Page 43 of The Angel Maker

“There was a fire. Mr. Hobbes was away from the estate at a conference. The fire broke out in the room his son was sleeping in. There was staff there at the time, and they managed to raise the alarm and contain the blaze, but not in time to save Mr. Hobbes’s son. You might have noticed the damage it caused when you visited yesterday?”

Laurence thought back to arriving at Hobbes’s house and recalled the charred, collapsed section he’d seen at the center of the building.

“What was the cause of the fire?” he said.

Gaunt hesitated. “I can imagine what you might be thinking,” he said. “But my understanding is the incident was fully investigated at the time. It was an electrical fault. It’s an old building, and parts of it have been in a state of neglect for quite some time.”

“Why would I be thinking anything else?” Laurence wondered.

“Sorry?”

“It just seems odd you would say that.”

“I—I’m not sure.” Gaunt shook his head. “What does the fire have to do with anything?”

“Nothing, I’m sure.”

Which was most likely the truth, and yet Laurence realized his thoughts kept running off on these strange tangents. Perhaps that was just a result of his natural curiosity, but whatever might bemost likelyhere, he couldn’t quite shake the sensation of there being a complicated network of cogs turning below the surface of this case.

But again, he stored the information away for now.

“You told us yesterday that you had some knowledge of Professor Hobbes’s possessions?”

“Yes. He had an extensive library. Some of the philosophical texts he’d collected over the years are intensely valuable. Your chief has kindly allowed us to begin removing them for safekeeping.”

“Yes, Chief Barnes is renowned for his kindness. Is anythingmissing?”

“Not from there.”

“From where, then?”

“Mr. Hobbes was a very rich man.” Gaunt looked awkward. “Over the years, he had amassed an additional collection of… I don’t know how to describe it. Shall we sayartwork?”

“I don’t know. Shall we?”

“Well, it’s all just money in another form, isn’t it? Some of the items in this collection were also valuable. Very valuable indeed. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of it’s there. But there might be a couple of things missing. Although one of them in particular—potentially the most expensive—there’s no way of knowing if it’s actually missing, or if it’s stored elsewhere, or if it even—”

Laurence lost patience. “What is this item?”

Gaunt gave a humorless laugh.

“A book,” he said.

Laurence was quiet for a moment. He thought back to the footage hehad watched, picturing the object that Christopher Shaw had brought out from the archway. It was about the right size and shape for a book. It had glinted in the light, but he presumed a valuable book would need to be wrapped in something to protect it.

He was about to press Gaunt for more information when his phone rang. He held up a hand to signal their conversation was far from over and the lawyer must wait, and then stepped away and took the call.

It was Pettifer with an update on the search for Christopher Shaw. She and another officer had gone to Shaw’s mother’s house and spoken to her, but the woman insisted she hadn’t seen her son in two years. Laurence detected in his partner’s frustrated tone that the woman had not been particularly easy to deal with. Regardless, Pettifer had managed to excuse herself for the bathroom, at which point she had ducked her head quickly into the various rooms and found no evidence of Shaw’s presence.

“Did you believe her?” Laurence said.

“I don’t know,” Pettifer said. “But given what happened, it wouldn’t surprise me if Shaw hadn’t been in touch.”

“Anything else?”

“Postmortem’s just finished; we’ll be getting a provisional result from that shortly. And we might have visuals on Shaw. I’ve found a bank account registered to him, and he’s made various withdrawals from cash machines over the last few months. The most recent was yesterday. I’m waiting on security footage from that now.”

“That’s something,” he said.

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