© 1986

Edinburgh 1970

It was snowing. Idly Sam Franklyn stared out of the dirty window up at the sky wondering if the leaden cloud would provide enough depth to ski by the weekend.

“Tape on now, Dr. Franklyn, if you please.” Professor Cohen’s quiet voice interrupted his thoughts. Sam turned, glancing at the young woman lying so calmly on the couch, and switched on the recorder. She was an attractive girl, slender and dark, with vivacious gray-green eyes, closed now beneath long curved lashes. He grinned to himself. When the session was over he intended to offer her a lift back into town.

The psychology labs were cold. As he picked up his notebook and began a new page, he leaned across and touched the grotesquely large cream radiator and grimaced. It was barely warm.

Cohen’s office was small and cluttered, furnished with a huge desk buried beneath books and papers, some half-dozen chairs crowded together to accommodate tutorial students, when there were any, and the couch, covered by a bright tartan blanket, where most of his volunteers chose to lie while they were under hypnosis, “as if they are afraid they will fall down” he had commented once to Sam as yet another woman had lain nervously down as if on a sacrificial altar. The walls of the room were painted a light cold blue that did nothing to improve the temperature. Anyone who could relax comfortably in Michael Cohen’s office, Sam used to think wryly, was halfway to being mesmerized already. Next to him the radiator let out a subterranean gurgle, but it grew no hotter.

Professor Cohen seated himself next to the couch and took the girl’s hand in his. He had not bothered to do that for his last two victims, Sam noticed, and once more he grinned.