‘Are you suggesting,’ asked Selwyn, his expression increasingly troubled, ‘he was murdered?’

‘Not only murdered,’ I said, ‘but Wallace confessed his involvement to me just this morning.’ I gave him a quick summary of what Wallace had described.

‘Suddenly I don’t feel so bad for Wallace any more,’ Yuichi mumbled quietly.

‘And he was happy just to tell you all of this?’ asked Oskar.

‘I think he’s been labouring under enormous guilt,’ I said. ‘Not to mention he was out of his mind from pain and morphine. I think he wanted to confess – before, well, before it was too late for him.’ I looked around them all. ‘Casey pressured him into doing things he might never have done otherwise, and I’m certain that’s the real reason he drank as heavily as he did. What the Patriots did to him is only a small part of it.’

‘What about Nadia?’ asked Selwyn. ‘Jesus Christ, they didn’t have something to do with that as well, did they?’

‘As a matter of fact, they did.’ I looked at Oskar. ‘Rozalia believed that someone deliberately smeared some kind of gunk on our transport to make any bee-brains we encountered think we were from a rival Hive, so they’d attack us. Well, I just learned from Wallace that Casey did exactly that, sabotaging the SUV while Wallace himself made sure our communications and drones failed just when we needed them. They worked hard to make the whole thing look like an accident. It wasn’t a jinx, Oskar – it was deliberate.’

‘So where’s Casey now?’ asked Winifred.

‘I don’t know. Last night, before we found all this out, me and Rozalia helped Wallace home after we found him rolling drunk. Casey came along uninvited. He hung around after we left, and nobody’s seen him since.’

‘Look,’ said Selwyn, leaning forward, his expression intent. ‘I’m not calling you a liar, but you’re going to need some pretty fucking incontrovertible proof that Casey really had a hand in all of this, regardless of what your predecessor claimed.’

‘Hey,’ said Yuichi, shaking the pages in his hand. ‘I’d call this pretty fucking incontrovertible.’

I reached into a pocket and took out the half-coin I had discovered in Wallace’s bedside drawer, holding it up as I explained its significance, and how I had come to find it where I had. I watched their expressions grow dark as I detailed the sequence of events that had led us to explore the island’s northernmost tip, and what we had found there.

‘Chloe can corroborate most of this,’ I said, returning the coin to my pocket. ‘Rozalia can vouch for the rest.’

‘Bullshit!’ shouted Randall, standing up and looking about ready to launch himself at me. ‘You’re making all of this up. You’re . . .’

‘Shut up!’ Chloe screamed.