We were back in the small room. There were wooden canvas crates leaning up against the right-hand wall, and metal shelves to the left containing files, paper and stationery… but I kept watching this time. One of the canvas crates was open and the painting inside was fully visible. It was of a man at a piano with two women around him, and the whole thing was bathed in candlelight. As we moved in closer towards it, my breath caught in my throat. I stared at the image, tracing the outline, the colours, the form and holding it up to the light of my memory thinking, What the actual fuck?

Because, it couldn’t be.

All I could do was stare at that painting and try to steady my breath, watching as the camera swivelled and Sabine looked straight into the lens and said, ‘Je sais ce que tu fais, Agnès,’ before blowing a kiss.

That means: I know what you’re doing, Agnès.

What was this?

Wesley was fucking around with the printer by then, his lips moving every now and then and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me, so I pulled my earbuds out to check.

‘Is your system working? Mine’s super slow,’ he asked.

‘Mine’s fine,’ I replied as snippets of memory from a long-gone conversation came trickling back – Austria, ceiling panels, SS, fire. It had been with a gallerist in Vienna, not long before Harrison finally gave me the shove. I’d had a lot of time on my hands by then. That was where I learned about that painting. Or rather, that’s where I learned about the fire and everything it destroyed. I went back to the hotel room and while I waited for Harrison to finish ‘rehearsing’ I googled it, imagining a world where those paintings were still hanging on a wall somewhere.

And that painting of the man at the piano was one of them.

But I had to be wrong about this. It made no sense.

I was still staring at my screen when the elevator doors slid open and the sound of Stan talking on the phone snapped me back into the present moment. I looked back over my shoulder and he was watching me as he headed across to his desk. I turned back to my computer, set my face to nonchalant, opened my email account and sent myself those two videos, ejected the drive and dropped it back into my bag for safekeeping. Then I dropped the empty envelope in the wastepaper bin beneath my desk.

I put my phone in my bag, stood up and took it to the bathroom.

As soon as I closed the cubicle door, I pulled up a search engine and typed in everything I remembered about that conversation in Vienna: fire, World War II, paintings, destroyed, ceiling panels, SS.

Up came a Wikipedia page for Schloss Immendorf.

I scanned the details.