“Yeah,” I said. “Either the computer was already on when he got here, in the middle of the night, or he knew the children’s names.”

*

“Scorcher,” Larry said happily, bouncing over from the kitchen windows, when he saw us in the doorway. “The very man I was thinking of. Come here, you, and bring that young fella with you. You’re going to be very, very happy with me.”

“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”

“What would make your day?”

“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”

“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”

I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”

“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”

“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.

“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”

“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.

“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”

“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”

“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”

The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”

The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.