For a while he fought it and, to his credit, it was a brave fight. But this thought had allies: panic, fear, the needs of his own body. He should have silenced it earlier, he knew that now.

Because it wouldn't let go, Robert cried off his next class, pleading a sick headache. It pleased the students, he could tell. When he announced the cancellation, they didn't exactly cheer, but he could see the relief on their faces, the sweet anticipation of time spent munching burgers and discussing their unwanted virginity. If he had cared, it would have been an insult.

Although claiming to be sick, he didn't go home. The idea of his silent, empty apartment appalled him. Instead he sat in a corner of the staff room and smoked. At least there he was on the periphery of reality; people coming and going; the sound of ridiculous or boring chatter. It didn't drown the voice of the thought, but it prevented it from completely overwhelming him. He knew this stuff. These things were all basically the same. With others around it could nag rather than scream. Alone, he would be entirely at its mercy. Robert didn't want to be alone, because that way he knew he didn't stand a chance. It was just too bloody good.

He stubbed one cigarette out and immediately lit another.

He didn't really like chain-smoking, it made him feel sick, but he had to do something. If he did absolutely nothing people would become concerned. But closing his eyes and pretending to be asleep wasn't a solution - he'd tried that.

As soon as his lids had drooped, he'd felt the thought hook its icy fingers round his testicles.

Robert didn't want to do it. It was good, but he didn't want to do it. The thought constantly showed him the advantages, but the disadvantages were immense. They far outweighed the benefits, but only, and unfortunately, on the rational plane. In the domain of the emotions, Robert's real home, where logic is useless and the rational mind a joke, there was nothing to be done but follow the long finger of the thought. And yet he could see, despite the fluffy and appealing images that littered this path of the heart, exactly where it led. Brief sweetness gave rapidly over into a space that contained nothing. An echoing, doorless room, waiting to be filled.

'Do you want a paracetamol?'

He hadn't noticed Rosemary slip into the chair beside him. She could have been there for hours for all he knew.

Looking inward with such intensity blinds the eyes. His answer was stupefied and sounded drugged, even to his own ears. 'What?'

'A paracetamol. Helena said you had a headache ...'

'Oh.' He looked at her eyes and was shocked by the level of concern he found there. Perhaps he looked terrible?

Robert made an attempt at a slight smile. 'No, no thanks.'

She moved her powdery face close to his. 'Are you all right, dear?'

Robert felt himself start to panic. Rosemary, though notoriously vague, was no fool. Again he wondered how he looked. He put his hand to his chin and heard a faint rasping sound as his fingers dragged across his unshaven flesh. He moved his hand up; his cheeks were still unmistakably flushed from the previous night's gin. He didn't need a mirror to tell him that he looked a fright. His appearance was probably the reason why Rosemary persisted. It was unlike him. Robert was always at least clean and tidy, well, he had been until - When had it all started? How many awful days now?

'Robert ...' Rosemary frowned. 'Don't you think you should go home?'

'Oh, no! No! It's OK - really.'

But Rosemary wasn't convinced. She touched his knee lightly with her fingers. Robert froze.

'If this girl is giving you this much grief, I'd get out if I were you.'

As he turned to face her, Robert felt pain as the taut muscles in his neck unwillingly moved. He could see by the expression on her face that he was answering her advice with hard and contemptuous eyes.

She looked sadly down at the floor and sighed. 'Just a thought, Robert.'

He felt ashamed. Poor Rosemary, she hadn't deserved a killing look, she was only trying to be kind. But it was too late. She rose from her chair and smoothed her skirt down towards her knees. Robert didn't follow her with his eyes.

She'd momentarily drowned out the voice of the thought and perhaps that had been wrong. Perhaps he shouldn't have spoken to her at all. Speaking was sometimes bad.

He'd spoken to the headmaster about the Norris twins and Billy on numerous occasions, but it had never done any good. Betty likewise. Best to keep silent, like back at school when he was a child. The thought was good in that it gave structure, direction. Just like school really good old Christ's Hospital. The other way there was too much freedom, too many paths. Some could be right, but he knew that he would choose the wrong one, he knew it!

Then he would be alone again, single, without her. People like Rosemary just couldn't understand.

Rebuffed, Rosemary walked away from him and joined the small cluster of people around the coffee machine.

