“You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both houses. She also volunteers at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy. Maybe that’s why he liked me. Those boots.

“Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

“Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom and the stain in the master bedroom and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

“So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. And in that other house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother because lately when he tries to talk to his mother all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it, either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still not all that nice. The only reason he’s nice to Liam is because Liam is his heir.