Pettifer had already moved into the small bathroom that led off from the main room, and he followed her in. It was a small, utilitarian area—just enough space to fit the basic necessities. Pettifer put on a pair of gloves and opened the cabinet on the wall above the sink, and then began working methodically through the various plastic bottles that were lined up inside. Hobbes had been on a great deal of medications. Some of the bottles rattled as she picked them up, but others did not, and it was those she paid closest attention to, holding them up to the light and peering at the labels. Some she returned; others she placed on the back of the sink. By the time she finished, there were six of those.
“So,” she said. “There we are.”
Laurence bent at the waist to read the labels.
Here was the anomaly the pathologist had noted in his report. The severe blood loss indicated Alan Hobbes’s heart had still been beating when the knife wound was administered to his throat, and that was judged to be the cause of death. But Hobbes had already swallowed enough prescription painkillers to euthanize a horse. Had he not been murdered, he would have been dead within an hour regardless.
“I assume,” Pettifer said, “we’re not suspecting the killer force-fed him?”
“Alan Hobbes was not Rasputin. He only needed killing once.”
“Self-administered, then.”
“I suppose we can’t be certain,” Laurence said. “But yes, I think so.”
He leaned back up again.
“We thought it was strange, didn’t we, that Hobbes would dismiss all his staff—as though he knew his killer was coming and had resigned himself to his fate. And so perhaps this is our explanation. He wasn’t expecting to be murdered at all. He was planning to take his own life and did not wish to be disturbed.”
“But then he was.”
“Yes.”
“Which can’t be a coincidence.”
Laurence considered that. Coincidences did happen, after all, and perhaps there really was an element of that here. But he, too, suspected there were connections they weren’t seeing yet and that, when they did, they would revolve around Christopher Shaw. Because while Laurence still didn’t understand why, he was sure that the man’s presence here would turn out to be key.
And also the item Shaw had removed from the property.
Tell me about this book …
Laurence turned away and headed back into the main room.
Close to, the air that seemed to be breathing steadily out from the archway felt colder, and the darkness before him seemed even more impenetrable. Both sensations were unpleasant, but the latter could be dealt with. Laurence reached out, searching for a light switch on the wet wall beside him, and found what felt like one. He flicked the switch, and pale light flared from a bare bulb hanging down. The rush of air from ahead was joined by a humming from above.
The corridor ahead was made of old, rough stone, dotted with green in places. It reminded him of a narrow passage below the ground in some ancient castle. But it was short. It ended in another archway only a short distance away, which appeared to open up into another room that was lost mostly in darkness for the moment.
Laurence stepped into the corridor.
When he reached the second archway, the breeze became much stronger, and he could hear something now. The noise was familiar on some level, but he couldn’t quite place it—it sounded a little like chattering teeth. He reached around the archway, searching for a light switch without success. Instead, he clicked on the flashlight and stepped forward.
The floor was made of stone, and from what he could see, the room was large and mostly empty—but not entirely. While the center was clear, a series of bookcases was bolted to one wall, their shelves entirely cleared of all the valuable philosophical texts Alan Hobbes had amassed over the years. Laurence turned his body slightly, moving the beam to the wall beside the empty bookcases. There was a desk and chair there, and a wide wooden display cabinet. Framed prints of some kind hung from nails that had been driven into the stonework above.
He played the flashlight’s beam over them but was unable to make out the details from where he was standing. And he found himself reluctant to move closer, as though the air itself had formed a wall that was pushing back at him.
“Laurence?”
Pettifer arriving behind him broke the spell. He shook his head and then walked across to the cabinet. It had drawers and glass panels, a padlock securing each. He could tell there were objects behind the bleary glass, but it was hard to make them out. A pen. An ancient sewing machine. What appeared to be a cat’s collar. An old black suit, folded carefully, with the brittle, desiccated remains of a flower resting on top.
Pettifer joined him, moving her own flashlight’s beam over the items on the wall above. He raised his own flashlight, illuminating the prints hanging closer to him. They were not pictures but pages of notepaper, small enough to fit four to a frame. The handwriting was smaller still. Even peering closer to the glass, Laurence found it almost impossible to decipher, and all he received for his troubles was the sensation that he was in the presence of evil.
“Jesus,” Pettifer said quietly.
“Would not feel at home here,” Laurence agreed.
He leaned away.
It appeared that Alan Hobbes had been many things. A professor of philosophy. An astute investor and businessman. A philanthropist. And yet behind that facade he had also been this. A man obsessed with the crimes of the serial killer Jack Lock, and who had dedicated his life to seeking out and purchasing—often illegally—every horrible artifact he could find that was connected to the Angel Maker.
Laurence became aware of the cold breeze again.
The sound of chattering teeth.
“Here,” Pettifer said.
She was holding her flashlight steady this time, revealing the open front of one of the display cases. The inside was lined with what appeared to be dark velvet, a patina of dust surrounding a pristine rectangular impression.
“About the right size and shape for a notebook,” Laurence said.
According to what Gaunt had told him at the church, legend had it that Jack Lock had spent his life writing down the future as it had been revealed to him. And that the book he had left behind could effectively be used to see into it.
Pettifer kept the beam on the empty case.
“You don’t really believe in all that, do you?” she said.
Laurence considered the question.
“Not at all,” he said.
Jack Lock had not been a prophet; he had been a deluded child killer. At the same time, Laurence did believe that Lock was also the product of a terrible household. That he had been a child saturated in religious dogma and subjected to physical and emotional abuse by his parents. And to the extent that the writing in his notebook had detailed these early traumas, he supposed that in some ways it did predict the future—because the initial seeds of Lock’s atrocities must always have been visible in its pages.
And there was another consideration.
“But it doesn’t matter what the two of us believe,” he said. “What matters is what other people believe—and what they might have been prepared to do to obtain such an item.”
“For example, commit murder.”
“Indeed.”
Chattering teeth again.
Pettifer seemed to notice it at the same time.