I think about it for a second.

‘Vanity,’ I say.

Theresa nods as if to say she’d thought as much. Her gaze falls on the gun in my hand.

‘We must call the police,’ she says, getting up cautiously. ‘I’ll tell them everything.’

I wonder whether I can trust her. Balder’s deception seems to have cut pretty deep. But who knows—she might be pretending, the way she’s been pretending for weeks.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Call the police.’

Theresa gets up, takes her phone from her bag, unlocks it and dials. She takes a deep breath. I grab the phone off her, hang up and put it in my pocket.

‘Sit down,’ I say. ‘We’re not going to call the police. If we take this to the police, it won’t be Balder who’s brought to justice but you. He knows why he left certain jobs to others. Breaking and entering, for example. Depositing loaded firearms in a person’s flat.’

Aggrieved silence. Then she says, ‘God, I was stupid.’

‘You can say that again,’ I say coldly.

She falls back on the sofa and buries her face in her hands for a moment before looking at me again.

‘What are you planning to do?’

Why does everyone always think I have a plan?

‘Stop him,’ I say.

‘How?’

I don’t immediately reply.

‘I need to get Arthur Grimm on board somehow,’ I say. ‘But there’s not much chance he’ll listen to me.’

Suddenly Theresa is smiling again.

‘I think I can help,’ she says. ‘Dr Grimm and I are good friends.’

61

Grimm takes a little persuading, but it turns out to be easier than I’d thought—I suppose he’s come to trust Theresa. I am beginning to realise that Kim 4 is Balder’s all-purpose weapon. For me she was the nice neighbour. For Grimm she was an ally.

Some weeks ago she turned up on his doorstep and warned him about a psychotic stalker called Norah Richter who went around (she said) suspecting people of having murdered a certain Valerie. Whenever this woman got it into her sick head that somebody was the culprit, she did all she could to make their life hell. There were indications, Theresa told Grimm, that Norah Richter had fixed on him as her latest target. Nobody knew how she chose her victims. But Theresa, who had herself been stalked for months by this lunatic, saw it as her duty to warn him.

After her visit, Grimm had googled me. Finding a recent photo was as easy for him as it had been for me, and he was even curious enough to wander down my street on one occasion—although, thanks to Theresa’s input and my undiplomatic manner, he was soon living in fear and trembling of me, reacting with understandable aggression when I pestered him with calls and turned up outside his house. Eventually an email came from Theresa: there was clearly no point in waiting for the police to do anything about me, and she’d had an idea. If Grimm wanted to know more, all he had to do was come to the entrance to the Prater at 10 p.m. sharp on February 11. By the big wheel.