Norah returned to the present. Opposite her, Aylin was on the phone, talking about her latest meditation retreat. When Norah got up and crossed the corridor to go to the toilet, she felt like a sailor staggering across a pitching deck wet with spray.

39

That evening she waited a long time for him, hidden in the shadows across the road from his flat. She had taken up her lookout post early so as not to miss him when he came home from work. Charges or no charges, she had to see him again; it was as if some inner compulsion were driving her. She recognised him from a long way off and everything about him aroused her disgust: his precise, measured, almost soldierly movements; his cold, pale eyes; his square chin; his fake, narrow-lipped smile. He greeted an old woman, perhaps a neighbour, and the smile flickered across his face only to drain away like water into sand as soon as she had passed. When another woman passed him a few metres further on—this one taller and younger with a blonde ponytail and an aloof expression—he strode on without so much as a glance at her.

Norah saw him vanish into the building and soon afterwards a light went on at a first-floor window. So that was where Arthur Grimm lived. Norah stared up at his flat, but he didn’t appear at the window. Then, just as she was turning to leave, the light went out and a moment later Grimm reappeared at the door, a black sports bag over his shoulder. She watched him walk down the street, get into his car and drive away. There had been some mention of sport in Werner’s dossier. Norah racked her brain. Did he play football? Work out? Then she remembered: he went boxing. That figured.

This time she had been more careful not to get too close, and from a distance she was so inconspicuous—jeans, a khaki parka, her hair hidden under a black beanie—that Grimm probably wouldn’t have noticed her even if he had happened to see her.

Norah stood on the cold, dark street, trying to work out what her intuition was telling her. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it carefully out of her bag. The unknown number.

Get away from there!

Norah stared at the message. Then she raised her eyes and looked about her. A street on a winter’s evening in a well-off residential area, light at most of the windows. A couple passed on the other side of the road; an underground train jingled in the distance. ‘Where are you?’ Norah whispered. A second text arrived.

He’s dangerous!

Norah looked about her again, but couldn’t see anyone watching her. Had she been followed? A moment later she wrote:

Why should I believe you?

As so often, there was no immediate answer. Norah set off towards the underground, her gloved hands over her cold, aching ears. She tried to put her thoughts in order. Then, at last, the answer came.