An intuition, faint but certain now. All along I had sensed that the dimensions of this room were wrong. The hallway too long. The office too short. A hidden room here. Not in Nelson’s wine cellar. Alicia would be arriving at his house soon. Maybe even finding the gallerist there alone, looking puzzled at the intrusion.

When Layla had slung me all the way to the wall panel, she stopped, breathing heavily.

“Well, this is what you both were looking for, isn’t it?” she said to me.

Layla sat down at Nelson’s desk, propping her chin in her hands. My head felt clearer, but my muscles were still weak. I found if I lay very still, I could think better, but I wanted to run. I must have made a noise because she looked over at me.

“It will be easier if you sleep through this,” she said in a tone that bordered on pity.

“Please,” I said, keeping my skull pinned to the ground. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s all his fault. Not yours.”

“I know,” she said. She smoothed her hair back in swift, automatic gestures. “I could leave this whole disgusting mess.”

I fought against the fog in my head. I had to press her. “You tried to leave once,” I said. “You got scared by what happened to Calvin. You left for grad school. You found Erik. You were free.”

A tremor crossed Layla’s face, and then it went blank again. I needed to push for that tremor to return.

“Any person would take your side,” I said sleepily. “Nelson manipulated you. The age gap. Your father’s friend. No one guessed, so no one helped you.”

Layla’s face was still glassy and blank. I thought through the timeline: how she’d started dating Erik at LAAC, how the London trip had exposed him cheating on her, how she must have run back to Nelson. Then Brenae’s death came, then Kim Lord’s murder and Nelson’s financial crash.

“You knew getting back together was a bad idea,” I said. “But Still Lives went down and Nelson lost everything. You couldn’t abandon him. Not even if you had started to believe he might have killed someone. Maybe two people.”

Layla blinked. “He did not touch Brenae,” she said. “Never.”

“I meant James Compton.”

“James Compton choked on his own vomit,” Layla said. “Nelson adored him. He was devastated that James died.”

“If Nelson didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, “how could Calvin blackmail him?”

She shrugged.

“Nelson stole something from James,” I guessed.

“No, he kept some of James’s money after James died, so he could carry on his work. That’s all. But that guy, Calvin, claimed he wanted to tell the true story of Shoreditch. He wanted a stipend for a couple of years, he said. To make sure he got ‘the facts’ right. Ha.”

“So what happened?”