“So you think Star came to Amsterdam to get her, Fricke, is that right?”

“Yes. I’m sure he wasn’t here before that. She told me he was coming. She said she was going to see him—she was so excited. And that was the day before she left.”

“He must have had a very powerful influence over her to make her do something so risky.”

“He had. It was like—like he summoned her, came to claim her. He told her he’d been looking for her all his life, and the second he saw her, he knew she was the one. Like it was destiny, or fate.”

“And she believed that—why? Because she was fourteen and it made her feel—special, singled out?”

“I guess so. She said—when she phoned—she said he was powerful. She kept talking about that. He read the tarot cards for her. He said he could show her who she was.”

“I see.” Gini lowered her eyes to her notebook. Again she had the sensation that Anneke was so close to herself. That intoxicating sense of self-discovery, she could remember that so well. With Pascal, in Beirut, and now. She always felt that when she was with him, she knew who she was. But if Anneke’s story was, in some respects, a mirror image of her own, its outcome had been very different. Anneke had been unlucky, undiscerning, and certainly foolish—though Gini would never condemn her for that. She had fallen in love with a man who was dangerous, even evil: from the moment Mitchell had started his story, she had never doubted that.

“Go on, Fricke,” she said, looking up. “All this helps me, and it may help Mina too. You must have asked Anneke a lot of questions. You were talking on the telephone—what? Ten minutes each time, more? Think, Fricke.”

“She said he asked about us a lot. He’d get her to describe our parents, me. He wanted to know about—oh, ordinary things. Family things. What we did at Christmas, where we went on vacation, how my parents first met.”

“Did he talk to her about his own family, where he came from?”

“No, never. Anneke said he hated women who asked questions, she’d learned that. And every time she asked, he got angry, really angry. So she thought maybe he’d had something horrible happen when he was a child. Like maybe he’d been abused, or fostered out, or put in a home, something like that. But that was just guesswork. He never said one word about his parents, where he grew up.”

“And the anger—she used that word?”

“Yes. The first time she called. She said he was really hard to handle, because one minute he’d be really quiet and sweet, and the next, for no reason, he’d go completely crazy. Freak out. Start screaming at her.”

“Rapid mood swings?”

“I know.” Fricke met her eyes. “Afterward, when she didn’t call again, I got afraid. I thought maybe he was on something. But Anneke said he was clean. She said she could handle the moods, she was the only one who could. He told her she had the soothing gift—that’s what he called it. He’d make her lie down next to him and stroke his forehead some special way. She was proud of that.”