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tight as unborn babies’, as if when the world goes killer they turn inwards and backwards, back to that first safe place.
    Richie made a small noise like a cat with a hairball. I trailed the torch around the room, to give him time to pull it together. There were a couple of cracks in the walls, but no holes, unless they were hidden by the posters—Jack had been into Manchester United. “Got kids?” I asked.
    “No. Not yet.”
    He was keeping his voice down, like he could still wake Jack Spain, or give him bad dreams. I said, “Neither do I. Days like this, that’s a good thing. Kids make you soft. You get a detective who’s tough as nails, can watch a post-mortem and order a rare steak for lunch; then his wife pops out a sprog and next thing you know he’s losing the plot if a victim’s under eighteen. I’ve seen it a dozen times. Every time, I thank God for contraception.”
    I turned the torch back to the bed. My sister Geri has kids, and I spend enough time with them that I could take a rough guess at Jack Spain’s age: around four, maybe three if he had been on the big side. The duvet was pulled back where the uniform had tried his useless CPR: red pajamas twisted up, delicate rib cage underneath. I could even see the dent where the CPR, or I hoped it was the CPR, had snapped a rib or two.
    There was blue around his lips. Richie said, “Suffocated?”
    He was working hard at keeping his voice under control. I said, “We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem, but it looks possible. If that’s what we’ve got, it points towards the parents. A lot of the time they go for something gentle. If that’s the word I’m looking for.”
    I still wasn’t looking at him, but I felt him tighten to hold back a wince. I said, “Let’s go find the daughter.”
    No holes in the walls here either, no struggle. The uniform had pulled Emma Spain’s pink duvet back up over her, when he gave up—preserving her modesty, because she was a girl. She had the same snub nose as her brother, but her curls were a sandy ginger and she had a faceful of freckles, standing out against the blue-white underneath. She was the older one, six, seven: her mouth was a touch open, and I could see the gap where a front tooth was gone. The room was princess pink, full of frills and flounces; the bed was heaped with embroidered pillows, huge-eyed kittens and puppies staring up at us. Springing out of darkness in the torchlight, next to that small empty face, they looked like scavengers.
    I didn’t look at Richie till we were back out on the landing. Then I asked, “Notice anything odd about both rooms?”
    Even in that light he looked like he had a bad case of food poisoning. He had to swallow extra spit twice before he could say, “No blood.”
    “Bingo.” I nudged the bathroom door open with my torch. Color-coordinated towels, plastic bath toys, the usual shampoos and shower gels, sparkling white fixtures. If someone had washed up in here, they had known how to be careful. “We’ll get the Bureau to hit this floor with Luminol, check for traces, but unless we’re missing something, either there was more than one killer or he went after the kids first. No one came from that mess”—I nodded downwards at the kitchen—“and touched anything up here.”
    Richie said, “It’s looking like an inside job, isn’t it?”
    “How’s that?”
    “If I’m some psycho that wants to wipe out a whole family, I’m not going to start with the kids. What if one of the parents hears something, comes in to check on them while I’m in the middle of doing the job? Next thing I know, I’ve got the ma and the da both beating the shite out of me. Nah: I’m going to wait till everyone’s well asleep, and then I’m going to start by taking out the biggest threats. The only reason I’d start here”—his mouth twitched, but he kept it together—“is if I know I’m not gonna get interrupted. That means one of the parents.”
    I said, “Right.