It wasn’t a question. She just repeated the word as though it might go away. She didn’t need to ask if he was murdered. Of course he was. That guy. He’d been in her living room. Right there on the sofa. Blood pumping through his veins, air going in and out of his lungs.

How did you survive?

I breathed in and out.

The one that had known Sam back then. Back when he was being tortured. The one that gave away the fact he was called Hunting Wolf.

Dead.

Craig shifted his weight onto the other buttock, then looked at her with sympathy. ‘We don’t need to bother you about it, Mrs Hunt. I’m sure you know, and I apologize for it now, but we had men watching your house. We know it can’t have been your husband.’

‘When did it happen?’ She was stunned.

‘Tuesday night. Same night we came round to you. Your husband didn’t leave the house that night, did he?’

It was meant to be a rhetorical question. He was not asking her, but telling her. But then he saw it. Huge and unmistakable and written in facial letters the size of a house. He tried not to let it show but she saw that he had seen it. It was the lie forming in her eyes and on her lips. Agnes Root had it right. Katie Hunt was a terrible liar. Craig watched her try and fail.

‘That’s right. He didn’t.’

There was silence for a moment. Craig picked up a leather glove from his lap and turned it over in his hands.

‘So. The animals. Anything spring to mind?’

He watched as she gathered up the pieces of herself. She lifted up her spectacles and put them on clumsily, as if to make herself more scholarly, or perhaps to try and put a barrier between her eyes and his.

‘Animals?’

She cleared her throat of an imaginary obstruction. Buying time. Craig had seen it often in liars.

‘Em, no. They would never do anything to hurt animals. They worshipped many of them as deities. In fact, when they killed for food they would spend days praying for the soul of the creature they’d eaten. No. I can’t think of anything that would make them hurt animals in a ritual way.’

Craig nodded, trying to make her continue. Only really now so he could watch her face and see how soon she could wipe off that big tell-tale fib.

She continued, wriggling under the pincer of his gaze. ‘Certainly they thought that animals could be their spirit guides. I’m sure you know that’s a very strong part of their religion even today. And some shamans believed they could shape-shift into animals to go unseen. But that’s about it really.’

‘Shape-shift? You mean, possess the animals?’