Fear has an aesthetics all its own. A frightened woman, for instance, is almost always beautiful. Hitchcock understood that—though his icons of fear are blonde, while mine are dark. I, for my part, didn’t overcome my fear until I began to take pleasure in it. These days, there is practically nothing I am afraid of.

57

A sound she couldn’t identify and then dazzling light. For a second, Norah was as disoriented as a newborn baby confronted with the world after months of soothing blackness. She blinked and looked around her. Floodlights—somebody had switched on floodlights. And weren’t they footsteps behind her? She turned to look, her arm raised to shield her eyes.

Then she saw him.

Tall. Burly. He was coming towards her from the big wheel, his silhouette emerging in the glare, like an image on a developing Polaroid. Norah stared at him. She had recognised him instantly; his hulking figure was as unmistakable as that of the cruel ogre in the book of fairytales she had read as a child. He was only a few metres from her and very smartly dressed; you might have thought he was on his way to a wedding or the opera. He wore a black dinner jacket and white shirt and carried something tucked nonchalantly under his arm. As he approached, Norah realised that it was a top hat.

Eventually he stepped out into the light. Now Norah could see his face—the coarse features that looked as if they were hewn in rough clay, the large-pored skin, the harsh mouth, and the tiny, disarmingly astute eyes. Professor Wolfgang Balder.

The man who made action art involving electric shocks.

The man who poured pig’s blood over passers-by.

The man who tortured women and called it art.

The nastiest man Norah knew.

The man who had destroyed Coco’s face, her mind, her life.

The Professor. Big B.

Norah’s overwrought brain must have short-circuited; she found herself recalling all the things she’d called him in her article. A charlatan. A violent criminal disguised as an artist. David Copperfield’s brutal brother. A poor person’s Houdini.

And she suddenly understood the meaning of his get-up. He wasn’t dressed for an evening at the opera; he was dressed as a magician.

In the cold glare of the floodlights, there was something ghostly about the professor; his face looked as rigid as a death mask. But his eyes were twinkling. He came closer. And closer. Then he raised his hands and, with infuriating slowness, began to applaud. Norah stared in stunned shock. He was only an arm’s length from her and now she could smell him too—that sickly sweet smell that was peculiar to him, as revolting as blood; as revolting as pipe smoke.

Norah moved away from Balder until at last he stopped clapping and looked at her calmly. Then his impassive gaze wandered to Grimm and he stared at the motionless body lying in the dark at the edge of the path. He stared for a long time. Then he raised his eyes again.