And yet the car persisted.
Everything is connected below the surface.
He took out his phone and tried Katie Shaw’s number again.
Then gave up.
“A busy signal this time.”
“Perhaps she just doesn’t want to speak to us,” Pettifer said.
“It seems so.”
They got out and made their way across to Michael Hyde’s front door.
Laurence still wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to speak to Hyde about, only that he had become certain the man was one of those connections below the surface. Three decades ago, Hyde had been a credible suspect in the fire that killed Joshua Hobbes, and yet his involvement had been dismissed quickly, with what seemed to Laurence a lack of due diligence. Christopher Shaw, who had been working for Hobbes, had been attacked by Hyde as a teenager. And now Alan Hobbes had been murdered.
Coincidences happened, Laurence knew. And sometimes they even arrived in pairs. But this many in a row suggested orchestration of some kind. Even if he didn’t quite know what questions to ask Hyde yet, he was hopeful that talking to the man would begin to suggest some.
They knocked on the front door and waited.
No answer. Behind the patchy curtains in the windows, he could tell the light in the front room was on. He looked up. One upstairs too.
Pettifer cocked her head.
“Hear that?”
Laurence listened.
“No.”
“I’m serious. What is that?”
She crouched down and pushed the mailbox open a little, then peered through. She stood up abruptly and grabbed the front door handle. It turned easily, and Laurence—knowing something was wrong without needing to know what—followed his partner quickly into the room beyond.
“Police!” Pettifer shouted. “Make yourselves known.”
She’d already cleared the area to the left of the door, and Laurence only briefly took in the shabbiness of the room before his gaze settled on the sight that must have caught her attention through the mailbox. A short distance ahead, a man was lying collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like one of his arms—at the least—was broken, and there was a pool of blood beneath his head. Laurence could hear the soft gargling noise the man was making as he choked.
Pettifer ran over to him and crouched down again, making an attempt to clear his airways with one hand while she scrabbled for her phone with the other. Laurence joined her quickly, catching a glimpse of the man’s face before it was obscured by her attentions. Even with the injuries he had suffered in prison, Laurence recognized him.
Michael Hyde.
What on earth was happening here?
Then he heard a thumping noise from somewhere above them and looked up the stairs. There was nobody directly in sight on the landing, but the sound came again anyway.
Someone was up there.
“Police!” he shouted. “Make yourselves known.”
He started up the stairs—quickly at first, and then more cautiously as he neared the top. For all intents and purposes, it appeared that Hyde had fallen, and he had seen no evidence of knife wounds on the man. But he also remembered the terrible violence that had been inflicted on Alan Hobbes and was aware he was unarmed here.
He stepped onto the landing.
There was what appeared to be a bedroom to the left—the brightly lit room he had observed from the front of the house—but a light was also on in the room directly to his right, and it was from in there that the sound was coming.
“Police,” he repeated—the word the only weapon in his arsenal right now—and then stepped through the doorway.
An old man was standing in the middle of the room. He appeared small and weak and was by no means an obvious threat, but Laurence kept his distance anyway. Appearances could always be deceptive. The man was wearing a tattered dressing gown and leaning on a cane. He was staring back at Laurence, visibly distraught, although whether that was through grief or rage was harder to tell.
“My boy,” he said. “My poor boy.”
Downstairs, Laurence could hear Pettifer talking to emergency services.
“An ambulance is on its way,” Laurence told the old man. “What happened here?”
The man—Hyde’s father, Laurence assumed—did not immediately answer. Whatever emotion was driving him was causing his body to tremble slightly, so that the tip of the cane was scratching against the floorboards. Laurence looked around. It was a bedroom—albeit a sparsely furnished one. Just a bed against one wall, with a table at the end. A closed laptop on that. There was no other furniture or decorations. The walls were bare. Except that, looking at the wall directly across from him, Laurence noted numerous patches of paint missing, as though at some point there had been posters up that had been pulled away quickly and carelessly.
“She murdered him,” the old man said.
Laurence looked back at him quickly.
“What happened here, sir?”
“That bitch.”
The old man’s body was still trembling.
“She came here. And she killed him.”
Thirty-three
Night had fallen properly by the time Katie arrived at the address James Alderson had given her.
It was a place on the run-down edge of the center. After she turned the corner, she found herself driving up a long road lined by dark, derelict buildings that loomed overhead. There were streetlights here, but they were long neglected. The plastic bulbs kept flickering and failing, as though the abandoned properties on either side of the road were blinking at each other.
But one further up was still working consistently, and as she drove closer she saw there was a man standing beneath it. He had a coat pulled tightly around him, one hand pushed down in the pocket, the other holding a cigarette. There were a couple of large backpacks at his feet. She recognized him properly as she pulled in, and without quite knowing why, fear began fluttering in her chest.
What are you doing, James? she thought.
It’s not safe to be standing out in the open like this.
She got out of the car, leaving the door open.
“James?”
He nodded.
“I’m Katie.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Okay.”
But her voice sounded faint and faraway, as though she were trying to reassure herself rather than Alderson. She glanced around the street. Aside from the two of them, it appeared completely deserted. The only sound was the soft buzzing of the streetlight above.
And yet she had the feeling of being watched.
It’s not safe to be standing out in the open like this.
She looked at Alderson. “What happened?”
“This was where Chris was supposed to meet him.”
She looked at the property behind him. Although it was closed and empty now, it was one of the few buildings on the street that appeared to be still in use. A café of some sort. She stepped to one side of him and peered in through the window, then tried the door handle.
She turned back to Alderson.
“Who was he meeting?”
“I don’t know exactly—a man who called us. He knew Chris had the book, and he was willing to pay for it.”
She shook her head.
“What book?”
“Something written by a guy called Jack Lock. This is going to sound crazy, but it’s supposed to tell the future.”