“You told me you were going to see Greg the day after he died.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re quite sure about that? Because there’s no record of an appointment in his diary.”

“He’d only arranged it the day before. It must have been just before the accident. He was very insistent that he should come and see me.”

“Do you know what it was about?”

“I’m afraid not. Is there a problem?”

“No problem,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

I put the phone back in its holster and returned to my chair by the empty grate.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.

That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.

“I was working,” I said.

“That’s fine,” he replied. “Don’t mind me.”

“All right.” I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.

“What are you working on?”

“It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice—look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.”

Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. “What’s this?” he said.

“It’s a laminate,” I said. “It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.”

He put the bottle down. “My gran used to hate old furniture,” he said. “She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.”

“It’s a point of view,” I said.

“When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.” He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. “This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.”

“I guess you haven’t come to hire me,” I said, “so why are you here?”