Norah groaned.

‘Oh my God, Coco.’

‘I know, I know. But I did it. I found an article about him, a new one, from last week. I thought I was going to freak out completely. All those clichés of his. I’m a simple man. A leopard can’t change its spots. Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla. But do you know what made me really angry?’

‘What?’ Norah asked resignedly.

‘There’s this story he tells the interviewer about how he learnt what fear is. He was playing in the garden one day as a child, and a stranger came along with a knife and attacked him, apparently leaving him slightly injured.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not his story. It’s mine. It’s something I told him on our first date.’

Wow, Norah thought, but said nothing.

‘I’ve no idea how I let him take me in. That pretentious piano-playing. And the way he’s always tossing out Shakespeare quotes. He’s such a conceited bastard. I can’t tell you how revolting I find him.’

Norah said nothing.

‘I could kill him,’ Coco said.

‘Don’t say that,’ said Norah. ‘You’re no more capable of killing than I am.’

‘You have no idea.’

Norah laughed, anxious to take some of the tension out of the situation.

‘You laugh,’ said Coco—she had stopped crying. ‘But everyone is capable of killing, if they have good reason. Even you.’

14

Norah couldn’t sleep after talking to Coco; her guilty conscience got the better of her. There was her poor friend, stuck in a tiny flat in that dump of a small town where her parents lived, hardly daring to leave the house—and it was all Norah’s fault.

Well, not quite all. But she’d done her bit.

She lit a cigarette, went to the window and looked out onto the street.

It had all begun when her boss had sent her to interview that art professor. The first interview had been held in the restaurant of a hotel—the second in the professor’s house. He’d got Norah’s hackles up right from the start. While at his house, she had briefly met his beautiful and considerably younger girlfriend Nicolette, who called herself Coco, and whom he referred to as my muse. He had sat in an armchair with his legs wide apart, while his muse sat in a corner of the sofa, her arms and legs entwined in an acrobatic pose that seemed designed to ensure that she took up as little space as possible.

The professor’s mouth was set in the rictus of a great white shark. During the interview, Coco kept getting up and darting out of the room. She moved almost soundlessly, but everything about her was screaming.

Norah knew that cowering posture, that look of fear. The first time she’d seen it had been at a party in her early student days, when she’d burst into the bathroom to find a girl staring at her with the wild eyes of a deer caught in headlights, crying and trembling. It turned out that their host, a boy Norah hardly knew, had spiked the girl’s drink, then taken her up to the bathroom, got her down on the tiles and done pretty much everything a boy can do to a girl who is just about conscious but completely defenceless. Norah persuaded the girl to go to the police and she went on to press charges, but the boy, not yet twenty, got off more or less scot-free—who wanted to mess up the future of a promising young man from a good family just because he’d made a silly mistake? The girl grew as thin and translucent as a ghost and ended up moving away. The boy stayed on and graduated.