Dear Diary,

What an insane thing it was, to sit in the middle of something that I created. This must have been what it was like to have a child. I’d never really thought of having one myself—too dangerous. But this overwhelming sense of achievement was something I could probably get used to. Every single person in that room at the Lord Chesterton was there because of me, because of what I had done. I took my place at the back of the room when the journalist arrived, hoping when Ted introduced her to his “associates” she’d misunderstood that label to include me. I didn’t know who the big hairy beasts who had turned up to support Ted were, but his shoulders seemed to have relaxed a little, now that they were here. Fabiana did her important fluttering around, setting up the Facebook Live feed and directing her podcast helpers to check identities as people arrived through the door. I watched Ted retreat to the end of the bar, flanked by his keepers, unable to decide, it seemed, if he should smile with embarrassment at people as they came in or pretend to be distracted by the view out the small window.

I had the whimsical sense that these people were all actors in my own play, that my hero, Ted, was standing there and breathing and trying to control his nerves simply because I had put him there with my devastating act; I had decided his fate. And no, look—I don’t want to sound like I think that what happened to Claire was justified because it created all this, this activity, this energy. But isn’t everything that is born, born of pain and suffering? It was because I suffered my affliction that I’d acted, and because Claire had suffered my actions that this had all come about. It was almost musical. I felt a real desire to know intimately what Ted had suffered in prison because of me. We could share pain with each other. That’s what people don’t understand. Sometimes pain can be as magical and productive as joy.

Ted took his place at the head of the room, and Fabiana did her cringingly narcissistic introductions, her shiny dark red bob picking up the lights at all the right angles, liquid ink. And then, before I knew it, Ted was speaking, taking us through that day again. He was agitated. Not a public speaker. Turning his wedding ring around and around.

When it came to question time, the audience erupted with hands high—the wrinkled arms of middle-aged ladies and the tattooed trunks of huge, muscled men. There was a teenager in the room, a boy in the front row with his mother. Fabiana decided who would get to ask their questions.

Urgh, what a bunch of sops they were, too! Half driven to prove their own unique emotional investment in the case, half determined to show Ted unparalleled demonstrations of sympathy, they prattled on with their theories about who had attacked Claire. A known rapist living in the area. A South Australian serial killer, inactive since 1975, reemerged somehow back into the killing fields, a row of ghost girls trailing sadly in his wake. When a woman at the back suggested someone from the drug-dealing underworld might have committed the deed to frame Ted, the big lugs in the corner bristled and huffed like disturbed crows, rattling the enormous gold chains at their necks. These people so badly wanted a piece of evidence to suggest that Ted was innocent, a simple answer that would come shining down out of the sky like the beams of an alien ship. There was a heavy lady in the back row waggling her arm back and forth who just about looked like she was going to suggest some X-Files-style solution to the problem. I shifted as far away from her as my seat would allow.

The scariest thing I heard that day was a question from the first couple of rows, the arm of a young man I couldn’t see.

“Ted, have you or the police followed up at all on the leads Amanda Pharrell gave you? The ones about the blue ute and the white dog? I think it’s in episode seven of the podcast…”

I had heard, of course, in episode seven, the mention of Ted passing on some leads to Fabiana Grisham about the ute and the dog. The details were vague, and the two weren’t mentioned again. I hadn’t been worried, as I understood that Amanda Pharrell, the woman who had dug up the leads in the first place, was crazy. There was no license plate mentioned. No witness corroboration, no composite sketch. And in the mixture of hundreds upon hundreds of leads mentioned across the podcast, the blue ute and the white dog were indeed true, but didn’t seem to be given more attention than the rest of them. It helped that the podcast stated that the CCTV of me was blurry and unusable, the RSPCA hadn’t identified me or my car, and that the ute they were looking for was a Ford Falcon XF. That was good.

“We’re looking into a couple of things with that,” Ted said. “I’d rather not go too deep into what’s happening with the investigation right now.”

Bullshit, in other words. The ute and white dog leads were bullshit. Ted didn’t have a thing on them, and neither did his weirdo friend Amanda.

The final question from the audience was a real bleeding-heart case, a true eye-roller, but I guess I should have expected something like it to top off the sycophantic display of Ted-love the audience had shown for the entire event. A woman put her hand up and asked, “Whatever happened to the white dog?”

Ted was taken aback. “Um”—he searched the ground for an answer—“I don’t actually know. We didn’t trace the dog after it was dumped at the RSPCA.”

“I hope it’s okay.” The woman’s voice was smaller now, sad. I think I threw up in my mouth a little. These people had done a mad scramble to show Ted they cared deeply about him and the case in the hour they’d been given, to demonstrate how incredibly sensitive they all were. As the journalist woman called the event to a close, there were still questions to be answered. Ted looked exhausted. I thought about leaving, joining the slow shambling queue of people heading out the doors.

But I had to let him know what he had done, I guess. I had to speak to him again. Because what’s coming now is because of him.