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brambles. I let us get a quarter of a mile away from the houses before I showed myself and then I stepped out on to the pavement ahead of her. I turned round to face her and stood there, staring in the way I’d practised in the mirror.
    She wasn’t nervous. She was brave. It was only very briefly that she hesitated. But she didn’t quite dare walk past me. Instead she crossed the road. There’s never much traffic on that road and so far not a single car had passed. She crossed the road, walking faster. I crossed too but behind her and I walked along behind her. Presently she began to run, so of course I ran too, though not fast enough to catch her up, just enough to gain on her a little.
    We had been going on like that for some minutes, the Wake Arms still a mile off, when she suddenly doubled back, hared across the road and began running back the way she had come. That finished me for chasing her. I stood there and laughed. I laughed long and loud, I felt so happy and free, I felt so much all-conquering power that I – I alone, humble, ordinary, dull me – could inspire such fear.
    After that I took to going to Epping Forest as a regular thing. Roughly speaking, I’d say it would have been once a fortnight. Since I do shift work, four till midnight just as often as ten till six, I sometimes managed to go in the daytime. A lot of women are alone at home in the daytime and have no men to escort them when they go out. I never let it go more than two weeks without my going there and occasionally I’d go more often, if I was feeling low in spirits, for instance, or Carol and I had a row or I got depressed over money. It did me so much good, I wish I could make you understand how much. Just think what it is you do that gives you a tremendous lift, driving a car really fast or going disco dancing or getting high on something – well, frightening women did all that for me and then some. Afterwards it was like Christmas, it was almost like being in love.
    And there was no harm in it, was there? I didn’t hurt them. There’s a French saying: it gives me so much pleasure and you so little pain. That was the way it was for me and them, though it wasn’t without pleasure for them either. Imagine how they must have enjoyed talking about it afterwards, going into all the details like Carol did, distorting the facts, exaggerating, making themselves for a while the centre of attention.
    For all I knew they may have got up search parties, husbands and boy friends and fathers all out in a pack looking for me, all having a great time as people invariably do when they’re hunting something or someone. After all, when all was said and done, what did I do? Nothing. I didn’t molest them or insult them or try to touch them, I merely stood and looked at them and ran after them – or ran when they ran which isn’t necessarily the same thing.
    There was no harm in it. Or so I thought. I couldn’t see what harm there could ever be, and believe me, I thought about this quite a lot, for I’m just as guilt-ridden as the rest of us. I thought about it, justifying myself, keeping guilt at bay. Young women don’t have heart attacks and fall down dead because a man chases them. Young women aren’t left with emotional traumas because a man stares at them. The oldest woman I ever frightened was the one with the Maltese terrier and she was no more than forty. I saw her again on my third or fourth visit and followed her for a while, stepping out from behind bushes and standing in her path. She used the same words the girl in Queens Wood had used, uttered in the same strangled voice: ‘What is it you want?’
    I didn’t answer her. I had mercy on her and her little ineffectual dog and I melted away into the woodland shades. The next one who asked me that I answered with professorial gravity: ‘Merely collecting lichens, madam.’
    It was proof enough of how harmless I