All the houses in Thorntonhall were big and lonesome. Even the smaller cottages were nestled in ostentatiously large gardens or had massive extensions hidden at the back. The hedges along the road were groomed into immaculate angles.

The arrangement of the village didn’t make sense to Morrow, looking out of the passenger window. On the outskirts the houses were tall Victorian villas, but towards the center they had seventies flair, angled roofs and big picture windows. She wondered if the center of the village had been bombed in the war.

Her driver took a sharp left down a tree-lined avenue towards the incident address. Away from the main road the houses were even newer, beige brick mansions monkeying the style of the older villas but with double garages, double glazing, double everything.

The avenue forked into two driveways at its end; a brand-new road of yellow chevrons led downhill to a modern ranch-style mansion and the uphill fork was a strip of raw-edged tarmac, leading up to a crumbling gray flint country house.

“I don’t get this place,” she said. “Where’s the shops round here? Why would you build a mansion down the hill from that mess?”

“That’ll be the original estate house,” said the driver, quietly nodding uphill.

“The estate?” Morrow sat forward.

The driver seemed embarrassed suddenly and Morrow had to strain to hear her. “Well, this one, the house we’re going to, it’s the oldest house on the highest position. See how the older houses are further away? All the land would have belonged to this house once. They’ve been selling it off in bits, furthest away, then closer, finally these giant new houses.”

Morrow looked at the gloomy old mansion, saw what the driver meant. She felt a shivering thrill of realization, saw the village grow up in her mind.

“How d’you know that?”

But the driver was reluctant to show her cards. “Just…watch a lot of architecture shows…TV.”

They craned forward as the car pulled up the steep incline, Morrow eager to be there and re-feel the synaptic twang. This was not the original driveway, she thought, trying to add to the driver’s conclusion, because a horse and carriage couldn’t have taken the sharp ascent. It was a new access to the property, built when the real driveway was sold off for the mansion with the chevron road. She looked at the driver for the first time. She was a new recruit but older, thirties maybe, had a just-out-of-uniform formality to her. She was pretty and dark with a fantastically Persian profile. And she was English.

Morrow didn’t press her. At the top of the hill the tarmac gave way to gravel, the car losing pull. They came around the front of the house and saw DC Harris, looking worried, standing next to two squad cars and a big forensics van.

The façade was pleasingly symmetrical and solid, built of gray stone, small windows and a big green front door at the top of a short flight of steps.

“What style is that then?”

The driver glanced up. “Georgian.”

“How can you tell?”

The driver frowned and looked at the house. She knew the answer, Morrow could tell, and she could see where the reluctance to admit it came from. A broad knowledge of architectural forms wasn’t much of a bonus in the canteen, and being a woman, older and English would already set her miles apart from the rest of them. The force was all about belonging, about them and us.

The woman blushed a little. “Um, well, everything’s kind of square and the windows are a giveaway. See the three windows on the first floor?” Morrow looked up, saw three small windows equally spaced along the first floor with sash openings. “That’s typical, but it’s late Georgian.” She pointed to the green front door in a square porch, sitting at the top of six steps. “That’s Georgian. You get doors like that in Bath and Dublin. Did you see the oval rooms at the back?”

“Where?”

“The middle rooms at the back of the house come out in a semicircle. That’s Georgian. That extension there,” she pointed to a block attached at the side, built in the same stone but with long tall windows in a set of three, “that’s neoclassical. That’s later. Victorian.”

Morrow looked at her. She was wearing a suit too expensive for someone of her rank. “Where the hell are you from?”

“Surrey. East Molesey.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“My partner got a job up here and I applied. Late recruit.”

It showed. She wasn’t intimidated by Morrow’s rank, had none of the schoolyard politics about her. “What did you do before?”

“Had my own business, electronics.”

Morrow grunted. They were dangerously close to making pleasant conversation. She wondered if “partner” was code for “lesbian partner” or just a common term in Surrey. She didn’t seem butch but then lesbians didn’t anymore. “They treating you OK?”

She shrugged a shoulder and looked away, blinked. In short no, they weren’t, but she wasn’t letting it get to her and she wasn’t going to tell on them.

Morrow was impressed. “Good for you. Ambitious?”

