The foyer was apparently vacant, save for the weird mannequin. The owner took the stairs to the circle but stopped short of the public area, instead unlocking a small door which would have been easy to miss if one didn’t know it was there. It had taken a long time to find out who still owned the theatre and negotiate a key, all in the name of a fake art project.

Inside the small room, the owner seated himself behind the control panel, or where the control panel would have been had all the equipment not been ransacked when the place went bust decades ago. The owner was looking through an opaque window to the theatre below where Priest and Elias should be sitting. The lawyer was very obediently in his seat, but Elias was on stage, just standing there, curtain up like he was in a starring role.

‘Oh, how perfect,’ the owner muttered. ‘How fucking perfect.’

He reached across and undid the top of the bag and then slid the window across a few inches to hear what was going on below, placing an iPhone on the control desk so the camera looked through the gap that had been created in the window. Started recording. The sound would be muffled, possibly even non-existent unless Elias shouted but the owner had set up recording apparatus all around the theatre because it couldn’t be guaranteed that Priest and Elias would sit where they had been told. The microphones were already running.

When Elias made his confession, the world would know.

Chapter 56

Chapter 56

Priest got the feeling that Dominique’s act was staged, quite literally. He seemed unhinged, constantly fidgeting with his hands, not really knowing how to stand. He was waiting for something, but what?

Then he started talking, quietly at first, so Priest had to lean forward to hear but then louder, until his voice filled the theatre and the strangeness of what he said was amplified a hundred times as it reverberated around the peeling walls.

‘I first interfered with my daughter when she was five years old,’ he rasped in a quivering voice. ‘She did not belong to Alexia, but another woman. She was delivered to me to raise, but I abused that privilege. I took her into the basement and made her dress up as a doll and we played for a while before I . . .’ Elias’s voice gave out, tears welling in his eyes. He cleared his throat, almost retched. He was trembling all over. Priest’s eyes widened in alarm as Elias tried to continue. ‘I am a paedophile, a child-abuser. I am amoral. I am sick. But I am not totally without humanity. I am capable of love, as I loved my daughter and as indeed I still love my son, but I cannot control my desires and I am disgusted with myself. My daughter, Elinor, was perfect in every way,’ Dominique continued, decades of guilt tumbling out of his mouth.