Page 83

“Where are you, James?”

Thirty-two

The red car again.

There it was, pulled up at an angle over the tatty grass verge in front of Michael Hyde’s house, illuminated by the beam of their headlights. Pettifer was driving, and she parked up behind it without a thought. It meant nothing to her, of course, but there was a moment in which Laurence couldn’t take his eyes off the vehicle—at all the stark joins in the metal. The photograph he had looked at yesterday was seventeen years old, but even back then it had felt as though the car somehow existed in both the past and the present simultaneously. Here and now, that effect was redoubled. Looking at the car in front of them, he thought that perhaps no single piece of original metalwork remained.

And yet the car persisted.

Everything is connected below the surface.

He took out his phone and tried Katie Shaw’s number again.

Then gave up.

“A busy signal this time.”

“Perhaps she just doesn’t want to speak to us,” Pettifer said.

“It seems so.”

They got out and made their way across to Michael Hyde’s front door.

Laurence still wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to speak to Hyde about,only that he had become certain the man was one of thoseconnectionsbelow the surface. Three decades ago, Hyde had been a credible suspect in the fire that killed Joshua Hobbes, and yet his involvement had been dismissed quickly, with what seemed to Laurence a lack of due diligence. Christopher Shaw, who had been working for Hobbes, had been attacked by Hyde as a teenager. And now Alan Hobbes had been murdered.

Coincidences happened, Laurence knew. And sometimes they even arrived in pairs. But this many in a row suggested orchestration of some kind. Even if he didn’t quite know what questions to ask Hyde yet, he was hopeful that talking to the man would begin to suggest some.

They knocked on the front door and waited.

No answer. Behind the patchy curtains in the windows, he could tell the light in the front room was on. He looked up. One upstairs too.

Pettifer cocked her head.

“Hear that?”

Laurence listened.

“No.”

“I’m serious. What is that?”

She crouched down and pushed the mailbox open a little, then peered through. She stood up abruptly and grabbed the front door handle. It turned easily, and Laurence—knowing something was wrong without needing to know what—followed his partner quickly into the room beyond.

“Police!” Pettifer shouted. “Make yourselves known.”

She’d already cleared the area to the left of the door, and Laurence only briefly took in the shabbiness of the room before his gaze settled on the sight that must have caught her attention through the mailbox. A short distance ahead, a man was lying collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like one of his arms—at the least—was broken, and there was a pool of blood beneath his head. Laurence could hear the soft gargling noise the man was making as he choked.

Pettifer ran over to him and crouched down again, making an attemptto clear his airways with one hand while she scrabbled for her phone with the other. Laurence joined her quickly, catching a glimpse of the man’s face before it was obscured by her attentions. Even with the injuries he had suffered in prison, Laurence recognized him.

Michael Hyde.

What on earth was happening here?

Then he heard athumpingnoise from somewhere above them and looked up the stairs. There was nobody directly in sight on the landing, but the sound came again anyway.

Someone was up there.

“Police!” he shouted. “Make yourselves known.”