Page 74 of The Angel Maker

But for now, he looked back at the file on the fire at Alan Hobbes’s property. The next document was an interview with a local man.

Laurence clicked it open.

Stared for a moment.

Then spoke quietly.

“Hell’s fucking teeth.”

“I copyrighted that,” Pettifer said. “You owe me money now. What is it?”

Laurence didn’t reply.

Instead, he quickly scanned the contents of the document. In the early stages of the investigation, a young man had been looked at as a possible suspect who might have started the fire that killed the child. The suspect had been seen close to the property on several occasions prior to the incident, and already had—among other things—arrests on his record for housebreaking and arson. His involvement had been dismissed relatively quickly, and as far as Laurence could tell without any obvious justification at all.

He scrolled back up and read the name again.

Everything is connected below the surface.

“Michael Hyde,” he said.

PART FOUR

Twenty-eight

Katie forced herself not to stare at Michael Hyde as he drove toward her.

Instead, she looked down at the steering wheel and rubbed her jaw, trying to give the impression that she was lost in thought and not paying attention to her surroundings. She didn’t want him to know she’d seen him.

He was driving slowly, keeping pace with the steady flow of traffic. But as he drew level, she could tell he was staring out the window, as though daring her to look back at him. It took all her strength to keep looking down. But she caught a glimpse of him turned in her direction, and even out of the corner of her eye, she could tell there was something wrong with his face. One of his eyes seemed smaller and blacker than the other.

The skin on the side of her cheek began crawling.

She counted slowly to five before risking looking up.

Hyde had kept driving. Ahead of her, she saw his rusted red car amid the other traffic and watched as it disappeared around a bend in the high street.

She sat there with her heart beating hard and the quiet of the car ringing in her ears. Her skin was still itching. Suddenly, without realizing shewas doing it, she found herself rubbing furiously at her cheek, as though attempting to scrub away some kind of filth his gaze had left.

Oh God.

It had been Hyde outside her daughter’s day care. It had to have been.

His face at her kitchen window last night.

He who had followed her—and still was.

As she continued staring at the road ahead, she started to shiver. She had been trying to work out what connection there might be between Chris’s disappearance and what was happening to her family, and surely she had just found it. The realization sent a cold spread of fear through her. Sam already thought she was overreacting. If she tried to explain that she thought Michael Hyde was stalking their family, he was only going to be even more certain she was seeing ghosts and jumping at shadows.

You’re always scared that something terrible is going to happen.

But she wasn’t imagining any of this. Chris had gone missing. Her family was in danger. And somehow Michael Hyde was involved in it all.

She sat there feeling helpless.

Then:

So… what are you going to do, Katie?

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