“Not here, no. I only moved in six months ago.”

They get out of the car. Jerry grabs his plastic bag and Hans flicks on the garage light so Jerry can follow without walking into a lawn mower or shelf. They head into the house. It’s neat and tidy and there isn’t a lot in the way of furniture.

“You’ve been here six months and you don’t have a dining table?” Jerry asks.

“You want to discuss the way I live, or what we’re going to do about your situation?”

“Fair point,” Jerry says.

They head into the lounge. There’s a TV and a couch and nothing else, no coffee table, no bookcase, no pictures on the walls. He imagines Hans sitting in here watching TV while his dinner plate rests on his legs. No wonder he hasn’t had a girlfriend stick around longer than two months. Jerry sits on the couch and Hans disappears then comes back thirty seconds later carrying a wooden stool. He places it opposite Jerry and sits down. Jerry starts to work on the sandwich. He can’t remember the last time he ate. It’s chicken and ham with tomato. He picks out the tomato and offers it to Hans who shakes his head. He dumps it back into the bag. Hans switches on the TV to a news channel and puts it on mute.

“When the police come knocking on my door,” Hans says, “and they will, I’m going to—”

“I thought you said they wouldn’t be able to make out the license plate of the car?”

“They’re going to cross-reference people you know with vehicles they own, but this address isn’t the same address my car is registered to. So that gives us time. My guess is we have a couple of hours then we have to hit the road. You have two hours to figure out where this journal of yours is.”

“I already know where it is,” Jerry says, and he’s been thinking about it the entire drive here. “The new owner has it. He found it under the floor and for some reason he wants to keep it.”

“And what reason would that be?” Hans asks.

“I haven’t figured that bit out yet.”

“Okay, so let’s keep that as a possibility. But I want you to consider something else. I want you to think about where else you could have hidden it. If we go in there and it turns out this guy really doesn’t have it, then where do we look? That’s what you need to figure out now, Jerry. Where else can we look?”

“Okay,” Jerry says.

“And once we find it, we read it, and we go to the police no matter what it says, okay?”

“Gary has it.”

“Okay, Jerry?”

“Yes, fine, okay.”

“Think about where else you could have hidden it.”

Jerry takes another bite from the sandwich. “Fine, I’ll think about that, but we also need to figure out who would want to frame me,” he says, talking with a mouth half full.

Hans shakes his head. Then he sighs. Then he looks at his watch and then he shifts a little on the stool. Then he says, “Fine. Then let’s think about that. Do you have any suggestions?”

Jerry puts the last bit of sandwich into his mouth. He hits a piece of tomato he’d missed on his earlier pass through. He perseveres and chews on, and he thinks about who would want to frame him, and then he lets Henry Cutter think about it too. In fact he lets Henry do all the thinking because Henry’s got the better mind for it and, sure enough, Henry comes up with an answer.

It’s the guy, Henry says. Gary is the one framing you.

“It’s Gary,” Jerry says.

“What?”

“He found the journal, and I’ve obviously written enough in there for him to realize I can’t remember things, so now he’s killing women and leaving me at the scene. The shirt under the floorboards was probably one of his.”

“Jesus, Jerry, can you even hear how ridiculous that sounds?”

Yeah, my bad, Jerry. That was a bit of a stretch.

“Forgetting about the fact that I dropped you off at home that night, and I saw you wearing that bloody shirt, how does he do it?” Hans asks, carrying on. “He waits outside the nursing home every night in a van hoping you’re going to escape? Then, the times you do, he picks you up, kills somebody in front of you, you take a nap and wake up and forget where you are? Then conveniently forget everything leading up to it?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“Do you have any idea how that sounds?” Hans asks.

Again Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“Okay, so let’s say some version of that is true, then why?”

“Because he can’t fake it,” Jerry says.

“What?”

“He’s trying to be a writer. He wants to be like me. Only so far all he has is a room full of rejection slips.”

“You’re still not making any sense.”

Jerry looks at the TV. There’s footage of bags of tightly wrapped cannabis and a bunch of police officers talking to people, footage of officers searching a house, of people being put into cuffs. The cops have put a dent in the nightlife of partygoers across the city, forcing the teenagers heading into town to damage their livers on alcohol now that all that weed has been confiscated. He remembers he once wrote a book about a gang who sold meth to high school kids. It didn’t end well for any of the characters. Is that where he’s heading now? To one of Henry Cutter’s bad endings?

“The biggest piece of advice I give people is write what you know, and fake the rest. There’s only so much research you can do. There’s only so far you can get into somebody else’s head.”

“I remember,” Hans says.

“Gary is killing these women so he knows how it feels, what they feel, what the whole thing looks like. It’s research. He can make his fictional world believable.”

“There are a million crime writers out there, buddy. If what you were saying had any merit, the good ones would all be killing people. Look, Jerry, let me be honest here—what you’re saying just doesn’t add up.”

Jerry knows it doesn’t. Of course he knows that. But throw a drowning man a brick and tell him it’ll float and he’ll pray to God you’re right.

“And the blood on your clothes today?” Hans asks.

“He put it there.”

“And the plastic bag in your pocket?”

“Okay, fine, so it’s not him,” Jerry concedes. “But it’s somebody, right? Because I’m not that guy. I can’t be that guy you see on the front page of the paper, the sick, twisted pervert who hurts women. I can’t be that guy, and if you don’t trust me, then trust Sandra. She would never have married somebody who could become that guy.”

Hans rubs his hand back over his scalp. “You do make a good point,” he says, “and I have to give you marks for trying. But everything you say can be contradicted by the fact you have Alzheimer’s. It’s a wild card. I know you want to think differently, but it does make you a different person.”

“But it doesn’t make me a killer. People don’t just wake up one day wanting to kill people. There has to be something wrong with them, something fundamentally wrong in their past. The guy who bought my house, maybe he’s innocent in all of this, but I still think he has my journal. We need to make him talk.”

“And how are you going to do that? You going to torture some poor guy on the hunch of a man who five days a week wakes up forgetting his own name?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“And this guy, does he have a wife?”

“I think so.”

“You want to tie her up too so she can’t go for help? Threaten to kill her in front of her husband? Cut her fingers off until he tells you where the diary is? Kill him if you have to, even though you’re not a killer?”

“It’s a journal not a diary, and it won’t come to that.”

“Okay,” Hans says, “okay. Look, you said you can’t be a killer, because if you were there’d be something fundamentally wrong in your past, right?” Hans asks.

“Right.”

“What about Suzan with a z?”

“She’s not real,” Jerry says.

Hans shakes his head. “She is real, mate.”

“Don’t say that,” Jerry says. “It’s not funny.”