“You sent Kloster a letter of apology? You didn’t mention it.”

“It was when I came out of hospital. I was confused and terrified. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for everyone close to me to die. I thought that if I asked for forgiveness humbly, pleaded and took all the blame, he’d stop. It was a mistake made in a moment of desperation. But when I tried to explain this to the superintendent he took out another document: the admission form for the psychiatric clinic where I was given the sleep cure. He said he’d had to make inquiries about me too. From his tone, he made it clear he thought he had my measure and wasn’t prepared to waste any more time on me. He asked if I realised that with the same lack of proof somebody sufficiently imaginative, or deranged, might also accuse me. Then he went back to a fatherly tone and advised me to accept that my boyfriend’s death had simply been a careless accident, my parents’ a tragedy, and there was nothing more to it. They’d caught my brother’s killer and this was indeed quite another matter: surely I hadn’t forgotten that they’d caught the brute with my brother’s blood around his mouth? Did I want them to let him go and instead pursue a writer awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion d’honneur with whom I’d had a personal problem of some sort several years ago? He stood up and said he couldn’t help me any further but there was a public prosecutor on the case if I wanted to take my stories to him.”

“But you didn’t,” I said.

She looked defeated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.

She lapsed into a long helpless silence, as if now that she’d told me everything she had retreated further into herself. She sat hunched in the armchair, hands with fingers interlaced in her lap, jerking her head and shoulders back and forth in small compulsive movements. She looked on the verge of shivering.