For some reason, that made him uneasy.
Still, there was enough detail in the file to be getting along with. The postmortem on the boy’s charred body concluded that he had died from smoke inhalation without waking. One small mercy, Laurence supposed, in a tale lacking many. Other conclusions appeared far less clear. For example, he found nothing whatsoever to justify the final ruling of the fire being the result of a wiring fault.
Hobbes had been interviewed, and his account was included in the file. Laurence read it through carefully and found it oddly moving. The language was formal and precise, which had the strange effect of making the grief even more apparent, as though he were reading the words of a man struggling hard to hold himself together in the face of impossible heartbreak.
There were several additional documents, including a list of people who had been interviewed at the time. Laurence was about to begin working through those when Pettifer exclaimed behind him.
“Hell’s fucking teeth!”
He turned quickly in his chair.
“What?”
“This.” She gestured at her screen. “Neither hand knows what the other is doing. I’ve just had a report sent through. Katie Shaw. That would be Christopher Shaw’s sister, right?”
“The name is right.”
“She reported a prowler outside her house last night.” Pettifer read the details off the screen. “Officers attended the scene and found nobody present. Case recorded. No further action at this time. For fuck’s sake!”
Laurence was inclined to agree.
“Do we have her number?” he asked.
“We do. Somewhere.”
As Pettifer began searching through her notes, Laurence turned back to his screen. Anxious now. He didn’t know what this new development meant yet, but it seemed likely that whoever had murdered Alan Hobbes was now searching for Christopher Shaw, and his family would be an obvious place for them to start. And while they might not know who that was yet, they did know the kind of violence that person was capable of.
But for now, he looked back at the file on the fire at Alan Hobbes’s property. The next document was an interview with a local man.
Laurence clicked it open.
Stared for a moment.
Then spoke quietly.
“Hell’s fucking teeth.”
“I copyrighted that,” Pettifer said. “You owe me money now. What is it?”
Laurence didn’t reply.
Instead, he quickly scanned the contents of the document. In the early stages of the investigation, a young man had been looked at as a possible suspect who might have started the fire that killed the child. The suspect had been seen close to the property on several occasions prior to the incident, and already had—among other things—arrests on his record for housebreaking and arson. His involvement had been dismissed relatively quickly, and as far as Laurence could tell without any obvious justification at all.
He scrolled back up and read the name again.
Everything is connected below the surface.
“Michael Hyde,” he said.
PART FOUR
Twenty-eight
Katie forced herself not to stare at Michael Hyde as he drove toward her.
Instead, she looked down at the steering wheel and rubbed her jaw, trying to give the impression that she was lost in thought and not paying attention to her surroundings. She didn’t want him to know she’d seen him.
He was driving slowly, keeping pace with the steady flow of traffic. But as he drew level, she could tell he was staring out the window, as though daring her to look back at him. It took all her strength to keep looking down. But she caught a glimpse of him turned in her direction, and even out of the corner of her eye, she could tell there was something wrong with his face. One of his eyes seemed smaller and blacker than the other.
The skin on the side of her cheek began crawling.
She counted slowly to five before risking looking up.
Hyde had kept driving. Ahead of her, she saw his rusted red car amid the other traffic and watched as it disappeared around a bend in the high street.
She sat there with her heart beating hard and the quiet of the car ringing in her ears. Her skin was still itching. Suddenly, without realizing she was doing it, she found herself rubbing furiously at her cheek, as though attempting to scrub away some kind of filth his gaze had left.
Oh God.
It had been Hyde outside her daughter’s day care. It had to have been.
His face at her kitchen window last night.
He who had followed her—and still was.
As she continued staring at the road ahead, she started to shiver. She had been trying to work out what connection there might be between Chris’s disappearance and what was happening to her family, and surely she had just found it. The realization sent a cold spread of fear through her. Sam already thought she was overreacting. If she tried to explain that she thought Michael Hyde was stalking their family, he was only going to be even more certain she was seeing ghosts and jumping at shadows.
You’re always scared that something terrible is going to happen.
But she wasn’t imagining any of this. Chris had gone missing. Her family was in danger. And somehow Michael Hyde was involved in it all.
She sat there feeling helpless.
Then:
So … what are you going to do, Katie?
How are you going to deal with this?
She had no idea. But she knew she had to do something to keep her family safe—that if she just waited and hoped everything would be all right then it might not be. Because that was how the world worked. Things came out of nowhere and changed everything and right now felt like a moment in time she would wish she could come back to and do things differently.
What to do?
Something.
And so, without really thinking about it, Katie started the engine.
* * *
She parked up by the corner of Michael Hyde’s street.
What exactly are you doing here, Katie?
She had no answer to the question because she hadn’t thought that far ahead. What she had done was turn around outside her brother’s apartment and then drive the quickest route here possible, breaking the speed limit along the way whenever it had been safe to do so. So the one thing she was certain of was there was no way Hyde could have beaten her back here.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she got out of the car. The slam of the door echoed around the empty street. There was an odd cast to the light, and a chill breeze in the air, and she pulled her jacket around her as she walked toward the end of Hyde’s street and turned the corner.
The whole area was run-down, but this street was particularly dilapidated. Many of the properties were boarded up, while the few that appeared still occupied had overgrown gardens strewn with litter and children’s toys blanched pale by the sun. Hyde’s house was about halfway down. When she reached it, she saw the front door was flimsy and that old graffiti stained the brickwork in places. The mortar had crumbled away beneath the gray windows, creating the illusion of tears.
A narrow driveway led along the side of the house. After one last look around, she headed down it. Round the back, she found an old door, the white paint peeling off the wood in jagged vertical strips.
Are you really going to do this, Katie?
Yes. She had to find out what was happening.