“I suppose it would be.” I look out through the window. There are shadows racing across the steep slopes of the opposite side of the valley, from clouds scudding through the sky above. If I stayed here, I suppose it would be that way for me too: a new start. New friends, a new job, a clean break. Except that the Manse isn’t clean. It’s rotten and fetid and rank somewhere inside, somewhere I can’t see, but I can feel it all the same.

“Are you still at the McCues’?”

“Yes. Which means I get to do bedtime stories with Callum. I may never leave.”

He smiles. “He’s a sweet kid. Brave soldier too.” He pauses. “His mum has an interesting reputation.”

He’s fishing, though I expect he already knows more than me. “Does she?” He smiles a little at my refusal to take the bait. “Are you done with the Manse?”

“We were done yesterday. Didn’t you get the message?”

“No.” I automatically look at my phone, and in fact it does have a message, but not from him. It’s from Pete: Call me when you can. It’s about the painting x. “Reception round here can be kind of sketchy.” He nods. “So I can go back there?”

“Yes.” Then he adds, “Though I wouldn’t until you’ve got a security alarm sorted out.”

“That should be in place tomorrow, I think.”

He takes a sip of his coffee, and then says, without the merest hint of a change of pace, “Were you going to tell me about the fox and the raven?”

I lean forward to put my coffee down on the table, marveling once again at his ability to jump track with no signal. “Ben, I suppose?”

“Ali, actually. He mentioned in passing that the vet confirmed the fox was poisoned. He assumed I already knew about its existence.” He puts a heavy stress on assumed.

Ali. To my pals. Of which it seems Detective Bryn Laws might be one. “How do you know Ali?”

“The tri club—triathlon. We cycle together. He was one of the first people I met here.” I stare at him for a moment, trying to imagine them both in Lycra. Having seen Laws’s lean musculature in the pool, it’s easy enough to place him on a bike, but I can’t see Ali beside him, no matter how hard I try. He sighs in mock exasperation. “Come on, it’s not that ludicrous.”

“It is if we’re talking about the same Ali.”

That brings a twist of amusement to his lips. “Middle-aged men in Lycra. It’s a thing these days. Not,” he adds hurriedly, “that I’d consider myself middle-aged yet.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re buying yourself time,” he observes mildly, but there’s still a hint of a smile around his ice-blue eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me about the fox and the raven?”