Page 49 of The Angel Maker

“Yes.”

“Why are you up?”

“Moon.”

Siena smiled happily and turned to the window just as rain began pattering against the glass.

“Moon came to say hello again.”

Eighteen

It was raining heavily as Laurence and Pettifer drove north out of the city, retracing the journey they had made yesterday afternoon. This time, he was driving. When they left the department, Pettifer had moved straight to the passenger side without discussing the matter, which Laurence had taken as a subtle reflection of their respective levels of enthusiasm for the journey ahead.

Water lashed the windshield, growing in intensity as they went. By the time they were into the countryside, it felt like angry fistfuls of rain were being flung at the car, blearing the glass in front of him faster than the squeaking wipers could clear it away.

“We could have sent someone else to do this,” Pettifer said.

“And miss this delightful view?”

“When you put it like that, I become even more right.”

She left it at that, the grumble more what was expected of her than a genuine complaint. A lot had happened that afternoon, and they both knew that, wherever else they might be right now, relaxing at home with their feet in front of the fire was not one of the options. But Laurence was aware Pettifer was doubtful about their pursuit of this particular angle.

She took out her phone and scrolled the screen with her finger.

He gave her a moment.

“Anything?”

“Just more fucking security footage.”

He understood her frustration, but took a slightly different perspective on matters. They wanted to know where Christopher Shaw was, of course. But Laurence thought knowing where he wasnotmight also be useful in its own small way.

Pettifer had done good work today. Tracing Christopher Shaw’s bank account had granted them a handful of glimpses of him, the footage all taken from cameras close to the ATMs he had used. Until recently, that had mostly been confined to an area west of the city, and Laurence was willing to bet that was close to wherever Shaw had been calling home. But his behavior had changed last week. Subsequent footage came from cameras in apparently random streets in the city center. The coverage was better there, and they had been able to follow him from street to street, even if they always lost him eventually.

For some reason, Christopher Shaw had altered his routine.

Even better was the footage they had from the last withdrawal, yesterday morning, which showed Shaw and another young man walking down the street together. They looked a little unkempt, and both were carrying heavy backpacks. While they disappeared off-grid quickly—annoying Pettifer immensely—the sighting made Laurence happy, because it provided them with more information. They now knew that Shaw had a companion. And that the two of them appeared to be on the move.

Pettifer sighed.

“What do you make of this?” she said.

He risked looking away from the rain-drenched road for a second and realized she had the results of Alan Hobbes’s postmortem report open on her screen. Upon first viewing the body yesterday, Laurence had imagined it obvious that the savage injury to the old man’s throat would be the cause of death—and indeed, the pathologist had confirmed that was the case.

But the story had turned out to be not so simple.

Not so simple at all.

Laurence looked ahead again, turning the wheel gently.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “We will see.”

The trees packed tightly on either side of the dirt road that led to Hobbes’s house provided some respite from the weather, but the car tires rolled and squelched in the mud, and then the rain redoubled its fury when they emerged into the clearing at the end. Laurence heard a sound like snapping kindling as he parked up on the pebbled area by the front doors. The scene was due to be released tomorrow morning. For now, a single police car remained in place, an officer sheltering against the elements within it.

Laurence stared out of the window at the house.

The building had appeared grand to him yesterday, but he found himself reevaluating this in light of what he had learned since. Those enormous wooden doors seemed smaller now, and the empty wings to either side appeared desolate and sad. But most of all there was the stretch of charred, fractured brickwork high above—the room where Alan Hobbes’s infant son had perished in a fire, and which had not been repaired in the three decades that followed. Right then, the house seemed as saturated by grief and sorrow as it was by the downpour.

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