The sleek boy like a dancer who’d been at Dieter’s party often came along to those dinners. His name was Pascal. He was studying law, and his parents were friends with Dieter’s landlord. Every Frenchman seemed to own a jumper in a well-behaved shade of yellow or blue, and Pascal always wore a pale yellow jumper with argyle socks to match. He never said very much, and I wondered why he bothered with us at all. Minna thought the answer was obvious: ‘He’s spying, reporting back to Dieter’s disgusting cousin about his friends.’

Dieter lived in West Berlin because Berliners were excused from military service, but he’d grown up in Bamberg. Minna said that she’d spent two weeks in Bamberg on a school exchange. ‘It was the worst winter in years, thirty below. We had to eat frozen vegetables. The fresh ones turned black from the cold as soon as you took them out of the supermarket. My host family wanted to show me the region, so I asked to visit Nuremberg. They beamed. They said the castle and the medieval Altstadt were wunderschön. I told them that I wanted to see the courthouse where the trials had taken place, and they were mystified – “What trials?”’

Dieter laughed at Minna’s outrage. Once he arrived with a present for her. It was a photograph of himself and his brothers. ‘I know you will cherish it, Minna. See – all four of us in lederhosen. In the street.’ His teasing was good-tempered – he was one of those rare people with a great capacity for amusement and none for mockery. In the staff dining room at the lycée, he’d nudge me in delight whenever the French did French things: stirring sugar into their yoghurt, or complaining that steak oozing pink had been overcooked.

A newspaper lay on a table in the staffroom. I read that Louis Althusser had murdered his wife, a sociologist called Hélène Rytmann. There was also a feature on the Yorkshire Ripper. He’d murdered a thirteenth woman, a university student called Jacqueline Hill. At first he’d been called a killer of prostitutes, and that label had persisted, although he murdered all kinds of women. The paper reported that one lived in terror now in the north of England, where no one was safe. I understood that ‘one’ meant ‘women’ and ‘now’ meant ‘since the murder of another nondisposable female’ and ‘no one’ meant ‘not even the middle class’.

The south of France was not the north of England, but the November evenings were just as dark. In the claustrophobic, badly lit streets near the cathedral, it was easy to believe that someone was waiting in a doorway, concealed. At times there really would be someone there, teenage lovers as self-centred as statues, or someone lighting a cigarette out of the wind. My building had no security system, so the street door was closed but left unlocked. If Rinaldi were to murder me, I told myself, it would be blamed on an intruder. The Bertys would howl with laughter at the turn of events.