were out cold. Better safe, amn’t I right?” He arranged himself comfortably against the wall by the living-room door, hands in his pockets. “Have a look around, tell me if you spot anything missing. In your own time.”
“The TV,” I said. I’d been expecting it but it still looked impossible, the big blank space on my wall, as though if I blinked hard enough my TV would surely be back in its place. “And the Xbox. And my laptop, unless someone put it away somewhere—it was probably on the coffee table—”
“No laptop,” Martin said. “Anything on it that anyone might have wanted?”
“No. I mean, my credit-card numbers would have been on there somewhere, but they could have just taken my—” The top of the sideboard was bare. “Shit. My wallet. It should be, I keep it right over there—”
“Gone,” Flashy Suit said. He had his notebook out again, pen poised and ready. “Sorry. We’ve canceled the cards and put a flag on them, so we’ll be notified if anyone tries to use them, but so far no dice.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Anything else?” Martin asked.
My eye kept being pulled back to the bloodstain shadows on the carpet. The memory caught me like a singeing crackle of electricity: clogged snuffle of my breath, pain, green curtains, a gloved hand reaching down— “The candlestick,” I said—I was glad to hear that my voice sounded normal, even casual. “I had a candlestick. Black metal, about this big, shaped like one of those twisted railings with a, a, a petal thing at the top—” I couldn’t make myself tell them how I had brought it out of the bedroom with me, the big hero all ready to smash the living shit out of the bad guys. “It was there, on the floor.”
“We’ve got that,” Martin said. “Took it for forensics. We think it’s what they hit you with”—indicating his temple. “We’ll get it back to you once the Tech Bureau’s done with it.”
The scar on my head itched, suddenly and viciously. “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Anything else? Anything here that shouldn’t be?”
I looked around. My books were all wrong in the bookshelf; I didn’t want to ask whether it was the burglars who had spilled them out, or the detectives searching. “I don’t think so. Not that I can see.”
“Those drawers there,” Martin said, pointing. “They went through those pretty hard. When we got here, the papers and that were all over the floor.” Another fizz-zap of memory, crawling through rubble that rustled and slid under me— “Any idea what they might’ve been after?”
The top right drawer was where I had had my hash and the leftover coke. Apparently the burglars had been considerate enough to take those, unless Martin was bluffing to see if I would lie to him—that affable, neutral face watching me, I couldn’t read anything off him— “No,” I said, pushing at what was left of my hair. “I mean, not that I can remember? Mostly it’s just stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere else. Paperwork, the restore disks from my laptop, I’m not even sure what else was in there . . .”
“Have a look through it anyway,” Martin suggested, only it wasn’t really a suggestion. “Maybe something’ll ring a bell.”
Nothing did. Fish food from when I’d had a tank years back, a T-shirt I’d meant to return to the shop but had forgotten about, why would I have a Radiohead CD, had someone lent it to me, was someone out there bitching about how I had never given it back? I kind of thought there had been an ancient digital camera in there, but I couldn’t be sure and certainly couldn’t remember, when Martin asked, what photos had been on it—pre-college holiday in Mykonos with the guys maybe, long-ago parties, family Christmases? The sun was turning the room into a terrarium and the chemical smell was giving me a headache, but I didn’t want to suggest opening the patio door when the detectives weren’t complaining and anyway there was a new lock on it, shiny and not quite covering the pale splintered wood where the old one had been broken out, and I didn’t have the key. I had changed my mind about these guys being better company than my mother. At least I could have told her to leave.
They took me through the apartment methodically, ruthlessly, room by room, drawer by drawer. My clothes were put away wrong, too. My grandfather’s watch was in fact gone: I gave the