Page 11 of The Man Made of Smoke

How long had you been planning to do it, Dad?

Not a useful question right now, I decided.

Back down one floor, I let myself into his room.

After my mother left, my father spent the next summer knocking through three rooms on one side here, converting them into a single space that stretched the entire length of the property. At one end were his bed, wardrobes, and drawers. At the opposite end, his desk and shelves. In between was a rudimentary exercise area, with weights racked by one wall and a heavy leather bag hanging down on a chain from the ceiling.

When I was a teenager, he would spend whole evenings locked away in here, and the sounds I heard from behind the closed door had seemed to define the parameters of his life back then. Typing awkwardly on the computer. A monotonous thudding. And silence.

I walked over to the bag now and gave it a gentle push.

The chain creaked softly.

Finally, I moved over to my father’s desk. The built-in shelves on the wall above housed his records: years of paperwork stored away in weathered ring binders and box files. Everyday police work on the island was dull, and at some point after I left for university, my father had channeled his energy into researching unsolved cases he found online.

Exciting, high-profile crimes.

I had no idea what he expected to achieve. A few years ago, on one of my visits back to the island, I’d asked him what he imagined he could find that all the more experienced investigators involved at the time had missed.

What didhebring to the table?

Brute force, he told me.

I’d rolled my eyes at that, and made some flippant comment about how he just wanted to be like the characters in the books he read. I didn’t mean it badly—just a casual joke—but I remembered him looking at me strangely for a moment, and that I had regretted saying it. Then he’d laughed gently, and everything had been fine. But he’d never brought it up again after that.

There was a desktop computer and printer on the desk.

There was also a single sheet of paper. I picked it up and turned it over: a printed photograph. The resolution was poor, but decent enough for me to see that it was an image of my father, standing on a footpath in the woods with something in the undergrowth at his feet. The quality made it impossible to see what that was, but my attention focused naturally on my father. He was looking toward the camera, the expression on his face lost to blur. As I stared at the image, it was hard not to imagine that he was dissolving before me. That the photograph was developing in reverse before my eyes, becoming ever more faded and indistinct, until soon nothing would remain.

I blinked.

Then I headed downstairs.

The living room appeared undisturbed. My father had always been fastidiously tidy. He used to tell me that everything had a place in which it lived and, as far as I could tell, everything was living there now. The rows of books; the paperwork stored neatly on the shelf beneath the glass coffee table; the remote control in its place beside the television.

I knelt down and rubbed the carpet. It was freshly vacuumed.

The coffee table had been wiped clean recently.

I walked through to the kitchen. Again, everything was spotless. One by one, I opened the cabinets and drawers, finding plates and cups and cutlery that had been stored away carefully. A full jar of coffee sat next to the kettle on the counter. Beside it, there was a rack of herbs and spices, the bottles all turned so that their labels faced out.

The fridge was humming gently. I opened it and found it half full. My father cooked all his meals from scratch and shopped weekly. There was enough food here for at least three or four meals. He wouldn’t have bought anything he wasn’t planning to use, which suggested that, evenjust a few days ago, he had been anticipating that he would be here, standing where I was right now.

And then something had changed.

But what?

The question made me feel helpless. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, beyond that there should have beensomethinghere to help make sense of what had happened. Some clue as to his state of mind. And yet I could see no obvious indication of disorder or distress. Quite the opposite, in fact. The house had the feeling of a home whose owner had simply stepped out for a time.

I unlocked the back door and stepped out onto the decking.

Night had fallen now, and the long garden ahead of me was black, the hedge at the far end lost in darkness. To my right, two lounge chairs and a table were set out on the patio. During my last visit, on his birthday, the two of us had sat there drinking. It was always nice out back on an evening, especially in spring. Everything was quiet, and the air smelled of the woods beyond the hedge.

I had got through more bottles of beer than he had that night, but I remembered him chuckling, and there being a little sparkle in his eyes. He had been at least a little bit drunk. What had we talked about? I wasn’t sure. Probably nothing much. Our relationship had become easier over the years, and the silences between us more comfortable. It was as though we’d both accepted that some of the doors between us were always going to stay closed, but that we could work well enough with the open spaces that we did share.

He’d seemedcontent.

I was sure of that much.

---