‘Yes, me. I don’t kill people with fake drugs. I’m not a hypocrite who persuades people that I’m the greatest – I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls …’

She said, ‘But I don’t even know what colour your eyes are. If you’d rung me up just now and asked me whether you were dark or fair or wore a moustache, I wouldn’t have known.’

‘Can’t you get him out of your mind?’

‘No.’

He said, ‘As soon as they’ve cleared up this Koch murder, I’m leaving Vienna. I can’t feel interested any longer in whether Kurtz killed Harry – or the third man. Whoever killed him it was a kind of justice. Maybe I’d kill him myself under these circumstances. But you still love him. You love a cheat, a murderer.’

‘I loved a man,’ she said. ‘I told you – a man doesn’t alter because you find out more about him. He’s still the same man.’

‘I hate the way you talk. I’ve got a splitting headache, and you talk and talk …’

‘I didn’t ask you to come.’

‘You make me cross.’

Suddenly she laughed. She said, ‘You are so comic. You come here at three in the morning – a stranger – and say you love me. Then you get angry and pick a quarrel. What do you expect me to do – or say?’

‘I haven’t seen you laugh before. Do it again. I like it.’

‘There isn’t enough for two laughs,’ she said.

He took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. He said, ‘I’d make comic faces all day long. I’d stand on my head and grin at you between my legs. I’d learn a lot of jokes from the books on after-dinner speaking.’

‘Come away from the window. There are no curtains.’

‘There’s nobody to see.’ But automatically checking his statement, he wasn’t quite so sure: a long shadow that had moved, perhaps with the movement of clouds over the moon, was motionless again. He said, ‘You still love Harry, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps I do. I don’t know.’ He dropped his hands and said, ‘I’ll be pushing off.’