Chapter Thirty-seven

Pettifer returned with two coffees but no news.

"I have spent over an hour in the darkroom," she said, "and I have nothing to show for it beyond a desire to shower."

The darkroom was the department's unofficial nickname for Theo Rowan's office. It was called that in part because of its basement location, but mostly because of the kind of crimes that were dealt with in there. Child abuse; human trafficking; sadistic pornography. Laurence found it hard to imagine delving into that kind of filth, day in and day out. While his own work certainly involved its share of horrors, the things Theo and his team investigated seemed to stem from a particularly dark and baffling level of hell.

"Nothing?"

Pettifer started to respond but then stared at the whiteboard and caught herself. In her absence, following his discovery about the provenance of Alan Hobbes's house, Laurence had added a great many more notes about Jack Lock. A photograph of the man had been printed and tacked up.

"What the hell have you done now?" Pettifer said.

"I'll explain in a minute. Theo first—or rather, second." He reached out his hand. "Because I appreciate the coffee a great deal."

"Yeah, you're welcome."

She handed the carton to him and then sat down and ran through the little that she had learned from Theo. Murderabilia. That was a new one for him—an ugly word for an ugly reality: people buying and selling drawings by serial killers, bricks from crime scenes, items that had once belonged to victims. Everyone involved had their own particular fetish or specialist subject. Theo had told Pettifer he knew a man online who traded exclusively in Third Reich crockery.

"I mean, why would anyone do that?" Pettifer said.

"The same reason people slow down when they're driving past an accident," Laurence said. "An interest in death. A desire to touch evil from a safe distance, where it can't touch them back."

He glanced at the board.

"And with Jack Lock," he said, "perhaps there is also additional interest because of his supposed ability to see the future."

"Yeah, maybe. But with Lock, it's also the scarcity of it. If you're batshit crazy enough to want to collect cuttings of a serial killer's hair, then there might be a steady supply of that, right? So it's not worth the same. But things associated with Lock like pieces of his writing are one-offs. Theo reckoned they'd be likely to go for a lot more on the black market. Plus they're just harder to come by."

Pettifer told him that Theo had trawled through the regular websites and some of the shadier ones without finding a single mention of Jack Lock. It seemed that Hobbes had not been into trading—that he had quietly gathered his collection together over the years and then kept it to himself.

But that situation had changed with his death. Laurence frowned to himself. If Christopher Shaw had taken the book in order to sell it, then he would need a market in which to do so, and he could hardly advertise in the small ads of the local paper. And if not, why had he taken it at all?

It was confounding.

"Theo's going to keep an eye out for us," Pettifer said.

"But in the meantime we're no further forward."

"No." She looked at the board again. "Unless you've got something?"

"Huh."

He explained what he'd discovered about the house.

"Huh indeed," Pettifer said. "All that tells us is what we already knew. Despite his wholesome appearance, Hobbes was a pretty sick man with an absolutely raging hard-on for all things Jack Lock."

"Yes. For some reason."

Laurence considered that. What lay behind Hobbes's fascination with this particular serial killer? A straightforward local connection was possible, of course, but he wondered if there was more to it than that. The internet page he'd printed Jack Lock's photograph from was still open in one of the tabs, and he turned to that now, scrolling down and scanning the information there.

And then stopped.

"There were two children there," he said.

"What?"

"After Lock was arrested and police arrived at the house." He tapped the screen. "This account says two children were found alive inside—presumed to be his sons. They were taken into care and adopted, but the details were sealed to protect their identities."

He did the math in his head.

"Alan Hobbes would be about the right age to be one of them."

Pettifer was silent for a moment, considering it.

"So would many people," she said. "But even if it's true, how does it help us? All it would tell us is why he might have had this lifelong interest in Lock."

"Everything is connected below the surface."

"No, it isn't," she said. "The house. Jack Lock. The fire. They're all distractions. What we need to focus on right now is finding Christopher Shaw."

She turned to her own computer.

But Laurence continued to stare at his screen. Pettifer was right that Shaw was their priority and that finding him remained key, but the distractions she had mentioned continued to occupy him. If Hobbes had been one of the boys found there, who was the other? Why had Hobbes been drawn back to such an awful place as an adult? And most confusing of all, why had he stayed there after a fire at the property killed the person he had loved most in his life?

The fire.

Laurence hesitated.

Gaunt had told him the fire had been ruled an accident—an electrical fault, if he remembered correctly—but it occurred to him now that he had taken that detail from the lawyer at face value. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to delve a little deeper. He had been exaggerating before when he said that everything was connected below the surface, but it remained true that many things were.

It took him a minute to pull up the file on-screen.

The investigation was an old one, which meant the paperwork from the time had been scanned and added to the system at a later date. Laurence swiftly discovered that whoever had done so had been less than thorough. There were several documents missing. In reality, the blame for that probably lay with some bored, underpaid intern doing slapdash work, but he found it difficult not to imagine more nefarious explanations. Hobbes had been a rich man, after all. Money pulled levers.

For some reason, that made him uneasy.

Still, there was enough detail in the file to be getting along with. The postmortem on the boy's charred body concluded that he had died from smoke inhalation without waking. One small mercy, Laurence supposed, in a tale lacking many. Other conclusions appeared far less clear. For example, he found nothing whatsoever to justify the final ruling of the fire being the result of a wiring fault.

Hobbes had been interviewed, and his account was included in the file. Laurence read it through carefully and found it oddly moving. The language was formal and precise, which had the strange effect of making the grief even more apparent, as though he were reading the words of a man struggling hard to hold himself together in the face of impossible heartbreak.

There were several additional documents, including a list of people who had been interviewed at the time. Laurence was about to begin working through those when Pettifer exclaimed behind him.

"Hell's fucking teeth!"

He turned quickly in his chair.

"What?"

"This." She gestured at her screen. "Neither hand knows what the other is doing. I've just had a report sent through. Katie Shaw. That would be Christopher Shaw's sister, right?"

"The name is right."

"She reported a prowler outside her house last night." Pettifer read the details off the screen. "Officers attended the scene and found nobody present. Case recorded. No further action at this time. For fuck's sake!"

Laurence was inclined to agree.

"Do we have her number?" he asked.

"We do. Somewhere."

As Pettifer began searching through her notes, Laurence turned back to his screen. Anxious now. He didn't know what this new development meant yet, but it seemed likely that whoever had murdered Alan Hobbes was now searching for Christopher Shaw, and his family would be an obvious place for them to start. And while they might not know who that was yet, they did know the kind of violence that person was capable of.

But for now, he looked back at the file on the fire at Alan Hobbes's property. The next document was an interview with a local man.

Laurence clicked it open.

Stared for a moment.

Then spoke quietly.

"Hell's fucking teeth."

"I copyrighted that," Pettifer said. "You owe me money now. What is it?"

Laurence didn't reply.

Instead, he quickly scanned the contents of the document. In the early stages of the investigation, a young man had been looked at as a possible suspect who might have started the fire that killed the child. The suspect had been seen close to the property on several occasions prior to the incident, and already had—among other things—arrests on his record for housebreaking and arson. His involvement had been dismissed relatively quickly, and as far as Laurence could tell without any obvious justification at all.

He scrolled back up and read the name again.

Everything is connected below the surface.

"Michael Hyde," he said.