Chapter Thirty-three

Early afternoon and they still had nothing.

Or at least, that was the way Pettifer was choosing to see it. They had spent the morning working in their office, taking separate calls and following up with the small handful of leads they had. None were going anywhere, and Pettifer was making her displeasure felt. Laurence had no idea how ending a call or flicking through paperwork could be accomplished with such violence, but his partner managed it well. Every knock at the door was met with a look so angry it threatened to flay skin. Word had spread on the floor outside. Every officer delivering an action or an update to the office did so with the manner of a nervous zookeeper approaching a lion's cage.

Even Laurence had yet to tease her today.

He shared some of her frustration. They were now on the third day of their investigation—and the fourth since Alan Hobbes had been murdered—and seemed little further along than they had at the beginning.

Fingerprint results from the apartment had come in first thing—a predictable smorgasbord from Hobbes's staff. They were still attempting to trace a couple of those, but most had been accounted for and interviewed, their whereabouts on the evening in question established. A number of Hobbes's business associates had also been investigated. To a man—and they were all men, Pettifer had made a point of noting—they had expressed shock at what had happened. All had alibis for the time of the murder. None appeared to have any motive whatsoever for harming Alan Hobbes.

Which left them with Christopher Shaw.

Or rather very much without him, because the boy had, for all intents and purposes, vanished off the face of the earth. There had been no further sightings of him. An analysis of his bank account had revealed money had been transferred there on a weekly basis by Alan Hobbes, but there were no outgoing payments that suggested rent or a mortgage. He appeared to have no social media accounts or internet footprint. And his fellow traveler—the young man spotted with him on the security footage—remained unidentified.

This all bothered Laurence greatly.

At the same time, it occurred to him that Christopher Shaw had lived a destitute life for a long time—that he had been a man without a safety net when he needed one—and so the fact he couldn't be netted so easily now might be considered a case of chickens coming home to roost. Regardless, they were at sea here. For all they knew, Shaw might be too.

His email pinged.

A message from Professor Robin Nelson, who had managed to compile a list of the handful of threatening messages received by Alan Hobbes that had been filed. Laurence resisted the urge to yawn as he read through the six notes—but then found his attention caught by the final one. According to the records, it had been hand-delivered to the office of the philosophy department on October 26, 1984.

"Look at this," he said.

Pettifer walked over and stood beside him, leaning down on the desk.

You have committed blasphemy, and it will be corrected.

—Edward

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" she said.

Laurence wasn't sure. The other notes on file were more obviously from angry students, but while this letter was quieter and less aggressive, there was still something about it that bothered him.

It will be corrected.

"I don't know," he said. "But Hobbes must have kept it for a reason."

"This was over thirty years ago."

"Even so."

"Well, I mean, that's brilliant. Yeah—I vote we take this very seriously indeed. Get out the champagne—we have the first name of a suspect."

"I agree," Laurence said solemnly. "We are halfway there."

Pettifer glared at him, then walked back across the room and sat down heavily. Laurence watched her go, then looked at the computer screen for a few more seconds before shutting down the message. Then he walked across to the whiteboard, picked up a cloth and pen, and began amending the provisional notes he had made yesterday based on the information they had discovered since.

A) Christopher Shaw attacked by Michael Hyde (May 3, 2000)

B) Katie Shaw reports CS to the police (September 3, 2015)

—CS disappears

C) Alan Hobbes murdered (October 4, 2017)

—philosophy professor (determinism)

—wife died in childbirth

—infant son died in fire

—dismissed staff on day of murder

—apparent suicide attempt (BUT killed anyway)

—collection of material related to Jack Lock

D) CS present at scene (October 4, 2017)

—no record of employment by Hobbes (BUT paid anyway)

—disabled security camera

—theft from property (?)

—homeless (?)

—unidentified male companion

E) Jack Lock

—serial killer

—determinism / free will / will of God etc.

—valuable book now missing = motive for murder (?)

Laurence clicked the top back on the pen and studied his handiwork.

"There," he said. "Forget the message. These are all things we know—or at least suspect. Some are more speculative than others, admittedly, but for the moment let's say these things are all true and see where it leads us."

Pettifer sighed.

Then she walked over and stood next to him.

"Okay. Where?"

He considered the board. It was like looking at a selection of puzzle pieces. Some of them appeared to fit together, but for now he couldn't tell which ones even came from the same puzzle.

One thing was becoming clear to him though.

"It suggests to me very strongly that Christopher Shaw is not our killer."

"How so?"

"Think about it."

Pettifer did not reply for a few seconds, and he could tell she saw it too. It was possible she didn't want to acknowledge it, given that Shaw was currently the only suspect on their radar, but the facts remained.

"All right," she said.

"Because if we assume the book was the motive," Laurence said, "then Shaw had no reason to kill Alan Hobbes. For one thing, he would surely have disconnected the camera before committing the theft. But more important, by the time Hobbes was killed, the book was already in his possession. There would have been no need for him to murder Hobbes for it."

"Assuming the book was the motive."

"Which, as I said, is what we're doing for the purposes of this exercise."

