By the time she arrived home soon after five, the strap of her camera bag having dug what felt like an inch-wide ridge in the flesh at her shoulder and her feet aching, all she really wanted was a strong coffee, a few chapters of her book and a long hot bath in which to lie back and enjoy both. Thank God for Madi’s super-efficient heating system, with hot water more or less in constant supply.

She threw everything down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and kicked off her shoes, before turning on the taps in the bath and walking back to the small kitchen to flick on the kettle, its blue light shining through the see-through window at the side as the water began to bubble. She had eaten a good lunch, a tuna sandwich and a salad, on a bench in St James’s Park, again sharing her crumbs with the birds, and had brought a jumbo sausage roll home in a paper bag, a simple meal which would be quick and easy to warm up later in the microwave. No need to go out again tonight, which suited her just fine. Being alone on the streets of a big, strange, impersonal city after dark was a step she did not yet feel quite ready for.

While she waited for her bath to fill, she couldn’t resist a quick look at the photos she had taken, flicking between them on the viewer, her trained eye instantly knowing which were worth doing something with and which could be deleted and, most importantly, recognising the two or three she could feel really proud of. There was one of the front of the palace, taken through the black railings of the gate, the camera tilted upwards, capturing the moment a pigeon, wings still outspread, had landed on the famous balcony. Another was of a guardsman yawning, clearly caught completely off guard, words she knew would make a fantastic caption and which she couldn’t help laughing about. And the horse. Oh, how she loved her photo of the horse. Not that it was doing anything especially unusual or earth-shattering. It was just the expression on its face, the ears upright and alert, the eyes somehow worldly and wise. She would try cropping that one and zooming in, to see if she could pick out the different shades of light falling on the fine lines of its hair.

Before she realised it, the water had almost reached the top of the bath, the surface smothered in big airy soapy bubbles from one of Madi’s potion bottles, and the whole lot was in danger of flowing over onto the floor. She could just imagine what Aaron and his mother in the flat beneath would say had she let that happen, with rivers of steaming bathwater flooding through those terribly thin floors he had talked about.

She turned off the taps, ran her hands through the water to check the temperature, pulled out the plug to let a few inches of water escape, then added a drop more cold. The kettle had boiled and she made her coffee, put the mug and her book down on the little flat area in the corner of the bath, then stripped off and lowered herself into the deliciously warm and soothing water. Ah, bliss!