“What about you?” I said. I wished Pat had had the sense to install a light in his attic. I didn’t want to take my torch beam off that trap—it felt like it might slide closer, in the blackness, till someone misjudged a step—but neither was I crazy about all those invisible corners. I could hear the sea, loud through the thin membrane of roof tiles and insulation. “What do you think he was chasing?”

“OK. First question, right, is access. No problems there.” Tom tilted his chin upwards. At the top of the back wall—above Jack’s bedroom, as far as I could figure—was a patch of weak gray light.

I saw what the building inspector had meant: the hole was a ragged gap that looked like the wall had simply ripped away from the roof. Richie let out a mirthless little breath of something like laughter. “Look at that,” he said. “No wonder the builders won’t take the Gogans’ phone calls. Give me enough Lego and I’d build a better estate myself.”

Tom said, “Most of the mustelids, they’re agile little buggers. They could get over the garden wall and up there, no problem, if they were attracted by escaping heat or cooking smells. Doesn’t look to me like an animal actually made the hole, but an animal could’ve expanded it, maybe. See that?” The top edge of the hole, jagged and crumbling; the nibbled insulation. “Teeth and claws could’ve done that, or it could just be weather wear. No way to know for sure. We’ve got the same kind of thing going on over here, too.”

The bar of torchlight swung down and back, over my shoulder. I almost leaped around, but he was only picking out a roof beam in the far corner. He said, “Cool or what?”

The wood was crisscrossed with a frenzy of deep score-marks, in parallel sets of three or four. Some of them were a foot long. The beam looked like it had been attacked by a jaguar. Tom said, “Those could come from claws, come from some kind of machine, come from a knife or like a piece of wood with nails stuck in it. Take your pick.”

The kid was pissing me off—the whoa-dude-chillax attitude to something that I personally wasn’t taking lightly, or maybe just the fact that everyone assigned to this case appeared to be fourteen and I had missed the memo that said we were recruiting at skateboard parks. I said, “You’re the expert here, old son. You’re the one who’s here to tell us what you think. Why don’t you take your pick.”

Tom shrugged. “If I had to bet, I’d go with an animal. No way I can tell you whether it was ever actually up here, though. The marks could’ve been made back when this was a building site and the beam was exposed, or lying around on the ground outside. That might make more sense, seeing as it’s just the one beam, yeah? If something made them up here, though: whoa. See the spaces between the marks?”