This story should have been gibberish, incoherent fragments gasped out between sobs. Instead, it was crystal clear. She was telling it with the same relentless, iron-willed precision that had forced her house to perfection every night, before she could sleep. Maybe I should have admired her control, or at least been grateful for it: I had thought, before that first interview, that Jenny dissolved in howling grief was my worst nightmare. This flat still voice, like a disembodied thing waking you deep in the night to whisper on and on in your ear, was much worse.

I said—I had to clear my throat before the words would come out—“When was this conversation?”

“Like the end of July? God—” I saw her swallow. “Less than three months. I can’t believe … It feels like three years.”

The end of July tallied with Pat’s discussion-board posts. I said, “Did you assume that the animal existed? Or did it occur to you, even just as a possibility, that your husband might be imagining it?”

Jenny said, sharply and instantly, “Pat’s not crazy.”

“I’ve never thought he was. But you’ve just told me he was under a lot of stress. In the circumstances, anyone’s imagination could get a little overactive.”

Jenny stirred restlessly. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe I wondered, sort of. I mean, I’d never heard anything, so …” A shrug. “But I didn’t even really care. All I cared about was getting back to normal. I figured once Pat put up the camera, things would get better. Either he’d get a look at this animal or he’d work out it wasn’t there—because it had gone somewhere else, or because it was never there to start with. And either way, he’d feel better because he was doing something and because he was talking to me, right? I still think that makes sense. That wasn’t a crazy thing to think, was it? Anyone would’ve thought that. Right?”

Her eyes were on me, huge with pleading. “That’s exactly what I would have thought,” I said. “But that’s not what happened?”

“Things got worse. Pat still didn’t see anything, but instead of just giving up, he decided the animal knew the monitor was there. I was like, ‘OK, hello, how?’ He was like, ‘Whatever it is, it’s not stupid. It’s very far from stupid.’ He said he kept hearing the scratching in the sitting room, when he was watching telly, so he figured the animal had got scared by the camera and worked its way into the walls. He was like, ‘That hatch is way too exposed. I don’t have a clue what I was thinking; no wild animal’s going to come out into the open like that. Of course it’s moved into the walls. What I really need to do is get a camera pointed inside the sitting-room wall.’

“I went, ‘No. No way,’ but Pat went, ‘Ah, come on, Jen, we’re only talking about a tiny little hole. I’ll put it out of sight, in by the sofa; you won’t even know it’s there. Just for a few days, maybe a week tops; just till we get a look at this thing. If we don’t sort it now, the animal could get stuck inside the walls and die there, and then I’d have to rip up half the place to get it out. You don’t want that, do you?’”