I don’t want to see you here again. That’s a warning.

Norah stood there for a moment, astonished by the turn her little evening walk had taken. Then she set off. Her heart didn’t begin to steady until she’d rounded the corner.

Back in the flat, Norah collapsed on a kitchen chair and as she sat there, warming up, she tried to put her thoughts in order. Thanks to the cold air and the shock, she was feeling surprisingly clear-headed, but she couldn’t get her head round what had just happened. What was the man’s problem? Who did he think he was?

A beep from her phone announced a new text and she made a little noise of surprise when she saw that it was from the same unknown number the other texts had come from. Was all that starting up again after days of radio silence? Bewildered, she opened her inbox.

That was stupid of you. Dangerous too.

For a moment, she could only stare at her phone. The blood rushed in her ears and she felt her fingers tremble and had to put her phone on the table. When she’d calmed down a little, she read the text again—not that there was much to read. It was like a slap in the face; there could be little doubt that the text referred to her meeting with Grimm. Norah closed her eyes. Had somebody followed her? She went through the last hour in her head. The taxi driver who had turned her away. The short walk to Grimm’s house. Had she seen anyone on the way there? Or outside his house? She couldn’t say for certain. She’d been far too wrapped up in herself—and in Grimm.

Norah opened her eyes again. Reply or ignore? She made a spur-of-the-moment decision and picked up her phone.

Are you following me? she wrote.

The reply came so quickly that she wondered whether her virtual contact had been expecting the question.

I’m protecting you.

Who the hell could it be?

What do you know about Arthur Grimm? she asked, but received no reply.

She put the phone back on the table. It was impossible to find out who the number belonged to. Even Werner, the best investigative journalist she knew, hadn’t managed.

But Werner knew a great deal about Grimm. The printout with the file he had put together for Norah was still on her desk. Was there anything she’d overlooked?

Arthur Grimm had been born in Frankfurt in 1974. He’d studied mechanical engineering in Aachen, then switched course. Werner had tracked down all the firms where Grimm had worked as an intern during and immediately after his studies. Norah skimmed the almost endless list and saw that Grimm had been living in Austria for some time. He’d started off in Salzburg—evidently moving there to join his then-wife—and ended up in Vienna where he had been living for the last four years, alone.

Norah compared the main points of her own life with those of Grimm. When she was born, he was eight years old and attending primary school in Hanover. By the time she started school, he’d moved on to secondary school. When she started secondary school, he was taking his final exams. The year of Valerie’s suicide, he was studying engineering and working on his dissertation. At around the time Norah took her final exams—passing by the skin of her teeth, which was, everyone agreed, only natural, when you thought of what she’d been through—he graduated and moved to Munich. And so it went on. Norah leant back resignedly. No overlap in their biographies; they hadn’t ever lived in the same place or known the same people or done the same things.