slowly, like someone drugged to the eyeballs—and looked at me with the same incurious, affectless gaze he would have given to a chair or a mug. Finally something switched on in his eyes, he blinked and said, “Yes? Did you find something?” and I came up with some babble, and gradually he found his way back. There were mornings when he came down in the same clothes he had been wearing the day before, crumpled into deep slept-in creases. When one evening I suggested tentatively that maybe I could help him change, he snapped, “Do you think I’m a fool?” and the glare he hit me with—a blast of pure undisguised disgust—shocked me so badly that I stammered something incoherent and buried my face in my book. The excruciating silence went on for what felt like forever before I heard his steps dragging out of the room and up the stairs. I was half afraid to go downstairs the next morning, but he turned from the cooker and smiled as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t just Hugo. Around him, Melissa was her usual happy self (and even now he never turned on her, with her his voice was always gentle, to the point where I actually found myself getting absurdly jealous); but when my family came over she went quiet, smiling in a corner with watchful eyes. Even when it was just the two of us, there was a subtle penumbra of withdrawal to her. I knew something was bothering her, and I did try to draw it out of her, a couple of times, maybe not as hard as I might have: I wasn’t really in the right form for complex emotional negotiations myself. I was still hitting the Xanax every night and now occasionally during the day, which at this point made it hard to be sure whether my array of resurfacing fuckups—brain fog, smelling disinfectant and blood at improbable moments, a bunch of other predictable stuff way too tedious to go into—was cause or effect, although obviously I had a hard time going for the optimistic view. Hugo and Melissa pretended not to notice. The three of us maneuvered carefully around one another, as though there was something hidden somewhere in the house (landmine, suicide vest) that at the wrong footfall might blow us all to smithereens.
Even though I knew it made no sense, I blamed the detectives. They had ripped through the place like a tornado, questioned us as if we were criminals, thrown us out into the street, all that stress had clearly fucked with my head and it had to have given Hugo a hard shove towards that downslide; they had wandered off and left us with a variety of pretty disturbing questions that they clearly had no intention of bothering their arses to answer; when you came down to it, we had been doing fine before they came, and now we weren’t. They had done something, as yet unclear, to the foundations, and now the whole structure was creaking and twisting around us and all we could do was brace and wait.
* * *
A week, ten days, and nothing. And then one evening—a cold, gusty evening, Halloween weather, torn leaves tumbling against the windowpanes and thin clouds scudding across a thin moon—there was a knock at the door. I was in the living room, in front of the fire, reading an old Gerald Durrell book that I’d found on a shelf and discovered I could actually follow, since there wasn’t much in the way of plot arc. Melissa was at some trade fair; Hugo had gone to bed straight after dinner. I put down my book and went to the door before whoever it was woke him up.
A torrent of wind hurled itself in and down the hall, knocking something off the kitchen table with a clatter. Detective Martin was on the doorstep, bundled and blowing, shoulders hunched.
“Jaysus,” he said, his face brightening at the sight of me. “The man himself. You’re a hard man to find, Toby, d’you know that?”
“Oh,” I said. It had taken me a moment to recognize him. “Sorry. It’s my uncle’s house—he’s sick, I’m staying here to—”
“Ah, yeah, I know that bit. I’m talking about the road. I’m after spending half the evening going in circles looking for it—and my car’s in the shop. I’ve frozen the knackers off meself.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Ah, beautiful,” said Martin, heartfelt, heading past me, cold striking off him. “I