It was some time since she’d written the feature for a German news magazine; it had been one of her favourite projects. For weeks, Norah had hung out with ‘gun freaks’, visited shooting clubs, spoken to huntsmen (there weren’t many huntswomen), and interviewed gun collectors. She’d been to the police shooting range and learnt how to shoot. Norah hadn’t held a gun in her hand since, but in the course of her research she had learnt enough about firearms to know that the revolver in the small, black case under her bed was not a fake.

The thought that somebody had come into her flat and up to her bed while she was asleep made her feel sick. She turned and walked down the passage to her front door, and pushed down the handle. Locked. What was going on? She tried to put her thoughts in order. Yes, she’d locked up behind her the night before, the way she always did since suspecting she’d had an intruder in the flat. Whoever had put the gun under her bed must have unlocked the door, deposited the gun and then locked the door behind them. They must have a key. A new key!

Then she realised she wasn’t thinking straight. Who said the case had only been there since last night? When had she last looked under the bed? For all she knew, the gun could have been there for weeks. Perhaps it had been deposited in her flat at the time when all those little things had gone missing.

Norah returned to the bedroom. The gun lay in the open case like a big black scorpion, shiny and lethal—the promise of an as-yet-unrealised, but inevitable, horror.

46

She knew what she had to do, but it was a huge struggle to make herself do it.

If her mother was to be believed, she had always been fiercely independent, even as a child, and hated asking for help. Norah remembered the time she had climbed the tall chestnut in her neighbours’ garden when she was a little girl. It was only when she reached the top and looked down that she realised how high she was—and that it was far easier to climb a tree than to get down again. She was stuck there like a cat. Too embarrassed to call for help, she had sat out an entire hour alone in that tree, listening to the other children playing in the distance, until eventually the nice grandmotherly lady from next door had spotted her and got her rescued.

That was how she felt now: a long way from everyone, unable to solve her problem on her own, but equally incapable of asking for help.

In the end it was probably David’s remarks that persuaded Norah to climb down from her tree. She sat at her desk, going through the options. There were three people on the planet whom she would describe as real friends: Sandra, Max and Paul. And she needed them now. Any differences they may have had in the past no longer mattered; the situation was too serious to bother about such niceties. It was 8 February, she had fantasies of killing Arthur Grimm—and she had a gun.