I brought them down, all three of them in my arms, the little tortoiseshell boy who was the boldest, climbing my hair. I slumped down in the basket chair.

‘I’ve checked downstairs,’ Joe said. ‘There’s no sign that anyone’s been inside.’

‘So, they cut the chain just so they could come in and nail the bloody crow to the front door?’

‘Whoever did this is sick,’ Joe said. ‘If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they just say it to our faces?’

He opened two beers and passed one to me. I took it and drank back several gulps. I lifted a kitten off my head, its claws dragging at my hair.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked. ‘What does the dead crow mean, and the red paint? Is it something to do with the devil? With the occult?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘It’s how they get to you,’ Joe said. ‘It’s how they operate. They know their psychology. They know they hardly have to break the law; they do one small thing to frighten you and leave your imagination to do the rest of the work.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘Whoever it is who wants to get rid of us.’

I took a bath. The bathroom was big as a ballroom and the lights in that room still didn’t work, so I lit candles that flickered shadows over the walls and the huge old claw-foot bath. Steam clouded from the surface of the water. The dimness in the outer reaches of the bathroom meant I couldn’t see the cracks in the tiles, or the mould stains on the plaster, the age-spotted mirrors, the basin with a corner missing, or the cobwebs in the high corners. I heard a pattering on the other side of the ceiling above me; a sound like a child singing. I thought of all the other people who had lain in this bath: Anna, Anna’s mother. There were pictures in the albums downstairs of Joe and Cece, as children, in the bath together; their two faces grinning towards the camera. The bath, the room, was the same, only the people changed.

A draught touched my face. A tiny drift of plaster fell from the coving. A spider scuttled up the wall. The door was ajar and I could hear Joe moving around downstairs. From time to time, he called up to me, and I called down to him; each of us reassuring the other that we were okay.