Ellis came around the couch and pulled back one of the heavy drapes to reveal a small door cut into the panel, the entrance to a secret passage. ‘We’ll go through here.’

Petra got up and went to him. Any instinct she may have had to run out of the room, down the swirling staircase and out of the gigantic doors and into the night, find her car, go home, maybe find Vincent along the way, was distantly smothered. She knew she wouldn’t locate Vincent or convince him to go with her until he was finished; she knew they wouldn’t let her just leave the building – she’d tried already, and that was not how this scene worked. Besides, she felt safe to go with Ellis – not once had she felt physically threatened by him, and the consistency of his aloof pretension had mellowed into reliability, something even approaching charm. She believed that any risk was fictitious and designed for her entertainment. And she felt intrigued – sucked deep into the dream-logic of the show by now, she wanted to discover the narrative closure that were being offered to her.

If she just turned and went home, there wouldn’t be a story.

That’s what she was encouraged to tell herself.

Ellis opened the half door and squatted down, shuffling his way through into the shadows beyond. ‘Follow me.’

Petra squatted down and peered into the doorway. From what she could see beyond Ellis’s folded form, into the space that was lit only in a low, gloomy red, the passage was organically carved like a narrow tunnel in a cave. The tepid air inside smelled of deep-dug earth and stale meat. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’ she asked.

‘Of course there is, but it’s boring.’ Ellis shuffled along and rounded a curve.

After looking back at the Club Room – Olivia’s chair vacant, Petra’s whisky glass sweating into the carpet, the stub of Ellis’s cigarette giving up the ghost in the ashtray on the mantel – Petra shimmied into the tunnel, scraping her right shoulder and knocking the top of her head as she squat-hopped to chase Ellis. If there was more than one direction in this passage, she didn’t want to lose him.

She managed to come up to a metre behind him, bumping her elbow and hip in the process, but just then he jinked right into a low archway from which most of the red light was spilling. Petra hurried after him, rounded the corner, and ran out of floor.