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heart from a sprinter’s gallop.
    Despite everything that had happened it might still be OK. Blinking back tears, Eddy made his way back to the van.

FOUR
    It was as a punishment that MacKechnie made her come in here, sitting on a hard chair in the soporific light of the bedroom, interviewing the bed-bound daughter-in-law who was little more than a bystander.
    Morrow could hear them behind the door, out there, behind her in the hall, a happy gang, muttering, looking at details, gathering important scraps of information that would flesh out the story while she was in here, being kept busy and out of the way.
    Meeshra looked rough, black fuzz grew down the sides of her face and her hair was wild, knotted at the back, where she had been sleeping on it.
    The door was shut behind them, for the sake of modesty, while Meeshra threatened the baby with her engorged nipple. The two-week-old child bucked and struggled, his gummy, desperate mouth clamping to skin and fingers but failing to meet the breast. It was too full, Alex knew, so heavy with milk that the baby couldn’t get his mouth around it. But the advice stuck in her throat. It seemed improper and intimate. It wasn’t her job, it was for a health visitor to tell her.
    “They were waving the gun and shouting. Looking for a guy called Rob. ‘Robbie.’ A right Scottish name, in’t it?”
    Lancaster lingered in Meeshra’s accent but it was fading to Scottish. She had been here for less than a year, she said, moving in with her in-laws after her wedding. They were a happy family, and here she blinked, a prosperous, hardworking family, and she blinked again.
    A female officer was standing behind Alex, jotting the lies down, allowing Alex to simply watch. Every individual had a tic that signaled a lie, and the best way to find it was ask them about their family.
    Morrow was sure that Meeshra wasn’t lying deliberately. Family myths and fables were more than conscious fibs; they were a form of self-protection, conversational habits, beliefs too embedded to challenge: she loves me, we are happy, he will change. But there was always a tic. It amazed Alex, the craven need of people to tell the truth. During questioning, when inconsistencies started to show in a story, people often broke down, sobbed with the desire to be honest, as if getting caught lying was the very worst that could happen. She’d seen men carve fingernails into the palms of their hands, breaking the skin to relieve the pressure to tell. Adamance was the most common giveaway. She’d never again trust anyone who began a sentence, “Honestly,” or “To tell the truth.” These were flags raised high above a statement, drawing the casual viewer’s attention; here be dragons.
    Professional liars thought out excuses beforehand and stuck to them, but synthetic memories were unwieldy; ask for a color or a detail and they were too slow to answer. Fluent liars were dangerous, either because they were so malevolent or suggestible.
    The skill of spotting lies had given Morrow a jaundiced view of the world. The worst of it was that it denied her the luxury of lying to herself. The cold light of day was no place to live.
    So she envied Meeshra’s insistence that they were all happy together. Sure, there were tensions but her mother-in-law was basically a good person, a bit educated but still good, and she knew how she wanted the house run and where the furniture should go and she had her own ways of cooking, eh? That was natural, right? And the baby was such a blessing, a son, first grandchild. She blinked at that and Alex noted it, filed it away. We will be happy, Meeshra said, stopping, surprised to find herself using the future tense.
    She pressed the baby towards her tit again. He rolled his bald head back and gave out a dry, thin squeal. Frustrated, Meeshra squeezed her nipple between her fingers and a powerful arc of watery milk jetted across the bed and soaked into the sheet. Tearful with embarrassment, she