She left it a couple of seconds.
“Go on.”
“Hope that actually you’re more than just that.” He shook his head against his hands. “The strange thing is I actually started the painting before I read about Jack Lock. But when I did, everything there chimed with me. The whole idea of determinism. If every detail of the past is set then everything in the future must be too. It’s the laws of physics. And so life just…” He trailed off.
“Continues down its set track?” she said.
He nodded, still staring at the ceiling.
“When I started the painting, I was planning to fill every single one of those spaces. All the things in the past—good and bad—that brought Chris and me to being happy now. But then I thought: how depressing is that? The idea that everything we are, everything we have, has all just been set out for us. That there’s no free will or room for chance in what happens. That everything has been preordained from the beginning of the universe.”
She didn’t reply.
“And so that’s why I left the empty spaces,” he said. “I wanted to cling on to a belief that things could have been different. That we actually have some kind of power or control over what happens in the future. The ability to change our paths. Because otherwise … I mean. What’s the fucking point?”
Again, she remained silent for a moment. She had no answer to his question. But it raised one of her own. Talking about the painting reminded her that the mystery of Nathaniel Leland had been coded into it, and while that might not have been her mother’s story to tell, perhaps James Alderson was close enough to her brother for it to be his.
“There was a little boy there,” she said. “In Chris’s part of your painting. Nathaniel Leland. Who is he?”
Alderson stared at her for a moment.
And just as he was about to answer, his phone vibrated on the table. They both started at the noise, and then Katie snatched it up quickly. It was a message sent from Chris’s phone, appearing beneath the threat she’d sent earlier.
I will be in touch. Talk to the police and I’ll kill him.
She stared at that for a moment, her heart beating a little harder.
Then the phone vibrated again as a second message arrived directly below.
Burn the book and I’ll kill you too.
Thirty-six
Leland stared down at the message.
Burn the book and I’ll kill you too.
It wasn’t enough.
The knowledge that his father’s book was in his brother’s hands had tormented him for decades. That it was now in the possession of someone who might destroy it was intolerable. His father’s writing was the word of God. If it was destroyed, Leland would do far worse than kill the person responsible. Even the suggestion of damaging it demanded punishment and suffering beyond imagination.
He put the phone away, his hand shaking slightly.
Then he turned and walked down the corridor to see Christopher Shaw.
And as he did so, his thoughts turned to fire.
* * *
It is July 6, 1985.
Leland is in church when he understands what he must do. As the last note of the organ music fades away, the congregation is silent for a moment. There is no soft sound of shuffling feet. No throats being discreetly cleared. If Leland were to close his eyes, it would be possible to believe the room is empty. But, of course, it is crowded. Because many people loved Charlotte Mary Hobbes.
But none more than him.
His gaze fixes on the coffin that rests at the front of the church, which houses the remains of the woman who was meant to be his. In a different world, she would have been—should have been. In this one, he is reduced to sitting at the back of the room. An interloper.
This is not right.
The thought throbs in his head.
This is not what was intended.
Glancing around, even the architecture of the church feels wrong. The corners where the walls met; the angles of the pews; the timber of the wooden beams in the rafters. To Leland, everything seems to be straining, tilting somehow, as though the entire building—God’s own house—is attempting to distance itself from the blasphemy unfolding within it. Candles line the periphery of the room, but while the flames burn brightly, there is even an oddness there too. The people here are motionless, the air entirely still. And yet every flame is flickering as though buffeted by an unseen, angry breeze.
And then the silence is broken.
At the front of the church, a baby begins crying.
A gentle murmur runs through the crowd at that, more emotion than sound, and a moment later a man stands up. He is cradling a tiny infant in his arms, rocking the child gently. Alan Hobbes wears a mask of absolute grief—a week’s worth of tears staining his sallow face—but somehow he is fighting through the pain and loss that appears to have racked him, cooing quietly at the baby in an attempt to soothe it.
Leland stares at his brother. It has been more than ten years since he first watched Alan and Charlotte laughing together at the dance, and while he is now married to Eleanor, with a month-old child of his own, he has never been able to forget the fact that Charlotte was meant to be his. He has always believed that, over time, the universe would correct its course and bring her to him. A part of him has been waiting patiently for the day. And so the news of her death was impossible for him to accept when he first heard it.
The grief was insurmountable.
Then the anger at what Alan had done.
At the future Alan had stolen from him.
And that emotion is rage now. It fills him from one burning side of his body to the other, and he has to force himself to watch the revolting pantomime playing out before him. How can Alan bear to show grief—especially here of all places? He must have known what was going to happen. He must have known what would come about as a result of his tampering. Or else he had steered the world onto this terrible course with neither care nor concern beyond for his own benefit.
Either way, Charlotte’s death is Alan’s fault.
But not just Alan’s.
Leland’s gaze settles on the baby’s sobbing face and feels his own expression harden at the sight of it. Joshua Hobbes—although it has no business even having a name. No right to comfort or soothing. It deserves to cry. Its very existence is an abomination in the eyes of God, the unnatural product of his plan being interfered with.
It should not be in this world.
And that is when the idea arrives.
Sitting there, staring at the baby with his fists clenched hard against the trousers of his suit, Leland realizes that while not everything can be put right, there are some things that still might be. And that rather than waiting for the journey to correct itself, it is within his power to help it on its way.
His duty even.
He relaxes his hands.
And at the front of the church, the baby stops crying.
As the ceremony progresses, Leland pays little attention to the words of the priest, and makes no attempt to join in with the hymns that are sung in this black parody of genuine loss. His thoughts have moved elsewhere.
He knows where Alan Hobbes lives now. The home they both grew up in is an old, dilapidated property in which accidents can easily happen—or be made to. It will take time to organize if he is to do it right.
There is no rush.
Even so, he makes a series of calls as he is driven back from the funeral. By the time he arrives home, he has already established there is a local man named Michael Hyde, with a history of burglary and arson, who will be perfect for the task he has in mind.