Alderson seemed like he wanted to laugh at the idea but couldn’t quite bring himself to. Instead, he took a drag on his cigarette and then breathed a plume of smoke out into the amber light. As it spread and unfolded in the air, Katie tried to remember what she’d read about Jack Lock last night. There had been something about a book, hadn’t there?
It’s supposed to tell the future.
Again, she shook her head.
“What—”
But whatever question she had been going to ask was interrupted by a buzzing in her pocket, and then a trill of accompanying music that felt dangerously loud in this deserted street. She took her cell phone out quickly. The screen showed another unidentified number.
She accepted the call and held the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Is this Katie Shaw?”
A man’s voice. She hesitated.
“Yes.”
“Ah, that’s great. I’m glad to get hold of you, Katie. I’m Detective Laurence Page. It’s good to speak to you again, by the way. Maybe you remember me?”
The name meant nothing.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, it’s a weird one. Me and your family actually go back a bit. I was involved when your brother was attacked as a teenager. It was me who met you at the police tape that afternoon.”
Now she remembered. Laurence Page. He was very tall, with a friendly face. Once she’d stopped trying to see past him that day, he’d made an effort to stoop a little so he was more on her level.
It’s my fault, she remembered telling him.
Over and over.
He’d frowned and tilted his head.
Oh, honey. It’s not your fault.
Not at all.
“Yes,” she said quietly now. “I remember that.”
“And now the two of us are talking again. Maybe that’s a coincidence—but honestly? I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t quite make sense of it all just yet, but I’m hoping you can help me out a little with that. Have you seen your brother recently?”
Be careful, Katie thought. Because he sounded just as friendly as she remembered him. But she wasn’t a kid anymore, and neither was Chris.
“No,” she said.
“Heard from him?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Ah, we should probably talk about that in person. Whereabouts are you right now?”
She didn’t reply. He took her silence for an answer.
“Because the thing is, I’m also calling you about something else. Maybe it’s connected, maybe it’s not. But I’m sitting outside someone else’s house. And you don’t need me to tell you who, right? Because my understanding is you were here earlier.”
Dread pooled in her stomach as she remembered the car she’d seen as she was leaving Hyde’s.
“Yes,” she said. “I was there.”
“It’s great to get that confirmed. Why were you here?”
That easygoing tone of voice again—as though the two of them were just a couple of old friends chatting. As though her going to Hyde’s house had just been an everyday visit during which nothing important had happened at all. Katie glanced around her now. She still had that crawling sensation of being watched, and her gut was telling her she needed to end this call and get away from here.
That there was no time for small talk pretending everything was fine.
“How is he?” she said quickly. “Michael Hyde.”
Laurence hesitated.
“He’s on his way to the hospital.” He sounded more straightforward now. Maybe he was as happy as she was to dispense with the pleasantries. “He’s pretty badly hurt, but I think he’ll live. Which is another way of saying that things could be a lot, lot worse for you than they are. Do you want to give me your side of what happened?”
“Hyde’s been stalking my family.”
“Really?” She could almost hear his frown. “How so?”
“You saw his bedroom wall, right?” Katie shifted slightly, swapping her cell phone to her opposite hand. “All the photographs he’d taken of us? My daughter, especially. All the notes and maps he’d made. They were all taped up there.”
A pause on the line.
“No sign of any of that, I’m afraid,” he said.
“You went upstairs?”
“I did.”
She tried to think. Assuming he was telling her the truth, it meant Hyde’s father had moved quickly to get rid of anything that might implicate his son—his good boy—in what he’d been doing.
“It was there,” she said. “He’s been following us. Watching us. I even called the police last night about it. He was in our back garden, looking in through the window.”
Another slight pause. It was hard to read silence, but she thought she detected a hint of annoyance in it.
“I did hear that you called,” Laurence said. “Okay. So let’s say I believe you about all of this. It makes it all the more important that we meet up. I really think what you need to do is come in so we can talk about all this properly in person. And—”
“Why were you there?” she interrupted.
“I’m sorry?”
“It can’t have been because Hyde’s father called you. You arrived too quickly.”
Silence.
“Was it something to do with Chris?” she said.
“I can’t tell you that right now.”
But it was obvious from his tone of voice that it had been. What did that mean? She knew the police had been looking for Chris at her mother’s house yesterday, and now something had taken them to Hyde’s house today. And yet she’d seen no obvious connection to Chris there at all. It was her family that Hyde appeared fixated on now.
“If you tell me,” she said, “I’ll come in.”
“I can’t right now. But I think—”
Katie ended the call. For a moment, the street was silent aside from the humming of the streetlight above.
Then Alderson spoke quietly.
“You’re in trouble too, I take it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is it to do with Chris?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
Alderson nodded to himself, then raised his hand and took a last drag on his cigarette. On the surface, he was trying to remain calm. But his hand was trembling and she could tell how scared he was deep down.
He dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel.
“So what do we do now?” he said.
* * *
What indeed?
She wasn’t sure how much effort Detective Laurence Page would put into tracking her down, but the first thing she did was turn off her cell phone.
She felt a pang of despair as she did so. Not only was she getting herself deeper into trouble, she was cutting herself off from Sam and Siena. The thought of them both created a yearning inside her—an intense desire to go home and for everything to just be okay again. She loved them both so much, and they seemed such a vast distance away from her right now.
After Alderson had put the backpacks on the back seat of her car, he clambered into the passenger side. They didn’t speak as she drove. She took them west out of the city center, keeping to minor roads as much as possible, and then pulled in at a high-rise travel hotel on the edge of an industrial park. At the reception, she checked them into a twin room, and they took a cramped, stinking elevator up to the eighth floor, standing in silence with their heads tilted back to watch the numbers change, two backpacks resting at their feet. The doors pinged and slid open. She led Alderson down the corridor until she found their room, turning the plastic key card between her fingers as they went.