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Another minute and we’d have missed him.

Which felt like a coincidence. Except he was beginning to think there were fewer coincidences in this case than he was comfortable with.

Laurence and Pettifer got out of the car, and he signaled for Gaunt to do the same. Again, the lawyer seemed reluctant, but then he joined them on the driveway. Laurence thought he seemed even younger now than he had when they’d spoken in the churchyard. Pale and nervous about something. Notguiltyexactly—more like he’d gotten himself involved in something that scared him without him quite understanding why.

“Mr. Gaunt,” Laurence said happily. “We meet again. How are you today?”

“Busy.”

“Managing Mr. Hobbes’s estate?”

“Yes.” Gaunt looked slightly sick. “Among others.”

“Excellent. That’s actually one of the reasons we’re here.”

He had brought the padded envelope with him. He held it up briefly to show Gaunt, and then slid the contents out of the open end.

“I was at the house of a woman named Katie Shaw earlier when this was delivered. The details on the reverse indicate that it was sent by you. Can you tell me what it is?”

Gaunt stared at it.

“A book,” he said flatly.

“Thank you. It is a book, yes—and a valuable one. But notonlya book.”

The book itself was wrapped in a protective transparent cover. But there had been something else included in the package. A photograph. Laurence held it up carefully for Gaunt to see.

“This is Professor Hobbes, isn’t it? And I assume the woman beside him must have been his wife?”

Gaunt looked at the image.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean, I never asked, but he used to keep that by his bed.”

“And so what do you make of this?”

Laurence flipped the photograph over, revealing what had been written on the back.

Gaunt read the message there and then looked a little helpless.

“I’ve honestly no idea,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t even know the photograph was there. Mr. Hobbes left very detailed instructions for what to do with his library after he died, and he’d packaged a few of them up already. Some of them had to be delivered to people, and this was one of those. I remember it needed to arrive at a specific time on a Sunday. But I have no idea why, or who the woman is it was sent to—Katie Shaw?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I don’t know who she is.”

Laurence waited. But he knew by now that Gaunt was not good at leaving silences unfilled, and it became obvious he was telling the truth. Hobbes had arranged for this book—with a photograph and a message secreted within—to be sent out to Katie Shaw for reasons unknown.

Interesting.

He put the items back carefully into the envelope.

“Does the nameEdward Lelandmean anything to you?” he said.

Another hunch. But Sam Gardener had told him Katie Shaw had a newspaper clipping about a missing child named Nathaniel Leland, and there had to be a reason for that. Laurence had looked into the case. The date of Nathaniel’s abduction was only a few days earlier than the fire that killed Alan Hobbes’s son—and the similarities did not end there. Nathaniel’s father was also a very wealthy man, albeit one who had remained curiously absent from the public eye. A man who made his money in the dark and kept it there. He was only two years older than Alan Hobbes.

And then there was the name.

You have committed blasphemy, and it will be corrected.