Page 72 of The Man Made of Smoke

I closed the front door.

And then, after hesitating for a moment, I slid the bolt across.

“Yes,” I said.

The kettle clicked off in the kitchen.

“But I think that maybe we both need some coffee.”

Whatever Sarah had discovered had clearly changed her mind about what might be happening, but I still felt the need to offer some fresh evidence of my own in advance. So I went first, showing her the photograph I’d received. Because even if I had been letting my imagination run away with me and making connections where they might not exist, the photograph proved thatsomethingwas happening.

She stared down at it for a while, her body still. We had spent a great deal of time in each other’s houses as kids, and she knew this one well enough not to have to look out of the kitchen window in order to understand what the picture implied.

“Someone was in your garden,” she said.

“Myfather’sgarden,” I said. “But yes. He must have just been standing there the whole time. Watching me.”

She looked up. “He?”

I pictured the little boy in the rest area.

“I think so,” I said.

“But you didn’t see him?”

“No.”

“Fucking hell.” She shook her head and looked down again. “Maybe you need to go to the police.”

“Maybe.”

Except that, even with the photograph, I still wasn’t sure exactly what I could say to them. The picture was evidence of trespass, but it was alsomeaningless out of context. I could start at the beginning and attempt to convince them, but it felt like I had accumulated disparate parts of a story that was difficult and complicated to tell.

But there was more to it than that. The presence of an intruder in the garden was disturbing and frightening, and the photograph made things personal. But it hadalreadybeen personal. Over two decades ago, I had failed to help that little boy, and I might have compounded my weakness afterward by agreeing it had been Robbie Garforth. If that was true, then what was happening in the present was my fault. And my responsibility to deal with.

“This arrived yesterday, right?” Sarah said.

“It was waiting for me when I got back from yours.” I sipped my coffee. “Sitting there on top of the ordinary post, so it must have been delivered sometime during the day. There’s no stamp or address on the envelope, so whoever left it had to have been here in person.”

“Have you got a doorbell cam?”

I almost laughed. There was as much chance of that as my father having secretly constructed a space shuttle in his bedroom.

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

A beat of silence in the kitchen.

“What about you?” I said.

“Okay. Let me show you what I found.”

She pulled a couple of sheets of paper from her bag and passed one of them to me. It was a printout of a news article, dated a few months ago.

I read it carefully.

SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING ACCOUNTANT

As the search for Oliver Hunter enters its second week, police divers today resumed their search of Bridgewater Canal in the hope of finding evidence pointing to the whereabouts of the missing Whitrow man.

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