It has to be. His head is gone, but he’s the right height and weight, and it looks like he was skinned within the last few days, not long after his death. His raw, sticky muscles are still dark red rather than brown, and his fingernails have not yet become claw-like as the flesh receded. None of the Crawdad Man’s other victims went missing recently enough to qualify.

Thistle slowly rises to her feet, looking at me. She doesn’t ask me how I know whose body it is.

‘What’s he doing in your yard, Blake?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’ It’s the truth, but it comes out sounding like a lie. I stare at the body. So much meat. If I washed the dirt off, it would still be edible.

‘You don’t know,’ Thistle says softly.

I say nothing. Shannon Luxford must have dumped it here. He followed me home.

No, not Luxford. The wigmaker. Shawn’s voice echoes through my mind: That woman I saw hanging around your house? She looked like a keeper.

At the same time I was planting Biggs’s hand at the college, she was dumping Ruthven at my house. To implicate me, to intimidate me, to confuse the investigation.

‘Okay,’ Thistle says. ‘Stay here. I’m going to call the FBI.’

She pushes past me and walks back into the house.

It takes me a moment to realise that she already had her phone in her hand. Why did she go inside?

I hear the freezer open.

I run back into the kitchen. Thistle is staring down into the freezer, eyes wide, knuckles white around the edge of the lid. She can only be looking at Biggs’s severed head.

‘Reese,’ I say, ‘this isn’t what it looks like.’

‘Jesus,’ she whispers. ‘You’re the fucking Crawdad Man.’

‘I’m not,’ I say, my heart going into higher gear. ‘I swear. Someone’s trying to make it look like I am.’

‘I wondered why this place was locked up like Fort Knox. I could tell the freezer was making you nervous … you said you were sick in the head. You even said you were afraid of hurting me. Oh God!’

She bends over, gagging. After three violent retches, she pukes onto the kitchen floor.

I rest my hand on her back. She shakes it off and backs away, flecks of vomit stuck to her chin. ‘Don’t touch me!’ I raise my hands. ‘Thistle. I didn’t do this. How could I? I’ve been with you the whole time.’

‘Convincing me that Luxford was guilty,’ she says. ‘You knew so much about the case.’

‘Luxford is guilty,’ I say. ‘He must have followed me home, got in here somehow.’

‘Oh.’ Thistle wipes her face with her sleeve. ‘Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.’

She’s only pretending to believe me.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘Trust me.’