Richie asked, “Anything else that made you think he could be hurting her? Anything you heard, anything you saw?”

“Those monitors being downstairs. That’s weird, know what I mean? At first I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d be anywhere but the kids’ bedrooms. When I heard her going on like that, though, I thought maybe he put them all around, so he could keep tabs on her. Like if he went upstairs or out in the garden, he could bring the receivers with him, so he’d hear everything she did.” Satisfied little nod: she was delighted with her own investigative genius. “Creepy or what?”

“Nothing else, no?”

Shrug. “No bruises or nothing. No yelling, that I heard. She did have a face on her, but, whenever I saw her outside. She used to be all cheerful—even when the kids were acting up or whatever, she’d this big fake smile on her. That went out the window, the last while: she looked down in the dumps the whole time. Spacy, like—I thought maybe she was on the Valium. I figured it was ’cause of him being out of work: she wasn’t happy about having to live like the rest of us, no more SUV and no more designer gear. If he was battering her, though, could’ve been that.”

I asked, “Did you ever hear anyone else in the house, other than the four Spains? Visitors, family, tradesmen?”

That lit up Sinéad’s whole pasty face. “Jesus! Was your woman playing away, yeah? Getting some fella in while her husband was out? No wonder he was keeping tabs. The cheek of her, acting like we were something she’d scrape off her shoe, when she was—”

I said, “Did you hear or see anything that would indicate that?”

She thought that over. “Nah,” she said, regretfully. “Only ever heard the four of them.”

Jayden was messing about with his controller, flicking at buttons, but he didn’t quite have the nerve to switch it back on. “The whistling,” he said.

“That was some other house.”

“Wasn’t. They’re too far away.”

I said, “We’d like to hear about it, either way.”

Sinéad shifted on the sofa. “It was only the one time. August, maybe; could’ve been before. Early morning. We heard someone whistling—not a song or nothing, just like when a fella whistles to himself while he’s doing something else.” Jayden demonstrated, a low, tuneless, absent sound. Sinéad shoved his shoulder. “Stop that. You’re giving me a headache. Them in Number Nine, they were all gone out—her too, so it couldn’t have been her bit on the side. I thought it had to be from one of them houses down at the end of the road; there’s two families down there, and they’ve both got kids, so they’d have the monitors.”

“No you didn’t,” Jayden said. “You thought it was a ghost. Again.”

Sinéad snapped, to me or Richie or both, “I’m entitled to think what I like. Yous can go ahead and look at me like I’m thick; yous don’t have to live out here. Try it for a while, then come back to me.”