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“Has she had any recent contact with her brother?” he said.

“I don’t know.” Gardener hesitated. “That was partly what the argument was about. She lied to me about being at work on Friday, and I was angry about that too. I don’t know what she was doing; she wouldn’t tell me. But I looked through her jacket the next morning and found something weird.”

An old newspaper clipping regarding a missing boy.Nathaniel Leland.The name meant nothing to Laurence, but he felt a chill go through him even so. Why was Katie Shaw interested in a missing child? It was anotherpiece of the puzzle. He didn’t know where it fit yet, but the more pieces he had, the better the chance that some would begin to slot into place.

“There was an address and a phone number too,” Gardener said. “I think they might have been Chris’s.”

Jesus Christ.

“Did you make a note of them?”

Gardener nodded.

“Hang on.”

He stood up and walked through to the kitchen. Laurence waited in the front room, alone with the child. She was still immersed in her book, and for a moment, Laurence simply stood there. Then he crouched down and tried to catch her eye, smiling at her when she finally looked up.

“Siena, right? My name’s Laurence.”

“Hello.”

“I want you to think hard,” he said quietly, “and to remember as best you can, because it’s important. Did you really see a red car?”

The little girl nodded.

Gardener walked back into the front room. Laurence stood up and accepted the piece of paper the man held out to him. An address and a phone number. He was familiar with the general area of the former; it was close to the location of the cash withdrawals Christopher Shaw had made in recent months. He folded the paper and placed it in his pocket.

He needed to call Pettifer.

“Thank you, Mr. Gardener. We will be in touch as soon as we have any news. It goes without saying that if you hear from Katie, you should let us know immediately. It’s urgent that we find her.”

Gardener slumped onto the couch. “Because sheisin trouble.”

“Yes.”

Because while Laurence still had no idea of the cogs turning below the surface here, the face of the clock was easy enough to read. Christopher Shaw was in possession of a book that someone was prepared to kill to get their hands on. And now his sister was involved too.

Laurence turned and headed to the door—but just as he reached it, someone outside knocked. Gardener was out of his seat immediately, but Laurence was closer. He opened the door to find a man dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, and a red baseball cap.

He was holding a package in one hand and a scanning device in the other.

“Delivery for Katie Shaw?” he said.

Thirty-nine

Katie parked up around the corner from her mother’s house, the car tires squelching in the wet mulch of fallen leaves in the gutter, and then walked the rest of the way on foot. She kept an eye out as she went, but there was nobody else in sight. When she let herself into the apartment, it felt emptier than before. There was an absence in the air and a heaviness to the silence. The familiar corridor stretching away before her was gloomy and still.

“Hello?” she called.

No reply. But it was early of course. Her mother was probably still in bed.

“It’s just me,” she said quietly.

She headed down the corridor to the spare room. The morning light was streaming thinly through the closed curtains, revealing motes of dust hanging in the air. The box remained where she’d left it yesterday on the floor beside the old desk, and nothing in the room appeared to have been touched. Of course, her mother had no reason to come in here. Even if the story was not hers to tell, she already knew it.

And now—after she had asked Alderson about Nathaniel Leland last night—Katie did too.

She walked across and knelt down beside the box and then began tosearch through everything inside. She found what Alderson had told her was here almost straightaway, only a little way under the news clippings her father had collected about Nathaniel Leland’s murder.