have sent someone else to do this,” Pettifer said.
“And miss this delightful view?”
“When you put it like that, I become even more right.”
She left it at that, the grumble more what was expected of her than a genuine complaint. A lot had happened that afternoon, and they both knew that, wherever else they might be right now, relaxing at home with their feet in front of the fire was not one of the options. But Laurence was aware Pettifer was doubtful about their pursuit of this particular angle.
She took out her phone and scrolled the screen with her finger.
He gave her a moment.
“Anything?”
“Just more fucking security footage.”
He understood her frustration, but took a slightly different perspective on matters. They wanted to know where Christopher Shaw was, of course. But Laurence thought knowing where he was not might also be useful in its own small way.
Pettifer had done good work today. Tracing Christopher Shaw’s bank account had granted them a handful of glimpses of him, the footage all taken from cameras close to the ATMs he had used. Until recently, that had mostly been confined to an area west of the city, and Laurence was willing to bet that was close to wherever Shaw had been calling home. But his behavior had changed last week. Subsequent footage came from cameras in apparently random streets in the city center. The coverage was better there, and they had been able to follow him from street to street, even if they always lost him eventually.
For some reason, Christopher Shaw had altered his routine.
Even better was the footage they had from the last withdrawal, yesterday morning, which showed Shaw and another young man walking down the street together. They looked a little unkempt, and both were carrying heavy backpacks. While they disappeared off-grid quickly—annoying Pettifer immensely—the sighting made Laurence happy, because it provided them with more information. They now knew that Shaw had a companion. And that the two of them appeared to be on the move.
Pettifer sighed.
“What do you make of this?” she said.
He risked looking away from the rain-drenched road for a second and realized she had the results of Alan Hobbes’s postmortem report open on her screen. Upon first viewing the body yesterday, Laurence had imagined it obvious that the savage injury to the old man’s throat would be the cause of death—and indeed, the pathologist had confirmed that was the case.
But the story had turned out to be not so simple.
Not so simple at all.
Laurence looked ahead again, turning the wheel gently.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “We will see.”
The trees packed tightly on either side of the dirt road that led to Hobbes’s house provided some respite from the weather, but the car tires rolled and squelched in the mud, and then the rain redoubled its fury when they emerged into the clearing at the end. Laurence heard a sound like snapping kindling as he parked up on the pebbled area by the front doors. The scene was due to be released tomorrow morning. For now, a single police car remained in place, an officer sheltering against the elements within it.
Laurence stared out of the window at the house.
The building had appeared grand to him yesterday, but he found himself reevaluating this in light of what he had learned since. Those enormous wooden doors seemed smaller now, and the empty wings to either side appeared desolate and sad. But most of all there was the stretch of charred, fractured brickwork high above—the room where Alan Hobbes’s infant son had perished in a fire, and which had not been repaired in the three decades that followed. Right then, the house seemed as saturated by grief and sorrow as it was by the downpour.
Alan Hobbes had been wealthy. He could have lived wherever he liked. And so Laurence found himself thinking about his own apartment—carefully organized to reflect his needs—and wondered what choosing to remain in this property said about Alan Hobbes.
After showing their IDs to the officer in his car, they hurried into the house. Laurence turned on the flashlight he’d brought, illuminating the chessboard-patterned floor and the twin staircases that lay ahead. The officer had taken them up the stairs on the right-hand side yesterday, and so for some reason he chose the left-hand side this time. It led them to the same landing, of course.
As they ascended farther, he breathed in and noticed odors he had missed upon their first visit: damp and mold; old wood and spilled ink. When they reached the first landing, he heard a noise behind them, and turned quickly, swinging the flashlight’s beam round to point back down the staircase.
Nothing but mist swirling there.
Beside him, Pettifer flicked her own flashlight on under her chin and pulled a frightening face at him.
“A genuine improvement,” he said.
With their flashlights bobbing, they made their way up the rest of the stairs, and then down the corridor that led to Hobbes’s apartment. The door at the end was closed but not locked, and when Laurence opened it, the space beyond was filled with a darkness the beam of his flashlight seemed to disappear into. Pettifer stepped past him and reached around the frame, her fingers groping across the wall until they found the light switch.
Laurence blinked at the sudden brightness, then clicked off the flashlight and followed her into the apartment. The main room was more or less as he remembered it but felt emptier than before, in a way the lack of people did not fully account for. The bed had been stripped down and resembled a hospital gurney now, the bloodstains on the wall somehow uglier in contrast to its bare metal frame. He glanced behind him and saw the camera above the door, hanging limply from its broken plastic casing.
Then he turned his attention to the archway at the end of the room.
Once again, the light in the room didn’t penetrate much farther than a foot or so into the old stone corridor. Beyond that, there was just a green-black darkness.
But he could feel the same cold breath coming from it as he had yesterday.
A light flicked on to his left.