"No, I see a question mark next to motive."

Laurence used the cloth to rub it away.

"That's better," he said. "Thank you. The book is now the motive for the killing. Ta-da. But not the motive for Christopher Shaw. For someone else."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"Brilliant. Shall we call him Edward?"

"Not necessarily. But whoever murdered Hobbes, perhaps he arrived at the property after Christopher Shaw had already left. He discovered the book was missing and then tortured Alan Hobbes in the hope of obtaining it. But, of course, Hobbes would not have known where it was, because in the footage he appears to be asleep when the book was stolen."

"Which leaves us nowhere," Pettifer said.

Laurence shrugged.

"If that is where we are, then it is better for us to know," he said. "And nothing is wasted. All the people we have spoken to needed to be investigated. And it still remains imperative for us to find Christopher Shaw. If any of this is right, then he is in possession of something people are prepared to kill for."

"However ridiculous we might find the idea."

"Exactly."

Pettifer sighed again. Thought for a moment.

"Maybe Theo can help?"

Laurence considered that and then nodded. Detective Theo Rowan and his team worked in a small room in the basement of the department, spending their days trawling through the darkest corners of the internet. The people who might want to buy and sell Jack Lock's book were most likely to be found there.

"Better for you to do that though," he said. "I don't think Theo likes me."

"He doesn't like men very much in general. Nature of his work."

"Indeed."

"Okay," Pettifer said. "I'll go and talk to him."

"Make sure you stalk around furiously on your way down there."

"Absolutely. Totally on it."

After she left the office, Laurence sat down at his desk. But instead of turning to the computer, he found himself staring again at the list on the board.

There were things missing.

The house, for example.

It continued to bother him. Even taking into account his charitable donations, Alan Hobbes had spent much of his life a multimillionaire. He had been a man with the means to live anywhere he chose—and yet he had spent the last thirty years in a dilapidated property far too large for his needs. He had never remarried. Aside from his teaching and his interactions with staff at the house, he appeared to have lived a hermitic existence. And even there, Laurence thought, the presence of staff would not have been required for the upkeep of a smaller property more suited to the size of the man's life.

So. Why?

With his elbows on the desk, Laurence closed his eyes and steepled his fingers against his temples.

His thoughts turned to the man's dead child. Joshua Charles Hobbes had been less than a year old when he died. Laurence had no children of his own, but he could imagine the depth of such a loss. He also understood—and there was no way of avoiding this—that Hobbes's grief over his son's death must have been compounded by the circumstances of his wife's.

Which made him think of his own father.

After Laurence had been old enough to understand the truth, there had been times when he had blamed himself for his mother's death. He would look at the single photograph of her his father had brought with them—a pretty woman, caught forever in the bright light of youth—and, in his head, he would speak to the image of her.

I am sorry, he would say.

It was my fault.

I should not exist.

But his father had sensed that impulse within him and leashed it tightly, an animal that would not be allowed to roam loose in their house. And his father would speak to him too. You have nothing to be sorry for, he would say. It is not your fault. You are a blessing, and every time I look at you, I see her too. And while the man had only a single photograph of his wife, Laurence understood that his father had come to this country carrying not just grief for her in his heart but also a part of her in his arms.

Every man was different, of course, but Laurence believed that Alan Hobbes had been a similar man to his father. The truth of that was etched on the child's headstone. Lost in his pain and grief, Hobbes had gifted a variation of his wife Charlotte's name to his son as a middle name.

But then the boy had died too.

In the face of such loss, Laurence could imagine most men would wish to escape the scene of their trauma rather than be confronted with it every day. And yet not only had Hobbes remained in the house, but the injury to the property had never been repaired. Those were choices that had been made deliberately. They implied that Hobbes had felt tethered to the house for some reason and been reluctant to move on.

But why?

Guilt of some kind, perhaps. Living there seemed a form of self-flagellation. As though Hobbes had blamed himself for everything that had happened and been determined to serve the sentence that warranted.

Right up until the end.

How did Hobbes's apparent obsession with Jack Lock fit into that? The man seemed to have made a concerted effort to collect everything associated with the Angel Maker, gathering it together in a collection he had then kept in what had once been his dead son's bedroom. Why would he—?

Laurence opened his eyes.

For a few seconds, he sat very still.

It couldn't be that simple, could it? He would be forced to kick himself if so—or have Pettifer do it for him, he supposed, which would obviously be worse. He turned to his computer and set to work. The information was easier to locate than he expected, and he had the report on-screen within minutes. The details were not specific, but there was enough information for him to read between the lines. And even if he did not quite understand it yet, he sensed it was as important as any of the other pieces of the puzzle he and Pettifer had assembled so far.

Alan Hobbes had owned the house for more than forty years. In the years leading up to his purchase, there had been a lengthy period in which the property had been empty and derelict. Potential buyers shied away. Investors made offers and then retracted them. Until Alan Hobbes came along, in fact, everyone involved with the property had seemed content to let it molder away quietly, empty and forgotten.

Because two decades before Hobbes bought the house, its grounds were where the remains of four dead girls had been found, buried beneath the flower beds.