He manages to make it sound like a casual question rather than an accusation, but nonetheless, I have to remind myself that I’m thirty-four years old and entitled to drink as much as I like in my own home. “A couple of glasses of wine with dinner.”

“And you say you went to bed at around eleven and it was sometime after three that you found the skull?”

“Yes.” Another edited detail necessitated by the elimination of Fiona. We thought it best not to edit the time she left in case anyone saw or heard her car.

He glances at me, and suddenly I have the feeling that his focus has sharpened, though his words are still conversational. “Why were you up? Did something wake you?”

“I . . .” Yes, something woke me: Fiona, standing at my door. Except that it was my screaming that brought her to the landing, wearing an entirely different T-shirt of Carrie’s. But Detective Laws is waiting for me to speak. “I needed the bathroom.”

“And why did you go into that room?”

It’s taking more mental agility than I would have imagined to remove Fiona. “I’m not sure, exactly; I was half asleep. The door was ajar, I think . . .”

Laws is squinting, like he’s trying to see something. “So you went to the bathroom first—yes? Okay, and then you came out. So you had to turn right to go back to your bedroom”—his hands are gesturing, palms facing each other but twisting from the wrist, as if to show the direction of travel—“which puts you, let’s see, opposite the spare bedroom door?”

It would do, if that’s what I had done. “Yes.”

“And you say you think it was ajar?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t notice it on your way up to bed?”

“Apparently not.” I hurry on to cover my flash of impatience. “Or it wasn’t open—it’s a drafty house. Old windows, you know. Sometimes doors blow open.” It’s true. The Manse speaks in its own way. Sometimes it shouts.

“Right.” He falls silent, though I don’t get the sense that he is finished with me yet. I turn and pour my now-cold tea down the sink. “Shame the cameras outside weren’t operational.”

“You’re telling me,” I say grimly. “They will be by the end of today.”

“Good. My colleague is going to go over security with you. You really ought to get an alarm system. With zones and a night setting.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Better safe than sorry.” I wonder what sorry looks like in his job, and then I wish I hadn’t. “We’ll need a list of everyone that’s been through the house since you got here.”

“Of course, no problem.”

“First the finger bones and now a skull,” he muses. “Have you noticed anything else that’s a bit out of the ordinary?”