Page 66 of The Angel Maker

“Maybe Theo can help?”

Laurence considered that and then nodded. Detective Theo Rowan and his team worked in a small room in the basement of the department, spending their days trawling through the darkest corners of the internet. The people who might want to buy and sell Jack Lock’s book were most likely to be found there.

“Better for you to do that though,” he said. “I don’t think Theo likes me.”

“He doesn’t like men very much in general. Nature of his work.”

“Indeed.”

“Okay,” Pettifer said. “I’ll go and talk to him.”

“Make sure you stalk aroundfuriouslyon your way down there.”

“Absolutely. Totally on it.”

After she left the office, Laurence sat down at his desk. But instead of turning to the computer, he found himself staring again at the list on the board.

There were things missing.

Thehouse, for example.

It continued to bother him. Even taking into account his charitable donations, Alan Hobbes had spent much of his life a multimillionaire. He had been a man with the means to live anywhere he chose—and yet he had spent the last thirty years in a dilapidated property far too large for his needs. He had never remarried. Aside from his teaching and his interactions with staff at the house, he appeared to have lived a hermitic existence. And even there, Laurence thought, the presence of staff would not have been required for the upkeep of a smaller property more suited to the size of the man’s life.

So. Why?

With his elbows on the desk, Laurence closed his eyes and steepled his fingers against his temples.

His thoughts turned to the man’s dead child. Joshua Charles Hobbes had been less than a year old when he died. Laurence had no children of his own, but he could imagine the depth of such a loss. He also understood—and there was no way of avoiding this—that Hobbes’s grief over his son’s death must have been compounded by the circumstances of his wife’s.

Which made him think of his own father.

After Laurence had been old enough to understand the truth, there had been times when he had blamed himself for his mother’s death. He would look at the single photograph of her his father had brought with them—a pretty woman, caught forever in the bright light of youth—and, in his head, he would speak to the image of her.

I am sorry, he would say.

It was my fault.

I should not exist.

But his father had sensed that impulse within him and leashed it tightly, an animal that would not be allowed to roam loose in their house. And his father would speak to him too.You have nothing to be sorry for, he would say.It is not your fault. You are a blessing, and every time I look at you, I see her too.And while the man had only a single photograph of his wife, Laurence understood that his father had come to this country carrying not just grief for her in his heart but also a part of her in his arms.

Every man was different, of course, but Laurence believed that Alan Hobbes had been a similar man to his father. The truth of that was etched on the child’s headstone. Lost in his pain and grief, Hobbes had gifted a variation of his wife Charlotte’s name to his son as a middle name.

But then the boy had died too.

In the face of such loss, Laurence could imagine most men would wish to escape the scene of their trauma rather than be confronted with it every day. And yet not only had Hobbes remained in the house, but the injury to the property had never been repaired. Those werechoicesthat had been made deliberately. They implied that Hobbes had felt tethered to the house for some reason and been reluctant to move on.

But why?

Guilt of some kind, perhaps. Living there seemed a form of self-flagellation. As though Hobbes had blamed himself for everything that had happened and been determined to serve the sentence that warranted.

Right up until the end.

How did Hobbes’s apparent obsession with Jack Lock fit into that? The man seemed to have made a concerted effort to collect everything associated with the Angel Maker, gathering it together in a collection he had then kept in what had once been his dead son’s bedroom. Why would he—?

Laurence opened his eyes.

For a few seconds, he sat very still.

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