I can’t stay here, she thinks. I can’t light the lamps, and drag the furniture around. I can’t lie awake listening for her. All the love has gone. She stands up, and the scrape of the chair against the floorboards is unbearably loud. The tap of her feet as she goes into the living room sounds like gunfire. She pulls on her coat and hat, opens the door and peers up and down the street, guiltily. What would happen if one of the old ravens saw her? A tempest of clicking tongues and gossip. But she can’t stay here. Not tonight. Not alone. There is something she needs to do.

Karaiskaki is a slum. It sits back from the waterfront a little to the west of the church of Saint Spyridon, a collection of old, decaying houses and newer, cheap buildings strung between them. When Mr Moumdji turns his taxi off the broad waterfront esplanade and into the shabby street that runs into Karaiskaki, Zoë sees that even now, in winter, the whores are lounging in flimsy dresses. Laughing to each other, singing, wheedling the men who sidle past them. Dancing on the gangplank of Charon’s boat.

Pyramids of rotting vegetables and discarded newspapers squat in boarded-up doorways. Broken bottles are sprayed across pavements. Mr Moumdji pulls up under the urinous glow of a street lamp. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back to Kokkinia, Miss Valavani? I’ll take you for free.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Zoë says gently. ‘I just need to find Pavlo.’ She has known Mr Moumdji for half her life, but she finds she can’t tell him the real reason she has come here. She pays the fare with what little cash is left over from the funeral, and watches as he drives away. Would you understand? she thinks. I have to sing for my mother.

She walks past cafes and tavernas spilling their yellow light and noise out into the street. There are men sitting at tables outside, smoking hookahs, leering. ‘Little chicken,’ they call to her. ‘My tender little red mullet. Where are you going on such a night?’ The street she is looking for is narrow and lined with shuttered businesses; it looks dead. Next to a cobbler’s shop, she finds an old poster of the last prime minister, slowly coming unstuck from the nondescript door to which it has been pasted. She knocks, and waits. There is a rattle and the door opens a crack. A man’s face appears, heavily stubbled, the points of his moustache lost in the shadows on either side of the narrow space through which he is glaring at her with bloodshot eyes.

‘Zoë!’