Sam’s eyes bugged. ‘Sign?’

‘The Visitors Welcome sign at the top of the path. Years ago. Carl burnt it down.’

Sam half laughed. ‘Who said you can ever stop learning something new, no matter how long you’ve lived in a place?’

‘They even tracked down Lou and Jude driving south. Lou’s car cracked its axle when it hit a pothole. Apparently it was badly unbalanced.’

‘The coffee machine?’

‘The La Marzocco. They questioned her about why and when she’d left The Lodge that day. It takes them a while to figure out the causes of fires. But they seem very interested in the StairLift.’

‘The electric chair.’

‘Possibility of an electrical fault. She told me they were asking her all about her installation and if there was a chance the wooden staircase could have been set alight first, and then it spread to the house.’

‘So it could have been an accident?’

‘Everything can always be an accident.’

After a lengthy silence, Sam said, ‘Shit of a week, eh.’

‘I’ve seen The Lodge burn down and my father taken to hospital after causing the death of yours. We could call it quite a week.’ Gordon felt guilty at the thought, but his gut told him that Ron had engineered the car accident to rid himself of Tony. The most meaningful conversation anyone had heard them exchange consisted of two words. ‘Ron.’ ‘Tony.’ Those men.

‘Do you reckon he meant it?’ Sam asked, reading Gordon’s thoughts.

‘I don’t think we’ll ever know.’

‘But what do you reckon?’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘I asked you first.’

‘How old are we, twelve?’

‘I’m twelve,’ Sam said seriously, ‘and you’re eight.’

After a pause to take this in, Gordon said, ‘Who else was left for him to blame? Me?’

Sam averted his eyes, as if he had seen in Gordon, buried—in a shallow grave—in his paternal DNA, a capacity for violence that he had never before suspected.

‘So who were you protecting?’ Gordon said. ‘Me or your father?’

A tremor in Sam’s neck told Gordon that he didn’t need to explain.

‘Bluebird. We were protecting Bluebird, so we could stay.’

‘You talked me into telling a lie.’

‘I was shitting myself, brother, I didn’t know what I was doing. We just had to cover our arses. I didn’t want you to have to live with being the kid who kicked his brother off a fucking cliff, and you can’t tell me I was wrong.’

‘And look where that got us. I don’t even trust what I remember anymore.’

‘We’re no different from anyone else, brother. We made our bed and shitted our own shit in it.’

‘Who do you think killed him?’

A sad whistle, like the signal for the end of a factory shift, came through Sam’s nose. ‘All of us. None of us. An accident. What’s the diff?’