And all the while my head chases its tail, trying to work out how this has happened. I’m marched down the road towards a waiting patrol car. Faces pop up in windows, desperate to know what’s going on. I feel like ducking my head, hiding my face, but I try and force myself to stand tall. The noble hero being abused.

But just before we reach the car I have a thought so terrible it feels like it’s stopped my heart.

What if I did do it?

What if it was me who killed Dirk Zeeman? Or rather a different part of me. The part that I’ve called the black wolf. What if all along the cannabis wasn’t really feeding the white wolf, it was actually nourishing the black? Made it strong enough to fully take over, without me even noticing?

I try to think, imagine how that could be.

I remember coming here, to this street, the house where the body lies. I remember working out the chain of logic. Dirk being the son of the last remaining board member at DH Biotech when the trial took place. I remember it all, so none of this makes sense. Unless …

Unless that all could be leakage between the two parts of me. False memories, disrupted realities to cover what I’d done?

I’m shaking badly, and even though I’m freezing cold sweat is seeping out of my skin. It’s true I’d not been able to get hold of Vermeer or Jansen on the way. But maybe I hadn’t really tried, maybe I was living between worlds and only pretended to call them, pretended that they didn’t answer. Was one side of my brain fooling the other? Spinning stories to cover its tracks, keeping part of me from knowing just what the other part was up to? I’ve interviewed people like that, people who seemed genuinely confused about what they’d done. Have I become one of them?

Has cannabis, just like the authorities have always claimed, made me schizo? Am I the copycat?

The thought’s like a thunderclap.