She made the awkward journey back through the trapdoor and down the ladder. As she reached the bottom rung, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand touched her bare arm. Hamish held out a mug of coffee to her, the image of a helpful but-ler, except that he was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Ad-vanced for his age. She was suddenly acutely aware of the shortness of the old T-shirt she had slept in. The little fucker had been looking up it the whole time she’d been climbing down the ladder.

“I put in milk but no sugar, Louise,” he said. “I thought you looked like someone who watched her figure.” She considered punching him, but she didn’t want coffee all over the hall, or a lawsuit from his banker daddy, an arsehole whom Louise had met at a parents’ evening. No coincidence that “banker” rhymed with “wanker.”

“Thank you,” she said and took the coffee from him. “You’d better get a move on, Hamish, you’re going to be late for school.” She emphasized the word “school,” just to remind him that he was actually, technically, a child. She wanted to see a little scowl of hu-miliation on his smooth, bourgeois features, but instead he said, “Goodness, Louise, you really need to chill.”

Louise pulled on shapeless sweats and went outside. She was still fuming at Hamish-now making breakfast in her kitchen, as comfortable as if he were in his own home. He made a surprisingly good cup of coffee, though. Archie had no idea how to make coffee unless it was instant. Louise wondered if Hamish made coffee for his own mother. It must be nice to have someone who did things for you. Perhaps in his own house he was as asocial and un-comfortable as Archie was at home, and perhaps, conversely, when he went to Hamish’s house, Archie went around like Little Lord Fauntleroy, saying, “Can I get you more tea, Mrs. Sanders?” to Hamish’s mother. No, that was a fantasy too far.

She stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, sipping her coffee while scrutinizing her house for flaws in the brickwork.

From somewhere inside the house, she could hear her mobile start to ring.

“That’s quite a crack,” a voice said. She turned and saw her next-door neighbor unlocking his car. He nodded his head in the direction of her front door and climbed into the driver’s seat, his family piling in after him. Louise moved smartly away from where she’d been standing and, looking up, saw a fissure crowstepping its way down between the brickwork above the porch. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” In the story, the Big Bad Wolf hadn’t been able to blow down the house made of bricks, built by the sensible pig. Unfortunately, a sensible pig hadn’t built Louise’s house. Louise’s house had been built by the Big Bad Wolf himself, Graham Hatter. What had Jessica said? “Subsidence or something.”

“Fuck,” she said.

The neighbor winced. He was some kind of Christian, he had one of those fish stickers on his car, and he obviously expected better of the police force. Weekday mornings he drove his children to school, Saturday morning to the swimming, Sunday morning to church. Mr. Straight Guy. The Vanilla Family. She hated them. “Fuck,” she said to see him wince again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He drove off in a cloud of disapproval.

Hamish appeared at the front door, holding her phone aloft. “You have a gentleman caller,” he said. He was very camp sometimes, so maybe he wasn’t the salacious hetero he pretended to be. Would she be able to say to her colleagues at Corstorphine, “My son is gay”? Say it loud and say it proud. It was a conversation she just couldn’t imagine somehow. Fourteen, she reminded herself, they were still children, they had no idea what or who they were. She crossed back over the road and snatched her mobile off Hamish.

“Yes?” Louise said sharply into the phone and then was sorry because it was Jackson Brodie, and then she was even more rude to him, punishing him for the fact that she had experienced a twitch of pleasure at the sound of his voice.

“I just wondered,” he said, “if the words ‘Real Homes for Real People’ meant anything to you?”

“What?”

“Real homes for-”

“I heard you. You’re not still sleuthing around, are you? ‘Real Homes for Real People’ is the slogan of Hatter Homes, their head-quarters are in Edinburgh, still a family business. Graham Hatter’s a Scottish bigwig, millionaire businessman, et cetera. I live in a Hatter Home. It’s a pile of shite. Squirrels are eating my house.”

She had waited until Archie and Hamish were sprawled in the living room, watching MTV with their breakfast, oblivious to any-thing that wasn’t their own stupid little world, and then she had sneaked into Archie’s bedroom. She struck the space bar on the hi-bernating screen of his computer, and a page of text came up. She scrolled down and read, “You know, Bertie, you’ve got to remember the rich aren’t like us.”

“I know, miss.They’ve got more money.” It was a story or a novel. Archie was writing a novel? When pigs flew. And if Archie wrote a novel it wouldn’t be this kind of novel, it would involve the de-struction of the world by robotic cyber machines, with compliant sex-doll women thrown in for good measure. She went into “My Documents.” The novel was on a CD. Definitely not Archie’s, there was correspondence from an “Alex Blake,” apparently replying to fan letters. Other correspondence with the same address from a Martin Canning. There was a part of a manuscript, a novel-several chapters of something called Death on the Black Isle. This was what Archie and Hamish had been reading out loud last night. “I think there’s more to this than meets the eye, Bertie.”

Then it had hit her-“Alex Blake” was the name of the guy whose house Richard Mott had been murdered in. Martin Canning was his real name-or was it the other way round? Her son, her harmless son, was in illegal possession of something that must have come from a murder scene. What else had they done? She felt something scooped out and hollow where her stomach used to be.

39

Gloria had intended the early-morning blaze in the garden brazier to be symbolic, a pyre for the past Gloria (Graham’s wife) and a signal for the future Gloria (Graham’s widow). She had imagined herself emerging from the flames like a phoenix, so it was rather disappointing that her wardrobe hadn’t made more of a show, even if it was only a couple of evening dresses-expensive designer things that she had worn for company dinner dances. Gloria had an uncomfortable vision of herself teetering into a succession of hotel ballrooms over the past thirty-nine years, mutton dressed as mutton, her body stuffed into the glittering carapace of a spangled dress, and her small feet (“pig’s trotters,” Graham called them) bound in unsuitable shoes.

Because he would soon be dead, she felt sure of it. Dead as a dodo. Dead as mutton. Dead as a doornail. Why a doornail? Why was a doornail deader than anything else? (The door itself, for example-equally dead, surely?) Did “dead” exist in the compara-tive? Could something be deader than something else? Dead, deader, deadest. Graham would be deader than Gloria. He would be superlatively dead. It had taken a lifetime for Gloria to realize how much she disliked Graham.

There was more smoke than fire, so she threw a firelighter into the brazier and watched the little tongues of green and blue flames as they began to lick at a rhinestone-encrusted bolero jacket by Jacques Vert. Mineral to mineral, dust to dust. The clothes hadn’t reduced to the soft, powdery ash she had imagined.

The electronic gates opened and closed several times. If Gloria hadn’t known that the man from the security company was down in the basement checking the system, she would have thought that a crowd of invisible people were being slowly filtered onto the property.