Norah opened the file again. She found the page she needed in Grimm’s biography and ran her finger down it until she came to the entry she was looking for.

Bullseye.

Arthur Grimm had worked at Wilkau Engineering while he was writing his dissertation. Less than a quarter of an hour from the town where Norah and Angie and Valerie had gone to school.

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Grimm had been very close by. For an entire year. Norah squeezed her lips together when she compared the dates. It had been an awful year, perhaps the very worst. It was the year Valerie died. On February 11.

REVENGE

I was eleven when I first understood what it means to thirst for revenge, a sensation so physical that it really does resemble thirst. I was a plump child with arms and legs as pale and soft as white blancmange and I was often bullied at school—certainly until the summer I had a growth spurt.

One day, for reasons I have forgotten, my elder brother flushed my goldfish down the toilet. (It was called Silver after Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which at the time I thought a very clever name for a goldfish.) I was devastated and cried for two days. On the third day, I pilfered the snail poison from the shed and killed my brother’s cat. My parents suspected the neighbours. My brother and I knew better.

There is, to my mind, only one way of dealing with injustice. If someone pushes you, you push them back twice as hard. That’s something we learn in kindergarten—or not at all.

I am disappointed, then, that she went to the police. Is it all over before it has even begun? Did I misjudge her?

People have robbed me, insulted me, spat at me. When I was nineteen, someone broke my nose and two of my ribs. I never went running to the police. Diogenes the Cynic said that the best way of avenging yourself on your enemies is to make yourself better than them. God, how dull. I’d have expected something more thrilling from a man who scandalised the ancient Greek establishment by living on the streets and wanking in public.

I have always been in favour of revenge. I think it a mistake to demonise something so deeply human. When we avenge ourselves, we cast off the role of passive victim and take action. That feels good, of course. Revenge is a fine and splendid thing; not for nothing is it one of the oldest dramatic motifs. It is universal; we understand it instinctively.

And yet we rarely give in to it. The Americans are better at that than we are; they took to the streets to celebrate bin Laden’s assassination—and quite right too.

I refuse to believe she is giving up. I must be patient, I must have trust. I am so tense I haven’t slept for two nights. Don’t disappoint me, I keep thinking. Don’t disappoint me.