The Inspector takes the lift, three floors up, and follows the blue line on the floor to the interview rooms. Walking past the first four, she lets herself into the empty fifth and switches on the light. Always before, she has walked this building with a kind of ambient pride, but not now. Now it is a crime scene, and the bad act—she has begun to know that it was bad, even granting that Hunter courted it—stains the walls and the air. Her unease deepens as the warm, bright illumination of the interview room rises at the touch of her fingertip on the switch. The empty chair in the centre of the room—ergonomically adjustable and fine-tuned to the most emotionally reassuring contours for the great majority of the population—has acquired for her a predatory quality recalling an old laboratory experiment called Wire Mother. In the Wire Mother test, mice were conditioned to consider a razor-edged structure as a parent—which they did, taking food and rewards for proximity and becoming accustomed to the inevitable injuries. Analysis revealed that, after a while, their brains came to consider the abuse as something like love.