Still, no one came.

She stood for a minute, straining to hear any movement inside, tiptoeing to look through the textured glass in the door. There was a light on inside, but no shadows moved. Outside, it was dark now, and it had begun to rain again. She’d rather be doing something else than standing here getting cold and wet. She tried the knocker again, conscious now of the urgent sound reverberating along the street. It sounded needy, not the sort of feeling you wanted to broadcast on a strange street just gone dark.

She took out her phone and checked the address and then responded to the text.

<I’m here. Are you in?>

Curtness was catching. She still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that her messages might be being read by other eyes. She’d keep herself to herself until she saw him. If she saw him.

She stepped over the flower bed, its neatly pruned rose stalks waiting for spring, and peered through the bay window. The curtains were drawn, a heavy red-lined material, but they weren’t quite fully closed. Over at the far face of the bay window, a slant of light showed through. She edged across the window ledge, trying not to get her legs tangled in a viney bush, and found an eyeline into the front room.

A lamp, an abstract painting on the wall above a fireplace. Shifting across, she saw a couch, someone’s legs in dark trousers.

A slam behind her.

‘Hi. Petra? Come in.’

Petra wheeled round, stumbled in the plant. She battled her way through the undergrowth to where Vincent was standing.

‘Did we have a…’ he trailed, apologetically scanning his outfit of dressing gown and baggy track pants, his hair clumped and tousled. Even in the dim light, she could see how drawn he was, almost grey, as if all the warm hue had been sucked out of his skin. He looked a hundred years old.

‘Did we have plans?’ he said, ushering her between the plants and to the door. ‘I’m sorry if I forgot. I’ve been…’ He looked so withered that for an ungenerous instant the thought that this old man had wound his body around hers just a fortnight ago repulsed her. But then he turned, and the light from the doorway did its work and he looked a little more like himself. Still, what the hell had happened to him?

‘You just asked me to come. I think.’ She held up her phone like it was ID. ‘You sent me your address.’

‘Nah, wasn’t me.’ He frowned for a second before his face changed. ‘God, you have to see this, Petra. Come in, come in.’ He warded her into the house and hustled her along the passageway so quickly she could hardly get a sense of the place.

The hallway was unlit, so all she got was a glimpse of the darkened stairwell going up, a low shelf with shoes at the entrance, a picture or mirror sourly reflecting. As she passed, she tried to glance into the front room she’d seen through the bay window, but the door was ajar. She had only the sense of low rose light touching up a shelf full of large art books and feathering off a framed poster of an exhibition. A waft of cigarette smoke, the slumped dark-hued couch, possibly green but turned the colour of sludge in the lamp’s saturating glow. A fragmentary glimpse of the person sitting there – dark jacket sleeve on the couch’s armrest, a relaxed foot in a shiny shoe and a black-trousered leg slanted away.