Of course there was no way I could sleep after that, what with the conversation just gone and the day to come.
I padded into the kitchen to raid the fridge, and saw, to my surprise, Dad working on his laptop, an apple stuck in his mouth like one of those pigs at Christmas.
His eyes twinkled at me over the apple. Had he seen Shafeen?
‘You on the night watch?’ I said lightly.
He took the apple out of his mouth and balanced it carefully on the table. With the bite out of it, the apple resembled exactly the glowing logo on his Mac. ‘No. I’m not spying on you. I’m doing prep for this Mexico shoot. What cameras we need. Lenses. Blah, blah, blah.’
I took a chair and we talked about his work for a bit, and I found it – as I always did – oddly comforting. He talked about the animals they were hoping to film in Mexico. Coatis, ocelots, axolotls.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘have you ever filmed foxes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Somewhere glamorous, I’ll bet.’
‘Very.’ He smiled. ‘Northamptonshire. It was a documentary about farmers controlling the fox population. Beautiful creatures, they were. But the farmers insisted they needed to be culled so we tried to show both sides.’ He winked. ‘BBC balance.’
I remembered Henry saying the same thing as the farmers. That if a population got too robust, it needed to be controlled by a higher predator. That was back when I still thought he was talking about foxes. Then, abruptly, I remembered the Bible lesson that the Abbot had spoken at the Red Mass. Just another reason that the Mass had to be real – I couldn’t have dreamed up a whole Bible verse, could I? ‘Do they ever set fire to them? The foxes, I mean.’
‘Set fire to them? God, no. Why would they do that?’
‘In the Bible. The fiery foxes in the Philistine corn. Samson sets fire to their tails. Of course the foxes die.’
‘I should think they do.’ He shook his head. ‘Blimey. My fault for giving you a religious education, I suppose. What do they teach you at that school?’
I wasn’t going to open that particular can of worms. Instead, I asked another question. ‘If you see something bad happening to an animal – when you’re filming, I mean – do you step in?’
‘Well, it depends,’ said my dad. ‘If it is just nature taking its course, then no. I’ve had to stand back before.’
‘Backstory, please.’
‘OK.’ He pushed his Mac away. ‘Well, for example, we were filming flamingoes in Ghana. They stand in this salt lake to fish, but if they stand in one place too long they get salt deposits on their legs, which grow like shackles. Eventually the shackles drag them down into the water and they drown.’
I thought about that. ‘How very sad.’
‘Yes. And the temptation is, of course, to catch one, take out your penknife and hack off the salt. But you can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, because it’s natural selection. The ones that move around so much that they don’t get salt deposits are the better hunters. This way the sedentary ones die out and the species becomes more successful – all of them become better hunters. It’s the survival of the fittest, Darwinism in action. In those cases, you just have to let nature take its course.’
At that moment I thought of the bliss of staying here, safe in that warm kitchen with my lovely dad, and letting everyone at Longcross just get on with their own warped version of Darwinism.
‘But if someone was deliberately harming an innocent creature,’ I persisted, ‘in a way that wasn’t just … nature, you’d stop it, no? I mean, if a farmer was setting fire to a fox’s tail, the film crew would step in, right?’
He looked at me steadily for a moment. I could see the exact second that he clicked that we weren’t talking about foxes. ‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course I would.’ He leaned in and gave me a massive hug, the kind that only my dad could give. He spoke into my hair. ‘Greer. Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything I need to do?’
‘Like what?’
‘Step in. Stand between you and harm. Like dads do.’
Like some dads do, I thought. Not Rollo. ‘No,’ I said aloud. What could Dad do? Go up against the de Warlencourts? Tell the police, who were in the family’s pockets? Maybe make himself a target? ‘It’s all under control.’ And I wondered if that was true.
Then Dad held me away from him. He grasped both of my shoulders and looked me full in the face. ‘You’d better go to bed then. If you’re going to put out some fires tomorrow.’
He knew. Of course he knew. Not the details, but that we were going back to Longcross to save someone’s skin. He hugged me again and this time he wouldn’t let me leave the hug for a long, long time. ‘Greer,’ he said, ‘be careful. You’re all I’ve got.’