‘You were angry with him and you wanted him to “set the record straight”,’ I said. ‘That was the expression he used, more than once. I was brought in as a tame journalist who could be manipulated or bullied into writing the story that you both wanted. You would have written it yourself in the end, wouldn’t you? That’s why you stole the recordings.’

‘Stole?’ Quin said, wrinkling his nose. ‘I wasn’t going to write anything. Our communications manager here has a way with words, he used to be a journalist like yourself. You would have been pleased with his copy. On deadline, too. But I explained all this to you, in the pub. That’s why you gave us the recordings.’

‘I did,’ I said. It didn’t feel quite right, but the capsizing possibility that that was exactly what happened could not be ignored. Pushing the DVRs across the table, a win-win proposition … ‘So, that’s my understanding of what happened. Except I don’t really understand it.’

‘What part?’

‘Any of it, really. Why were you so furious with Pierce? Or rather, why were you so eager to remedy it this way? If you thought he was a fraud, why have anything to do with him? Why involve me, why go to all this obsessive trouble? You could have just walked away. He didn’t matter. Neither did I. But you kept … messing with us.’

The light around Quin had dimmed while I had been speaking as his various screens went to sleep. They were the only illumination in the room, apart from the cast-off light coming through the glass wall from the God Board, and the technologist had fallen into shadow. With a tiny twitch of one wrist, he woke a screen, and was back, seemingly more pale and stark than before.

‘As I told you, we didn’t have proof of Pierce’s fraud, and I wanted it,’ Quin said. ‘We needed proof he had invented Night Traffic. Because we couldn’t find anything. If it was a fraud, it was perfect. No incriminating detail, no inconsistencies or problems in the chronology. His edit of reality had been exquisite.’

‘Because it was all true.’

‘So it transpires, but we couldn’t tell, and it was infuriating. All we had was his confession, and his apparent sincerity. His emotion.’

A shaving of disgust dropped from the last word. I felt a pang of sympathy for Pierce, to have had this crisis, this fracture, in the presence of the calculating mind of F.A.Q.

‘But why did it matter to you?’ I insisted.

‘When he confessed, when we imagined there was this elaborate fiction in play,’ Quin began, ‘there were possibilities. We were interested in Pierce for more than one reason. But I had to know.’