She looked back at him once, but as she became more involved in the trite niceties of break time she soon stopped paying him attention. Briefly, but without real concern, he wondered whether her conversation was about him, but he decided that it wasn't. They were all laughing, so it couldn't possibly be. It was about sex, the latest staff conquests. He felt sorry for them. The fleeting ego-building one-nighters with foreigners young enough to be their sons or daughters.

The last resort of the desperate middle-aged ex-pat.

The thought resurfaced.

In order to make the thing work, he had to go over to this Smits's textile plant which was, she had said, somewhere in Uskiidar. Location was important and actually doing it there would lend the thing the credence that he felt it needed. In addition, he had to think himself into the role of a racist of death-dealing magnitude in which the police had cast him. That was not easy because it was so dreadful, so utterly unlike the person that he really was.

But then for the purposes of the thought, which was to be the instrument of his continuance with Natalia, he had to put things like that to one side.

He bent his mind to discovering what kind of words and beliefs someone associated with Smits might express.

Silently, at first, he mouthed the word 'Jew'. The strangeness of its resonance appalled him. Was it perhaps because they were such an ancient race or maybe because hatred of them, on account of the 'death' of Christ, was so ingrained inside the European psyche that the word, now attended, made him feel so odd? Despite the already stifling heat, Robert shuddered. If just simply thinking of a word in a particular context could elicit such deep, if repellent, reactions, how much more might saying or writing or acting upon these feelings achieve? He thought about people, thin like sticks, starved beyond sanity. And then of others, their long medieval robes flapping in the crisp, Northern European wind as grave-faced men in black pushed them roughly into huge, devouring bonfires. Even playing around with such images appalled him, and yet ... and yet he had to do it because she wanted and needed him to and what if the old man were guilty and ... and ...

'Jew.' He said it this time. Not loudly, but audibly enough for a few heads to turn in his direction. For some reason, it made him laugh, although not for long because several other of his colleagues were watching now, their faces both puzzled and concerned.

Under normal circumstances, whatever they were, he knew that he should have been grateful in some way for their concern. But he wasn't. They were nothing, nobodies to him. His mind was filled only with her now and, emboldened by his obsession and in order to place the idea firmly in his mind, he said it again.

'Jew.'

Now they were all looking at him; looking and wondering and not knowing in any sense what he knew. Robert smiled. This secret was his and hers - this awful, repellent, death-defying deed.

When he did finally rise from his seat, he did so slowly and without a word. I'm going to do it now, he said to himself, right now. Many eyes watched as he made his way to his little cupboard-like office and closed the door behind him.

Despite the gravity, not to mention the unpleasantness that underlined the occasion, Reinhold Smits did smile when he saw her. He couldn't help it. Though so very much older than the woman that he remembered from all those years ago, she was still, unmistakably, herself. Still arrogant, still unsmiling, still marvellously regal.

'Hello, Maria,' he said.

She held her hand out to him, the knuckles glittering with diamonds. 'Reinhold.'

He took it and, bowing over the outstretched claw, brushed his lips lightly against the crumpled skin. 'I don't have to tell you why I have come.'

'No,' she replied, 'you do not. Please sit down.'

He took the chair beside her bed, smoothing the legs of his trousers as he sat. 'Whatever you may think,' he said, 'I didn't kill Leonid.'

'You had ample reason to do so.'

He nodded his head in assent. 'Yes. But then he had reason to want me dead also.'

Her short laugh came out like a cough. 'I don't think so!

You took his job, which was nothing. As for me and my relationship with Leonid ...'

'Yes?'

'You never got me, Reinhold, in either the romantic or the political sense. Leonid had no reason to want your death.'

He smiled a small but none the less acknowledging smile.

'Yes, I see.' Whether he did or not only Smits would know, but now he changed the subject. 'And so how are you, Maria? How is what is left of your life?'

'I am who I always was, Reinhold, and I remain, in that sense, as it were at your mercy. But for you, being in thrall to Leonid must have been extremely galling.'

He sighed. 'It was at first. But as the years passed ...'

'You must have given him a fortune during that time.

Most of which he poured down his throat.' She slid her eyes upwards to meet his. 'Was it all worth it?'

'In the beginning, yes.'

'And later?'

Unable or unwilling to meet her gaze for any longer, Reinhold Smits shifted his attention to the floor. 'As far as I am aware, all those who could or would substantiate Leonid's stories either disappeared or died many years ago.'

'But you kept on paying?'

He shrugged. 'What else could I do? He still possessed the photographs and besides he couldn't work again after I dismissed him. I provided him with no references and his escalating drunkenness precluded even illegitimate work. We were both, if you like, in thrall to each other, a situation which suited us, and anyway, without the paltry little amounts from my ample coffers, he would have starved.'

