Wherever there was. Now that she was forced to accept some sort of existence after death, some sort of existence alongside us, she still couldn’t accept it. The idea of Helena floating about in a karmic migrant detention centre for eternity didn’t sit well. In the past ten days she’d devised an idea. She preferred to believe that what she’d seen of Helena was the last flash of her physical energy reaching out to Petra’s empathetic neurons. Or something like that. In any case, what she preferred to believe made no difference to what was real, what was true. And it didn’t explain how Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes were playing a vital part in the avant-garde theatre industry after they were dead. She shelved the questions because the answers still didn’t match her worldview.

What was important right now was what Vincent preferred to believe – and to try to engage with him on that level. Whatever she chose to believe, it was his metaphors that would motivate his actions – and she wanted to know what action Vincent was planning to take now.

‘What did she want? Can you tell me?’ she asked.

‘She asked me to do something.’

‘Worthing.’ Petra lowered her voice and pressed her mouth closer to the phone, but nobody hunkering past on the pavement was listening. ‘She asked you to kill Curtis Worthing.’

He said nothing – a confirmatory silence.

It all made sense. This is how it would have worked with every other show – find a likely perpetrator, seed the thought… then wait. ‘Have you done it?’

‘Yeah, right,’ he scoffed. But when he picked up that she was serious, his tone sounded genuinely appalled. ‘Of course not.’

‘Why not?’

‘Jesus. Because I don’t believe it’s what Beccie would really want. You were right – they’re using her to get their way, confusing her, feeding her lines. Beccie’s not like that.’

‘But why not, Vincent? He needs to pay. We could find a way. This is what Olivia wants. And she gets what she wants. She can tell us how to do it without getting caught—’

‘Petra.’

‘They always make it look like an accident, like a coincidence. If we just get in touch with Ellis, he’ll—’

‘Petra! Jesus Christ. Just stop, will you?’

After a chastened moment Petra said, ‘Can you come and see me?’

A long pause. ‘Listen, Petra. I’m sorry to say this now, but maybe I should’ve said it earlier when I realised…’

‘Realised what?’

He sighed. ‘It’s just that I don’t think it’s a great idea for us to… I mean, for me to see you anymore.’

‘Oh.’

‘I think you got the wrong idea. You’re great, really, but maybe you took it all more seriously than I could. I tried to tell you that. That I… that I couldn’t get into anything serious. With anyone.’