Some clever soul had painted each set of footprints a different color. Detectives Tailor and Vincent showed me various photos. There was one of the area around Em’s body. You could just see Em’s boot in the top corner. The snow was all mushed up from where we had kneeled over her. There were lots of pictures of the footprints in the snow leading to and from the house. One of the detectives, Vincent, seemed to think there was an extra set. Em had gone out, but not come back. Marcus has gone out once and found her, and then come back to fetch us, then he had gone out and eventually back again. The rest of us had gone out and back once. An extra set—boot prints. They were the same pair that Zack had been wearing, one of the pairs left by the door.

The other detective was less convinced. In places the tracks were obliterated, they crossed and disappeared and some could have been from the day before, and while new snow had fallen, it’d been an inch or two at most.

The cause of death had been confirmed. Em had died from a bleed on the brain caused by a blow to her head, this and hypothermia. It would have taken her a few hours to die. She would not have been in pain. But would she have known? Would Em, lying there, have known she was dying, known that she was alone?

I wanted to take a knife and cut the thought out of myself. To go further, to find the home of grief itself, the site where it was lodged and hack it out of my body before it killed me. In the middle of the night, I thought about joining Em, and the thought of being dead gave me comfort, gave me relief and allowed me to sleep. When I awoke it was to all the terror of a nightmare, but the thing you were scared of, already happened.

The detectives wanted to know what I thought she was doing out there.

“Was she leaving? Had she gone for another walk? Perhaps to meet someone? Or was it another game?” The necklace had been in Em’s coat pocket. Detective Tailor slid it over the desk in a plastic Ziploc bag. I looked at it dully.

“She must have come and taken it from where I left it on the rug, after David and I had gone back up, after Rob had gone to bed.”