'How very humane of you.'

He turned back to face her, but this time his expression was filled with disgust. 'Well, somebody had to do it! And even though it wasn't me who put him in that position in the first place and even though he hurt and frightened me beyond-'

'You have only yourself to blame!' She stabbed one hard, unforgiving finger dangerously close to his eyes. 'If you hadn't been such a monstrous pervert, Leonid would not have had cause to do what he did!'

'In order to protect you!'

'Yes.' Although seated she pulled her neck up to its full height and raised her eyebrows so that she was looking down upon him. 'Back then my life was at stake, Reinhold. My life! What you wanted to do would have exposed me to all manner of dangers, not from one, but from many quarters.

That my use of Leonid to prevent you from doing that caused you both so much discomfort is very sad, but I'm afraid that from my point of view, it was very well worth doing!'

A long silence followed her outburst. Time during which both of them reflected, for their own reasons, upon things that had been, things that were far from edifying. But when the conversation did resume the subject, for the time being, was changed.

'You look very well,' she said.

He smiled. 'Chemotherapy is a marvellous preservative.'

'Oh.' For the first time during their meeting she looked both confused and at a disadvantage. 'I'm sorry.'

'There's really no need,' he said. 'I've done everything that I ever wanted to do, plus more. I have no complaints - bar one, of course.'

'And what is that?'

He looked up at her, but this time he did not smile. 'I should like to be left alone by the police. Should like to die with my reputation intact.'

'I see.' She reached across to her bedside table, took a cigarette out of one of her packets and lit up.

'In part,' he continued, 'I suppose that it was my own fault really. Had I not written to offer my condolences to you on the death of Leonid, you might have quite forgotten about me altogether-'

'I doubt that!'

'But then to mention my name to the police was, even for you, Madam Maria, a little spiteful, don't you think?'

'If, as you say, Reinhold, you had nothing to do with Leonid's death, then surely whatever information I may or may not have given to the police is irrelevant.'

It was so like her to push the argument back on to his shoulders. She was, and always had been, so dreadfully sly. How little the years had changed her. Quite suddenly, Reinhold Smits lost all patience with niceties and became, for such an old man, fiercely animated. 'As I believe I said to you on the telephone, I will not tolerate your groundless and, to my mind, unbalanced spite!'

She laughed at him. 'This, from a Nazi! Really, Reinhold, I-'

'My beliefs have nothing to do with it! There-'

'Listen, Reinhold, the police already knew that Leonid had worked for you at some time. And, to be fair, your opinions were not unknown at the time. Besides ...' Here she paused. She took a long deep-lunged drag upon her cigarette and looked him straight in the eyes.

'Besides what?' he said, his eyes still flaming with too long pent-up rage.

'Besides, whether you killed Leonid or not, you were in his apartment on the day that he died, weren't you?'

'No, I ...' His words denied it, but his face, which was now the colour of ashes, told a different story.

Maria Gulcu smiled. 'Remember when you telephoned me just after the police had been to visit you?'

'Yes, it was-'

'Remember what was said? The conversation we had about when and how Leonid died?'

Something, maybe even, he thought, his poor, tired old heart, tightened in his chest. 'Yes?'

'Remember how we wondered how someone could batter an old man so savagely and how you said that even despite your beliefs you thought it was absolutely dreadful that the murderer had then drawn a large swastika in Leonid's blood just above his head?'

'I do recall it, yes. What is your point?'

'The point, Reinhold' - she smiled again, this time revealing all of her yellowing teeth - 'is that, try as I might, I cannot find any reference to such an occurrence in any of the newspaper reports I have read about the incident.'

Without moving his head, he slid his eyes away from hers.

'Well, then, I suppose ... Well, the police must have told me, it ...'

'Oh, I don't think so, Reinhold.' Her voice was soft now, honeyed, almost seductive. 'They certainly didn't tell me about it. And if you consider the thing logically, that does make sense.'

'How?'

'Well, if you were a policeman who was confronted with a bizarre and possibly racially motivated crime, would you want to let every madman in the vicinity know about such a thing? Crazy people have been known to copy such acts.

I'm not saying that you are lying, Reinhold, but I think that the likelihood of Inspector ikmen furnishing you with such information is very slight.'

He wrapped his arms protectively about his thin body and put his head down. 'But he must have! He did! How could he not have?'