Chapter Forty-nine

Laurence stared up at the fire burning high above him.

It had taken hold properly now, and the entire top floor of the house was ablaze, the flames stretching out into the wings on either side and beginning to lick their way eagerly downward. Flickers of light and shadow played across the windows of the floor below. He watched as the glass in one of them shattered and billows of black smoke began unfolding out.

Beside him, Pettifer glanced back toward the tree line.

"Where the fuck are they?"

"On their way."

The first time they had come here, Pettifer had remarked about money buying privacy. Which was true of course—but the flipside of that was isolation. When the fire that killed Joshua Hobbes began here three decades earlier, there had at least been staff on hand to tackle it as best they could. There was nobody now. Fire engines, ambulances, and more police were currently on their way from the city, but the house would be left to the whims of the blaze for a while yet.

A section of wall toward the center crumbled suddenly away. Dust and timber tumbled down and scattered in front of the open door, embers swirling in the air above.

"Shit," Pettifer said, then called out more loudly: "Move away, please!"

Laurence watched as James Alderson and Katie and Christopher Shaw moved a little farther back from the building. They were gathered close together—survivors supporting each other. He was relieved to see it. The three of them were alive at least, if not entirely unharmed. Christopher Shaw was bruised and shaken, and Katie Shaw's nose had been broken, but both had escaped the flames in time, and both would live. James Alderson had taken slightly more of a beating. When Laurence and Pettifer had arrived, they had found Alderson fighting a man in the entrance hall and immediately intervened. Alderson hadn't resisted them, and they had left him free for the moment. The other man—who had underestimated what it might be like to take on an angry Pettifer and her baton—was currently handcuffed in the back of their car.

Pettifer's phone rang now.

"Shit."

She stepped away to take the call.

Laurence looked up at the flames again.

From what he understood, Edward Leland was up there somewhere—but so far beyond help that he and Pettifer had made only a cursory effort to force their way up the stairs against the wall of heat and smoke that was pushing down from above. The fire had been moving quickly even then.

The whole place was going to burn down today.

Along with everything inside it.

And that was a thought he could not quite get away from. Among the many questions the last few days had brought, two in particular had been preoccupying him. Why had Alan Hobbes—a man with the means to live anywhere—chosen to live in a place with such a terrible history? And while Hobbes had devoted his life to learning and philanthropy, why had he also spent time and money collecting all the items associated with a monster like Jack Lock?

But as Laurence watched the fire consume the house and its contents, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was looking at the answer to both those questions. Alan Hobbes had gathered everything together in this place so that it would all be destroyed in this moment right now.

That it was what he had planned all along.

Which was impossible, of course.

If Laurence was correct, then Hobbes and Leland were the sons of Jack Lock. But their father's book was nothing more than a description of abuse. It was a record of the damage that had been done to him as a child, and the damage he had then perpetuated an adult. It could no more foretell the future than the past defined the measure of the men who emerged from it.

Pettifer finished her call and stepped back over.

"Anything?" he said.

"Michael Hyde. He just broke into Katie Shaw's house."

Laurence looked at her.

"Everything's fine," she said quickly. "It looks like Hyde really was after their daughter for some reason. But the husband was there. He managed to subdue him. Hyde's in custody right now."

Laurence looked back up at the flames dancing in the air above. At the play of embers there. They seemed to be forming patterns against the sky behind, and for a moment it was like he was seeing words in a language he couldn't read, and which dissolved before he could see them well enough to try.

But the mention of Hyde reminded him of being at Katie Shaw's house earlier—and of something that Alan Hobbes really had arranged from beyond the grave. He headed over to their car, ignored the man handcuffed in the back, and retrieved the package that had been delivered to Katie Shaw's house. Then he walked across to the three of them, his feet crunching softly on the gravel, the heat from the fire growing warmer on his face as he approached.

They looked up at him expectantly. Christopher Shaw had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders but was still shivering a little. Even so, he was not quite what Laurence had been expecting. Everything he had read had suggested a man lost and adrift—at odds with the world and unable to find his footing—but Shaw looked stronger and more determined than that now, as though he had been standing on something precarious that had begun to stabilize for him.

Laurence handed the package to Katie Shaw.

"This arrived for you earlier," he said. "And I suppose that it helped to lead me here today. I would be grateful if you could tell me why and how."

Katie took it and slid the contents out.

The photograph first.

She stared at it for a moment and then turned it over and read the message on the back. From what Laurence could tell, neither the image of Hobbes and his late wife or the words that had been written on the reverse meant anything to her.

Then she unwrapped the book.

Laurence had been able to read the cover through the transparent packaging it was protected in. It was a rare second-edition copy of Theorie Analytique des Probabilites by Pierre-Simon Laplace, and it seemed to mean nothing at all to Katie Shaw. But as she opened it and flicked through its pages, Laurence frowned. It was obvious now that the book was far more tattered than it had appeared within its protective casing. The cover was torn and creased, as though it had been carefully unstitched from one book and then stretched and folded around a much larger one.

After a few seconds, Katie Shaw looked up.

"It's not for me," she said.

And then she turned to her brother.

"It's for you."