Except that they didn’t really love him, any more than he believed he was a regular, ordinary guy. Everyone was just acting in the manner expected of them at such an event. Television has taught the whole world how to behave. Except, of course, for the protestors: prophets as they now appeared to be, illuminated by the deceptive light of hindsight.

The pickets. Mothers Against Death. Wouldn’t they be pleased this morning. ‘Mr Delamitri,’ shouted the anonymous woman who had now become a TV star, ‘my son was murdered. An innocent boy, gunned down on the streets. In your last picture there were seventeen murders.’

Bruce sat in the small, bare police interview room and watched his past self, thinking, ‘Yeah, and there was plenty of sex in my movie too, but I bet you haven’t had any for a while.’

That was what he had been thinking. Why hadn’t he said it? He couldn’t suppress the uneasy feeling that things would have been different if he had told the truth. It was completely irrational, of course, but ever since the police had left him alone he had been tortured by the thought that somehow honesty might have saved him from the terrible fate that had overtaken him.

‘I stand here on legs of fire.’ Jesus! Legs of fire? Just for that, he almost deserved what had happened to him.

He couldn’t have been honest, of course, particularly not to that picket line. Not in his old life. He’d had different priorities then. It was one thing haranguing Oliver and Dale about the absurdity of blaming a filmmaker for some murder that had happened in a place he’d never been to, and quite another to do it to the anguished relatives. It would have been the most terrible thing he could have done. Imagine the headlines: ‘Bruce Delamitri Insults Bereaved Mothers’. It would have been the numberone story from the ceremony, a terrible, terrible scandal. Bruce found himself actually laughing at the thought. As if he’d care now. Funny how one’s sense of proportion changes when the cops have been swarming all over your lawn and a SWAT team has smashed its way through your roof.