‘As you can see, the police have had a little refurb,’ he says, his hand pressed to my back. ‘What brutes they are, ruining such a literary landmark as this.’

His voice sounds odd, like he’s deliberately changing it.

‘Connor, why are you doing this?’ I say as he takes my arm. ‘How did you even get in here?’

‘I thought it would be fun,’ he says, gripping my arm tighter. ‘A little game of make-believe. After all, you like pretending, don’t you?’

He laughs and it sounds so menacing I shrink into myself. Please don’t let him hurt me.

We walk out of the living room, back to where we started.

‘Here we have the grand hallway,’ he says, sweeping his arms out like some deranged estate agent. ‘Or, as we like to think of it, the gateway to Holly Maze House. The late owner liked to claim that this part of the house dated back to 1647 but that was just bullshit to fool a load of gullible children. The truth is that this house was actually built in 1930, so the chances of it being haunted by a load of seventeenth-century, plague-addled ghost kids are pretty slim. But, hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’

He pauses then and as he stares at me I catch a whiff of cologne. It smells sharp and citrusy and it sticks in my throat.

‘Now, this stupendous piece of trash is, if our esteemed late author friend is to be believed, a rare Jacobean walnut sideboard,’ he says, still gripping my arm. ‘Though only for the purposes of flogging books and houses. It’s actually a great big fake, like everything else in this house. You know he actually shipped that maze here from a garden centre? Ha! And the gravestones? He commissioned them from a stonemason and got him to carve the names of the characters on them. Then he told the press he’d “stumbled on them” when out for a walk and the discovery had inspired the books. The truth was he’d written the first book before he even moved here. It was all just a marketing ploy, the lot of it. What a fucking joke. Oh, look though, something’s missing.’

He pushes me towards the sideboard, holding his hand firmly on the small of my back.

‘What’s missing?’ he says, his voice gruffer now. ‘Can you tell me?’

I shake my head, tears springing to my eyes.

‘You don’t know?’ he says mockingly. ‘Oh, I think you’re fibbing. You know very well what’s missing because you came in here and took it, didn’t you? The day old Mr Holly Maze was bumped off.’

I feel a chill when he says that. How does Connor know about the bird? Did he follow me that day? Did he see what happened?