Page 75 of The Man Made of Smoke

Both of us lost in our own thoughts.

I ate the sandwich slowly, trying to put things together in my head.

Oliver Hunter killed; Graham Lloyd forced to watch.

Graham Lloyd killed; Rose Saunders forced to watch.

Rose Saunders killed; Darren Field forced to watch.

And now Field was missing. If he had been murdered—presumably as a result of talking to my father—then that implied someoneelsehad been abducted and forced to watch him die.

So your father might still be alive.

You might be able to save him.

Perhaps that was what a part of me really had been thinking, but I had to remain calm and detached. Because that line of thought was dangerous. I sipped my coffee now and considered the situation logically. If ithadbeen my father who was abducted and made to watch Field die, why hadn’t he been released and given the choice as to whether to tell his story or not, the way the other victims had?

That didn’t make sense.

And I also knew that my father had felt things strongly. He had been an impulsive, frustrated man, prone to outbursts and to lashing out: a man who struggled to control his emotions. He would have felt an enormous weight of guilt over what happened to Darren Field; I had no doubt about that. All the evidence still suggested that he had jumped from the Reach. Apart from anything else, it was difficult to imagine him being taken by someone without putting up a hell of a fight.

And Michael Johnson was likely to be part of the killer’s chain.

I wondered what we were going to find when we arrived on Johnson’s doorstep. Would he even talk to us? If he did, perhaps it would be a comfort to discover he had no idea what we were talking about. But if he told us a similar story to Rose Saunders’s partner then I wasn’t sure what would happen next. Because if we couldn’t persuade him to talk to the police—which seemed a genuine possibility under the circumstances—then we would be no closer to proving any of it.

The killer had been careful and clever.

I watched the rain dappling the glass.

Okay then, I thought.

And then I braced myself and attempted to conjure up a presence in the air behind me. It was more solid now, and arrived more quickly than it had over the past two days. The man was taking shape in my subconscious. And while I reminded myself that it wasn’t real and couldn’t hurt me, I still felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising.

Who are you?I thought.

You know who I am.

My mind supplied a note of contempt to the voice, because if the man had once been that boy, he would surely hate me for failing to help him as a child. And yet the words themselves weren’t quite true. I didn’t knowwhohe was. Nobody did. All I knew waswhathe was now.

And what is that?

You’re a serial murderer, I thought. You’re organized and you’re highly intelligent. In terms of what motivates you, your crimes don’t seem to fall into the hedonistic category. It’s possible that you enjoy the control you have over your victims, but I don’t think it’s the power itself that matters. And you don’t seem like a visionary. Which suggests to me that you’re mission-oriented. That would certainly fit with your behavior and victim selection.

You seem very sure of yourself.

No, I thought. It’s impossible to be sure without meeting you.

You’re getting ahead of yourself, doctor. You talk about my behavior. What exactly is it that I’m doing?

You’re playing some kind of sick game.

I’m sure you can do better than that.

All right then, I thought. You force a person to watch someone being murdered. If they tell the police then you kill them next, and you force someone else to watch that. You’ve created a chain of victims, one after the other.

And who do I kill? Not just anyone, right?

No, I thought. That’s part of your mission. You’ve targeted the people who were at the rest area that day. The people who looked the other way. The ones who failed to help you.

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