Page 72 of The Angel Maker

She couldn’t think of anywhere else to go to search for her brother and despondency settled on her. Perhaps it was best just to go home. It was late in the day now—in every sense—but if she told Sameverythingthat had happened, then maybe he would believe she wasn’t overreacting. She didn’t see what else she could do but try.

And she was about to do just that when she glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw the old red car rolling slowly along the high street behind her.

With Michael Hyde at the wheel.

Twenty-seven

Pettifer returned with two coffees but no news.

“I have spent over an hour in the darkroom,” she said, “and I have nothing to show for it beyond a desire to shower.”

The darkroom was the department’s unofficial nickname for Theo Rowan’s office. It was called that in part because of its basement location, but mostly because of the kind of crimes that were dealt with in there. Child abuse; human trafficking; sadistic pornography. Laurence found it hard to imagine delving into that kind of filth, day in and day out. While his own work certainly involved its share of horrors, the things Theo and his team investigated seemed to stem from a particularly dark and baffling level of hell.

“Nothing?”

Pettifer started to respond but then stared at the whiteboard and caught herself. In her absence, following his discovery about the provenance of Alan Hobbes’s house, Laurence had added a great many more notes about Jack Lock. A photograph of the man had been printed and tacked up.

“What the hell have you done now?” Pettifer said.

“I’ll explain in a minute. Theo first—or rather, second.” He reached out his hand. “Because I appreciate the coffee a great deal.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome.”

She handed the carton to him and then sat down and ran through the little that she had learned from Theo. Murderabilia. That was a new one for him—an ugly word for an ugly reality: people buying and selling drawings by serial killers, bricks from crime scenes, items that had once belonged to victims. Everyone involved had their own particular fetish or specialist subject. Theo had told Pettifer he knew a man online who traded exclusively in Third Reich crockery.

“I mean, why would anyone do that?” Pettifer said.

“The same reason people slow down when they’re driving past an accident,” Laurence said. “An interest in death. A desire to touch evil from a safe distance, where it can’t touch them back.”

He glanced at the board.

“And withJack Lock,” he said, “perhaps there is also additional interest because of his supposed ability to see the future.”

“Yeah, maybe. But with Lock, it’s also the scarcity of it. If you’re batshit crazy enough to want to collect cuttings of a serial killer’s hair, then there might be a steady supply of that, right? So it’s not worth the same. But things associated with Lock like pieces of his writing are one-offs. Theo reckoned they’d be likely to go for a lot more on the black market. Plus they’re just harder to come by.”

Pettifer told him that Theo had trawled through the regular websites and some of the shadier ones without finding a single mention of Jack Lock. It seemed that Hobbes had not been into trading—that he had quietly gathered his collection together over the years and then kept it to himself.

But that situation had changed with his death. Laurence frowned to himself. If Christopher Shaw had taken the book in order to sell it, then he would need a market in which to do so, and he could hardly advertise in the small ads of the local paper. And if not, why had he taken it at all?

It was confounding.

“Theo’s going to keep an eye out for us,” Pettifer said.

“But in the meantime we’re no further forward.”

“No.” She looked at the board again. “Unless you’ve got something?”

“Huh.”

He explained what he’d discovered about the house.

“Huh indeed,” Pettifer said. “All that tells us is what we already knew. Despite his wholesome appearance, Hobbes was a pretty sick man with an absolutely raging hard-on for all things Jack Lock.”

“Yes. For some reason.”

Laurence considered that. What lay behind Hobbes’s fascination with thisparticularserial killer? A straightforward local connection was possible, of course, but he wondered if there was more to it than that. The internet page he’d printed Jack Lock’s photograph from was still open in one of the tabs, and he turned to that now, scrolling down and scanning the information there.

And then stopped.

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