Too late now. Good. I have to do something. The police aren’t going to solve the case. If teachers at the best independent primary school in the Culver Valley set tests that make no sense, if parents drive their own children to hospices and pretend they’re lunatic asylums . . . No, I don’t trust the police to catch Damon Blundy’s killer. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t me.

I picture myself lying in the dark, on a bed in the Chancery Hotel, naked and blindfolded. Will he touch me? Does it still count as infidelity if I’m doing it to catch a killer?

What if I take a knife with me—a sharp one? Lie on top of it to hide it.

Purely hypothetical questions. What-ifs.

Once I’ve heard King Edward tell me the truth about Damon Blundy, what if I find myself yearning to kill him, to stab him through the heart? What if I don’t have the strength to resist?

PAULA PRIVILEGE ON THE COUCH
Damon Blundy, April 30, 2013, Daily Herald Online

What is a poor (or even a rich) woman to do when, week after week, the newspapers contain no mention of her name or her sex life? Much to the chagrin of Saint Paula of Privilege, she can’t sue the Sun or the Mail for failing to run scurrilous stories about her in the absence of new material, and even I, her most vocal adversary, have neglected her of late in favor of my old friends Keiran Holland, Reuben Tasker and Bryn Gilligan, each of whose separate but thematically linked dedication to irrationality grows stronger by the day.

Here’s the story, for those of you who missed it: Tasker published a new, much less pretentious and rather gripping horror novel last month, Riven, that garnered some favorable reviews. If I were his editor, I’d encourage him to dispense with the supernatural element of his writing, since his chief talent is for describing gruesome horrors inflicted on one human being by another; meanwhile, the representatives of the spirit world sip ghost-blend coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the wings and mutter, “We’re pretty much redundant here, aren’t we, guys?”