Page 29 of The Man Made of Smoke

“It’s fine.”

“It’s just…” Aspinall trailed off, looking sad and wounded. “It’s just what a father would want their son to know.”

“Thank you.”

And I was about to close the window, but he was still hovering there, unwilling for some reason to end our encounter.

“What are your plans?” he said.

“I’m sticking around for a while.”

“That’s the thing about this island, right?” A note of bitterness entered his expression. “You think you’ve got away, but the place keeps dragging you back.”

“No,” I said. “Just until things are sorted.”

He nodded to himself, as though that was what everyone said.

“So what are you going to do now?”

I looked out through the windscreen. What was I going to do? I had been turning that question over in my mind ever since finding the makeshift campsite up on the crag. It would have been possible for me to overlook the photograph, or fail to understand its significance, but it was much harder to ignore what it had led me to. My father had decided not to go to the police, and so far I had respected his wishes, but whatever duty I still felt to him, others were beginning to press on me now.

And yet perhaps there were still a few of his footsteps I could follow in first.

I put my hands back on the steering wheel. Thinking about the name Darren Field, and the address I’d read on the driving license that had been left so conspicuously in the tent. Like a breadcrumb on a trail.

“I think I might go for a drive,” I said.

I arrived at the terminal in time to catch the midday ferry.

After parking in the hold, I stood out on the passenger deck above, watching the empty sea ahead as I left the island behind. After my previous visits here, it had always been a relief to do so. But this time, I knew I would be returning later, and any prospect of escape was tempered by the thought of what I might discover in the hours ahead.

I suppressed the anger that had surprised me back at the Reach, and imagined my father standing behind me.

Did you make this journey, Dad?I thought.

He offered no response to that. Any reply he gave could only come from my own subconscious, and that wasn’t a question I was capable of answering. Time would tell. One thing I was sure of was that, if he had done, he would have been standing out where I was right now. Whenever we journeyed off the island together, he insisted on doing so, even when the weather was bad and I tried to persuade him to sit inside where it was warm.

What?I imagined him saying now.And miss this view?

I smiled.

“Plus it’s bracing, right?” I said quietly.

That’s right.

He sounded pleased that I remembered.

Keeps the senses sharp, my son.

When the ferry reached the mainland, I returned to the car and joined the steady stream of vehicles rolling slowly down the ramp. Within a few minutes, I was away from the terminal and driving along country roads. I had Darren Field’s address programmed into my GPS. The town I was heading to was about an hour’s drive away. I turned the radio on. I didn’t recognize the name of the station my father had it set to, but it turned out to be the kind of gentle conversation that was exactly what I needed right then. As I drove, I listened to people talking about nothing, allowing their voices to wash over me, until it was almost a surprise when I realized I had arrived at my destination.

The address was in a nice neighborhood. Detached houses curled around horseshoe-shaped streets, with trees spaced out neatly along the grass verges. I parked and looked out the window. Field’s house was as well maintained as the ones around it, but it seemed to have a melancholy air, as though someone had stopped taking care of it, but too recently for the cracks to have begun to show.

I tapped the steering wheel.

Doubting myself now.

What was I hoping to achieve by coming here? The idea that it might be dangerous to do so had been lingering at the back of my mind throughout the journey. The worst-case scenario, I supposed, was that I was parked outside the home of a manipulative killer. But that didn’t make sense to me. In my experience, murderers did not tend to leave clues that led directly to their front door. If there was a link between this address and the body my father had found in the woods, I was sure theconnection would be more oblique than that. But it was hard to imagine what it might be.

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