One
You can’t do this.
It’s not allowed.
Alan Hobbes looks up from the book on his desk. He listens carefully, but the only thing he can hear is the silence ringing in the room. There is nobody else here. He sent everyone home earlier and is alone in the house. Or, at least, he is for the moment.
And yet the voice of his brother, Edward, echoes in the air from across the years.
Hobbes stares at his bookshelves for a few seconds and then shakes his head. He is old now; that is all it is. Everything is swimming together as the end approaches. And really, that is fine. They say that people’s lives flash before their eyes as they die, and what else can that mean except that the nature of time changes as death approaches? Or rather—he corrects himself—that our perception of it does, so that we finally begin to see time for what it was all along. A journey seems to take place step by step while you’re on it, but if you could look down from above you would see the whole route laid out below you. You would understand that the beginning, middle, and end all exist at once, and that they always had and always would.
It is not something to be afraid of.
Hobbes looks back down at the notebook on the desk. The time he has left is limited, and he needs to concentrate. Because death is coming for him. He can feel it approaching steadily and inexorably. It will be arriving at the house in just a few short hours, whereupon it will open the door downstairs and creep up one of the twinned staircases that lead to his rooms.
And then it will all be over.
Except that isn’t true. His own journey will end tonight, but others will continue. Has he been careful enough? Is everything in place? It is difficult to be sure, especially as there are other drifts than the perception of time that come with old age. But he has done his best.
He thinks of those people he has never met and never will, but whom it feels he knows so well.
Right now, Katie Shaw is at home, making dinner. She is worrying about her daughter, her marriage, and one of the children she teaches. She is blissfully unaware of the turn her journey will take tomorrow and where it will lead her.
Detective Laurence Page is listening to classical music at home. He doesn’t know Hobbes’s name yet.
And Christopher Shaw, of course.
Christopher will be here soon, which reminds Hobbes that time is short. He can see death edging ever closer in his mind’s eye—a knife in its hand—and the thought of what is going to happen spurs him on.
It is October 4, 2017.
Hobbes picks up the old pen.
You can’t do this, he remembers.
It’s not allowed.
Even so, he begins to write.
Two
Holy shit,” Pettifer said. “Would you look at this?”
Laurence was doing exactly that.
He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his arm resting on the sill of the open passenger window. He had been staring idly out for some time, watching as they left the old factories and office blocks of the city center behind them and then the suburbs full of crammed houses. Now they were passing through the more affluent neighborhoods to the north. It was aspirational here: a world of sprawling bungalows, detached mansions, and enormous gardens.
But there were even richer locales ahead.
“How the other half live,” Pettifer said.
“And yet die like the rest of us.”
“Yes, well. Let’s try not to upset anyone at the scene, shall we?”
“Don’t worry.” Laurence closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of the fresh air rushing over his face. “I will behave.”
“Do you need to have the window open?”
“I like the wind.”
“Could you close it?”
“I could,” he said happily. “It is within my power. But I’m not going to.”
Pettifer sighed. She had fallen into that trap before.
But she did have a point, Laurence thought. Not about the window, or him behaving (although, of course, there was that), but about the divisions of wealth within the city. Although it was also interesting that it seemed a fresh observation to her. Laurence had come to this city—this country—as an infant, shortly after his mother’s death, and one of the many things he had inherited from his father was an immigrant’s sense of curiosity. Many of the other officers seemed to take the city for granted, whereas Laurence had never quite shaken away the sensation of being an outsider here. Of not quite belonging. Of seeing the city as something that needed to be understood. The way he thought about it was this: his colleagues were excellent at telling the time on the clockface, but it often seemed to surprise them to discover there were cogs behind it that made the hands turn.
A short time later, he opened his eyes.
They were driving through countryside now. Fields sprawled away into the distance on either side. Some were dotted with cattle or crops, but most seemed empty. Perhaps they were simply being left fallow? Laurence wasn’t sure; his knowledge of the agricultural industry was cursory. But it was difficult to shake the sensation that the land here belonged to people who owned so much of it that they could afford to leave acres barren and untended, forgotten afterthoughts in their vast inventories.
Laurence yawned.
“How much farther?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t hear you because the window is open.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She didn’t reply—this time avoiding another familiar trap. Laurence smiled to himself. He liked Pettifer a lot. They had been working together as partners for more than three years. They complemented each other well in that they annoyed each other in precisely the right ways unless it was important that they did not.
A minute or so later, she slowed down and flicked the blinker. They turned right onto what seemed to Laurence little more than a narrow dirt road leading off between the trees that were packed in tightly on either side. The muddy ground beneath the car had hardened into an undulating wave, and the tires rolled from one side to the other as Pettifer navigated the twists and turns.
“Mr. Hobbes liked his privacy,” Laurence said.
“I guess so. But if you had as much money as that, wouldn’t you?”
“I honestly don’t know how much money he had.”
“No, well.” Pettifer ducked her head slightly, peering out of the windshield at the winding track ahead. “Clearly enough to get away from other people. Which I have to say has always been an enduring dream of mine.”
“And of all the people who know you.”
