‘Yes, of course,’ said Katya in a muffled voice.
‘Perhaps we could start with Josh’s thoughts on Anomie?’ said Strike, opening his notebook. ‘Did he ever have any ideas about who was behind the game, before he got the idea it was Edie?’
‘Oh dear,’ said Katya, looking distressed. ‘I was afraid you were going to ask me that.’
Strike waited, pen poised.
‘Would you mind giving me back my tea?’ Inigo said in a low voice to Robin.
She handed him back his mug and watched a little apprehensively as he raised it tremulously to his mouth again.
‘Well… yes, Josh did tell me once who he thought Anomie was, but he was talking a bit wildly at the time,’ Katya said.
‘Was that one of the nights he turned up here drunk?’ asked Inigo over the rim of his shaking mug.
‘Inny, that only happened a couple of times,’ said Katya with a weak smile, and turning back to Strike she said:
‘You really need me to say?’
‘It would be helpful.’
‘All right, well… it’s so silly… but Josh thought it was a twelve-year-old boy.’
‘A specific twelve-year-old boy?’
‘Um… yes,’ said Katya. ‘His – his name’s Bram. Bram de Jong. He’s Nils’s son – the man who owns the art collective.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw Inigo give a very slow, world-weary shake of his head, as though the conversation was moving in a direction he’d expected but deplored. Katya went on quickly:
‘But Josh definitely doesn’t think it’s Bram any more, because…’
Her voice became still higher as she fought off tears again.
‘… because, you see, Josh thinks Anomie’s the one who stabbed them,’ she said. ‘That’s the first thing he – he said to me, when I saw him after – after what happened. “It was Anomie.”’
‘Has he told the police that?’ said Strike.
‘Oh yes. They didn’t understand what he was mouthing at first, but I realised what he was saying. They asked him why he thought it was Anomie, and it was because the – the person with the knife whispered something to him, after stabbing him.’
For the second time that afternoon, a prickle ran down the back of Robin’s neck.
‘What did they whisper?’ asked Strike.
‘“I’ll take care of things from here, don’t worry”,’ quoted Katya. ‘And then they stole the folder Josh took to the cemetery with him, and his phone.’
‘“I’ll take care of things from here, don’t worry”,’ repeated Strike. ‘Was it a male or a female voice?’
‘He thinks it was male, but he’s sure it wasn’t Bram. Well, of course it couldn’t be Bram. He’s only twelve.’
‘This folder the attacker took: I take it it’s the one supposedly containing—?’
‘Proof that Edie was Anomie, yes,’ said Katya in a small voice.
‘Supposed proof,’ Inigo corrected his wife.
‘It was Yasmin Weatherhead who gave Josh the dossier, right?’ said Strike, ignoring Inigo.
‘Oh, you already know that?’ said Katya. ‘Yes, yes it was.’
‘We don’t know much about her,’ said Strike, ‘except that she helped Josh and Edie with fan mail for a while.’
‘With fan mail and social media, yes,’ said Katya. ‘I – well, I was the one who actually recommended Yasmin to them. She was – I mean, I thought she was, when I first met her at North Grove – just a nice, sincere young fan. She’s, um – well, she’s quite a big girl, and she seemed very sweet and grateful to be getting the opportunity to work with two people she admired so much. She didn’t seem to have much else in her life, so I – as I say, I urged Josh to let her help out. They really did need somebody, and I thought Yasmin seemed ideal. Her day job was handling social media and PR for a small cosmetics firm, so she understood managing a brand and so on…
‘But it ended badly. She seemed so nice and sincere, but I’m afraid she wasn’t at all.’
‘Why d’you say that?’ asked Strike.
‘Well, Josh and Edie found out she was playing Drek’s Game,’ said Katya. ‘Anomie’s game, you know. As a matter of fact, I think she’d become a – a moderator, is it? In the game. And Edie was really unhappy about that, because Anomie was being so nasty to Edie online, and when she found out that Yasmin was chatting away to Anomie she suspected some of the private information Anomie had about her could be coming from Yasmin. So she told Josh she wanted to get rid of Yasmin and – and that was that.
‘Anyway, Yasmin turned up at North Grove again a few weeks ago. Josh was staying there again, because he’d accidentally flooded his flat, and she showed Josh this dossier of evidence that supposedly proved Edie was Anomie. He brought the dossier with him, here, the night before it happened. Before they were stabbed.’
‘He was here the night before, was he?’ said Strike, looking up from his notebook.
‘Yes,’ said Inigo, before his wife could answer. ‘Katya had given Mr Blay to understand that he could turn up at any hour of the day or night and he took full and regular advantage of the offer.’
There was a short, nasty silence, in which Robin rather missed Freddie Mercury.
‘Josh set fire to a wastepaper basket accidentally, in his room at North Grove,’ said Katya, ‘and the curtains caught fire too. I think he’d fallen asleep and dropped a cigarette. Anyway, Mariam was furious and she threw him out. It was ten o’clock at night. So he went wandering around for a bit and finally turned up here, because he didn’t really have anywhere else to sleep.’
Inigo opened his mouth to speak and Katya said in a rush:
‘He couldn’t have gone back to his father’s, Inny. They weren’t talking to each other.’
‘And all the hotels were closed, of course,’ said Inigo.
‘So Josh stayed the night here, did he?’ asked Strike.
‘Yes, in the spare room upstairs,’ said Katya miserably.
‘And he showed you the dossier Yasmin had given him?’
‘Yes, the following morning,’ said Katya, her knuckles white because she was clutching her tissues so tightly. ‘I didn’t read it all, just a few bits and pieces.’
‘Can you remember what the bits you read said?’
‘Well, there were some printed-out tweets of Edie’s and Anomie’s where they’d said similar things, like they’d both enjoyed the same film and neither of them were excited about the Queen’s Jubilee. And there were emails between Edie and her agent, Allan Yeoman. In – in one of them, Edie said Anomie was actually rather a good thing, and she didn’t want him shut down, because fans were starting to feel sorry for her, which would give her and Allan Yeoman more leverage when negotiating with Josh and me. The email was quite rude about me, actually, saying that every bit of advice I’d ever given them had been wrong and – and bad. She also said she thought Drek’s Game was rather good and that there might be a way of monetising it, and she told Allan she thought Anomie should get the bulk of the profits, as he’d done all the work, which seemed such an odd thing for her to say when Anomie’s been persecuting her online all these years.’
‘Did you believe the emails were genuine?’ asked Strike, who thought he already knew the answer.
‘Well, I – I didn’t know what to think. They looked genuine, but… as I say, I hadn’t seen Edie for three years at that point, so… well, I didn’t know what to think,’ she repeated. ‘She’d left me – not that we ever had a formal arrangement – but she stopped talking to me and hired Allan Yeoman instead, so I suppose… well, they looked convincing. But then, when that article came out in The Times, about Edie being on the list of targets of that right-wing group, I realised they must have been clever forgeries. Somebody must have hoodwinked Yasmin. I can’t believe Yasmin would have deliberately – I can’t believe she’d be part of any terrorist group. I’m sure she isn’t mixed up with anything like that.’