Page 7 of The Angel Maker

Gaunt frowned.

“Not this morning. That’s the strange thing. I’ve worked on behalf of Mr. Hobbes for a few years now, and there’s always been quite a team onsite whenever I’ve visited. I handle the accounts, so I have most of their contact details. I’ve already spoken to a couple of them today.”

Laurence felt a flare of annoyance. First of all, this man was in his crime scene, and now he appeared to be conducting their investigation for them.

But waste not want not.

“And?”

“The two I spoke to both said they were dismissed yesterday afternoon,” Gaunt said. “And from what they told me, it was the same for every other member of staff. They were all told by Mr. Hobbes that their employment was no longer required. He thanked each of them individually—warmly, I’m told—and said they would be contacted shortly about severance pay and references.”

Laurence fell silent for a moment, considering that.

Obviously, Gaunt’s words by themselves could not be trusted, and so he and Pettifer were going to spend a great deal of time verifying his claims. But he also suspected Gaunt was telling them the truth. And if so, what did that mean?

He turned his back on the lawyer and stared at Alan Hobbes’s body. Another camera flash went off, the bright light emphasizing the man’s pale, emaciated frame and the vicious injuries that had been inflicted upon him.

“It’s like he knew,” Gaunt said quietly.

Laurence didn’t turn around. Instead, he crouched down slowly. From this angle, he could see Hobbes’s face. It was contorted in an expression of sorrow and suffering so acute that, even in death, it was easy to imagine he was still feeling pain now.

“It’s like he knew,” Gaunt said again. “Like he knew this was coming and was ready for it.”

Three

It was an afternoon for premonitions. The first came after work, as Katie drove out of the school grounds and saw her brother for the first time in two years.

He was sitting on a bench just outside the main entrance: a disheveled figure with his head bowed and long hair trailing down, dressed in old jeans and a stained jacket that he was pulling tightly around himself. Katie’s heart started beating faster when she spotted him. The encounter had come out of nowhere, and there was no time to be sure what she was feeling. A part of herlongedto see Chris again, but she was also frightened of why he had come back after all this time, and what he might want.

She slowed the car down as she reached him.

Chris noticed her approaching and looked up. But then she met his eyes through the window and immediately turned her head away and sped up again. Not Chris at all. Just another young homeless man. Even after two years, she would have recognized her brother immediately. However much he might have changed in that time, there would have been no mistaking the scar that ran down the side of his jaw.

Calm down, Katie.

If you’re going to do this, then focus.

She turned the steering wheel carefully, breathing slowly to steady herself.She had the address of the house she was heading to, but she didn’t know that part of the city well and had to rely on the GPS on the dashboard. In a strange way, that took some of the pressure off. It meant she didn’t need to think about the fact she probably shouldn’t be doing this. Instead, she could dutifully follow the blue line on the screen, as though the start and end points of her journey had been defined for her, and driving the route between was inevitable and beyond her control.

Even so, the nerves returned as she neared her destination.

You shouldn’t be here.

She parked up outside a semidetached house on a nondescript street. Most of the properties here had seen better days, but the area itself was neither rich nor poor, and there was certainly nothing to single out this house in particular. It was a home you would drive past without noticing. And she supposed that, on one level, that was one reason she had come here.

She got out of the car and shivered a little. After an endlessly oppressive summer, the air the past few weeks had become colder and sharper. Every morning, the trees were a little barer, the sidewalks carpeted with more and more fallen leaves. Right now, the sun was bright and the breeze mild, but there was a wistfulness to both, as though even if the year wasn’t dying quite yet it had accepted it was going to.

She walked to the door and rang the bell.

A woman answered a minute or so later. Her graying hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, and she was wearing a pale blue outfit. Katie wasn’t sure if she had just come back from work or was about to head out. But then she registered the weariness on the woman’s face and reminded herself it could be both.

“Mrs. Field?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Nice to meet you.” Katie smiled. “My name’s Katie Shaw. I’m your son’s teacher.”

The smile wasn’t returned. Instead, Mrs. Field folded her arms and leanedagainst the doorframe, looking even more tired now than she had a moment ago: a woman working two jobs who was about to be given a third.

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