Page 57 of The Man Made of Smoke

Please help me.

The voice from the back seat was not the same one I’d imagined last night. That had been the voice of a killer, whereas this was that of a child,scared and desperate. I made sure to keep a careful grip on the steering wheel. The presence behind me wasn’t real.

Please help me.

I kept up with the traffic in front.

If you’d helped me then none of this would be happening.

Concentrate, I told myself. It was just the old guilt surfacing: the idea that if I’d only acted differently then everything would be better. And that wouldn’t help me right now.

A woman had been murdered. Leaving aside the identity of the killer for the moment, the circumstances around her death allowed me to make a handful of tentative deductions.

Killers could be categorized in a number of different ways, one of which referenced the level of planning that went into the crime. A murderer might be organized or disorganized, for example, or some mixture of the two. Disorganized killers acted on impulse, made mistakes, and were generally easier to catch. But if the body had been left in the woods for my father to find, and the killer had arranged to take a photograph and deliver it to him, that suggested the opposite: an intelligent and highly organized offender. A man who had done precisely what he set out to do, made no mistakes, and left behind only the evidence that he wanted to be found.

The hardest to catch.

Rampton.

I took the exit and then followed the directions through a series of ever-winnowing residential roads. The presence behind me disappeared. And a short while later, I parked on a dusty spread of land at the edge of the canal. Newland Lock. It was a few ramshackle buildings clustered in a circle, all of them shuttered up and closed.

I got out of the car.

Nobody in sight. Everything silent. A crooked wooden lock spanned the water, the sides adorned by blackened cogs that reminded me of rusted clockwork. I crossed it carefully, the wood soft and fragile beneath my feet, a trickle of water spattering out quietly far below.

All the barges here were moored a little way ahead, tethered to ironrings in the ground by thick ropes, and lined up bow to stern along the bank like rides in an out-of-season fairground attraction. Most of them were weathered and ancient, their small gray windows cracked and webbed. But when I reached plot nineteen, I saw that the vessel moored there was in better repair than its neighbors. The sides had been decorated with painted flowers, but also with ornaments glued to the wood: dried flowers pressed behind glass in frames; plastic boxes of seashells; a battered acoustic guitar. The barge looked rickety but cozy, resting in the water like some decades-old arts-and-crafts project.

A man was sitting on a chair outside on the deck.

He was in his fifties, long white hair swept back in a ponytail, and he was wearing a black waistcoat dappled with paint, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Apparently, he was oblivious to the cold morning air. Or perhaps to everything, I thought. Because even though he was holding a cup, the expression on his face as he stared down at the water suggested he might have forgotten it was there.

I stopped on the bank.

“Excuse me,” I called up.

The man turned his head to look at me, but his blank expression didn’t alter. As his gaze settled on me, it was like he wasn’t really seeing me, and when he spoke he sounded weary.

“What do you want?”

“I was looking for Rose Saunders,” I said. “Does she live here?”

The name focused him slightly, bringing him back into his own head a little. While he didn’t answer me immediately, it was obvious it meant something to him.

“Rose,” he said finally.

“Or Rosemary?”

“No. Always just Rose. That’simportant.” He frowned to himself. “And what exactly do you want with my Rose?”

I hadn’t prepared an elaborate story in advance, because I hadn’t known what I would find here. But given that the address had been in my father’s search history, it felt safe to make at least one assumption.

“Because I think my father might have come to see her,” I said.

The man said nothing for a few seconds. His gaze moved steadily over my face. Trying to focus. Trying to remember.

“The policeman?” he said.

I hesitated. But my father would have needed a way in. And if that was what he had decided to tell this man then I supposed it had been close enough to the truth.

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