‘He’d be easier to find, wouldn’t he?’

‘Easier to find? If he’d left us some DNA, we’d have him banged up already.’

‘But, as it stands, we have no evidence to charge Tony Donnelly in connection with the Mullen killings.’

‘No, none at all. But he’s not going anywhere, since we have his prints from the Shogun. So we can worry about that later.’

Fry stood up, abandoning her untouched coffee on a corner of the DI’s desk. No matter how hot it seemed at first, coffee from the machine always turned cold and undrinkable with unnatural speed.

‘But the case against him for Rose Shepherd will be tight enough, won’t it?’

‘If forensics come through,’ said Hitchens. ‘With luck, we’ll get a DNA match from the car, gunshot residue from his clothes, footwear impressions from the track where the Shogun was abandoned. There’ll be something, don’t worry. We’ll build a tight enough case. In fact, it’ll be a headline grabber when it comes to trial.’

Fry still hesitated. ‘I wouldn’t want the Mullens to get forgotten in all the excitement. In a way, the arson was a far worse crime.’

The DI nodded. ‘They won’t get forgotten, Diane, I promise you. Why don’t you get on with that line of enquiry now, and start sifting out some possibles from intelligence? The IU ought to be able to suggest a few names you’d go to if you wanted a nice house fire in a hurry.’

There was one other subject they weren’t mentioning. It had all been gone through already, and no doubt it would be thrashed out again before long.

‘And the Lowthers?’

‘They’re coming in tomorrow,’ said Hitchens. ‘And I’m not looking forward to it one bit.’

‘Ben Cooper has gone home, by the way,’ said Fry, though the DI hadn’t asked her.

Hitchens looked hurt, as if she’d accused him of not caring about his officers. ‘Yes, I know. But he seemed OK, don’t you think?’

‘As far as I could tell. He gave a clear enough statement, but that’s just training. It was a hell of a thing to happen. Ben was right there, and he did his best. John Lowther was always going to do it, one way or another.’

‘But knowing Ben …’ said Hitchens.

‘He’ll be blaming himself. Right.’

At home that night, Cooper was going automatically through his routine – feeding the cat, taking a shower, checking the fridge, remembering he had no food in the flat. That was the great thing about routines – you didn’t need to think. You could switch off the brain and freewheel.

Then he switched on his PC and opened Outlook. The evening’s crop of email included a series of George W. Bush jokes, sent by his friend Rakki from his office address. It looked as though he’d forwarded them to everyone he knew, so the jokes would be doing the rounds for a while yet. In fact, Cooper was sure he’d seen most of them already.

He read them anyway. Not because he was interested, but because it stopped him thinking about anything else. It stopped him re-running the images and sounds from a couple of hours before – the terrified expression on a face falling through air, a sickening crunch, and a voice suddenly cut off, stopped short as if someone had turned the ‘off’ switch of a radio. And the awful silence that followed. Worse – the singing of the birds and the whirring of cables, as life carried on as normal, undisturbed by the moment of death. It was as if they were mocking him for his failure.

Oh, wait. That was the stuff he wasn’t going to think about.

Cooper surprised the cat by picking him up and rubbing the fur behind his ears. Randy gave him a hostile look. This wasn’t in the routine. There was still food to be eaten.

‘OK, OK. It’s not your problem, I know.’

But it had done the trick, and broken his train of thought. He put the cat down again and turned back to his email. How many is a brazillion? That was a good one.

Of course, there was more to think about yet. It was Friday, the day of Matt’s appointment with Dr Joyce, their GP. Matt knew his brother would be home at this time of the evening, but he’d have no idea what Ben had been through during the day.

As if their minds were already making a connection, the phone rang. Ben had no doubt who it was. He could picture Matt in the office at Bridge End Farm, and he could imagine his expression changing with each unanswered ring. He could just decide to ignore the call, of course. Would Matt give up and go away, and never mention the subject again? No, he wouldn’t.

‘Hi, Matt.’

There was a second of silence. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘It figured.’

‘I keep forgetting. You’re a detective.’

Matt sounded calmer than when they’d spoken last night. Was that a good sign, or not?

‘You had the appointment today, right?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Was it any use?’ asked Ben.

‘Well, actually – yes.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing. He just listened.’

‘Right. So …?’

‘He’s a smart bloke, that doctor,’ said Matt. ‘That’s all I needed, really – somebody to listen. I felt a lot better afterwards.’

‘Well, that’s good.’

Ben reflected that it was perhaps what he’d refused to do himself, to listen. He hadn’t wanted to hear what Matt was saying.

‘Do you know what I reckon?’ said Matt. ‘I think I was getting worked up about this business over Mum’s problem so that I didn’t have to worry about the real stuff.’

So they were back to the euphemisms. Back to the family collusion, the maintenance of the pretence. That was quite normal.

‘Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. Was I right to call?’

‘Yes, you were right, Matt. Thanks. I’ll see you at the weekend, probably.’

A moment of silence again. The sound of Matt thinking. ‘Are you OK, Ben?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

Finishing the call, Ben went back to his PC. There was an offer of fake Rolex watches that hadn’t been caught by his junk-mail filter, and an advert for the latest bargains at an online CD shop he’d used once. And there was an email from Liz. It was only a short one, but it meant a lot more than all the others put together. It finished with a little smiley face formed by a colon, a dash and a bracket.

It was odd to think that this might have been Rose Shepherd’s means of communicating with the world. Emails were a deceptive form of communication at the best of times. Without hearing the intonation in someone’s voice, or getting clues from their facial expression or body language, it was easy to misinterpret the meaning of their words. Irony could be taken literally, a joke could be read as an insult, and ferocious arguments could develop for no reason. Conversation was transmitted through a filter that got half of it wrong, like some unfinished translation program.

But at least it was communication, of a kind. Cooper remembered his mother’s attitude after she’d begun to get really ill and almost never left the house. Lying in her bed at Bridge End Farm, she had once said to him in a lucid moment that she wasn’t sure the world existed any more. When he asked her why, she explained that she had no evidence it was really out there still. Other people talked about it sometimes, but she never actually saw it for herself.

It had been pointless for him to argue with her. Of course, her family and friends often sent her postcards from the places they visited. Cheerful, colourful pictures of sandy beaches and historic buildings. France, Italy, Florida, Skorpios. Bulgaria, even. But Isabel Cooper didn’t believe in those places, any more than she believed in the people she saw on TV. For her, the outside world had become a series of images on a screen, and a set of postcards in a box. Just another illusion.

Maybe she had come to believe, like Bishop Berkeley, that nothing existed unless she perceived it for herself. Cooper didn’t know much about philosophy, only what he’d learned in a sort of slogan form during General Studies lessons at Edendale High School – esse est percipi, the principle of existence through perception. So he wasn’t sure what else Berkeley’s theory said. Was the opposite true? If you perceived something, did that mean it existed? Or could perception be an illusion, too?