Chapter One - The Search Continues
Several weeks previously, however, at that precise moment, the only sound that graced Katrielle's eardrums was the sound of her father's old grandfather clock as she sat in his study. She had always thought it odd that, in the midst of a bustling, noisy city like London, it was always so quiet in her father's house. So quiet and full of odd books and trinkets, unlike any other house Katrielle had ever been in. The old professor's study, however, was very much like her own office at the Layton Detective Agency - an utter pigsty, no matter how hard Ernest tried to keep on top of the chores.
Ernest. Though he rather liked to accompany her on her investigations, the search for her missing father was always something she preferred to do alone. She wasn't sure whether it was because Ernest wasn't family or because he didn't know the professor that well, but Katrielle never felt comfortable with the idea of him getting involved, asking so many questions, questions which were still too painful for her to answer. About her biological parents, her origins, whether it could bear any relevance to his whereabouts. Katrielle couldn't see why it would; after all, she had looked into this already; they were dead and, as far as she could see, they weren't worth knowing if they put their drug habits before their only child.
That thought brought Kat back to why she was sitting in her father's study in the first place. She had, as she had done many times before, run out of ideas in her investigation so, as she always did in times like these, she was rifling through her father's possessions, searching for any clue of his whereabouts that he may or may not have left for her. She had already gone through most of his possessions, and was now looking through photographs. It wasn't that he didn't have many, but it appeared that most of them were taken around the same time, judging by how old her Uncle Luke was at the time. It also appeared that they were all taken by the same person, but Kat had already pursued this line of her investigation and it had been largely fruitless; either Emmy Altava was dead or she really didn't want to be found, and judging by the stories Flora had told her about Emmy, either was likely.
It was when she had finished looking through the album and was about to close it she noticed something she hadn't before. A tiny corner of a photograph sticking out from behind a picture of her and Alfendi as children. Kat carefully tugged it out and examined it.
It was of her father as a young man, probably in his twenties, with a woman who had her arm around him. She was quite pretty, Kat thought, with glasses and red hair, donning a lab coat. "She's a scientist..." Kat thought. Then she stopped. "This must be Claire." Flora had told her all about Claire, her father's first and only love. Kat remembered it well...
"I think it broke his heart when she died," Flora had told her, "and he grieved a lot when he lost her the second time... he was so quiet..."
So why hide her photograph? Kat frowned, squinting at the photograph. She could make out another someone in the background, someone she recognized. He was watching the professor and Claire, and he was glaring at the young couple.
"Dad knew him," Kat thought suddenly, "I know his face..." she leaped up and crossed the room, grabbing her father's old book of newspaper cuttings. She flipped through it quickly and stopped as she landed on the right page, towards the back of the book; "Dimitri Allen Released After Twenty-Five Year Sentence." Kat looked at the date on the header of the cutting and her heart nearly stopped; it was a week before her father's disappearance.