Gardener walked back into the front room. Laurence stood up and accepted the piece of paper the man held out to him. An address and a phone number. He was familiar with the general area of the former; it was close to the location of the cash withdrawals Christopher Shaw had made in recent months. He folded the paper and placed it in his pocket.
He needed to call Pettifer.
“Thank you, Mr. Gardener. We will be in touch as soon as we have any news. It goes without saying that if you hear from Katie, you should let us know immediately. It’s urgent that we find her.”
Gardener slumped onto the couch. “Because she is in trouble.”
“Yes.”
Because while Laurence still had no idea of the cogs turning below the surface here, the face of the clock was easy enough to read. Christopher Shaw was in possession of a book that someone was prepared to kill to get their hands on. And now his sister was involved too.
Laurence turned and headed to the door—but just as he reached it, someone outside knocked. Gardener was out of his seat immediately, but Laurence was closer. He opened the door to find a man dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, and a red baseball cap.
He was holding a package in one hand and a scanning device in the other.
“Delivery for Katie Shaw?” he said.
Thirty-nine
Katie parked up around the corner from her mother’s house, the car tires squelching in the wet mulch of fallen leaves in the gutter, and then walked the rest of the way on foot. She kept an eye out as she went, but there was nobody else in sight. When she let herself into the apartment, it felt emptier than before. There was an absence in the air and a heaviness to the silence. The familiar corridor stretching away before her was gloomy and still.
“Hello?” she called.
No reply. But it was early of course. Her mother was probably still in bed.
“It’s just me,” she said quietly.
She headed down the corridor to the spare room. The morning light was streaming thinly through the closed curtains, revealing motes of dust hanging in the air. The box remained where she’d left it yesterday on the floor beside the old desk, and nothing in the room appeared to have been touched. Of course, her mother had no reason to come in here. Even if the story was not hers to tell, she already knew it.
And now—after she had asked Alderson about Nathaniel Leland last night—Katie did too.
She walked across and knelt down beside the box and then began to search through everything inside. She found what Alderson had told her was here almost straightaway, only a little way under the news clippings her father had collected about Nathaniel Leland’s murder.
Her hands trembled slightly as she carefully picked up the envelope. It was very old. But while the writing scrawled on the front had faded with time, the words there remained visible, and the weight of them was undiminished by age.
Chris—adoption details.
She felt tightness like a clenched fist in her chest, and opened the flap of the envelope, then pulled out the thin sheaf of folded papers inside and began flicking through them.
There was a certificate of adoption, complete with her brother’s name, Christopher William Shaw, and those of her parents.
There was his original birth certificate.
“William Grace”—Date of birth: April 14, 1985.
And then a sheet explaining the reasons for his adoption.
On April 13, 1986, the child was discovered, having apparently been abandoned, in one of the vestibules of Saint William’s Church on Grace Street. The child’s age was impossible to determine, and so date of birth has been estimated as the date of discovery minus one year. Staff were extremely moved by the circumstances, and the child was provisionally named in reference to them.
Subsequent investigations to establish the child’s identity were comprehensive and exhaustive but failed to uncover his parentage. At the time of writing, such investigations continue, and the prospective adoptive parents are aware of this. With that in mind, we wholeheartedly recommend and endorse the attached application. All our investigations and evaluations suggest Ann and David Shaw, along with their daughter, Katie, will provide a loving home for William Grace, and that they are prepared for the eventuality that he may, at some point, be reunited with his birth family, along with whatever complications such a development might entail.
She read the document a second time and then tried to absorb it. Most obviously of all, it didn’t change anything. Her brother was her brother; he always had been and he always would. If anything, this revelation even made sense of some things. The way Chris had always seemed so at odds with the world. Always adrift and out of place. Never quite fitting in. The paperwork in her hand right now didn’t really explain that, of course, but in some strange way it felt like it did.
“So now you know.”
She looked around to see her mother in the doorway, leaning on her cane.
“Chris was adopted,” Katie said.
“Yes.”
“What about me?”
“No.” Her mother shook her head. “Your father and I tried to have children for a long time. It didn’t happen for us, and we gave up hope it ever would. So we applied to adopt—which was when I finally got pregnant. You know what they say about men planning and God laughing. But it seemed right for us to remain on the list; it felt like something we should do. And that’s how your brother ended up coming to us after you were born.”
Katie swallowed.
“Did Chris know?”
“No. Although I always wondered if a part of him suspected. And I assume he knows now. He must have found out when he was looking through the photographs. He was in here for a long time that day. I’m sorry about that. Like I said yesterday, I’d forgotten these things were even here.”
“How did he react?”
Her mother smiled sadly.
“He didn’t mention it. A part of me wishes he had done. We could have spoken about it then. But I hope the reason he didn’t is because he knows it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t, does it?”
“No,” Katie said.
Except that it did. She kept picturing Chris reading these documents and news clippings, and trying to imagine how he would have felt. It doesn’t matter, her mother had just said—and perhaps it didn’t to the two of them. But she thought it would have mattered to Chris. All she could see in her head right then was the sensitive little boy he had been, and she wanted to reach backward in time and hug him. She should have been there for him when he made this discovery. He should have wanted her to be.
And then came a different memory. The four of them visiting her father’s shop that day, when her brother had started across to join her at the barrier and their mother had called out to him but not to her.
Chris, don’t.
It’s dangerous.
“Is this why?” she said.
Her mother shook her head.
“Why what?”
“Why you always loved him more than me?”
She had barely known those words were coming, and a part of her regretted them as soon as she’d spoken them. But another part of her felt relieved—as though she’d been carrying this resentment for such a long time and had finally managed to cast some of it out of her. When her mother understood what she’d said, her face started to crumple. But then she caught herself. She looked down at the cane and began turning it round carefully in her grip. There was something about the movement that suggested all the mistakes of her life—all its disappointments and regrets—were playing out in her mind at once.