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“Wait. Siena’s here—”

“Give her a hug from me, then,” she said. “And tell her I love her very much.”

Sam started to say something else, but she moved the phone away from her ear and his words were lost in the wind. She canceled the call and turned off her phone.

And then she stood beside the car, her palm pressed to her forehead, sobbing.

It wasn’t wise. If another car came along, the driver might notice and stop to help. But the tears came anyway. She wanted so badly to be back with her family where she belonged. It was easy to imagine how confused and upset Siena must be, and she already knew how frightened Sam was. But it also felt like her course had been set and there was no escaping from it now.

Perhaps that had always been true.

After a minute, she calmed herself down and got back in the car. Jack Lock’s book, still wrapped in its protective packaging, rested on the passenger seat beside her. There was a sense of malevolence to it. It was just a book—the fantasies of a madman—but it was still hurting people after all these years, and through a chain of cause and effect she couldn’t fathom it had made its way into her family’s life and was continuing to spread its poison.

Just come home to us.

Katie started the engine and set off again.

I’ll try, she thought.

I promise.

Forty-two

The law firm that Richard Gaunt worked at was situated on a pleasant, leafy street to the north of the city center, nestled into a row of shops between a bakery and a barber shop, a driveway leading down beside the latter. As Laurence drove along the road toward it, Pettifer hung up the call she had been on.

“Anything?”

He could already tell from her body language that it wasn’t.

“No,” she said. “They’ve finally tracked down Kieran Davies.”

“Who?”

“Well, exactly. The last member of Hobbes’s staff. He’s finally turned up, alive and well, and there’s an officer talking to him now.”

“Huh.”

It seemed like a long time ago that he’d been concerned with the abruptly dismissed staff members. Then again, it was important to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Especially because the developments of the day so far had only confirmed how little they still knew. The whole picture might have been coming slowly into focus, but it remained far too complicated for him to understand what the hell he was looking at.

The address Sam Gardener had given them had indeed been Christopher Shaw’s home—an apartment that also turned out to be part of AlanHobbes’s portfolio of properties—but it had obviously been abandoned. They had a name for his traveling companion now—a boyfriend, it appeared—and were trying to locate him, but there were several James Aldersons in the city to work their way through, and even if they came up with the right address, Laurence highly doubted they were going to walk in to find the two of them curled up by the fire.

No further sightings of Christopher Shaw.

Laurence had arranged for Katie Shaw’s mother to be spoken to again. Assuming Gardener was correct, therehadbeen some level of contact between her and her son, which meant she had been lying to them the other day. If so, she was still lying to them now; she remained adamant she had not seen Chris and had apparently sat there the whole time with her face set like stone. The officer had asked Laurence if he wanted her arrested, but Laurence had decided not. Despite his frustration, he found himself almost admiring the woman. Her stubbornness verged on the elemental.

But there had been two more interesting developments.

Pettifer sighed.

“Remind me what we’re doing here again?”

“Following a hunch,” Laurence said. “Besides, what else do we have to do?”

He flicked the blinker and turned in to the law firm’s driveway.

“Ah!” he said. “And would you look at that?”

Because they encountered Gaunt sooner than he’d been expecting. The lawyer was in his own vehicle, on his way off the premises, and their cars came to a halt nose to nose, blocking each other’s way. Gaunt stared at the pair of them through the windshield for a few seconds, a blank expression on his face. Laurence smiled patiently. Beside him, Pettifer raised a hand and waved. Gaunt got the message. A few seconds later, he reversed backward, and Laurence rolled their car slowly down the driveway and parked up alongside.