They had been through the house.
Not violently. That was somehow worse. Somebody had come through fourteen rooms with numbered plastic markers and a camera and had put everything back approximately where it had been, and the whole building had the particular wrongness of a place that has been handled by strangers who were being careful.
The kitchen island was bare. The cabinet above the sink stood open with an evidence seal across the hinge. There was fingerprint powder in the grain of the terrace door, grey and slightly greasy, and a rectangle of clean floor by the sink where something had been taken.
The garden gloves' hook was still empty. That one had been Sophia. It struck me as very unfair that the house could not tell me which absences were police and which were family.
"They to
