Chapter 6

“Yeah?”

“Father can be, well…” Rupe stared off into the clouds that were billowing around the sky. “You mustn’t mind anything he says. Best to just play along, really. He has senile dementia, you see.”

It was so unexpected I stared at him.

“Started around ten years ago, although we didn’t know at the time, of course. He started to forget things. People.” Rupe took a deep breath and flashed me the worst acted smile I’d ever seen. “So you mustn’t mind anything he says. Or does. He can’t help it, the poor old dear. But he was having one of his better days when I came out this morning, so he may be quite all right.”

He led me around the house to a side door that opened without a key. We walked through the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen—the table in the middle was bigger than our whole kitchen back home, I reckoned—and into a black-and-white tiled hallway with a wide staircase leading up off it.