I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”

“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”

“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”

That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you—”

“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises—we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later—but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”

“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”

“Fine. I’ll let our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”

Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”

His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.

“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him—”

“Jenny did nothing.”

“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”

“She wasn’t slutting—”

“How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”

“There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was—”

I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”