Soon a birthday present for Ruth, and then a Christmas present. Jonquil had pressed some books on Rachaela, unsuitable for anyone. Oxfam could have those.

Someone behind her.

Nothing in that.

One night a drunken man had staggered after her the length of Rosamunde Street. He had taken her arm and she had thrust him off. ‘What’s the rush, darling?’ he had said, and she had pushed him hard. He lost his balance and fell against some railings. ‘Bloody tart! Fucking whore!’ he had warbled, but no more than that.

There were generally people about, harmless people, perhaps concealing lives of molten depravity but offering no threat to the single woman on her way home.

A man with a dog now, coming up the road. Cars zoomed by in wings of water.

The one behind her did not fall back, or pass her.

His step was very soft. Somehow she knew the step—not its author, but its meaning.

Her stomach tightened. She was being silly.

The man with the dog drew level and went by.

Ahead, the traffic lights at the end of Beaumont Street were in sight. Green, amber, red.

Black snow drifted over her face.

It was like before. It was like the time when she had been hunted.

No, that was absurd. How could they find her now?

She reached the lights, had to wait. The shops showed a blaze of colours. She could turn, look up the dark road, and see who had come after her.

There he was. A man standing about forty feet away. Hesitating, as if trying to make out the numbers on the house fronts, which were perfectly clear.

Her heart tumbled down a stairway.

A short man in a dark overcoat and woollen hat.

It was frighteningly stupid. For people did not keep on wearing the same garments, not for eleven, twelve years. People did not stay the same.

She had. The mirror had told her.

She had not changed.

She thought of the green before the flats and the sudden figure. ‘You must go, you know.’

‘Go away,’ she said. But later he had come back and handed her the letter, the letter Adamus had typed, from the Scarabae.

He was too far off to be sure, the foreign face which maybe had not aged by another line, the gelid eyes, invisible.

She needed to see him more closely, to be sure. And even then, could she trust her memory?

It was impossible they could have found her this time. Even if they had been trying all the years between. She refused it.

The lights changed and the cars grudgingly screeched to a halt.

Rachaela crossed over the road.

She looked back and saw the man stop dithering before the houses, and cross further up the street, just before the cars took over again.

He came on, walking in the same direction as Rachaela, the dilute snow sparkling in his hat like sequins.