A Masculine Ending by Joan Smith

Dr Loretta Lawson is a successful academic, teaching English literature at one of the colleges making up the University of London in the late 1980s. She is also a founding member of Fem Sap, an academic European journal that had been set up to espouse radical feminism. 

In this latter capacity, as the book opens she is travelling to Paris in late summer to attend what she anticipates might be a tense meeting of the Fem Sap board, at which some of the more extreme members are expected to push the magazine in an increasingly radical and antagonistic direction. Loretta has arranged to pass the weekend staying in the vacant apartment jointly owned by one of her friends. Arriving at the flat far later than planned, after a traumatic journey, she is surprised to find that the larger bedroom is occupied, with a man apparently sleeping in it. She stays in the other room, and departs for the board meeting early the next morning, without seeing any further signs of the other occupant. 

When she returns to the flat after the board meeting, which had been as long and contentious as she had feared, Loretta finds the flat empty. However, when she looks into the larger bedroom, she is shocked to see that the bedding and carpet are very heavily bloodstained. There are no other signs that anyone has been in the flat, apart from an early review copy of a new book of structuralist literary criticism, that seems completely out of place, and which Loretta absent-mindedly takes with her. 

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