A flash of movement from the back garden catches my eye through the window. I turn to look outside, suddenly terrified that the policeman I can now see poking through the garden—literally poking; he has some kind of long white stick—will find the decaying, Post-it note–adorned raven and conclude . . . conclude what? That I am nuts, most probably. At the very least, that I am to be treated as potentially unstable. I suddenly wonder if I have actually committed a crime. Is it against the law to defile the corpse of a bird?

“Miss Calder?” asks the detective. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” I turn round abruptly with a half-hysterical smile, then quickly dim it on seeing his startled expression. “I mean, as can be expected under the circumstances. Of course.”

“Mmm.” He considers me thoughtfully. His eyes are blue. A pale ice blue.

My father is . . . I can’t think about my father. I won’t, at least not intentionally. I know I can’t dislodge him from the edges of my consciousness, the periphery, where the landscape is amorphous and ill formed. But I won’t go there. That way madness lies.

NINETEEN

The skull is male.

Once again, that was immediately obvious to the forensic anthropologist; Laws rang to tell me, in his dry, thoughtful way. I can tell that he’s handling me, managing me, trying to gently nudge me into a corner. He drove me to the police station to have DNA taken: swabs from my cheeks—I can still feel the scrape on one side—and fingerprints too, though there is no physical reminder of that. He drove, asking questions, the same questions again but in different ways. Testing me, always testing . . . And new questions, too, about who we’ve met since we’ve been here, about my parents and who knew them, about how well Carrie and I get on, how much we see each other. I am discovering that his ability to jump topics with a minimum of fanfare is disconcerting. And exhausting.