Her eyes jerked open and she stared at the kind girl without recognising her face, although suspecting she had seen it somewhere before.

Now the trembling was more violent and her entire body spasmed with a terrible will of its own. There was a young Asian woman sitting directly opposite and her eyes were wide open and yet she was sleeping. And she knew, somewhere deep inside her foggy mind, that it was the sleep without end.

The faces of the other women seemed to melt in the darkness, dissolving into shapes that had nothing to do with human faces. Then one of the women stood up and began removing her clothes. Ripping at them, not bothering with buttons, desperate to be free of them.

‘I am burning,’ the woman said in English, and then abruptly sat down, curled into a foetal ball and closed her eyes.

The girl from Belgrade stared dumbly at the boxes that seemed to crowd in on them. Birnen – Arnen – Nashi – Peren, said the boxes.

Grushi – Pere – Peras – Poires. Pears in what felt like every language except for Serbian, every tongue on the planet except her own.

What was the word for the fruit in Serbian?

‘Kruske,’ she said out loud.

She could hear her mother calling, saying her name loud and clear, even though her mother was five years in the grave.

How could these things be? How were they possible?

Sleep now, she told herself, and think about it all later.

But the voice pulled her back again.

‘Please, sister. Hold me now.’

So she held the kind girl – she had forgotten to do it before – and she kept holding her, long after the kind girl’s trembling had stopped. It was all silence in the back of the lorry now and the silence was matched in the world outside, for at some point in the endless night, the lorry had stopped, and remained stopped, even though nobody came to open the door.

She could no longer see the steam of her breath. Indeed, she was no longer aware of the need to breathe.

And as the kind girl died in her arms, she suddenly understood. Dying is easy.

Living is hard.

PART ONE

The Woman Who Fell Through the Ice

1

We thought we had a bomb.

That’s why Chinatown was deserted. If the public thinks the police have found a dead body then they get out their phones and settle down for a good gawp, but if they think we have found a bomb then they will get on their bikes.

The lorry was outside the Gerrard Place dim sum restaurant that marks the start of London’s Chinatown, parked at an angle with its nearside wheels up on the pavement.