The streets were poorly lit and quiet here, still in the commercial sector, and they climbed the hill then in silence to the Métro at Schuman below the Berlaymont. There no longer seemed a need to speak, and the lack of words between them was an easy thing. Bannerman felt relaxed in the company of this woman with her hair cropped short like a boy’s, but with a smile and touch and smell that were warm and feminine. Still, he could not shake off his distress, and she seemed to appreciate his distance and disquiet.

The child had touched some inner nerve end, a severed memory, and in his mind he kept replaying the scene in Slater’s flat. Her eyes were always the focal point. Sad, appealing eyes, deceptive in their dark passivity, even at the height of the screaming. Only now, with the short passage of time, were they having their full effect on him. He knew why. Somewhere inside he knew why, but would not or could not admit it.

He remembered the small, gloomy office of the weekly newspaper where he had got his first a job as a reporter. A gauche young man full of anger at the world. Cynical already, although he had not yet fully shaken off his youthful idealism. Insecurity, however, had manifested itself as arrogance, which had not endeared him to the other reporters. They had made it hard for him there, and he had learned the toughest way you can – without friends. It was during this period, of transition from adolescence to adulthood, that he had met the girl, forming a relationship that would seal his future.

She had been a timid teenager in telesales, fresh out of school, impressed by his apparent self-confidence, starry-eyed at what she saw as the romantic world of newspapers and newspapermen. He had embodied all that she, as a young girl, might have dreamed of in a young man. And he had grasped her vision of him, as an insecure youth does, and played to it, built on it.

He had allowed her adoration to puff up his ego, and he would lie awake at night in his attic digs overlooking the canal, playing the game, making the rules and breaking them. He felt the way it gave him power to have her love him when he did not love her. Though when you play that kind of game, sometimes the division between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, and that is when it becomes dangerous.