Page 27 of The Angel Maker

There was an area at the edge of the garden where the grass was absent and the soil was exposed. He had turned and flattened it numerous times over the years, always under cover of darkness. A short distance below the surface lay the remains of the angels he had made over the years.

As God has written.

He turned back to the door and opened it.

The garage was wired up to the main building, and he reached into the darkness and flicked the switch. The strip light suspended from the roof began humming, growing slowly in strength, and the shadowy interior before him gradually transformed into a bloodred sea crisscrossed by black lines. The building was full of old iron: benches, frames, racks of old weights. The crimson light created a fractured web from their interweaving angles.

Leland left the door open and made his way through to the weight bench at the back of the room. This was one of the earliest presents from his adoptive father. The body of the bench, made from hard wood, had been polished smooth by years of sweat and pressure, and the iron struts were speckled with rust. The bar resting across was flaky, the weights on either end locked and immovable, the metal fused into place.

Leland laid down and pressed out twenty repetitions.

While he remained stronger than he looked, he was in his seventies now, and the weights he lifted had diminished with age. The bench had deteriorated too. He could hear it protesting with each repetition, and then the rattle and shudder when he placed the bar back on the struts. Every day, the structure felt more and more precarious, as though it might collapse beneath him at any moment. But it was wrong to fear that.Worsethan wrong—a blasphemy. Because whatever would happen would happen. The story was already written, and it would unfold in the way it had been intended, just as the flower contains the seed that contains another flower.

Deus scripsit.

Leland sat up. His view of the corrugated ceiling above swung backward out of sight, replaced by the bright rectangle of the open door at the front of the garage. A large man was standing there, waiting patiently and politely. Mr. Banyard, one of his more trusted associates.

Leland beckoned him in.

“It’s done?”

Banyard nodded and handed him the cell phone he had taken from Alan Hobbes’s apartment. The phone was scant compensation for what he had really been sent to retrieve, but it might offer a route to it. It had been locked, of course, but when you have the necessary resources that becomes a simple matter of time, and breaking the security in this instance had taken less than thirty-six hours.

“Thank you,” Leland said.

The man nodded once, then turned and picked his way back through the garage. Leland’s expression remained blank as he watched him leave, but a fire was burning inside him at the thought of what was to come. For now, though, he put the phone to one side and lay back down on the bench.

It trembled as he began pressing the weight again.

But it stayed firm. The past held and the present played out.

As God has written.

Ten

Whenever Laurence thought about what happened to Christopher Shaw, it was Michael Hyde’s car he kept returning to.

He remembered the scene of the attack well. The road taped off, the curbs lined with police vans, their lights flashing rhythmically in the afternoon sunshine, the bloodstains on the pavement. The ambulance that had rushed Christopher Shaw to the hospital was gone by then, but Hyde was still present—out of sight inside one of the vans—along with the passing delivery driver who had intervened in the assault and helped save Christopher Shaw’s life.

And then the girl running toward him at the cordon.

But before that, there had been a moment when Laurence had found himself all but hypnotized by Michael Hyde’s car. It had swerved off the road in front of Shaw, and it rested there still, angled at a slant across the pavement, with the driver’s door hanging open and its interior illuminated. What struck him about it was howpiecemealthe car looked. It was as though it had started off as one vehicle a long time ago and then almost every part of it had been replaced in the years since. Sections of bodywork did not match the chassis; one segment of the roof didn’t fit the rest. Everywhere he looked, the colors were different shades of red. The vehicle appeared a patchwork of parts: a mixture of the present and adozen different pasts, and as Laurence had stared at it, it seemed to shift between time periods, as though it somehow existed in all of them and none of them at once.

Seventeen years later, he found himself looking at it again.

It was one of several photographs arranged on the table before him. The office he shared with Pettifer was small. There was enough space for a desk and a computer each—facing away from each other in opposite corners of the room—and this semicircular table, placed against one wall, at which they were sometimes forced to sit cramped together, elbow to elbow, annoying them both enormously.

Fortunately, Pettifer was yet to arrive.

He looked down at the photographs.

The car, yes.

And Michael Hyde, obviously. This particular picture was the mug shot after he’d been taken into custody following the assault on Christopher Shaw. There were several others on file, but they all ultimately showed the same individual. Hyde was a small man with weak and insipid features. His pale, unhealthy skin appeared to have been wrapped around a skull that lacked any form of underlying bone structure, and his hair was sparse and tufty, like patches of lank grass.

Not a winner in life’s genetic lottery, Laurence thought. Hyde had been only in his midthirties when this photograph was taken but could easily have passed for two decades older. And yet, while unpleasant, he was not an obvious physical threat. A grown man could have smacked him down without issue—and indeed, a man had done just that.

But Christopher Shaw, of course, had not been a grown man.

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