indeed, when I had always assumed that the confrontation would come from someone close to me. I knew how that felt, from the ending with Elise: the walls folding in, the ceiling coming down, crushed, trapped, suffocated. That was how I had imagined it, when I had dared to imagine it, or found the thought inescapable: with Eddie and Polly in the aquarium, with Eddie in the publisher’s office upstairs, with Kay.
But this was different. I wasn’t crushed and I wasn’t trapped. Which is not to say that I wasn’t afraid: on the contrary, the thought of a vengeful Quin in possession of this kind of information and talking about it with others as he had plainly talked about it with Pierce – that was chilling.
‘So Quin guessed?’ I asked. ‘About me?’ What I wanted to ask was: what kind of proof does he have? Anything I can’t lie my way around?
Pierce grunted, a bitter dreg of a chuckle. ‘Guessed. Yeah, Quin is great at “guessing”. Gifted really. Quin “guessed”.’
‘I don’t understand what this has to do with me. Or … I mean, I see what it has to do with me, but I don’t know what … why Quin said all this to you.’
‘He was angry,’ Pierce said. ‘With you, and with me. Are you still recording this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Switch that off for a minute, would you?’
‘Sure.’ I picked the DVR off the coffee table and pressed the off button.
‘Inaccuracy makes Quin angry,’ Pierce said. ‘Deliberate inaccuracy especially so. He says one of the biggest challenges Bunk faces is filtering out the lies from social media. Like when someone tells Tamesis that they’re in the office when really they’re in the pub.’
Acid bubbled up within me. Pierce’s sarcastic tone earlier could be understood – Quin hadn’t guessed at all.
‘He doesn’t care about the social reasons for that sort of thing, the niceties,’ Pierce continued. ‘It’s just bad data, it corrupts his models. I asked him why he wanted anything to do with my map, with the kind of research I did for Murder Boards. He said that he was trying to run a stochastic analysis of apocrypha and myth. But he … I had a lot of research material for Night Traffic around in the flat, and he looked at all that too. Without asking.’
Pierce had been taking very small sips from his whisky before this, as if unfamiliar with its taste, or at least unfamiliar with its taste at this hour. Now, however, he took a deep draught, draining his glass.
‘The thing about Night Traffic,’ he said, with a little lick of his lips, ‘is that I made it up. None of it happened. None of it is true.’
I swallowed. Pierce was glaring at me, full eye contact, judging my reaction, as if he were trying to read my thoughts about what he had said.
He wouldn’t be able to. My thoughts were: He doesn’t know about the second DVR. The one that was in my shirt pocket. The one that was still recording.
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