She looked at Morrow, gave a sharp nod, eyes cautious behind. No one admitted to being ambitious nowadays.

“Good. When you get promoted over their heads they’ll say it’s because you’re female. You’re smart, that’s against you, so’s being a bird and being English and—well, yeah.”

The driver pretended not to understand the unspoken but her mouth twisted in a thwarted smile as she pulled on the handbrake. They sat together and watched Harris walk over to the car. His skin was as Scottish as it was possible to be without actually being tartan: white on the brink of blue. He had small eyes, black hair and a ridiculously small mouth that barely met the width of his nostrils.

“Look,” muttered Morrow, as Harris walked over to the car, “I won’t tell anyone you said that, about being ambitious.”

“Thanks, boss,” she said quickly.

“You’re smart though, so you know, keep close and, um…” Morrow was suddenly aware of how short her time was, how soon she would be irrelevant. She wanted to be helpful but had nothing concrete to offer. “I’ll take your ideas and pass them off as my own.”

She meant it as a stupid joke but the driver thanked her again, their voices overlapping.

They opened the doors and stepped out at the same time. Morrow was relieved Harris was there so they couldn’t speak to each other anymore.

“Aye,” Harris frowned at the driver, “you—on the door-to-doors. Specifically: saw anything? Knew the residents here? And whether they’ve been up recently. We need to know whether anything was stolen. Wilder’ll take you.”

The driver nodded and walked over to DC Wilder lingering by the cars.

“Who is that?” Morrow asked when the woman was out of earshot.

Harris looked. “DC Tamsin Leonard.”

“She smart?”

Harris grunted noncommittally. Morrow could have slapped him. Since the last round of pay increases DCs were getting a better wage and overtime for every extra minute over their shift. It was a disastrous decision. The men were making more than the DSs and didn’t need to stay on for days at a time until a case was resolved. Now, fingering someone for a promotion would be a betrayal and the smart ones were hiding among the donkeys. But the disenchantment went deeper than that. Bannerman’s rudeness had made it a point of pride among the men to hide their lights, as if being good at their job was helping Bannerman be a prick. The belligerence was bedding in. Morrow felt that she was watching it harden from a habit into the culture of their team.

She looked up at the roof of the Georgian house, pretending to check the property over, glad of the excuse to arch her back. “Been in?” she asked.

Harris nodded uncomfortably at the ground. “Hmm…”

“What?” she said. “Mess?”

“Bad mess,” he said quietly.

“Since when?”

“Last twenty-four hours. Probably yesterday evening.”

Morrow looked up. The roof tiles were clustered, sitting not quite true. Lumps of dead leaves peeked out over the gutters around the roof. Standing in full view at the side of the house, a septic tank slumped on rusting stilts. On the far corner, above a window, a tiny yellow hexagon housed the alarm, but the plastic was sun faded and the blue lettering no longer legible.

“This is one of those worth-a-fortune/cost-a-fortune houses, isn’t it?”

Harris nodded at his notes. “How was your funeral?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“No, I know—”

“It was my auntie’s.”

She’d had to lie. She’d already said her father died because she couldn’t bring herself to admit that her son had. Not for a long time. Eventually, she admitted that Gerald dying was the cause of her depression, but she’d still pretended her dad died around the same time. They made her sit for session after pointless session with a counselor in the welfare unit. She did her time, knowing nothing would help and all her bosses would ever see was the time sheet. Her father’s death was one lie she wasn’t prepared to admit to. It freed her, broke the link with the infamous McGraths and she felt triumphant, claiming he was dead when he wasn’t. It made her feel as if she had killed him.

“Yeah,” said Harris, “your auntie.”

“It was all right, anyway.”

“Yeah, good.”

She looked up again. The house had been dearly beloved of someone at some time: an apple tree in the front garden was overloaded with fruit, unpicked, dropping and rotting in the overgrown lawn. The flower beds had been turned but not replanted.

She found it depressing—it made her think of Danny and John and the frailty of family, how easily, despite all the parts being in place, everything could suddenly turn to shit. “Where’s the cash?”

Harris looked at her, the little “o” of his mouth like an undelivered kiss. “In the kitchen.” He raised his eyebrows. “There’s more than we thought. It’s in euros.”

