Ali and Ben exchange glances again, and then Ben tries this time. “It’s possible that, well—”

“That someone is trying to scare me out of the Manse.” Ben blinks in surprise, though whether it’s in response to my words or flat tone, I can’t tell. “Yeah, I grasped that too.” I turn for the kettle. My mind is running down several different paths, all at once, like a set of rats in a maze. Someone is trying to scare me. If the TripAdvisor reviews are true, if Callum is right, someone is trying to scare me. Toast wouldn’t come in, and the cat never does—someone must have served me up two dead creatures in one week . . . But then again, Callum could be mistaken, and the TripAdvisor reviews could be malicious inventions, and the raven and the fox could just be dreadfully timed unfortunate incidents. But there’s the missing bin bag, and the missing insecticide, and the person who might or might not have been in the house—if they happened at all . . . except I couldn’t have imagined the flies. Surely I couldn’t have imagined the flies. And I didn’t imagine the stone that was thrown. And even if the TripAdvisor reviews aren’t genuine, perhaps they were written by someone trying to scare me off . . .

I can’t sort it out. It’s all too muddled.

“Why, did something happen?” asks Ben from behind me, with surprising perception.

“Yes. A few things, actually.” I look for a way to buy time. “I think perhaps we should all have a coffee.”

Ali looks at Ben and sighs. “I’d best gie Piotr a bell and tell him we’re not coming.”

My father is in a care home in Antwerp. He speaks so rarely that the staff haven’t worked out that he isn’t Belgian. He’s been categorized as having Alzheimer’s, though given he’s been in precisely the same condition for many years, it must surely have been the early onset kind, which seemed a tragedy to the staff in the early years but less and less so as time passed. Twenty-seven years ago, he was found in a physically and mentally traumatized state in a backstreet, dressed in a suit without any belongings or identification, but carrying a local newspaper from Ghent, which led the police to believe that’s where he came from, and to this day the staff in the care home call him Mr. Ghent. He’s still mobile, but he can’t manage the most basic of his own needs himself and needs twenty-four-hour care. The staff don’t mind him in the slightest, though—he’s not violent, or vocal, or prone to wandering. He’s so little trouble, one could forget he’s there.

FIFTEEN