Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”

After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”

“Get your doctors to tell you.”

“They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”

No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.

Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”

*

The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.

Richie said, “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if …”

He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

“You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”

Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.

I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’s still lying to us.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.

Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you?”

I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”

*

That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.

Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.