Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers … Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”

I pointed to the door into the hallway. “What about over there? Did they get anywhere near there?”

Larry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Not a sausage within about four feet of that door: no spatter, no bloody footprints except the uniforms’ and the paramedics’, nothing out of place. All just as God and the decorators intended.”

“Is there a phone in here? A cordless, maybe?”

“Not that we’ve found.”

I said, to Richie, “You see what I’m getting at.”

“Yeah. The landline was out on the hall table.”

“Right. Why didn’t Patrick or Jennifer go for it and hit 999, or at least try to? How did he restrain both of them at once?”

Richie shrugged. His eyes were still moving across the end wall, from blood spray to blood spray. “You heard your woman Gogan,” he said. “We don’t have a great rep around this estate. They could’ve figured there was no point.”

The image pressed up against the inside of my skull: Pat and Jenny Spain throat-deep in terror, believing that we were too far away and too indifferent even to be worth calling, that all the world’s protections had deserted them; that it was just the two of them, with the dark and the sea roaring up on every side, on their own against a man with a knife in one hand and their children’s deaths in the other. Going by the tight movement of Richie’s jaw, he was picturing the same thing. I said, “Another possibility is two separate struggles. Our man does his thing upstairs, and then either Pat or Jenny wakes up and hears him on his way out—Pat would add up better, Jenny would be less likely to go investigating on her own. He goes after the guy, catches him in here, tries to hang onto him. That would explain the weapon of opportunity, and the extent of the struggle: our man’s trying to get a big, strong, furious guy off of him. The fight wakes Jenny, but by the time she gets here, our man’s taken Pat down, leaving him free to deal with her. The whole thing could have gone very fast. It doesn’t take that long to make this kind of mess, not when there’s a blade involved.”

Richie said, “That’d make the kids the main targets.”

“It’s looking that way anyhow. The children’s murders are organized, neat: there was some kind of plan there, and everything went according to that plan. The adults were a bloody, out-of-control mess that could easily have ended very differently. Either he wasn’t planning to cross paths with the adults at all, or he had a plan for them, too, and something went wrong. Either way, he started with the kids. That tells me they were probably his main priority.”