‘You must take care of them both. You understand?’

Billy nodded, that grown-up in his eyes returning. Sam slipped the dollar into his pocket and stood up. Billy pulled on his sneakers and looked across at his Dad once more.

‘Mom still loves you. I told her everything.’

Sam looked at him and lowered his head. Billy looked uncomprehendingly at the sorrow on his father’s face for a moment, then opened the door and left. Sam heard him thump down the stairs past Katie with a few boyish words of explanation, then watched as her figure slid into view, standing in the doorframe.

‘Sam. Speak to me.’

She breathed rather than spoke his name, and he stood by the window gazing at her, longing to speak to her and hold her. But he could not risk the questions he might ask, nor bear the answers if they were not the ones he had to hear. His power was his purity of heart, and already he had broken his prayer to go unseen. He would have to return to Calvin by his wits, not with the powers of a shaman. There was no time to pray again, to chant and prepare. She had broken him. For now.

He looked at her for a long time, and when the screaming that Billy started at the front of the house sent the two cops at the back running round to assist, Sam lifted the window and flung his legs over the sill. He looked back at his wife, frozen in the doorway as if she were in a dream.

‘I love you more than my life,’ he said, dropped ten feet into the thick snow, and slipped away into the night.

Craig McGee blinked at the windscreen, trying to keep his aching eyes open as he turned out of Oriole and into Lynx. Everything would change, he had said to Katie. It had. Except that he knew somewhere deep in his heart, that it had always been like this. Nothing had changed at all. The only change was that he was admitting it was true.

He had thought when that first shard of belief wedged in his soul that the policeman in him had died. But it hadn’t. The reverse was true. It was the policeman who listened to what Billy had told Katie and knew that there were too many answers to the impossible questions in that tale to be ignored. Bizarre answers, but answers nevertheless. Everything the boy said had a kind of deadly logic. It was the policeman in him who knew that Sam hadn’t killed his dog. The boy’s outrageous explanation of what happened answered the riddle so neatly, linking those animals at the murders in the way he knew something would, only a fool would refuse to give it brain-time.

And yet …