Page 51 of The Man Made of Smoke

After the call, he stood with his hands on his hips for a minute, surveying his desk. The next day, he walked into town and bought his very first box file.

John pulls off the boxing gloves now, wipes his palms on his tracksuit bottoms, and walks over to that old desk.

His collection of box files has grown substantially since then. They are filled with information about the various unsolved crimes that have caught his attention over the years. Inside them are newspaper reports, and printouts, and the scribbled notes he’s made while poring over everything, sketching out his own theories.

He picks out that very first box file now—the one that started it all—and blows the dust off its cover. It creaks as he opens it. This first box file contains the core of his research into the Pied Paper case, including all the reports about the encounter at the rest area.

He takes the paperwork out and reads through it carefully.

There is no mention ofDarren Field. But he did make records of the witness statements given at the time, and one of them calls to him.

“I go for a cigarette break on the hour, every hour,” a worker at the neighboring hotel told the police. “I watched them both arrive, and I watched them leave.”

John frowns at that, working back through his memories.

He’s gone over what happened that day many times, and while much of it is little more than smoke in his mind after all these years, there are still patches of clarity. He recalls that teenager, standing outside the hotel. For some reason, he had caught John’s attention: leaning against the wall in his kitchen whites, smoking a cigarette. John can still remember an impression of his face, and when he superimposes it over Darren Field’s now, he feels something in his subconscious stir. When he had half recognized Field, he had wondered where it could be from.

Now he wonders if a better question might bewhen.

Those butterflies are back in his chest again: little flutters that tell him he’s onto something. Even if he hasn’t been able to establish a connection conclusively yet, itfeelsright. He just needs to relax and let the insight come, the way it does for the detectives in the books he reads.

Finally, he turns on the computer.

Follow those damn butterflies.

Fifteen

I went downstairs and got a bottle of good red wine from my father’s cellar, then sat at the oak table in the kitchen. I poured myself a glass. Then after a moment’s hesitation, I got a second glass from the cupboard, poured a measure of wine into that, and placed it carefully on the table across from me.

Then I sat down and stared at the chair opposite until I could almost see my father sitting there.

It was the same technique I’d employed throughout the day, but I made it more deliberate now, more concentrated. As before, there was no magic to it; it wasn’t like conjuring a ghost. Any answers I received would only ever come from inside me. But that in itself could be revealing, because the subconscious often catches its fingertips on textures that the conscious mind skims over.

What’s happening here? I asked my father.

A moment of silence. And then:

That’s a very good question, my son.

Why don’t you talk us both through it? First principles, right?

First principles, I thought. Yes.

What is happening is that you found the remains of a dead woman in the woods. Someone took a photograph of you standing there at that moment and then delivered it to you.

Sure. And we have to assume that was the killer, don’t we?

Yes, I think it has to be.

Tell me about the photograph?

It was taken from a particular vantage point, I thought. You realized that just like I did, and when you went up there you found a wallet belonging to a man named Darren Field.

I did.I imagined my father nodding.It looked like it had been placed there to me. It wasn’t an accident—more like a breadcrumb on a trail. The intention was to lead the person who found it somewhere.

And so you followed that trail?

I did. I went to Darren Field’s address to talk to him, and the two of us had a chat. I mentioned the island, the woman. And then the very next day, he vanished.

---