“And?” I ask. There is more to this, I can tell.

“Not just the odd strand. Have you ever had a cat?”

“We had a dog, when I was little.” A dog that Benny had begged and pleaded for. My parents rehomed him two days after Benny passed. They said he was a painful reminder. Did they send me to boarding school for the same reason?

“Close enough. You’ll know the hair gets everywhere. And Nebelungs are terrible molters. The clothes were covered in the stuff.”

“So…” Although I am warming to the boy, I do wish he would cut to the chase a little faster.

“So, Megan didn’t have a cat. Where did the fur come from?”

“Do you know the answer or was that rhetorical?”

“Megan’s friend, Hannah? Her mum has a Nebelung.”

“So, you’re telling me that is where the fur came from? Hannah’s mum?”

“No, I’m telling you that Megan gave the cat to Hannah’s mum.”

“When?”

“Late February. He had a turquoise collar. See this photo from Leah’s Instagram?” He slides a sheet of paper over the desk toward me. I’m not a cat person but this one is kind of cute. The turquoise contrasts nicely with his light gray fur, slightly mottled like the ash in a grate from a fire long since extinguished. Derek slides over a second sheet, another cat photo. “This is from Hannah’s mum’s Facebook.”

“You think…”

“That Megan gave Hannah’s mum Leah’s cat. Yeah.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Well,” he says and offers an almost apologetic smile, “she claims it was a stray.”

“Microchip?”

He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other. It seems to be dawning on him that this isn’t the slam dunk he’d imagined it was. “No,” he finally says.

“So how can we prove it?”

“We could get a DNA match on the fur?”

It’s actually not a bad suggestion. But if Hannah’s mum claims it’s a stray, I’ll need to get a warrant to obtain a sample. Somehow I can’t see Judge Elspeth Metcalfe, with her fancy bottle of mezcal, siding with me on the need to grant one though. I can just hear her condescending tone as she berates me for bringing something with such a “flimsy hypothesis.”

Derek flinches as I throw my glass across the room. It shatters into pieces like a rainfall of diamonds. “FUCK!” I scream. So many pieces of the puzzle and none that I can actually use. Either Chris was the unluckiest man in the world, or Megan was cleverer than any of us had given her credit for.

I think it is time I went to see the one person who might just know the truth.

The Jonas Institute is a hideous place. I will make my daughter promise me that she will never, ever let me live somewhere like this. Oh, it looks nice from the outside, a huge manor house nestled in the shadows of the North Downs, just outside Dorking. The grounds are full of trees laden with fruit, so much so that the boughs are drooping toward the ground with the weight of their bounty. The gravel driveway crunches under the wheels of my Lexus, and for a few moments I am overcome by a sense of serenity. One subsequently shattered by the screaming of the stark-naked man who is running at full pelt toward my car. He is chased by two huge men who look like they belong on the New Zealand rugby team instead of the white nursing scrubs they are wearing. I stay in the car until they have tackled him and bundled him toward a smaller two-story building to the left of the main house. A building whose windows are covered in bars.