‘So why are you here?’

His eyes flashed in the dark. He moved more quickly than she would have thought possible, reaching her in two steps and attempting to wrest her bag from her. Norah just managed to dodge him; his left hand gripped thin air, Norah stumbled, steadied herself, reached into her bag, tossed it aside. Grimm, too, steadied himself and spun round, ready to attack again. Then he saw the gun in her hands. He looked surprised, like someone who has just woken from a dream and finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings. Gasping, he pulled himself up to his full height. His usually inscrutable mask was now the face of a man who knows he has made a possibly fatal mistake. Norah felt her hands trembling and saw that Grimm had noticed.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said.

‘Get back,’ she said.

Grimm stared at her.

‘And if I don’t?’

His shrewd eyes glinted wickedly.

‘Will you shoot me?’

Norah said nothing.

‘It would be murder,’ Grimm said. ‘That won’t bring your little friend back to life.’

‘Get back,’ said Norah.

Grimm looked at her challengingly and Norah made a tiny step backwards to put some distance between them. He saw.

‘You’re not going to shoot,’ he said, sliding his hand into his pocket.

Norah shot.

The noise was so loud that it deafened her for a second—the recoil so violent that it sent fierce pain through her hands, arms and shoulders. For a long ghastly moment, Grimm’s eyes met hers. Then he fell backwards to the ground and lay there motionless. There was immediate silence.

Above them the stars twinkled.

ON FEAR

Fear is something I think about a lot. Fear is a phantom that holds sway over us, without being real. It is of our own making.

I remember the first time I felt the fear of death. I was thirteen years old and still a child—much less mature than the girls on my road who twisted their hair round their fingers and painted their lips with their mothers’ lipstick. It all started in the garden and I still have a clear image of our garden in those days—the lawn that was more moss than grass, the small vegetable patch where my mother grew cucumbers and tomatoes, the gooseberry bushes and, right down at the bottom, the compost heap, which I always avoided because my brother told me there were grass snakes living there—big black snakes with yellow marks on their heads. (I never found out whether he was telling the truth.) Beyond the compost heap, a stream formed a natural border to the garden behind, but could easily be jumped. That must have been how the man got in. I was out in the garden on my own one day, playing football, and when I looked up, there he was, with a knife in his hand. It was all so unreal I didn’t even scream. I just stood there, rooted to the spot, staring at him as if he were a still from a TV series or one of the horror films I loved to watch—a still which, by some magic, had found its way into real life—into my life. To this day, I haven’t understood what happened next. The man came up to me and, with a rapid, almost rehearsed-looking movement, he slashed my face with his knife. Then he turned and ran away. He was never found, but he has fuelled my imagination ever since. Who was he and why did he injure a plump little boy and then steal away? What were his motives? Did he have other plans that he was too scared to carry out? Was he hoping to kidnap me? To kill me? I had nightmares about him for years, and the fear I suffered in those nights was far worse than the fear I had felt in the situation itself. The real horror only set in after the event.