He’d used coloured pencils – no doubt taken from Mia’s room – and all of them dark shades: blacks, heavy browns and deep reds. There were fifteen sketches in total, each showing the same scene: a dark, featureless room and a man with his face to the corner. Page by page, as in a flip-art book, the figure grew in detail, from a shadow to a man with short hair, tennis sneakers and an oversized black jacket. On the final four pages, a long, jagged crack formed on the man’s face. Small brown shapes were spilling out from inside.

‘Moths,’ she whispered, even though she wanted to scream. Then, from someplace deep in her mind, Holly Cutter said, Spiritual distress.

As Kate closed the notebook and slipped it into her pocket, she felt the touch of a finger rest lightly on top of her head. Startled, she gasped and spun around. When she saw that nobody was there, she ran her hands through her hair. A chunk of dust came loose. It must have fallen from above.

It drew her attention to the ceiling. There was a flat, rectangular manhole cover there that gave into a cavernous storage cavity in the roof. Mia called it the door to the roof, and when she was younger, believed the cavity was home to a hideous, child-eating gremlin. If the door was open, then the gremlin would slink down into the house at night and scramble down the hallway and into Mia’s bed.

In the years of checking the ceiling door, it had only ever been open once – John had left it ajar after going up there to look for his old Sonic Youth CDs – until today. There was a pencil-thin space between the cover and the lip of the opening. There was no reason for John to go up there, but then again, there was also no reason for him to be in Belport.

Kate remembered an article she’d read a few weeks earlier on Facebook. It was a news report about a man who lived alone in an apartment in Kyoto, Japan. When the man noticed food disappearing from the kitchen, he installed security cameras in every room of the apartment. When he sat down to watch the footage, it showed a woman creeping out of his hallway closet in the dead of night, eating food from the kitchen and using the bathroom. After he called the police, the woman was arrested. She claimed to have been living there for months.

‘Kate? Kate!’ Fisher called from across the hall. ‘Come here!’

She followed his voice into Mia’s room, which was painted a bright blue. Fisher was standing in the corner, looking at something that was obscured from Kate’s view by a towering wardrobe. On top of the wardrobe was a large plastic tub full of Mia’s summer toys, and plastered on its big double doors were posters of yoga cats.

‘What is it?’ she asked.