And that was when he saw her. She was with two people outside, he could see them through the glass of the front door. One was a polony of about her own age, the other a lanky-looking fellow with fair hair. Terry had seen them both somewhere, earlier today, he couldn’t remember where. Then the two turned away, and she was coming in. He turned quickly from the desk and moved away, leaving the nun staring after him. He strolled across to where there was a green board attached to the wall and pretended to read the notices pinned to it. The woman who had come in wasn’t dressed like a doctor, but he knew she wasn’t a patient,  either, from the confident look she had about her. She stopped at the desk and signed her name into a ledger or something. She seemed a bit unsteady on her legs. Had she been drinking? She wasn’t Spanish, with that pale skin. It had to be her. She didn’t look like she did in the photograph, but he recognised her all the same, with that dark hair and narrow face and pointed chin.

She turned from the desk now and set off down a long white-painted corridor, at the end of which a big frosted-glass window glared with light from outside. She was a bit bow-legged, which was a thing he liked in a buer. He had adopted that word, buer, and polony, too. He was interested in words, and made a habit of collecting new ones. Percy had told him once he was ‘a bit of a connoisseur’. Percy was being sarcastic, as usual, but he was more right than he knew. Terry was a connoisseur, in certain things, especially now that he had learned from Percy how to pronounce the word.

A buer and a polony were different, two different types. One was tough, with a smart mouth and game for anything. The other was more of a lady. Funny, that. How would you know which was which? He would, he’d know. This one, for instance, was a buer, while the other one, that he’d seen her with outside, in the black dress with the white collar, she was a polony.

He was wondering what to do. He had that fluttery feeling inside him that he always got when a target came into his sights. He set off after her. Passing by the reception desk, he spotted a clipboard on the counter that someone must have left there and forgotten. The nun was still on the phone, and took no notice of him. Smoothly he picked up the clipboard and walked along, frowning at it, doing his impersonation of a doctor. He saw the woman stop at the far end of the corridor and go in through a doorway.