“High denominations?”

“Five-hundreds.”

They smiled up at the house. Five-hundred-euro notes usually meant money laundering, usually meant drugs. It was the highest denomination note available in a dependable currency and needed far less space than hundred-dollar bills. “How much?”

“God, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands?” He grinned. “Wait till you see it.”

“Someone in there with it?”

“Aye, Gobby. He’s glad of the sit down.”

She felt herself warm to the house. “She had the money but she’s not spending it? Is it someone else’s? Maybe she didn’t know it was there.”

Harris shrugged. “Possible, not likely. Wait till you see where it is.”

If it was drug money it could lead them to a team, a big international operation. It could make for a nice tidy case, give them extra clean-up.

“It’s something well organized anyway ’cause it’s not loose cash. It’s got bank bands on.”

“You know this area?”

He shook his head. “Been in and around for an hour or so, haven’t seen a soul in the streets but workmen and gardeners.”

“Ma’am?” Leonard had hurried over from standing with Wilder. “Boss called. Says your phone’s turned off so he called him.” She pointed back at Wilder, standing a hundred yards away holding his work mobile and looking shifty. He had been wise enough not to come over with the news. “Wants to talk to you.”

“Does he now?”

At her shoulder, Harris coughed a wry comment.

Leonard didn’t understand what was going on. “Yes?” she said uncertainly.

“Say you couldn’t find me.” She turned her back abruptly and asked Harris, “So what’s the story?”

“Female, twenty-four years old. Her mother died here recently—”

“That hers…?” She pointed to a steel ramp leaning against the steps to the front door.

“Yeah, mother was in a wheelchair.”

“Carers coming in and out?”

Harris checked his notes. “Round-the-clock care. Found a set of accounts in the living room.”

“Expensive?”

“God, aye. Makes me want to save up paracetamol for my own mother, looking at that.”

“Maybe the money was for that?”

“You’d keep it in a bank then, wouldn’t you? If it was straight.”

In their peripheral vision, they saw Leonard edge away.

“Check the agency they used, find out who was coming, who had keys and so on.”

They watched Leonard arrive at Wilder’s side and say “I can’t find her” to him. Wilder held the phone out to her. Morrow was glad to see Leonard hold her hands up and back off.

“Shit runs downhill,” observed Harris pleasantly.

Morrow allowed herself a smile. “So, victim’s name?”

“Sarah Erroll.” Harris paled slightly.

“You look ill, Harris.”

“Oh…” He tipped his head up the stairs to the green front door, cringed and glanced down at her stomach. “I dunno…”

Morrow tutted at him. “For God’s sake, don’t start that.”

She looked back at him. Harris was genuinely not sure that she would be all right. It bode ill, she thought; Harris was fairly hardened.

She looked up the steps to the open front door. A white-suited scene-of-crime officer was kneeling inside, examining the lock, but the house yawned black beyond him. “Who found her?”

“Lawyer was expecting her at his office, a meeting about the estate details from her mother’s death. She didn’t arrive so he came here…”

It didn’t sound right. “That was sinister enough to warrant a visit?”

“Very out of character, apparently. She was steady, always where she said she’d be. Important papers. He came to find her and did. He’s still inside.”

They had been there for nearly an hour. Morrow wasn’t just late because of the funeral, she’d had to drive back to the station to dump her car. Officers were not allowed to use their own vehicles on police business, in case they ran someone over or got followed home. “Still here? Get him out. Get him to the station—why’s he still there?”

Harris drew a sharp breath. “Intruders came in around the back. We’re doing forensic there but also trying not to bring him out past the body. He’s kind of trapped.” He cleared his throat. “The men are calling her ‘nice legs.’ ”

“Who?”

“Sarah Erroll.”

“Something happen to her legs?”

“No—‘shame about the face.’ ” He hissed a breath in through his teeth. “’S a mess.”

Morrow groaned. It was bad for a victim to have a dehumanizing nickname just one hour after the start of an investigation. It was hard enough as it was to get the men to admit that they cared. There was only one thing worse than a violent death, she thought, and that was a humiliating or funny death. No one gave a shit then and it impacted on the quality of the investigation.

