“And that’s the motive? Revenge?”

“More complicated than that. Pat isn’t doing what Conor signed on for any more. Conor isn’t getting his transfusion of secondhand happy-ever-after, and he’s desperate for it. So he decides he’s going to step in and put things back on track. It’s up to him to fix things for Jenny and the kids. Maybe not for Pat, but that doesn’t matter. In Conor’s mind, Pat’s broken the contract: he’s not doing his job. He doesn’t deserve his perfect life any more. It should go to someone who’s going to make the most of it.”

“So, not revenge,” Richie said. His voice was neutral: he was listening, but he wasn’t convinced. “Salvage.”

“Salvage. Probably Conor’s got a whole elaborate fantasy about sweeping Jenny and the kids off to California, Australia, somewhere a web designer can get a good job and keep a lovely family in style and sunshine. But in order to step in, he needs to get Pat out of the way. He needs to break up that marriage. And I’ll give him this: he was clever about it. Pat and Jenny are already under pressure, the cracks are starting to show, so Conor uses what’s to hand: he steps up that pressure. He finds ways to make them both paranoid—about their home, about each other, about themselves. He’s got a knack, this guy. He takes his time over the job, he ratchets things up little step by little step, and before you know it, there’s no place left where Pat and Jenny feel safe. Not with each other, not in their own home, not in their own minds.”

I realized, with a kind of detached surprise, that my hands were shaking. I shoved them into my pockets. “He was clever, all right,” I said. “He was good.”

Richie took his nail out of his mouth. “I’ll tell you what’s bothering me,” he said. “What happened to the simplest solution?”

“What are you on about?”

“Stick with the answer that needs the fewest extras. That’s what you said. MP3 player, speakers, remote control; extra breakins to move them around; a load of luck so Jenny never hears the noises … Man, that’s a lot of extras.”

I said, “It’s easier to assume that Pat was a fruitcake.”

“Not easier. Simpler. It’s simpler to assume that he was imagining the whole thing.”

“Is it? And the guy who was stalking them, wandering around their house eating their ham slices, at exactly the same time as Pat was turning from a sensible guy into a looper: that’s just a coincidence? A coincidence that size, my friend, that’s one hell of an extra.”

Richie was shaking his head. “The recession got to both of them; no big coincidence there. This thing with the MP3, though: that’d be a one-in-a-million shot, making sure Pat hears the noises and Jenny never does. You’re talking about day and night, for months; and that house, it’s not some massive mansion where people can be miles apart. No matter how careful you were, sooner or later she’d hear something.”