‘Has it changed so much?’ asked Susanne. ‘This is something that interests me. I am a psychologist.’

‘Beauty and intelligence. Now that has been universally attractive throughout the human experience. But to answer your question, yes, it really has undergone radical variations. What is particularly interesting is that our ideal of female beauty has changed more rapidly over the last century than at any time in human history. There is no doubt that mass media has played a key part. All you have to do is to compare the screen sirens of the forties and fifties with the stick-thin fashion models of today. What I find particularly amazing is the way that, within a given time, one will find different ideals of beauty running concurrently within the same culture.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Susanne.

‘No man finds the stick-thin catwalk model attractive. It is a woman’s definition of female beauty. This imperative to be thin is a strange tyranny exerted on women by women. It is what differentiates us as genders that make us attractive to each other. Men like curves, women like angles.’

‘But that contradicts what you said before,’ said Fabel. A joke was a joke, but he was beginning to get fed up with the small man’s preoccupation with Susanne. ‘You said that the “ideal” of feminine beauty has changed throughout the centuries.’

‘True, but within set parameters. If you look at the classical ideal of beauty as set out in Greek or Roman sculpture, it is pretty consistent with, say, the nineteen-fifties ideal. Then came a preoccupation with a large bust. However, if you look at Renaissance art, breasts were always small and firm. In those days, the big bust was associated with the wet-nurse: the lower-class woman who nursed babies for wealthier mothers determined to maintain their figures. There have been radical swings in fashion, the most extreme being the near-obese Titian model. But, generally speaking, there have been limits.’

Fabel thought about the murdered women in Cologne. About how they seemed to have fuller hips and bottoms.

‘What about bottoms?’ he asked. ‘Have there been fashions in bums?’

‘Obviously in the eighteen-hundreds there was a real fixation with them. The bustle exaggerated the bottom to an extreme and physically impossible degree. But generally the function of the hips and bottom has been to accentuate the narrowness of the waist. And that certainly was the intention with the bustle. It isn’t a single body part that is important: it is its relationship with other parts. All fat women have full bottoms but obesity is unattractive. Men who are attracted to larger bottoms tend to look for the contrast with a narrow waist. It’s part of our most primitive psychology. We assess the figure of another to judge their fitness and suitability as a sexual partner.’

After they left the event Fabel and Susanne took a taxi back to her apartment.

‘I rather think he fancied me,’ she said laughingly.

‘Mmm.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Susanne looped her arm through Fabel’s. ‘You jealous? He really wasn’t my type …’