But there must be some pity in it: Harris looked pale, sad, and his eyes searched the gravel as if he’d lost something and it worried him.

Morrow looked away and muttered, “What, is it sexual?”

Harris paused to draw breath and she flinched. She hated sexual murders. They all hated them, not just out of empathy with the victim but because sexual crimes were corrosive, they took them to hideous dark places in their own heads, made them suspicious and fearful, and not always of other people.

“No,” he said, finally, sounding unsure, “not superficially. No sexual assault. She was fine-looking though. Slim…there’s photos. We should think about that as a possible motive, maybe.” Harris took a deep breath and tipped his head sideways to the house, eyebrows raised in a question. “Not joking, it’s bad, boss.”

She was suddenly very angry. “You keep saying that, Harris—yes, you have managed to get that over.”

He smiled at the ground. “OK.”

She slapped his arm hard with the back of her hand. “Talk about a bloody buildup. You should do trailers for the movies.”

As they set off for the steps Morrow was affecting barely contained fury and Harris was smiling, no longer worried for her.

Anger was her trump card, the sole emotion that could sweep sorrow to the curb. Stay angry, stay detached. Everyone was worried about her doing the job because she was pregnant. She could feel herself fading in the eyes of the big bosses, becoming an invisible factor, dying in their eyes. They made ludicrous suggestions that her pregnancy might make her forgetful, emotional, incapable. Actually, the pregnancy had sharpened her mind and brought her into the day. She never wanted it to end. She knew her dread was partly about her son’s sudden death, but she had spent time in the special care unit once, as a cop, when she was sent to guard a newborn awaiting adoption. The mother had tried to stab it through her own stomach and they were afraid she would get out of her room and come for it. While Morrow was there a nurse had told her the statistics about twins. For now she lived moment to moment, enjoying it while she could, savoring the visceral minutiae of this time before, the taste of food, the depth of sleep, the intimate wriggles inside her skin. She had never been more acutely in the present than she was now.

They took the steps up to the house together, watching the ground for traces. The stone was spotted with lichen, the balustrade moss-covered. A rotting cast-iron boot scrape was sunk into the bottom step, lions rearing on either side, their noses and ears eroded to stubs.

The door at the top of the steps was green, heavy, solid, and a forensics guy was kneeling down, taking scrapings from the brass lock. The intruders hadn’t come in this way, but they would have to prove that no other method of entry had been used. A recent home-invasion case had failed because a wily defense had created reasonable doubt by suggesting a possible second entrance by an unknown crew. It came as an order from the top: they had to use their limited resources proving negatives while hairs and fiber traces got blown around hallways.

Harris followed behind her and when, for a moment, she tottered on the doorstep, she felt his palm brush her back. She was only five months gone but she was already enormous. Her center of gravity was shifting every time the twins moved. She smiled back at him and heard him give a little snorting laugh.

The shallow porch inside the door had a black stone floor. A worn oak bench sat on one side beneath a series of coat hooks, empty, apart from one gray woolen jacket on a hanger. It was unusual, chic, with round lapels, a tight waist and a flare at the hips. A red label with gold writing was just visible. On the door jamb a holy water font hung on a string from a nail, the little semicircular sponge inside dried up and yellow.

“Papes?” she said, wondering instantly if the word was offensive.

Harris nodded. “Suppose.”

She shouldn’t have said that. She was sure the word was insulting. “That’s unusual, isn’t it? I thought you couldn’t be a landed toff and a Catholic. They couldn’t inherit land or something…”

Harris shrugged. “Maybe they’re converts.”

Morrow expected to see a line of muddy wellingtons in the porch. Instead, a pair of elegant black velvet high heels were casually discarded on the floor, one upright, one collapsed on its side. They were new: the scarlet sole was barely scratched. Next to them lay a small Samsonite wheelie bag: a molded white plastic oval with a crocodile-skin pattern punched out on it. It was a hand-luggage bag, very new, and clean, with a first-class British Airways luggage tag looped through the handle. She stepped over and looked down at it. Glas Intl from Newark, dated yesterday, in the name of Erroll. It was a very small bag to take to New York.

