Several times recently Steffi had wondered about it. Whether he was all right, whether she should ask him somehow, in one of the tiny windows of conversation they had. But it didn’t really feel like – as the English would say – any of her business. And that night when they did meet, the night with the crying, was embarrassing to recall, largely because she sensed he was so embarrassed by it. It was easier not to refer to it at all. It had been easiest of all to assume that whatever emotional strain he was under that night, it had passed by now. It was a pretty reasonable thing to assume. If he needed some sort of help, somebody else would be supplying it.

With that assumption in her head she had left the house in the early afternoon, saying no more than the briefest hi and bye to James, who was in the kitchen, preparing some sort of stodgy snack. She hadn’t spent more than a few moments wondering why he wasn’t going in to work today. She didn’t really know his schedules; it was obviously a day off. There was nothing in what he said or did, in that brief period of their last interaction, to make a normal person worry about him.

Yet just a few hours after that, he’d left the same building with what sounded like the genuine intention of killing himself. Steffi, without ever having asked for a responsibility like this or feeling she deserved it, was perhaps the last person to have seen him, said hello, had the chance to change his path. It was mad, and awful, but still … not exciting, that wasn’t it. But there was the chance to do something. To solve a puzzle that meant something real.

The barwoman had hair like Steffi wanted hers to be: spiky, a bit punk-looking. Bleached, and then dyed red at the tips. It was tiring even to think about how long it would take to do all that. She allowed Emil to order her a beer and sighed inwardly as he tried to get a fuller grip on the situation.

‘He’s fired because he’s bad driver?’

‘No, I don’t think it was that.’ James had said – in that terrible conversation – that he had always been an impeccable driver, and Steffi hadn’t just been humouring him when she said she believed it. He wasn’t the sort to build himself up unduly, and anyway, you only had to see how he got the hoover into corners. ‘It was something more complicated. His boss, his boss was his mate, and they had, they fell out or something.’

‘Fell …?’