She looked for more signs of later dinners with Stephen, but could find none. This did not mean they had not existed. She had quite probably conflated several dinners’-worth of conversation, for Pol Pot was a subject to which Stephen frequently returned. He had told her about Pol Pot’s Paris days with the Marxists and café revolutionaries, about his wife and sister-in-law who had also studied in Paris. He had asked her if she had read Hannah Arendt. He had expressed a desire to go and see for himself what really happened. She had asked him why he had picked on Cambodia, when the world was full of atrocities waiting for novelists, poets and screenwriters to descend upon them like vultures, and he had smiled his gentle, quizzical little smile and said, ‘Because it’s so extreme, I suppose. He had a great project, you know, P-p-Pol P-p-Pot. The greatest reconstruction project of the twentieth century. He was going to take Cambodia out of history, and make it self-sufficient. He was going to begin again. I suppose I want to find out what went wrong. Of course, everybody now blames P-Pol P-Pot. Pol Pot killed my father, Pol Pot killed my son. That’s what they all say. But Pol Pot still has 40,000 supporters. He’s still represented at the UN. And Sihanouk says he’s a man of great charm and charisma. He must have more to him than a radioelectrician manqué.’

‘Paul Whitmore didn’t have any charm or charisma,’ said Liz.

‘No. But he was a private killer, not an official one.’

‘So you think Pol Pot’s really a hero?’ Liz had asked, dipping her Amaretto into her strong black coffee and sucking on the moist dissolving almond crumbs as she waited for his reply.

‘No,’ said Stephen, carefully rolling himself a little cigarette. ‘No, I don’t think that. You know I don’t think that. But I’m interested in what happened. How did he get such a bad name? Such a big bad name? Such a big, bad, difficult name?’ And he had smiled, at his own difficulty.

‘Because he was such a big bad monster and was responsible for the death of a nation?’ suggested Liz, placidly.

‘Do you believe in monsters?’ Stephen had asked. ‘Single, self generated monsters?’

Or something like that he had said, on one of those evenings before he disappeared. He had gone off to see if he could find out what had happened to the dreams of Pol Pot. Out of curiosity. To write a play, about the Rise and Fall.

‘Look, Liz,’ he had said, ‘you are curious about human nature. And so am I. So why should I not go?’