I spied Rinaldi in the local mini-mart, briefcase under his arm, buying a pack of frozen peas. He was at least forty, but his springy hair was still lavish and dark – even his hair thought well of itself. One half of his shirt collar was tucked into his jumper while the other protruded. It was the kind of detail that would appear in newspaper profiles when he was finally arrested. His freezer would contain nothing but peas and an assortment of body parts. Sometimes I scared myself in a way that tangled with pleasure, and sometimes I was just scared.

I was scared when visiting the W.C. after dark. With stone pressing in on both sides, the stair in my building was always cold. It was also dim, even at noon on the brightest day, but was lit at night with a hard white glare. Whenever one of the lights timed out, the darkness that followed seemed blacker than black. There was a timer switch on my landing but not at the top of the steps that led to the W.C. above. By the time I’d finished in there, the light on my landing had always timed out. I wasn’t afraid of falling as I made my way down in the dark. But anyone could be waiting on the steps below, hidden by the bend in the stair. I’d stand outside the W.C., listening to the silence. Silence is pure potential. It can contain anything. The Yorkshire Ripper had come out of the dark to stab Jacqueline Hill again and again with a screwdriver. By the time he was through, her body must have resembled a pulpy red fruit.

The W.C. problem weighed on me to the point that I considered asking Dieter if he’d sublet a room to me. But which room? His apartment had three bedrooms, but one spare was a study and the other was kept locked. Minna and Nick would try to outdo each other in speculation about what it contained. The stolen Gibson Stradivarius? Pharaonic gold from the Valley of the Kings? I’d have settled for sleeping on Dieter’s couch – but I couldn’t recall a couch, only those nervous golden chairs. Anyway, in daylight hours I was too ashamed to tell people that I was afraid. In daylight hours I’d berate myself for my spinsterish obsession. By that contemptuous ‘spinsterish’ de Beauvoir must actually have meant something like ‘virginal’. She relished sex but was a spinster herself, having turned down Sartre when he proposed marriage. Jacqueline Hill too was a spinster, and I hoped, against the odds, that in her short life she’d enjoyed plenty of good sex.

My jaw often ached that winter – after a while I realised that I was clenching my teeth from fear. Why didn’t I buy a torch to light me down from the W.C.? I could have shone it into the eyes of an intruder. But I reasoned that my fear had no grounds so the expense was unnecessary. What I find remarkable now is that I valued my life at something less than a few francs.