I DON’T KNOW WHO I’M writing this for but perhaps it’s for you. If that makes it sound like a confession, you may wonder what I’m expecting in return. A small part of me, I admit, seeks forgiveness, or at least understanding. But that part of me is less important than the forgiveness I wish to give myself, and which I find elusive.

I am writing to draw a line under the past, with its rot creeping into the present. I know now that if I had done this a long time ago, the present would never have been postponed and things would be different today.

In one of his more fatalistic moments, Finn said to me: ‘Anna, you know our story can never be written.’

‘Why not?’ I asked him.

‘Nobody would believe it,’ he said.

But I’m here now, sitting in a medieval vault in a house in Tegernsee on the southern borders of Germany, reading Finn’s story-our story- and I’m aware that all I have between me and the hostile forces that swim up at me from the pages is the Contender handgun and the twelve rifle shells on the table by my hand. And now that I’ve found these notebooks of his, or books of record, as he calls them, buried in this vault along with all the other material of our secret profession, I see his fatalism was short-lived. As I sift through the piles of notebooks, oddments, scraps and sheets of paper, documents and microfiches-their edges stained with cellar dampness-with only the heat of an oil burner to keep me warm, I can see that he has practically written our story himself.