I open my mouth to speak, but nothing makes sense—nothing I’ve heard and nothing I might say. “No. You killed him.”

“That’s not true, Nicki. Can I kiss you?”

“No.” My stomach flips over.

“All right, I won’t if you’d rather I didn’t. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want.” He looks at my naked body as he says it, taking his time. Lingering with his eyes.

I try to imagine that I am wearing clothes, lots of them: underwear, dark woolly tights, a skirt, a shirt, a thick sweater . . .

“I want to leave this room,” I say.

“Well, you can. But you said you wanted me to explain about Damon Blundy.”

“I don’t need your explanation. I know you killed him and I know why.” If Hannah Blundy didn’t kill Damon, Tasker must have. His wife wouldn’t have done the thing with the knife. Why would she? It would mean nothing to anyone apart from me and King Edward. “I know what ‘He is no less dead’ means,” I tell him.

“Do you?” He smiles.

I’m not going to give him the reward he’s after: the satisfaction of hearing the solution to the puzzle that means so much to him. All the trouble he went to: organizing his cryptic murder scene, then typing it out in painstaking detail in his “Looking for a Woman with a Secret” ad for me to find.

Yes, King Edward. I know what “He is no less dead” means. After you emailed me to explain your strange views on adultery—that it doesn’t count and isn’t wrong if you only kiss and stroke and rub and lick and suck and bite, then run away in time to salve your conscience—I told you in no uncertain terms what I thought of your hypocrisy. I used one of my bizarre analogies that you’re so fond of. I wrote back and said, “You’re free to behave as you like, obviously, but if you want to know what I think of your ethical position on infidelity, I think it’s the stupidest, most self-serving piece of crap I’ve ever heard. If a married man writes to a married woman secretly for years telling her she’s the love of his life, that’s cheating. If he meets her at a hotel and they both remove all their clothes and touch each other in every conceivable sexual way bar one, that’s cheating. To pretend it isn’t is so dishonest it’s pathetic. It’s as pathetic as forcing a man to lick fatal poison off a knife and then, once he’s dead, saying, ‘But I didn’t stab him, Officer. The knife didn’t actually penetrate his skin.’ So what? He’s just as dead, isn’t he? You’re still a fucking murderer.”

“You’re a murderer,” I hear myself say.