She pointed to the handle. “It’s hand luggage but she checked it in. What did she do that for?”

“Heavy?”

“Maybe. She have other bags with her?”

“Not that we can see.”

She pointed at it. “Get that dusted and take it in, I want to see what’s inside. Call US immigration. Her visa entry form will have a note of which hotel she was going to stay in and how long for.”

Harris scribbled in his notebook.

“What have we got on her so far?”

“Not much at all. Next of kin on the passport is her mother, who’s dead. We found her national insurance number but it looks like she’s never worked.”

“Might be right. She could be living on family money?”

“Still pay income tax, wouldn’t you? On interest or something?” Harris looked at the first-class luggage tag. “She had money.”

“Could she have worked abroad? Or be married? Have another name?”

He shrugged.

Morrow looked into the dark hall. “The kitchen cash could be her inheritance, hidden for tax reasons.”

“In new five-hundred-euro notes?”

“Aye, right enough.” They were in it now, talking in shorthand, half voicing half thoughts, seeing through the same eyes. She thought again that it was a shame Harris wouldn’t put himself forward for promotion. For him it wasn’t just about the money, it was personal: he loathed Bannerman. She saw Harris flinch when the man’s name came up in his company, and when any routine humiliation was visited by Bannerman on one of the troops they looked to Harris. She was hoping to be out of the department when it came to a head.

Through an inner door the reception hall was imposing but windowless. Two large oak doors led off it; one into a giant empty living room with faded blue silk wallpaper, one to a shabby library. The right-hand wall was punctured with a large flat arch leading to the Victorian extension and the stairs.

The darkness was exacerbated by wood paneling up to waist height and deep chocolate wallpaper flecked with gold. All the light in the room came from the arch. The brown wallpaper on the left of the hall had faded to a striking orange diagonal where the sun hit it: a pale smear of time across the wall.

The black and white tiled floor was pitted and grimy. Like the porch, the hall was curiously devoid of furniture and effects. She could see empty spaces, lighter tiles, darker wallpaper, where furniture had been removed and pictures had been taken down. She pointed at them.

“Burglary?” Harris suggested.

Morrow looked at a six-foot-high square of brighter paper on the wall. A giant dresser had stood there for a long time. “They’d have needed a hell of a big van.”

It caught her eye because it was clumsy: through the opening to the stairwell, lying against the wall, was a red mobile phone. It was a chunky, inelegant handful that lay comfortably on its side. It didn’t match the velvet high heels in the hall.

“What is that? Her mother’s phone?”

“That,” smiled Harris, “is a taser disguised as a phone: 900,000 volts.”

“They left it?”

He shrugged. “They left it or it was hers, we’re not sure. They’re available in the US.” He nodded back to the suitcase. “She went there a lot, nearly once a month according to her passport.”

Morrow was surprised. “The money coming from there?”

“She didn’t seem to be going anywhere else.”

The taser phone could have been left there by the intruder. Traceable objects left at the scene were sometimes hidden, fell under car seats, slid under heavy furniture, dropped down the side of settees but sometimes they were found in full view. Most people scanned a room as they left it, but in the heightened state of awareness after the commission of a crime people sometimes remembered to take their cigarette butts but forgot they’d left their car outside.

She stepped back and looked around the hall again, bringing her eye to the phone afresh. Very visible. It seemed unlikely that they dropped it and didn’t spot it on the way out. All it would take was a backward glance. There was nothing in the hall to lose it behind. “I think it might be hers. Has there been a threat, a recent break-in?”

“I’ll find out.”

She filed it away, aware of the soothing sense of calm that came over her when she spotted an incongruity. She noted them and waited patiently for the meaning to make itself known. This looked complex and distracting, the sort of case she’d mull over in her bath, as she rubbed the baby oil on her belly at night, as she dodged calls from a psychologist assessing her rapist nephew. She warmed at the prospect, as others would in anticipation of a football match, a concert, a drunken night out. It was the promise of utter absorption.

Morrow approached the arch that led into the Victorian extension and a big room so light it was slightly dazzling after the darkness of the reception hall.

The forensic team were still processing the scene; she could see their shadows shifting on the wall, hear the crisp crumple of their paper suits around the corner.

