“Maybe. Though she didn’t seem that freaked out.” Could it be that she was so calm about the skull because she put it there? The most anxious she had been was when she spotted that I caught a whiff of smoke on the second-floor landing. I expect it will probably irk me enormously later to think she must have been smoking in my house without asking for permission—which I would have refused—but at the present time it hardly seems important.

“Cool head in a crisis,” yawns Carrie. “A good quality.” She glances across at me. “Are you . . . are you starting to come round on her?”

“Yes,” I say. “A bit.” And Carrie smiles. I’m not lying, exactly; it’s just that I’m still splintered. There’s the Ailsa who had a nice dinner with Fiona and Carrie, who appreciates Fiona’s forthright company, and then there’s the Ailsa who can’t do that. The Ailsa with a list of names in her head, the Ailsa who watches.

•   •   •

The police are here.

They’ve been here all morning; three of them, picking through the Manse, poking into rooms, as if they half expect the rest of the skeleton to leap from a closet and dance a jig, headless and one-handed. The bones from under the bed are human, so very human in fact that it apparently took the forensic department mere seconds to identify them as such. And so, I don’t actually have to call the police after all, because they turn up at my door before I even have the chance.

It’s a Detective Chief Inspector Something-or-other who’s evidently in charge, which he signals by leading the conversation on the doorstep. He’s a tired-looking man in an ill-fitting gray suit, perhaps a little shy of six feet. He starts to explain what department he’s with or some such detail, but I interrupt. “We found more.”

“More?”

“Bones. Well, one more, to be exact. A skull.”

He scratches his chin with a thumb. “You found a skull in your house.” The weak morning sunlight finds some freckles on his nose.

“Yes. Last night.”

“Right,” he says faintly. Then, “Where?”

“In one of the spare bedrooms.” I step back. “You’d better come in.”

“I would think so.”

And so I explain, and then I show the detective and his two underlings the bedroom, where we all stand in silence in the doorway for a moment and appreciate the macabre art that is presented by the sharp white of the skull grinning from its pride of place on the navy bedspread.

“Someone put it there, guv,” comments one of the underlings. “Like, on purpose.”

His boss surveys him with the merest hint of an eyebrow raise. “No kidding,” he says shortly.