I looked around. I was glad I had chosen to meet her on a sunny morning with children running around making a racket.

“It’s not a matter of sleeping,” I said. “At the moment I don’t dare close my eyes because when I do I see the photograph of Jenny Hintlesham lying dead with… well, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I can’t accept that there is someone I have met, who is walking around leading a normal life after having done that.”

Grace was running a long, slim finger around the rim of her coffee cup.

“He’s highly organized. Look at the notes and the effort taken to deliver them.”

“But I still can’t believe that the police couldn’t have protected these women after he’d said what he was going to do.”

Grace nodded vigorously.

“In the last few weeks I’ve done some research. There have been a number of cases of this kind. One was a case a few years ago in Washington, D.C. A man made murderous explicit threats in notes to women. The husband of the first woman hired armed guards and she was still murdered in her home. The second had twenty-four-hour police guard and was tortured and killed in her own bedroom while her husband was in the house. I’m sorry to talk like this, but you asked me to be frank. Some of these men see themselves as geniuses. They’re not geniuses. They’re more like men with an obsessive hobby. What they are is motivated. They want to make women suffer and then to kill them, and they devote all their energy and resourcefulness and intelligence to carrying it out. The police do their best, but it’s hard to combat such singleness of purpose.”

“What happened to that killer in Washington?”

“They finally caught him at the scene.”

“Did they save the woman?”

Grace looked away.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “All I can say is that this isn’t a sweating psychopath living in a cardboard box under a bridge. He’s probably functioning perfectly well at the moment. Ted Bundy returned from committing two separate murders and, according to his girlfriend, he didn’t even seem tired.”

“Who’s he?”

“Another man who killed women.”

“But why go to all this trouble?” I protested. “Why not just attack women in dark alleys?”

“The trouble is part of the pleasure. The point I’m making, Nadia, is that you’ve got to give up all your commonsense views about character or motive. He’s not after your money. He doesn’t even hate you. At least, that’s not how he sees it. He may see it as love. Think of the letters he sends: They are love letters, in a perverse way. He becomes obsessive about the women he chooses.”

“You mean he’s the train-spotter and I’m the train.”

“Well, sort of.”

“But why? I can’t understand all this effort, writing notes, doing a drawing, taking terrible risks delivering the notes, and then killing these ordinary women horribly. Why?”

I looked Grace in the eyes. Her face was now almost a mask, expressionless.

“You think because terrible things are happening there have to be big motives. At some point, this person will be in custody and someone-it may be me-will talk to him about his life. Maybe he was savagely beaten as a child, or abused by an uncle, or suffered a head injury which resulted in a brain lesion. That will be the reason. Of course there are plenty of people who were savagely beaten or abused or injured who don’t grow up as sexual psychopaths. It’s just what he likes doing. Why do we like doing what we like doing?”

“What do you think will happen?”

She lit yet another cigarette.

“He’s escalating,” she said. “The first murder was almost opportunistic. He probably didn’t even look at her face, as if he wanted to eliminate her individuality. The second was far more violent and invasive. It’s a characteristic pattern. The crimes become more violent and uncontrolled. The perpetrator gets caught.”

I suddenly felt as if a cloud had passed over the sun. I looked up. It hadn’t. The sky was a beautiful blue.

“That should be helpful to the person after next that he picks on.”

We both got up to leave. I looked round at Lynne and she avoided my gaze. I turned back to Grace.

“How do you feel about the last couple of months?” I asked. “Are you pleased with the way you’ve conducted the inquiry?”

She picked up her sunglasses, her keys, and her cigarette packet.

“I gave up smoking-when was it?-five years ago, I think. I keep going over and over and thinking what I could have done different. When he’s caught, maybe I’ll know.” She gave a rueful smile. “Don’t worry. I’m not asking for your sympathy.” She took something out of her pocket and offered it to me. It was a business card. “You can call me anytime.”

I took it and looked at it in the pointless, polite way one does.

“I don’t think you’d be able to get there in time,” I said.

FIFTEEN

When I was at college, supposedly learning how to be a grown-up and ready for the real world, I had a friend who died of leukemia. Her name was Laura, and she had tiny feet, cheeks like rosy apples, and a dirty laugh. She got ill in her first year and died before her finals. We got used to the fact of her death and her absence from us horribly quickly, remembering her occasionally in jolts of shame and sentimentality, but I thought a great deal about Laura now. In a strange and entirely unwelcome way, I felt closer to her-and to Jenny and Zoe, women I’d never met-than I did to my living friends.

Even Zach and Janet felt distant to me. They seemed appalled, yet almost embarrassed, by my situation. They rang me up too often but didn’t come round often enough, and when we did meet there was nothing we could properly talk about, because I was in the shadow and they were in the sunlight. We were self-conscious together. It was as if I had gone beyond them, into some other place that they could not enter and I couldn’t exit. I remembered with a shiver that Laura had said the same kind of thing, toward the end, when it was obvious to all of us that she wasn’t going to make it. She had said, or shouted, rather, that she felt as if she had gone into a waiting room, and soon the door on the other side of it would open for her and she’d have to go through. I remembered the shudder of terror I had felt when she’d said that. I had imagined the door opening out onto pitch black, and stepping out of a lit and furnished room into the empty abyss.

Laura had gone through all the stages you’re supposed to go through when you’re confronting the fact of death: disbelief and anger and grief and terror and finally a dazed, numbed kind of acceptance-perhaps because she was so worn down by the treatment and by the lurches between hope and despair. One night after she had died, a group of us had had an ugly argument, fueled by too much to drink, about whether she could have lived, or lived longer, if she had struggled more, rather than giving up and letting go. In the past, the image of letting go had for me been one of a hand gently uncurling from the hand of a beloved; now, after seeing the photos and case notes, it was more of two hands clinging to a ledge until a heavy boot stamps them off. Someone said she should have fought harder, as if it was Laura’s fault that she had died, not just brutal bad luck.

I was going to fight. I didn’t know if it would make the smallest bit of difference, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to cower in blind terror in a fucking waiting room, staring at the door in the opposite wall, feeling only the heart-thumping, mouth-drying, stomach-churning, blinding, dehumanizing dread I’d been feeling for the last few days. I’d seen the photographs, the case notes. I’d talked to Grace. I didn’t have much faith in Links and Cameron, partly because I sensed they didn’t have much faith in themselves and, without ever admitting it, they were waiting for me to die. So I was left with me. Just me. And I have always hated waiting.