When she looks again, she sees not illumination but the spotlights of a stage. The pools of light are not coincidental but painstaking—and surely Diana Hunter’s injunction that the word should imply pain staked rather than pains taken has been obeyed here. This is agony and unthinkable fear written in blood across the grey surface of the road. It is a display, a victory procession. This crime is not a crime—or rather, its criminality is a side issue, the envelope in which the message is delivered. It is a code, and death is just a convenient vector.