Had Vincent convinced himself he’d seen Beccie in the warehouse? That show was custom-designed to make your ghosts emerge. If you had any emotional baggage, it was no surprise if it took shape in that intense atmosphere. The poor man.

‘I heard her calling to me,’ he said. ‘I followed her there.’

Petra didn’t know how she should handle this. It didn’t seem the right thing to let him suffer these delusions, but who was she to correct him? Maybe it was best to just help him in the direction of common sense. ‘You couldn’t have taken this picture. We weren’t allowed cameras, remember?’ Vincent would realise he was mistaken. He’d probably been as sleepless as her – after tripping out on ‘seeing Beccie’, he might have disappeared home, found some publicity shots of Cabinet and photoshopped her image into them. He certainly looked like he’d been doing something obsessive all weekend.

He frowned, thought. ‘Yeah, I did have it with me. I always have it with me, you know that. I took these shots, Petra. You have to believe me.’

It was true: Vincent did carry his camera wherever he went, always ready for a rare image. Petra could imagine him firing off some illicit frames of the inside, even if it meant he’d be kicked out. Illicit shots, the pictures few others would take – they were what a photographer like him thrived on. Though she couldn’t remember him having the camera with him, they’d been separated so soon, she honestly couldn’t swear to it. ‘And no one stopped you?’

‘No.’

‘Mysterious, isn’t it?’ The voice came from behind Petra, in the kitchen doorway, and there he stood. The man in the cheap cream suit, the shiny patent leather shoes. Petra recognised him immediately, and her heart punched her ribs. The man she’d seen at the basement pizza place, who’d been watching her at the pub. He wasn’t wearing the white-banded fedora, and in the bright light of the kitchen she could see his face properly for the first time. He was wearing a layer of foundation but the stark light picked out the pits in his skin. His thinning brown hair was slicked back over a pasty scalp and his eyes were still, their focus unchanging. They made Petra think of a dead shark she’d seen at the oceanarium in Umhlanga. They ran educational shark autopsies, and the day she’d gone on a high-school trip, the thing stared right at her as its hide was sliced open and its liver and belly removed. It almost seemed to be smiling as the Coke bottles and plastic bags were stripped out of its guts.

The man sat down at the kitchen table opposite her, hands in plain sight, folded on the tabletop. ‘I think they wanted him to take the photos. Olivia Jouval gets what Olivia Jouval wants.’

Vincent looked across at him with a strange expression – resignation? fear? – something passive and doomed. Like a schoolboy would look at a bully he knows he has no chance of outrunning. Taking a deep breath in before he gets his ass kicked again.