On the third day, they returned to Paris. Anton was in his hotel at Notre Dame de Lorette when he heard from the hall porter that Jean Jaurès had been murdered in a restaurant a short way down the road, in the rue Montmartre. Someone had fired two shots through the window into his back. Jaurès was dead within minutes.

Finding himself among the first people at the scene, Le Croissant, Anton felt obliged to telephone his magazine and let them know. It appeared that the murderer was a young nationalist who was hot for war and determined to stop Jaurès attending an international peace conference. There was blood and broken crockery on the floor, but the significance of what had happened, Anton suspected, lay beyond imagining.

It was two weeks into August before he was at last able to return to Vienna, by way of Lyons and Geneva. As the train pulled in, he noticed in the newspaper he was reading that the Panama Canal had officially opened, with the first commercial crossing from one ocean to another made by a steamer called Ancon. The report was on page fourteen.

There was no sign of Delphine in their rooms and he could find no one else in the building to ask for information. When his telephone call to Baden went unanswered, he returned to the station and took a train.

The thatched house was locked and the ground-floor windows were shuttered, as they always left them when they went back to Vienna. Both bicycles were propped up against the wall of the veranda. Inside, everything was tidy. There was no note for him on the writing table in the window, and nothing in the small kitchen, where all the dishes and pans had been washed and put away.

Upstairs, the brass bed was stripped down to its uncomfortable mattress. In the wardrobe were the clothes they kept there, country things and a little spare linen, everything folded as it would normally be.

In the smaller room, the bed with the cherry-wood frame was made up with clean sheets; the windows with the bubbles in the original glass were closed, though a dead fly lay on the sill.

Part Two

1

‘War,’ said Lena, who was eight years old. ‘What does it mean?’

‘How should I know?’ said her mother, Carina, who, before Lena, had had five children by five different men. The only time she felt happy was when she was pregnant; with a child growing inside her it was impossible to worry about the small things of life. She had no interest in her children once they were born; they had all been taken into orphanages. Carina was unable to read or write; her favourite days were the ones when she could drink schnapps until she fell down. She was a familiar figure in the neighbourhood, and easy to avoid.

‘Will men kill each other?’ said Lena.

‘Yes.’