Without Hutchinson, I was at a loss. I checked my credit card, but he hadn’t even billed it. Like Peter, he was gone, and I was torn between fear that something awful had happened to him and the conviction that he was an opportunist, a fraud, a failure who had never been any kind of real detective at all.

In the end, I phoned Patricia and told her it was time to report Peter missing to the police. It was what you were supposed to do, after all. After delivering the news, I hung up and watched two films in a row that left no discernible trace in my mind whatsoever. There were explosions. That’s literally all I can tell you. But films with explosions weren’t enough. On YouTube, I hunted for footage of molten lava, volcanic eruptions, showers of magma. From a drone, I looked down on Plosky Tolbachik in Russia, Marum Crater on the island of Vanuatu, on Nyiragongo Volcano, Congo. I saw uninhabitable landscapes of roiling fire, flowing lava rivers that destroyed everything in their path, and I couldn’t look away.

Back at work, as ever, there was much to be done, the never-diminishing list of tasks. But I couldn’t feel it anymore, the hounding urgency. It was like my job had gone the way of other games, crazes we had indulged in at school, like marbles or cat’s cradle, until the day we suddenly didn’t. I sat at my desk and did nothing. Sometimes I signed off without reading what I was signing off on. At night, I watched the volcanoes, waiting to see what would come next. Something was coming free, underneath the surface, somewhere under my skin, away, out of sight, because how else can you explain it? The quickness with which I responded to Alice’s email, the fact that within nine hours of receiving it, I was on a plane.

The email came at about eleven in the morning. It’d been two weeks since I’d seen her. I paused before opening it, wondering if Alice was perverse enough to send me a thank-you note. The message took less than twenty seconds to read. There was an attachment. Around me, my colleagues tapped at their keyboards with lowered eyes. The air-conditioning droned. My skin prickled all over, like I was being stung by a swarm of microscopic bees. I clicked, and the file opened to show a color scan of a cutting from a newspaper. The writing wasn’t in English—a Romance language. Spanish? No, Italian—but there was a picture, a photograph underneath the headline. It took a few seconds before I saw what Alice was getting at.