‘Not really. The electrics blew during the fire. The computer won’t switch on and apparently looks ancient. There are some drawers that won’t open, but I’m not convinced we’re going to find a map with an X on it that completes the puzzle for us.

‘The upper floors had their windows bricked up, though. Not just in the apartment where he was keeping his prisoners. His bedroom, too. Freaked the firefighter out for a minute. There’s a painted view where the windows used to be, crude, like a child painted it. Curtains and all. Makes me wonder if it wasn’t Harris at all who bricked up his bedroom window, but actually his grandmother.’

‘If his depression was that bad, maybe she didn’t want the prospect of him jumping out of the window. It’s a tall building,’ Baarda suggested.

‘Yeah. Can you imagine being that kid, though? He must have felt as if his very existence caused his mother’s death. Dad never showed up, grandmother might not have been exactly thrilled with the way things turned out. What a shitshow his childhood must have been.’

‘So he has therapy, it doesn’t work, he begins to imagine he’s dying. Where does that take him, ultimately, to try and rectify it?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want it to be rectified,’ Connie said. ‘We spend so much of our lives in our own comfortable sphere, where we’d do anything at all to survive. We rely on medicine, the emergency services, luck, fate. Death is the worst thing we can imagine. Only for some people, that’s not the case. I spent enough time locked up with people who felt death might be the less painful option to living that I can honestly say, we need to rethink our views on this.

‘Perhaps he wants to pass on. It may be that his particular hell isn’t constantly believing he’s dying, but in repeatedly realising that he isn’t. Someone that desperate is capable of doing absolutely anything to make it stop. To make their life, in this case their living death, end.’

‘Why torch the house now if he’s been in this cycle for so long? He still needs somewhere to live. All his photos are here. He’s perfectly set up to house his replacement family.’

‘Something must have changed, and dramatically enough that he’s decided he’s not coming back. There’s a massive hole in the floorboards between the upper floor and the one below, so maybe his plans went badly wrong this time. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s decided his life is about to end whether nature planned it that way or not. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the pain any more.’

‘Fuck,’ Baarda muttered.

‘Fuck would be a fair summary at this point,’ Connie agreed.