Con had been a heavy smoker since his teens, and a major carnivore throughout adulthood. He developed diabetes in his fifties and needed a bypass in his sixties. Manolis thought about that a lot – it had turned him into a vegetarian and often made him extinguish his cigarette early, as he did this evening in a deep Soreno glass ashtray. Con had always hated that his son smoked, which forced Manolis to hide his cigarettes. He still felt a twinge of guilt every time he lit up, and now needed to ask his father for forgiveness.

Manolis fetched his Val and parked it beside the sheriff’s office, where a marshal might have otherwise tied his trusty horse. He checked the cupboards, failed to locate olive oil, found only instant coffee, and sighed lightly. As he stood under the shower for nearly twenty minutes, the cold water tore away his layers of dry sweat and dead skin, and returned his body to life. The bedsheets smelt like bleach and were as rough and hot as burlap. He flung the top sheet onto the linoleum floor and opened all the windows and doors. The overhead fan spun so fast it stood still.

Sleep came effortlessly, against the backdrop of chirruping cicadas. Having pondered his own issues over a cigarette, Manolis often liked to think about a case in the haunted moments before sleep; he did so in the hope that something might come to him on either side of consciousness that cracked an investigation wide open. He claimed to have once solved a homicide after taking an afternoon nap and dreaming the location of the key piece of evidence. On other occasions, he’d dreamt the faces of perpetrators and where bodies were buried. It wasn’t some divine gift – it was just the spillover from a dedicated mind. Ruminating on a case also had the recent bonus of preventing Manolis from thinking about his wife. He especially missed her warmth beside him in bed. As his head found shape in a flat pillow leaking feathers, he tried to picture Molly’s face being pummelled with stones, but in the end only saw black. The investigation was still too new, and his weariness too great.

A LOUD CLATTER woke Manolis after an indeterminate period of time. It interrupted his dream, recurring, of an antiseptic hospital ward, and his dying father. He sat bolt upright in bed, sticky-mouthed, in a damp pool of his own sweat, listening.

Was the commotion inside or outside?