‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, noticing that she’d scuffed the side of her left hand in the fall. ‘Doesn’t look too bad, but you should put some antiseptic on it.’

Still the same terse silence. She turned her anxious gaze behind her again, scanning the street as though she thought she was being followed. Pedestrians walked by, paying no attention. The traffic stream kept rumbling past in the background. A municipal cleaning crew was slowly working its way along the street towards them, gathering up last night’s wreckage. A couple of pigeons strutted and pecked about among the debris in the gutter, seemingly unbothered by whatever was frightening the woman. Then she quickly looped the strap of her satchel over her shoulder and hurried on without a word or another glance at him.

Ben watched her disappear off down Rue Georges Brassens, walking so fast she was almost running, still glancing behind her every few steps as if someone was chasing her.

He shook his head. Some people. What the hell was up with her? The way she’d acted with him, anyone would think he’d been about to attack her. And who did she think was coming after her?

Maybe she was an escaped lunatic. Or a bank robber fleeing from the scene of the crime. Perhaps some kind of political activist or protest organiser the cops were trying to round up and throw in jail along with the other thousand-odd they’d already locked up.

Ben looked around him and saw no squads of gendarmes or psychiatric ward nurses tearing down the street in pursuit. Nor anyone else of interest, apart from the usual passersby who were all just going about their business, the majority of them deeply absorbed in their phones as most people seemed to be nowadays, doing the thumb-twiddling texting thing as they ambled along and somehow managed to avoid stumbling into trees and signposts. It seemed to him that those without digital devices to distract them from their present reality were walking somewhat more briskly than normal, a little stiff in their body language as if trying hard not to take in too much of their surroundings and dwell at any length on the signs of the battlefield that their city environment had become.

One way or another, though, the Parisians had far too much on their minds to be worrying about some panic-stricken woman running down the street blindly crashing into people.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and was about to move on when he saw that the young woman had dropped something else on the ground. She’d been so distracted that she had failed to notice that her phone had bounced off the kerbside and into the gutter, where it was lying among the washed-up debris and broken bottles the cleaning crew hadn’t yet reached.