Now, in the semi-darkness of the living room, she was sitting on the sofa in only a sweatshirt, her bare legs pulled up to her chest. The television was on mute; there was something soothing about the moving images. Norah tore a page out of her notebook, picked up a biro, then stopped, the pen hovering over the paper. She didn’t hesitate because she couldn’t think of any potential ill-wishers—she could come up with a few. But she found it hard to gauge them. How could you tell if someone was vindictive or given to cruel pranks? Could you tell? Norah began to doodle.

There had been that stalker, years ago, before she moved to Berlin. He’d inundated her with emails and texts, bombarded her with calls, lain in wait for her—but all that was deep in the past. Who else? Alex was out of the question; he was the least malicious person she knew. And the men before him? None of them had lasted long or been particularly serious—and they were all ancient history. No. None of those men would dream of following her and breaking into her flat just to scare her. Not even crazy Igor, the dancer she’d gone out with before Alex; he was working in Russia at the moment anyway and Norah was sure he had no idea she’d moved to Vienna. No, he may have been crazy, but it wasn’t him.

What about women? There must be one or two who held a grudge against her. What about the wife of that doctor she’d dated for a while—Gustav, the one who picked her up in a bar in Kreuzberg and told her he was single? His wife had left a few nasty messages on Norah’s phone when she found out—fair enough, Norah had thought and seen no reason to hold it against her. She’d called things off with Gustav and hadn’t heard from the woman since. It seemed unlikely that she should suddenly emerge from the shadows.

And work connections? Norah had been working as a journalist for a good fifteen years, mainly freelance at first and then—in Berlin, for example, or here in Vienna—as part of an editorial team. She wasn’t an investigative journalist; she didn’t uncover criminal activity or political scandals, but worked mainly in culture, interviewing people, writing reviews and the occasional column—sometimes a travel report or a feature. Nothing very controversial, though there could be no doubt that she’d offended the odd person over the years; she’d more than once received nasty letters at the office. On one occasion a theatre director had even turned up at her flat after she’d panned a play of his and told her that a cunt like her, who didn’t know the first thing about dramaturgy, would do best to avoid the subject. Norah had taken her revenge by sketching the incident in a column. She hadn’t named the director, but it was hardly necessary; anyone with any knowledge of the Berlin cultural scene would have known who she was talking about. Norah hadn’t heard from him since. Was he, perhaps, rearing his head again after all these years? Unlikely. As far as she knew, he was still in Berlin, stuck in the same old rut—starting early on the whisky and getting his kicks out of humiliating his lead actresses.