And suddenly it’s raining blood. It’s dripping from the roof and streaking the ground, covering people’s skin and matting their hair. I can smell it. I can feel the sickly-sweet metallic taste on my tongue, and all over the station people have collapsed like marionettes and are lying in their blood in crumpled heaps. Only the pianist and I are left. He is still playing his melancholy little tune, just for the two of us, and everything is drowning in black and red.

Then I blink and the station is just a station again; people are hurrying to the platforms or the exit and there is no blood, only everyday life. The whole thing can’t have lasted more than two or three seconds.

I know where I’ve seen the scene before—or something similar. It was in a museum in Berlin. One of those provocative installations that brought Balder criminal complaints—and world fame. A station, innocent passers-by and gallons of fake blood.

I leave the station, the music ringing in my ears, and suddenly that, too, brings back a memory. I remember when I last heard it. Not something similar, but exactly the same music.

It was also in Berlin—in the bar of the Adlon Hotel. Halfway through my first interview with Balder, he got up, sat down at the grand piano and suddenly began to play. And now it hits me: the man sitting at the station piano is Wolfgang Balder.

All at once I know everything. I don’t understand, but I know. Wolfgang Balder followed me to Vienna. Because the havoc he wreaked in Berlin wasn’t enough for him. Because he wasn’t satisfied with destroying my job and my relationship. Because he thought I’d got off too lightly.

I think of violent blows. I think of electric shocks and a scalpel.

I think of the way he destroyed Coco. The way he isolated her from her friends and family. The way he seduced and manipulated her, chipping away at her, inside and out—with words, with fists and finally with a scalpel. I think of Coco’s face before she met him, beautiful and girlish and innocent—a naïve Alice in a grisly Wonderland.

Professor Balder called such treatment art. Conceptual art. A performance. No court was willing or able to prosecute him.

I think of Coco’s face today, one side untouched, the other ruined—not only by the ridges of scars left by the scalpel, but also by the deep incision that severed her facial muscles and left her unable to move her face. Two sides. ‘Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde’ was Balder’s name for this ‘work of art’.

That is the man I am up against.

That is the man I loathe more than anyone else on the planet.

Professor Wolfgang Balder.

I take a cab. I drink a vodka. I try to calm down. Then I head for home. As I trudge up the stairs I think of Valerie. I think of Arthur Grimm and the woman who told me about him on the phone. I think of Sandra, the most scrupulous, reliable person I know, who assured me that Grimm was innocent. And I see myself, pointing a gun at Grimm. I see the terror in his eyes and—