The guests always had secrets, some of which were linked to the murder and some of which weren’t. And everything always happened in one place, like a manor house, a train or a small village. The detective wouldn’t have had the energy to run around a big city.

Then he started his final speech. Point by point, he revealed how everything had happened.

Sometimes the murderer tried to escape, sometimes they cried or started shouting furiously, sometimes they removed their disguise, but in the end, they were always caught.

‘Oui, bien sûr, mademoiselle. I know everything ,’ he declared, patting the young woman’s hand. ‘And now, let us drink a glass of blackcurrant juice. Mrs Parker assures me it is England’s finest.’

‘Parker would have been so much better,’ Mum said.

‘I bet this was filmed in Cornwall,’ Dad said.

I was silent, content, because, once again, everything had been resolved. The lies had been exposed; the show was over. Objects and events had their meanings, and every character their purpose. Nothing was left dangling.

MUM’S FINGERS AND TOES. Mum has long, dry fingers which smell of cigarettes. Her nails are oval, and there is a ragged wave in her thumbnail. Mum’s fingers sit inside her sleeves when she’s cold and in her hair when she’s thinking. Mum’s big toes are slanted. In summer, Mum wears open-toe sandals, and she paints her toenails blood red.

‘Look, Mum’s toes have been cut off,’ Dad says, but it’s a joke.

That’s what Mum’s fingers and toes are like.

8

8

We used to live at Sawdust House. It was our home. It was yellow and white with a red roof. Mum and Dad bought Sawdust House when I was a baby. It had an upstairs, a downstairs and a cellar. At first, the upstairs was cold and old, but we gradually moved up there as well, and I got a room of my own. The heat from downstairs rose upstairs, and the cold air from upstairs flowed into the downstairs hall.

Everything in Sawdust House was a work in progress. Every time someone came to visit and Mum showed them round, she would always say either what things had been like or what they would be like one day.

‘There used to be a wall and a door here,’ she explained in the hall. ‘I’ve got the wallpaper ready for here,’ she said upstairs, where the walls were covered only by raw timbers and shreds of old yellow backing paper. ‘There used to be a balcony here, before that new extension. You could make this into two rooms if you wanted to.’