Mielikki Neith stretches her shoulders against her pillow, wincing as she finds bruises on the bone. First Kyriakos the banker, and now Athenais: fleshed, persuasive histories that do not belong in Diana Hunter’s head. Stories that hinder access to her thoughts under neural examination. It is posited in the academic literature—which the Inspector has now skimmed in preparation for her meeting with the perfumed Oliver Smith—but this is in her understanding the first sighting in the wild of an actual Scheherazade Gambit. Not one story but two, so that as the investigator begins to reach the bottom of the first, so another emerges to renew the defence. When that begins to fail, the subject can revert to the first stream, and so on, the graph of this pattern giving the technique its more formal name: Sine-reinsertive Occultation. It’s still futile, and no doubt incrementally more strenuous and damaging, which may well be significant in the Hunter case. Still: impressive to hold two such fantasies in the mind at once. Neith would have doubted it was possible.