“Yeah,” Richie said. He pushed the door open and cold air swept into the kitchen, stripping away the stagnant layer of blood and chemicals, turning the room, for a breath, fresh and stirring as morning. “Wait and see.”

I found my phone and rang the uniforms—they needed to send down whoever was handy with the padlocks, before the Gogans decided to set up a nice little sideline selling souvenirs. While I waited for someone to pick up, I said to Richie, “That was a good interrogation.”

“Thanks.” He sounded nowhere near as pleased with himself as he should have. “We know why Conor made up that story about finding Pat’s key, anyway. Keep Jayden out of trouble.”

“Sweet of him. Plenty of killers feed stray puppies, too.”

Richie was looking out at the garden, which had already started to take on an abandoned feel—weeds pushing up above the grass, a blue plastic bag left to flap from the bush where it had blown. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably they do.” He slammed the back door—the final rush of cold air fluttered the stray papers left to drift on the floor—and turned the key again.

Gogan was waiting at his front door to get his key back. Jayden was behind him, hanging off the door handle. When Richie handed over the key, Jayden squirmed out, under his father’s arm. “Mister,” he said, to Richie.

“Yeah?”

“If I hadn’t have given your man the key. Would they not have got kilt?”

He was staring up at Richie with real, sharp horror in those pale eyes. Richie said, gently but very firmly, “This wasn’t your fault, Jayden. It’s the fault of the person who did the job. End of story.”

Jayden twisted. “But how would he have got in if he didn’t have the key?”

“He would’ve found a way. Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it’s got started, you can’t stop it, no matter what you do. This whole thing got started a long time before you ever met this fella. Yeah?”

The words slid down my skull, dug in at the back of my neck. I shifted, trying to get Richie moving, but he was focused on Jayden. The kid looked about half convinced. After a moment, he said, “I guess.” He slipped back under his father’s arm and vanished into the dim hall. In the moment before Gogan shut the door, he caught Richie’s eye and gave him a small, reluctant nod.

*

The two sets of neighbors at the bottom of the road were in, this time. They were the Spains, three days back: young couples, little kids, clean floors and saved-for fashionable touches, houses ready and welcoming for visitors who wouldn’t come. None of them had seen or heard anything. We were discreet about telling them to get their back door locks changed: just a precaution, a possible manufacturing fault we had stumbled on in the course of the investigation, nothing to do with the crime.