After two or three days things seemed to come to a head for him. “If you won’t come over,” he threatened, “I’m giving up. I’m sick of dealing with it all.” There was a pause, then: “Michael? I’m sorry. I know you wanted this to be—”

There were no further calls after that, until the most recent one. And all that said was:

“Kearney?”

There was a background noise like rain falling. Kearney tried to return the call, but Tate’s phone seemed to be switched off. When he replayed the original message, he heard behind the rain another noise, like a signal feeding back then swallowing itself abruptly.

“Kearney?” Tate said. Rain and feedback. “Kearney?” It was hard to describe how tentative he sounded.

Kearney shook his head and put on his coat.

“I knew you’d go out again,” said Anna.

As soon as Kearney let himself in, the black cat, the male, ran up to him, fawning and mewling for attention. But he extended his hand too suddenly, and, lowering its haunches as if he had hit it, it ran off.

“Shh,” said Kearney absently. “Shh.”

He listened. The temperature and humidity of the suite were supposed to be tightly controlled, but he couldn’t hear the fans or the dehumidifiers. He touched a switch and the fluorescents came on, buzzing in the silence. He blinked. Everything but the furniture had been crated up carefully and moved somewhere else. There was plastic packing material scattered over the carpet, along with discarded strips of heat-seal tape. Two damaged cardboard boxes, bearing the logo of a firm called Blaney Research Logistics, lay discarded in a corner. The benches and desks were empty but for the dust which had built up over the months of their occupation, to make circuit-like patterns between the installations.

“Puss?” said Kearney. He drew with his finger in the dust.

On Tate’s credenza he found a single yellow Post-it note. There was a phone number, an email address.

“Sorry, Michael,” Tate had scribbled underneath.

Kearney stared around. Everything Gordon Meadows had said about Tate came back to him. It made him shake his head. “Brian,” he murmured, “you conniving bastard.” He was almost amused.

Tate had taken his ideas to Sony, with or without the help of MVC-Kaplan. He had clearly been planning it for weeks. But something else had happened here, something less easy to understand. Why had he left the cats? Why had he disconnected the flatscreen displays, then swept them onto the floor and kicked them apart in a rage? You didn’t associate Tate with rage. Kearney stirred the pieces with his foot. They had fetched up among the usual litter of junk food wrappers and other refuse, some of which was more than a week old. The cats had been using it as a lavatory. The male was cowering in the wreckage now, staring up at him like a little live gargoyle.

“Shh,” he said.