“When I spoke to Jessica Howard, she said it was your idea that Emily do medicine. She suggested that you were anxious one of the children be the keeper of the Howard flame. That that burden came to rest upon Emily.”

A flash of rage creased her brow and stained her cheeks like wine spilled on white linen.

“It was not a burden, that’s so typical of the way Jessica twists everything, Emily wanted to do medicine, wants to still, she…”

Sandra caught herself, and gave a rueful little laugh, and twisted her mouth in acknowledgment of her flash of temper.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Loy. Sisters-in-law. Jessica is…not always the easiest person to get along with. I’m sure it is difficult to marry into a family like ours. But her own insecurities, her need to be the center of attention, haven’t helped matters. She wouldn’t even come to my mother’s funeral this year. Said they’d never got along, and to pretend otherwise just because she was dead was hypocrisy. Never mind that it was her husband’s mother, the self-obsessed fucking egotism…”

“Did Emily go to the funeral?”

“Of course. She and her granny were close. But look, I don’t…I didn’t really want to get into all this…I don’t necessarily believe that’s at the root of Emily’s issues…”

“I think family is central,” I said. “She seems very angry at the Howards. That there’s some great tradition, some grand example she’s expected to live up to. She wishes you’d just all leave her alone.”

Sandra nodded.

“She’s nineteen, just started at college, a new life. Maybe that’s as it should be. Jonny’s gone the other way, he talks about the Howards like we’re an empire on the march, superior beings all. Probably healthier at that age to want your family on the sidelines. Make your own name.”

I was relieved at what she said. It didn’t mean the blackmailer had gone away. But it suggested that the source of Emily’s troubles was not as grave as it might have been.

We stood in silence for a moment. The fire, reflected in the black glass of the wall, seemed to wash the room in its red glow; logs spat and hissed in the grate. Sandra smiled, and this time I smiled back. She came close to me; I could feel her breath on my face, her wood spice scent, her sudden need. I swallowed, and took a step back, and put my hand in my jacket pocket, and fingered the mass card that had been left beneath my windscreen wiper outside Shane Howard’s surgery, and played a hunch.

“All right then, Sandra,” I said. “Do you remember someone called Stephen Casey?”

I must really have fallen for Sandra Howard. Because when she looked at me, and looked away and as quickly back, and said, “Who?” and then, when I had repeated the name and she, having given herself time, having made a thinking face and taken a thinking walk, shook her head emphatically and said “No,” not only did I realize instantly that she was lying, I was surprised.

“He died on All Souls’ Day, 1985,” I said.

Her eyes cast around the room, and up at me, and away again. It was almost painful to watch. The telephone rescued her. She left the room to answer it, and I stared at the fire and tried to remember the last time I had been surprised that someone was lying to me. I looked in the flames and tried to remember my ex-wife’s face. I found that I couldn’t.

I WENT THROUGH A DOOR THAT LED DOWN TO THE FRONT of the new house and stood outside and smoked a cigarette. There was a sloping garden and a gravel drive that seemed to lead down to the road, and I wondered why Sandra Howard had not approached the house this way. But since I was already wondering whether anything she had told me was the truth, it didn’t seem the most pressing detail. I wondered also whether I should feel pleased with myself that I had caught her in a lie, thereby breaking the spell she had cast over me, or dismayed by my easy susceptibility to a beautiful woman who paid me some attention. Maybe it was Jessica Howard who had got under my skin; maybe it was her daughter’s lurid adventures in pornography. Male lust is a tenacious and comical affliction, immune as it can sometimes be to feelings of compassion or understanding; at times it reduces us all to the lunatic in that Italian movie, sitting in a tree hollering “I want a woman.”

I checked my phone and found that Dave Donnelly had called again. I walked down the drive a pace, intending to ring him, when I spotted a circular pool halfway down the garden. Security lights lit the grass as I approached it, and I realized it was a match for the pool in the back garden of Emily’s dollhouse. It was bigger than the one in Shane Howard’s back garden, and less ornate: a low, roughly packed granite wall, maybe three feet of water, a rough sandy bed. No marble, no crystal gems, no sense of it being a memorial or a deliberate feature. I looked back up the hill: the turrets and castellations of Rowan House loomed up behind the new extension, ghostly in the mist, like a phantom castle from a gothic romance.

When I walked back up to the house, Denis Finnegan and Shane Howard were in the living room with Sandra. Shane was attempting to fix himself a drink he evidently didn’t need; when he saw me he came across and wrapped his arms around me, pinning my hands to my sides, and lifted me off the floor in an embrace. He smelled of whiskey and of rain.

“You found her! You boy ya! You found my princess!” he roared. His voice was hoarse, ragged with emotion; he looked like he’d been crying. He set me down and batted me on the shoulders with his forearms; I raised my hands to prevent him picking me up again.

“Have you seen her?” I said.

“I looked in,” he said. “She’s woozy. Sandra had a doctor in to give her something. Best to sleep it all off.”

Shane nodded then, as if his daughter’s difficulties could be dispensed with like a hangover, and went back to his drink. Denis Finnegan raised his eyebrows and beamed conspiratorially at me; Sandra looked anxiously around at us all.

“Where did you get to today, Shane?” I said. “We were all trying to get hold of you.”

Shane thrust his chin out and shrugged, like a bored and dismissive primate.

“Just needed to get some air, you know? After talking to you, got rattled. Couldn’t sit still. Drove around a bit, parked up near the old pine forest on Castlehill. Turned the old phone off, so I wouldn’t be waiting. The waiting is the worst. Tramped around there for a while. Stopped off for a few drinks, little place in the mountains. Then turned the phone back on and got the good word.”

Shane delivered all this in a burly rugby-club drawl that brooked no further interrogation. Maybe that was all he had done. And maybe I was bought and paid for. But I wasn’t going to be treated like the help.

“This case is not closed yet, and for as long as it runs, I’ll need access to you at any moment; I don’t want you to vanish like that again, do you hear me?” I said. “That’s if you care a damn about your daughter’s safety.”

Shane was ready to blow at that, but I didn’t give him an opening. Instead, I gave him what I had given Sandra: the sexual relationship between Emily and Jonathan, the two porn films and David Brady’s involvement with them, the threat of blackmail over underage sex leading to Emily’s part in the extortion attempt on Shane Howard, the uncertainty over just who was behind it all, the murder of David Brady. I left out the detail of my having been in David Brady’s apartment, and I left out Tommy Owens and Brock Taylor; I gave them everything else.

Shane Howard had been on his feet when I recounted the history of his daughter’s sexual relationship with her cousin, his hands balling into fists, his eyes blurring with rage; but the news of David Brady’s murder hit him the hardest. Sandra went to him and wrapped her arms around his great shoulders and pulled his head to her breast and they subsided to the floor, Sandra whispering to her little brother and stroking his sand-colored hair. It was touching and pathetic, a grotesque pietà that was moving and disturbing. It was a pity there wasn’t a fourth tower, the Howard Psychiatric Hospital; then the entire family could walk down the hill and check themselves in. I realized then that I wanted, as much as anything else, to understand this family in their houses on the tops of hills, to uncover their secrets, to see the Howards plain. Once I had admitted that to myself, I knew that there was no way on earth I was stepping off this train until the end.