‘You will destroy yourself.’

The room stopped its agitation. There was a pause and then the mass was growing smaller again. He could feel it. The sheet was a ball of cloth in his fist. Sam could sense the thing controlling its fury, weighing up the child-like opponent that was hiding his face in the covers. There was an age as it waited. The voice came again, calm and in control.

‘Will I? Then before that, we must do some more of what we do best together.’

Sam opened his eyes slowly and turned his head to the chair. It was in human form again. Sam could only croak, hoarse with fear. ‘And what’s that?’

The pale face creased with a laugh that was not a laugh, and it got up slowly and left the room. Conventionally. Through the door.

Two things for him when he came back from the museum. They’d let Wilber go. Hip hip hooray, thought Craig sourly. And the deer. They’d discovered that the deer’s heart had burst open.

Bell had been conspiratorial with the news, as though he had been told that it was no concern of McGee’s any longer and not to pass on the information. Craig wondered which of the two pathologists that had arrived from Edmonton had done the work. They had the coyote too, although the way it had died seemed all too obvious.

He sat for a moment at his desk and watched the snow fall through the pencil blinds. No mention on the log from Edison and Patel that Sam Hunt had gone out Tuesday night. They’d observed him go to bed and the lights go out and then nothing till the next morning. But he had gone out. His wife knew. What did he do? Sneak out a window? His car didn’t move so if he got up to Hawk’s how did he do it?

But so what? Even if Sam Hunt had flown out of the window with a fucking gold lamé cloak on and a neon light flashing round his head, what was all this killing about? These dead animals. Wilber’s talking animals. Craig held the bridge of his nose between a thumb and middle finger.

Come on then, Becker. Solve it, you asshole. Make it eighteen solved murders, you smug bastard. Craig was at sea.

He needed to speak to Hunt again. Speak to the apple. He caught sight of the dreary paper Katie had given him, sticking out of his storm-coat pocket, rolled into a disrespectful cone. Craig leaned forward and fished it out, slapping it onto the desk in front of him with a sigh.

A study and history of the occult beliefs of the Stony, Blackfoot, Kinchuinick and Flathead tribes of the Western states of Canada, including field studies, observations and transcripted testimonials. By Doctor Aird Lennox and Chief Cecil Bows With the Wind. 1964.