Thank you for talking to us.

I have to let it all sink in.

I try to recall my first interview with Balder. I can remember the passages that were printed, but not the in-between banter. What did we talk about? What did I reveal about myself?

It takes me only a few minutes to find the digital recording of the interview on my laptop. I click open the file—not without reluctance—and almost immediately, Balder’s deep voice fills the room and I see him before me again, sitting over his coffee in the Adlon (presumably the only place good enough for him), sizing me up with those tiny, darting eyes of his. Later that day he would make a pass at me, apparently failing to notice the dislike I was fighting to conceal behind a carapace of professionalism. But I didn’t know that then.

I fast-forward a little to skip the polite clichés at the beginning of the interview, then click on Play.

‘I read your feature on guns,’ Balder says. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I’ve always been fascinated by guns. Haven’t you?’

My reply was fuzzy. In fact, Balder was altogether louder and clearer, presumably because I’d placed the recorder nearer to him—but perhaps also because, unlike me, he made no effort to keep his voice down. He seemed not to care that everyone else in the hotel could hear what he was saying.

‘Why did you do the feature if you have such an aversion to guns?’ he asked, in response to whatever I said.

‘Precisely because of that aversion, I suppose.’

‘And what makes guns so terrible?’

‘You can do such terrible things with them.’

‘You mean, you can kill people with them?’

Again, my reply—if there was one—was inaudible.

‘Do you think you could do that?’ Balder asked. ‘Kill someone?’

‘No,’ I heard myself say with a laugh. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then what are you scared of?’

I closed the file; I’d heard enough. After that first meeting in the Adlon I had persuaded my boss to let me write a longer feature on Balder rather than stick to a straight interview format. She had agreed and I’d gone on to interview Balder a second time. That was when I met Coco. And disaster took its course.

I had never put so much work into a feature. Luckily, it went straight to press because my boss was laid up with appendicitis and couldn’t check through it. I knew it wasn’t balanced; I had sided entirely with Coco and the other women.

Fuck that, I thought. The bastard deserves it.

I close my laptop, feeling so calm that I know I haven’t yet grasped the full implications of what I’ve just heard.

The whole thing was orchestrated by Balder.

It would explain so much—the sinister fortune teller’s acting career; Sandra’s certainty that Grimm is innocent. It’s all beginning to make sense. The truth is seeping into my consciousness.

Grimm is innocent.

Valerie killed herself.

That’s all.