Hirsch scanned the floor automatically for spent cartridges before unholstering his service pistol. Stood for a while, listening. The house spoke like any old house, but he didn’t have the sense of human hearts beating in it. He stepped quietly along the hallway and stopped at the first of the intermediate doors.

A teenage boy’s bedroom: posters, scattered clothing, general mess. He went in. No bodies, no one hiding. The room opposite contained two single beds. Rumpled bedclothes on one, with a scattering of soft toys and a Little Mermaid poster on the wall. The other bed, for an older child, hadn’t been slept in. Novels in a fantasy series on a bedside table, boy-band posters on the wall, a little desk holding a lumpy pottery jar stocked with a range of colourful pens.

No blood, no bodies.

But Hirsch added another Denise Rennie falsehood to the list: she apparently had three children, not one.

He continued to the end of the hallway and knelt beside the dead woman. Flies had found her. She was cold, no pulse, and the blood had dried to a stiff scab on the T-shirt. Her head was turned to the left, her cheek against the floor, giving him a clear look at her face. Yes: Denise Rennie.

Hirsch gathered himself again. The doors on either side were partly open. The left led to the main bedroom: a queen-size bed, a massive old wardrobe and a modern desk with an ADSL modem, a printer and a computer on it. Two red lights among the green on the modem, indicating some kind of fault. The internet would be a problem this far from town.

He checked the wardrobe and the floor on the other side of the bed, then returned to the hallway. Stepped around Rennie to knuckle open the other door.

A sitting room with a Christmas tree in one corner, a mess of wrapping paper, boxes and presents strewn around it. Looted after they’d been wrapped and placed under the tree, thought Hirsch. All he wanted to do was make this mundane deduction and leave the room, but his gaze was drawn to the sofa and the overwhelming fact of a teenage boy slumped in death, facing Grand Theft Auto on a wide-screen TV, big headphones over his ears, a game controller in his lap. Wouldn’t have heard his mother’s screams or the shot that put her on the floor—but paused his game when the shooter entered. Shot in the chest before he could get up.

Hirsch stood there, thoughts in chaos. Mother dead, son dead. But where was the husband? Anna, the toddler? The older daughter? Had the husband run off with them? Butchered them in one of the sheds? Dead somewhere himself?