I watched the exemplary family tear itself to pieces in front of three hundred of the people whose good opinion they had spent decades buying, and I felt no rush of triumph.

Only a deep, heavy tiredness.

But I did notice something, watching them turn on each other, and it clarified everything I had spent weeks trying to understand about this family.

For months I had wondered how people who beat and starved and stole could sit at a dinner table and call themselves united, cultured, close.

The answer was on the parquet floor in front of me: they had never been any of those things.

The unity had been a performance, exactly like the antique furniture and the oil paintings — a prop maintained for as long as it was profitable and abandoned the instant it stopped paying.