The world suddenly brightened as the dark trees fell away, curling off to either side to form a black perimeter around a large, sunlit clearing. The dirt track beneath the car became an immaculately maintained driveway of pale gravel that led in a straight line across an expanse of neatly trimmed grass.
The house was about three hundred feet ahead—although, Laurence thought, leaning forward himself now, house barely did the structure justice. There was a three-story building at the center, and taller wings stretching out on either side, every visible edifice topped with towers and turrets. His gaze moved over the face of the property. There were almost too many windows to count. Some were aligned in neat rows, while others appeared to be just randomly placed dark squares. Taken as a whole, the building looked like a curve of jawbone, inverted and pressed into the land.
Two police vans were parked out front.
A few officers dotted around.
The house—he needed to think of it as something—loomed ever larger as they approached. Looking up, Laurence noticed that a part of the roof in the middle was more jagged than the rest. Whatever room had once been up there was now partially exposed to the air, and he could see a few blackened struts of wood sticking up. An old fire. The bricks below were scorched, and the window directly beneath had shattered and not been repaired.
The tires crackled as Pettifer brought the car to a halt behind one of the vans at the entrance. One of the uniformed officers approached the vehicle.
Laurence held out his ID.
“Detective Laurence Page,” he said. “Detective Caroline Pettifer.”
“Yes, sir. Ma’am.”
They got out of the car. Laurence looked at the entrance before them: two enormous wooden doors beneath a stone arch. They were far wider and taller than any human would require.
“Good Lord,” he said. “You could ride a horse through there.”
Pettifer walked around the car and stood beside him, hands on her hips, looking up.
“Told you so,” she said. “The other half.”
* * *
A sergeant led them inside to the scene.
Through the doors, there was a large reception area, the floor made of cracked black and white tiles. Laurence looked up as they walked; the ceiling was two stories above. Ahead of them, separated by a vast mirror, two wooden staircases curled upward. There were no windows, and dust hung visibly in the air, and yet there was the hint of a breeze coming from somewhere.
He and Pettifer followed the officer up one of the staircases—which joined the other on a small landing. Another pair led up from there, curving around each other like a figure eight, so that they turned back on themselves again as they ascended. The arrangement seemed pointless to Laurence—whichever route they chose, they ended up in the same place—but eventually they emerged into a large area he estimated must have been above the entrance hall. Despite the solid floor beneath his feet, he was aware of a vast distance stretching away below him, and it felt like if he fell he would be falling forever.
“This way, sir.”
“And ma’am,” Pettifer said.
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”
A thin corridor led away to the left with an open door at the far end. As they approached it, Laurence could see officers moving in the room beyond. He was expecting another grand, ornate space, but his expectations were confounded. He and Pettifer followed the officer into a small area that, in some ways, reminded him of the modest confines of his own apartment. Looking around, he saw little in the way of furnishings: a single bed against one wall, on which the victim was still lying; a cart of medical equipment beside it; an old television on a stand, angled toward the bed. He looked to his left. There was a small, open-plan kitchen area there, and a closed door next to it that he assumed led to a bathroom.
And at the far end of the room, an archway.
He stared at that for a moment. It clearly led away into some deeper chamber of the house, but the blackness there was impenetrable. Laurence could hear the faintest rush of air emerging from it, and the sound reminded him of something breathing.
He stepped over to the bed and looked down at the victim.
Breathing was clearly not a sound Alan Hobbes would be making again. The old man’s lower body was still beneath the covers, but he was exposed from the waist up. His head was tilted at an unnatural angle, all but severed by a vicious knife wound.
The cause of death, at least, was clear.
But Laurence also scanned the man’s exposed, scrawny torso, taking in the additional stab wounds there. The bedsheets below the body had once been white but were now saturated with blood. Whoever had murdered Alan Hobbes had taken their time in doing so, and the old man had clearly been too weak and feeble even to begin to fight them off.
It was too early to form an opinion, but Laurence found himself working through possible scenarios. Hobbes was clearly rich—or had been, he supposed, given you famously couldn’t take it with you. Money conferred privilege but rarely came without problems of its own. You made enemies along with it, and there would always be people who wanted to take it from you once you had it. The torture could suggest either—it was impossible to say right now. But Laurence was already confident that the motive would ultimately reside, as they so frequently did, in the dead man’s bank account.
Pettifer was standing beside him. He was sure she would have formed the same opinion. He was about to voice it anyway, as it was important to be first, but then there was a cough from behind them.
They both turned around.
The man standing there was not a police officer. Instead, he was dressed in an expensive-looking three-piece suit, and his brown hair was gelled into neat curls. He was thirty, at most, and obviously trying to appear older than he was.
Like a little boy trying on his father’s suit, Laurence thought. Which he might have considered uncharitable if the man hadn’t also been curling his lip slightly as he looked between Laurence and Pettifer, as though trying to work out who was the superior, and if so, why.
Laurence saved him the bother. He beckoned to the nearest uniform.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Who is this young man, and why is he in my crime scene?”
The uniform, predictably, looked slightly helpless.
Copyright © 2023 by Alex North
