Page 111 of The Man Made of Smoke

Fleming’s voice.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where are you, Dan?”

I looked around, trying to keep my hands steady on the wheel. The motorway was disorientating at night. The pulses of light and stretches of darkness had a hypnotic effect, and the empty blackness of the surrounding countryside made the outside world anonymous and indistinguishable. I might have been anywhere right now. Or nowhere.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said.

He hesitated.

“I’ve just checked in with the police at Rampton,” he said. “They had a call out to a flat there early this afternoon. Resident was a guy named Michael Johnson. That’s another one of the people who were at the rest area that day, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s dead.”

I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, the stretch of motorway and cars around me seemed entirely different.

“How?” I said.

“I don’t know yet. It’s developing. From what I can gather, they thought it might be a break-in gone wrong at first, but I get the impression that the scene is… different.”

“Different?”

“Bad.”

I tuned Fleming out, trying to think it through. Michael Johnson was the most recent victim in the chain, and he’d believed that if he didn’t report what happened to the police then he would be safe. And yet the man had killed him anyway. And from what Fleming had just told me, Johnson hadn’t been taken away for a second time like the other victims, with someone else forced to watch him die. He’d just been butchered in his flat.

I could still sense the figure in the back of the car.

The hate there. Therage.

“What are you doing?” I asked it.

“Sorry?” Fleming said. “What was that?”

“Nothing. I have to go, Liam.”

I hung up and tossed the mobile phone back down on the passenger seat. I needed to concentrate. I had instructions to follow. If I deviated from them, and the man killed Sarah, then that would be my fault. And whatever I had done as a child, I would never forgive myself if I failed Sarah now.

Another wave of light passed through the car.

I could still sense the figure in the seat behind me.

Why did you kill Michael Johnson? I thought. What are you doing?

When the figure answered, it took me a moment to realize it was repeating my own words back to me.

I’m escalating, it said blankly.

It’s a mistake to think of my rules as being absolute. All they do is serve a purpose, and I’ll bend them if they don’t suit me.

And what suits you now?

The figure didn’t reply. I looked up and recognized the overhead sign lit up against the night sky ahead. The slip road was coming up.

What suits you now? I asked again

---