She led Harris towards the body and felt him staying in her blind spot, trying to hide behind her. He was bracing himself for what he knew was coming up.

It was another large, empty room, this time papered in time-yellowed cream, veined with blue, speckled with birds faded to an almost invisible pink. Turning the corner, they saw the edge of a white plastic stairlift chair folded flat against the banister at the bottom of a wide wooden stairwell. It was new, clean and the remote control was perched on the armrest, ready for use.

“Careful…,” muttered Harris behind her.

She was about to turn and reprimand him when she saw the woman’s feet, far apart from one another, toenails painted scarlet. Morrow’s weight shifted half an inch and, confronted with the full sight, she lost her breath. She had expected disgust, had defenses against that, but against sheer, suffocating pity she had nothing.

The woman had come down the stairs, in a hurry, holding the banister maybe. She must have fallen backwards and they killed her where she lay. Her legs had fallen open at the knees, the orchid of her genitals assaulted the eye. The neck was still intact, the rest of the body apparently untouched. It was a nice body. Slim brown legs, slender sun-kissed thighs.

But the worst of it for Morrow was that she had clearly not been positioned like that: her feet were uneven. Sarah Erroll had dropped there, died there and had been left. The killer had not looked at her, thought how to demean her and set her in a way that was undignified. They had left her there carelessly. Her vulnerability was unbearable. Morrow understood the distancing joke about her legs now: it was only a matter of time before the officers came to despise Sarah Erroll, as if she had chosen to be found like this, because the reality of it was too pitiful.

She stepped over, took a breath and tried to look at the injuries but she found herself examining the banister: delicate struts, deep warm wood. SOCOs were taking fibers from the dried pools of blood on the stairs, white-suited, their little boxes of kit, white plastic vanity cases, littering the steps.

Morrow tried again but her eye would not stay where she put it. It skitted off the face to the window high above the stairs, to a painting of a greyhound hung on the wall, to a bloody footprint on the stair next to her.

It was natural, she knew that: the need for order in a face. When injuries were this catastrophic there was nothing to anchor the gaze, no starting point for the human map. It took an act of will to force your eyes over it, a cold determination to orientate yourself.

She remembered a scene-of-crime photograph from a helicopter crash on a hillside on the Western Isles. The front of the chopper had been cut off so the pilot’s body was clear and crisp in the picture when it was projected onto the cinema screen in the dark room in Tulliallan Police College. He was sitting upright, his right hand still resting easily on the throttle. She remembered the confusion she felt looking at that face: red but not bloody, no eyes, no lips but the teeth were there, a strangely shortened nose. She remembered the feeling of disorientation as her eyes slid around the picture until she suddenly saw Munch’s The Scream hanging down at the pilot’s side like a deflated balloon. His face had been sliced off by the rotor blades.

Morrow took a breath and forced herself to look at the red pulp at her feet, made her eyes stay out of respect for the woman, to set an example. The lobe of one of her ears had become detached and nestled under the shoulder, a fleshy comma, speckled pink.

It was easier to look at photographs back at the station, often more effective for finding patterns or traces, but the officers in the hall would see her looking closely at the woman, tell each other and it would set the tone. No nonsense, no hysterics, look straight at it and say what you see.

The effort of looking made her breathing shallow, her heart rate slow and the blood drain from her extremities. She was standing so still that the twins in her belly mistook horror for sleep and performed sinister somersaults around each other.

She was looking at a blunt-trauma split in the skin, feeling the babies dance a slow sensuous ballet in honor of the mess, when the flesh pulsed suddenly and Morrow lurched back, thinking the thing alive.

She looked up. A SOCO ghost stood at the top of the stairs, face obscured, eyes guilty. A door had been opened on the first landing and the light had shifted on the body.

It began as a nervous titter. Someone in the hall laughed and she looked around. Suddenly everyone in the hall was laughing, embarrassed in the circumstance, and the laughter became relief, a normalizing expressing of shock and disgust, puffed out in great hearty gusts, echoing around the hall and snaking up the stairs, punching through the oppressive silence in the old house.

Morrow tutted. “Calm down, for God’s sake. As if you’ve never seen a bit of pudding before.”