Finally the man inside the glass box grunted and pushed his paperwork back toward him.

“Which room?” asked Cormac, figuring that surely this was the one question that would need an actual spoken answer, but the man only put a burly finger on a cheap plastic tag attached to one of the keys: 238.

“Brilliant,” said Cormac, who was not normally a sarcastic person. “Thanks so much! For everything!”

But the man hadn’t heard, or wouldn’t hear, because this was London, and Cormac picked up his rucksack again and headed for the old creaking lift.

THERE WERE TWELVE rooms on either side of the central lift, with a large kitchen at each end—rather grotty—and two sets of bathrooms. The facility was obviously old, but the windows were big, looking out across the roundabout and onto North London and the river itself. Cormac fiddled with the lock and entered the little student room.

He didn’t know what he’d expected—he supposed something left over—but the room was almost completely bare. There was a north-facing window, a single bed, a sink with a mirror above it, harsh-brown carpet, and a cheap wardrobe with a few hangers inside it. He worried then if he should have cleared everything out of the cottage—he’d left the books, the dishes, and the rugs. Was that not right? But it was only for three months; he wasn’t clearing out his entire life.

This person had, though. There was nothing here at all.

Chapter 20

After such a long journey, Lissa was absolutely sure she’d gone too far, or at least was going around in circles. She could distantly appreciate the hills dotted with lambs, the deep blue of the loch, the shadows cast by the crags on the fields, the farmers out plowing new seed—she understood in the abstract that these things were nice—but looking through the dirty bus window was a bit like watching it on television, as if she were seeing it from a distance.

And now she was worried she’d missed her stop, and she would put any money on Uber not working out here, and everyone was looking at her funny (she was convinced) and the bus driver was trying to chat her up, and this was just awful and doing her anxiety no good at all.

Finally, after about half an hour, during which she simply sat on her hands, trying to breathe, trying not to let everything get on top of her, the bus driver, who’d been trying to engage her in conversation for the last forty minutes and didn’t understand why she didn’t know making conversation with the bus driver was very much the least you could do on a bus, stopped in Kirrinfief Square, where he normally liked to take a short break and buy a book, and smiled at his last passenger, the pretty girl with the curly hair who looked terrified.