Years later, Norah saw him again, at a reception given by the publishing house she was working for at the time. She recognised him immediately. He looked confident, successful. To her horror, he made a beeline for her. He said he knew her from somewhere—he never forgot a pretty woman—but he couldn’t think where. They hadn’t gone to the same school, had they? No? Ah, they’d been students together—wonderful. Might he introduce her to his wife Johanna?

A beautiful, fragile-looking woman in a short black dress appeared at his side. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘How do you two know each other?’

‘Oh, your husband raped a friend of mine when we were students,’ Norah replied.

Then she turned away and went home, images of the trembling, frightened girl flashing across her mind, and a sick feeling in her stomach because the world was so fucking unjust and she was powerless to do anything about it.

Norah stood at the window, thinking of the first time she’d met Coco. It wasn’t long afterwards that the professor made such a mess of her that her own mother probably wouldn’t have recognised her. Norah did her best to help. For the second time in her life, she talked a woman into putting her faith in the law, and once again it backfired. She soon discovered that the professor was extremely astute and legally almost untouchable—especially given Coco’s history of mental illness. He ended up suing the two women for libel and Coco was left a quivering wreck.

Then Nora did something that was to cost her her job and eventually her relationship: she wrote about him. As a student she had learnt that a good journalist must never resort to malice, however good the cause, but she abandoned this principle for Coco. She wrote the article that the professor deserved, and by the end it was less an article than an indictment—an indictment in which not only Coco was given a voice, but all the other women whose lives the professor had destroyed. Because that was what he did; he destroyed women.

When the article was published, all hell broke loose—for Coco and Norah. Norah’s boss was furious about the libel charges. That didn’t surprise Norah, but what did surprise her was the way everyone rushed to defend the bastard, dismissing the women Norah had quoted in the article as greedy and limelight-seeking. She still felt sick just thinking about it.

When it was clear that Norah’s initiative had completely failed, the professor turned up on her doorstep one day. She let him in, her belly full of disgust and hate; she was too curious to turn him away. They stood facing each other in Norah’s study and she asked how it felt to destroy someone’s life. He only smiled smugly, swinging himself onto her desk as if he owned it. Everything about him revolted her—his violence, his greed, the way he smelt, the way he grinned and the suit he was wearing that must have cost as much as Norah’s car.