Cautiously, he’d taken the gag from the man’s mouth. The psychologist hadn’t even tried to plead. In that moment, he’d felt a terrible kinship with his victim. He didn’t know what had happened in the man’s life to give him this capacity for resignation, but he identifed an echo of his own learned behaviour and hated de Groot all the more for it. ‘Very fucking sensible decision,’ he’d said gruffly, turning away to hide his unease.

He didn’t want to think about that moment.

More beautiful pictures. The heaving chest, the convulsive jerking and twitching of a body fighting to stay on the right side of eternity. It made him feel better to replay his newly minted memories like this. He couldn’t remember anything else that had ever made him feel so light-hearted.

And afterwards, the other pleasure he’d discovered, an unforeseen. Now at last he was able to show those whores who was boss. After he’d killed the professor in Heidelberg, he’d been astonished to find, driving back to the boat, that he wanted a woman. He was mistrustful of the urge that had so humiliated him in the past, but he told himself that he was a different man now, he could do what the hell he wanted.

So he’d made a detour to the back streets near the harbour and picked up a whore. She’d had a place to take him to, and he’d paid extra for the privilege of tying her up, spread-eagling her over the stained bed as he’d spread-eagled his victim over his desk. And this time, there had been no mortification. He’d been hard as a rock, he’d fucked her with brutal speed, he’d made her groan and beg for more, but it hadn’t been her he’d seen, it had been the mutilated body he’d left behind. He felt like a god. When he’d finished, he’d untied her and forced her on to her stomach so he could celebrate his new potency by sodomizing her too. Then he’d left, throwing her a handful of coins to demonstrate his contempt.

He’d driven back to the boat on a high such as he’d never known, not even after he’d killed the old man.

It wasn’t what he’d learned from Heinrich Holtz after the funeral that had lifted the curtain of darkness inside him or helped him to forgive his grandfather. Sometimes he wondered if he possessed the ability to forgive; so many responses that other people took for granted had been squeezed out of him. If they’d ever been there in the first place.