“Are you worried I might try to get in touch with them?”

Links took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. I looked across at Stadler. For the first time he wasn’t looking back. He seemed to be finding something of great interest in a notebook.

“We’ll keep you as in touch with our progress as we can,” Links said.

“Investigation?” I said. “It’s just a letter.”

“It’s important to take these matters seriously. Also, we have a psychologist, a Dr. Grace Schilling, who is an expert on, er… She should be here”-he looked at his watch-“at any minute, really.”

There was a silence.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not stupid. I had a break-in about a year ago-well, nothing was taken. I think I disturbed them. But it took the police about a day to get here and they did sod-all about it. Now I get a single nasty letter and it’s a major operation. What’s going on? Don’t you have real grown-up crimes to solve?”

Stadler snapped his notebook shut and put it in his pocket.

“We’ve been accused of not being sufficiently sensitive to offenses targeted against women,” he said. “We take threats of this kind very seriously.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s good, I suppose.”

Dr. Schilling was the kind of woman I rather envied. She’d obviously done really well at school, got fantastic grades, and still looked rather intelligent. She dressed pretty elegantly as well, but even that was in an intelligent sort of way. She had this long blond hair that looked great but that she’d obviously pinned up in about three and a half seconds to show that she didn’t take it all too seriously. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d catch standing on her head in front of a group of screaming tots. If I’d known she was coming I really would have tidied up the flat. The only thing that irritated me was that she had this air of extremely serious, almost sad, concern when she addressed me, as if she were presenting a religious TV program.

“I understand you’ve been in a relationship which ended,” she said.

“I can tell you that that letter wasn’t written by Max. For all sorts of reasons, including the fact that he would have trouble composing a letter to the milkman. Anyway, he was the one that walked out.”

“All the same, that might mean you were in a vulnerable state.”

“Well, a pissed-off state, maybe.”

“How tall are you, Nadia?”

“Don’t rub it in. I try not to think about it. Just a little over five foot. An emotionally vulnerable dwarf. Is that the point you’re trying to make? You should be all right, then.”

She didn’t even smile.

“Should I be worried?” I asked.

Now there was a very long pause. When Dr. Schilling spoke, it was with great precision.

“I don’t think it would be… well, productive, to get alarmed. But I think you should behave as if you were worried, just to be on the safe side. You have been threatened. You should act as if the threat means what it says.”

“Do you really think somebody just wants to kill me for no reason?”

She looked thoughtful.

“No reason?” she said. “Maybe. There are a lot of men who feel they have very good reasons for attacking or killing women. They may not be reasons that would convince you or me. But that isn’t much comfort, is it?”

“It’s not much comfort to me,” I said.

“No,” said Dr. Schilling, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking to somebody else, somebody I couldn’t see.

FIVE

They stayed and stayed. After a couple of hours Links received a message and shambled away, but Stadler and Dr. Schilling remained. While Schilling talked to me, Stadler went out and came back with sandwiches, cartons of drink, milk, fruit. Then, while he took me through the flat examining my security arrangements (to be substantially upgraded), she retreated into my kitchen area, made some tea. I even heard the rattle and clink and splashing of washing-up being done. She returned clutching mugs. Stadler took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

“There’s tuna and cucumber, salmon and cucumber, chicken salad, ham and mustard,” he announced.

I took the ham, Dr. Schilling took the tuna, which made me think the tuna must be vastly healthier and that there was something slightly squalid and frivolous about my choice.

“Are you some kind of medical policewoman?” I asked.

Her mouth was full, so she could only shake her head while laboriously attempting to swallow her sandwich. I felt a moment of triumph. I’d caught her looking undignified.

“No, no,” she said, as if I’d insulted her. “I do consulting work for them,” she said.

“What’s your real job?” I asked.

“I work at the Welbeck Clinic,” she said.

“What as?”

“Grace is being too modest,” Stadler said. “She is eminent in her field. You’re lucky to have her on your side.”

Schilling looked sharply round at him, and went red, almost in anger or distress, I thought, rather than embarrassment. All these looks and whispered asides. I felt like an intruder into a group of old friends who had their own special catchphrases, jargon, their shared happy history of working together.

“What I really meant,” I was saying, “is that I’m a children’s party entertainer. I often don’t have much pressure on my time during the weekdays when everybody else is in their offices. But you, Dr. Schilling…”

“Please, Nadia, call me Grace,” she murmured.

“All right, Grace. I know that doctors are incredibly busy people, which I’ve discovered every time I’ve wanted to see one. I freely confess that this is very pleasant sitting here and chatting, and I’m extremely willing to talk about my life in whatever detail you want. But I was just thinking why a grand psychiatrist like you is sitting here on the floor of a crappy bedsit in Camden Town eating a tuna sandwich. You’re not looking at your watch, you’re not receiving calls on your mobile. It seems strange to me.”

“It’s not strange,” Stadler said, wiping his mouth. He’d had the salmon. I bet the ham sandwich was the cheapest as well as being the most unhealthy. “What we want to do is to make a plan of how to proceed. We want to give you informal protection, and the purpose of this meeting is to decide what kind. As for Dr. Schilling, she is an authority on harassment of this kind and she has two objectives. Most important, of course, is to help us to find the person who has sent you this threat. To do that she needs to look at you and your life, to get a sense of what has attracted this madman.”

“It’s my responsibility, is it?” I said. “I’ve led him on?”

“It’s not your responsibility in any way,” Grace said urgently. “But he chose you.”

“I think you’re being daft,” I said. “This is a guy who gets off on sending rude letters to women because he’s scared of them. What’s the big deal?”

“You’re not right,” Grace said. “A letter like that is a violent act. A man who sends a letter like that has-well, he may have-crossed a boundary. He must be considered dangerous.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“Do you think I’m not getting frightened enough?”

She drained her mug of tea. She almost looked as if she were playing for time.

“I may advise you what you should do,” she said. “I don’t think I should tell you what to feel. Here, give me your mug. I’ll get some more tea.”

Subject closed. Stadler gave a cough.

“What I’d like to do,” he said, “if it’s all right, is to talk to you a bit about your life, who your friends are, the kind of people you meet, your habits, that sort of thing.”

“You don’t look like a policeman,” I said.

He gave a slight start. Then he smiled.

“What’s a policeman meant to look like?” he asked.

He was a difficult man to embarrass, or at least for me to embarrass. I had never met anyone before who looked me in the eyes the way he did, almost as if he were trying to look inside. What was he trying to see?