Jo walked to the door in the hope there might be a breeze. There wasn’t. The morning was absolutely still.

She looked back across the courtyard, in the direction of the second floor. A uniformed deputy was standing guard at the doorway, and below, at ground level, Chen and his assistant were reloading equipment into the back of the coroner’s van.

‘Reckon you could describe him to an artist?’

Torus shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘He hasn’t got a car parked out there, so did you see anyone drop him off?’

‘No.’

‘No vehicles? A cab maybe?’

‘No.’

‘See any vehicles coming and going that didn’t belong to guests?’

This time, Torus didn’t respond.

‘Rivaldo?’

He looked conflicted. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. There was this red station wagon on Saturday or Sunday night. I ain’t sure which. Didn’t see who was driving it either.’

Jo took a step closer.

‘It didn’t belong to any of the guests?’

‘If it did, they didn’t put it in here,’ he said, pointing to the column in the guestbook where occupants were asked to write down their licence plates. ‘It must have only been here a few hours, though, cos I was checking some couple in, then I went to watch a movie out back, and next time I came through to here the car was gone.’

‘You remember the make or model?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No. But there was a sticker in the windshield.’

‘Yeah? You remember what the sticker said?’

‘Caraca something or other.’

‘How you spelling that?’

Torus spelled it out for Jo.

‘And you don’t remember the rest of what it said?’

‘No. The Caraca bit was big and bold, the rest was small as shit.’

Jo’s eyes went to the second floor again as another deputy began knocking at a door halfway along, hoping for an answer that wasn’t going to come. Jo had already found out that the same seven people had been staying here since the night Gabriel Wilzon checked in: two couples, a guy on his own, a lone female and Wilzon himself. The deputy had already talked to all six remaining guests – and none of them had seen anything. Now he was reduced to knocking on empty rooms.

But maybe this wasn’t going to be a total dead end.

Jo just had to find out what Caraca was.

15

Someone else was at Black Gale with us.

It was a man, barely more than a silhouette at the top of the track. He didn’t look towards the farmhouse – and even if he did, it would have been hard to see the Audi: it was parked behind one of the tractors, in the shadows of the barn.

‘Healy,’ I said quietly. ‘Look.’

We both got up and went to the window.

‘Who the hell is that?’ he muttered.