Page 73 of The Angel Maker

“There were two children there,” he said.

“What?”

“After Lock was arrested and police arrived at the house.” He tapped the screen. “This account says two children were found alive inside—presumed to be his sons. They were taken into care and adopted, but the details were sealed to protect their identities.”

He did the math in his head.

“Alan Hobbes would be about the right age to be one of them.”

Pettifer was silent for a moment, considering it.

“So would many people,” she said. “But even if it’s true, how does it help us? All it would tell us iswhyhe might have had this lifelong interest in Lock.”

“Everything is connected below the surface.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “The house. Jack Lock. The fire. They’re all distractions. What we need to focus on right now is finding Christopher Shaw.”

She turned to her own computer.

But Laurence continued to stare at his screen. Pettifer was right that Shaw was their priority and that finding him remained key, but thedistractionsshe had mentioned continued to occupy him. If Hobbes had been one of the boys found there, who was the other? Why had Hobbes been drawn back to such an awful place as an adult? And most confusing of all, why had he stayed there after a fire at the property killed the person he had loved most in his life?

The fire.

Laurence hesitated.

Gaunt had told him the fire had been ruled an accident—an electrical fault, if he remembered correctly—but it occurred to him now that he had taken that detail from the lawyer at face value. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to delve a little deeper. He had been exaggerating before when he said thateverythingwas connected below the surface, but it remained true that many things were.

It took him a minute to pull up the file on-screen.

The investigation was an old one, which meant the paperwork from the time had been scanned and added to the system at a later date. Laurence swiftly discovered that whoever had done so had been less than thorough. There were several documents missing. In reality, the blame for that probably lay with some bored, underpaid intern doing slapdash work, but he found it difficult not to imagine more nefarious explanations. Hobbes had been a rich man, after all. Money pulled levers.

For some reason, that made him uneasy.

Still, there was enough detail in the file to be getting along with. The postmortem on the boy’s charred body concluded that he had died from smoke inhalation without waking. One small mercy, Laurence supposed, in a tale lacking many. Other conclusions appeared far less clear. For example, he found nothing whatsoever to justify the final ruling of the fire being the result of a wiring fault.

Hobbes had been interviewed, and his account was included in the file. Laurence read it through carefully and found it oddly moving. The language was formal and precise, which had the strange effect of making the grief even more apparent, as though he were reading the words of aman struggling hard to hold himself together in the face of impossible heartbreak.

There were several additional documents, including a list of people who had been interviewed at the time. Laurence was about to begin working through those when Pettifer exclaimed behind him.

“Hell’s fucking teeth!”

He turned quickly in his chair.

“What?”

“This.” She gestured at her screen. “Neither hand knows what the other is doing. I’ve just had a report sent through. Katie Shaw. That would be Christopher Shaw’s sister, right?”

“The name is right.”

“She reported a prowler outside her house last night.” Pettifer read the details off the screen. “Officers attended the scene and found nobody present. Case recorded. No further action at this time. For fuck’s sake!”

Laurence was inclined to agree.

“Do we have her number?” he asked.

“We do. Somewhere.”

As Pettifer began searching through her notes, Laurence turned back to his screen. Anxious now. He didn’t know what this new development meant yet, but it seemed likely that whoever had murdered Alan Hobbes was now searching for Christopher Shaw, and his family would be an obvious place for them to start. And while they might not know who that was yet, they did know the kind of violence that person was capable of.

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