Page 37 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Stop,” John says.

He holds up a hand. It’s enough.

He remembers what Sarah told him when they sat together at the seafront last week.She’d been hurt before that. There were knife marks on the bones.Maybe if he were still police, it would be important to hear Field’s testimony as to what happened next, but it’s not something he wants or needs to listen to now.

Field is looking down. Focused on the floor. Crying quietly at the memory. It looks like he’s reliving the trauma of what he was forced to see.

“He made you watch him kill this woman?” John asks.

Field shakes his head quickly. “I don’t want to say what he did.”

“You don’t need to.”

“But he was so…angry. In my head, that’s all I can see of him: he’s reds and blacks. He’s fuckingscreaming. It’s just rage. And he keeps looking at me the whole time, like he wants me to see every second of it.”

A beat of silence.

John tries to think.

“What happened afterward?”

“Everything goes dark,” Field says. “Maybe he gave me an injection of some kind. Or I drank something. I don’t know; I can’t remember. But at some point, I woke up, and I was back in my car. For all the world, it was like I’d just pulled over at the side of the road to take a nap. But my phone was gone. My wallet was missing. I’d lost close to two days.”

John leans back in his chair.

Thinking again—or at least trying to.

He has never been involved in a major investigation, and he is nowhere near as good at this as Daniel would be. But he has decent instincts. He knows when someone is lying to him, and there’s none of that with Darren Field. At the same time, the story is so outlandish that it’s hard to know what to make of it.

He glances at the closed door.

“What did your wife say?”

“She was pissed off with me,” Field says. “I mean, what do you expect? I hadn’t been answering my phone the whole time. I’d worried her sick, she said. Although, honestly, she didn’t seem all that worried. She thought I’d been off with someone, or out on a bender or something. She probablystillthinks that.”

“You didn’t try to tell her?”

Field looks at John incredulously.

“You’re joking, right?”

John takes the force of that. He found the woman’s remains, and so he knows there must be some truth to Field’s account, but even he isn’t sure what to make of it. He can imagine the reception the story would receive from someone else. It’s so outlandish that who would believe it?

At the same time, he can’t understand why Field wouldn’t have at least tried to tell someone. How could you carry an experience like that without buckling under the weight of it? And if the story is true then there must be evidence out there to corroborate it.He’s not the kind of man other people see, Field had said, but that was magical thinking. Field’s phone data can be tracked. There will be footage of his vehicle and itsmovements. If the story is true then the man who did this thing is not invisible. Heexists. There will be traces of him everywhere.

“Darren,” John says. “You need to talk to the police.”

Field shakes his head again, more quickly this time.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I imagined it all. I was out of my mind, and it was all just some terrible dream. That’s probably true, right? And if it wasn’t—”

“Darren—”

“And if it wasn’t,” Field interrupts him, “then it matters even more.”

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