She swallowed the last mouthful of baguette and put on a cap, grabbed her backpack and left the house. She walked down the high street to the market in the square, where she stopped between the stalls and shoppers to savor the atmosphere.

A group of children had gathered around a small, rickety table. On the table was a cardboard box, and inside it, a kid goat was being fondled by the children’s eager hands. A sturdy man in dirty dungarees pushed his way between a pair of twin boys and stuffed a bottle into the goat’s mouth. With the other hand, he held out a plastic basket to the parents who were watching and smiling at their children’s excitement. Reluctantly they fished out some coins from their pockets and tossed them into the basket. The man thanked them mechanically and immediately yanked the bottle from the mouth of the hungry goat, milk spraying all over.

Anna watched the man repeat the performance. She was about to angrily snatch the bottle from his hand when she noticed an elderly couple sitting under a flourishing wisteria at the café across the street.

The man was bald and wearing a bright-yellow polo shirt. His attention was fixed on a croissant. His shirt was what had caught Anna’s eye, but it was the small, apple-cheeked woman in the chair next to him that made her stop dead in her tracks.

She didn’t have time to register what the woman was wearing or eating. All she saw was the camera she was holding up and the look of disbelief on her face as she stared directly at Anna.

Anna turned and walked with measured steps to the nearest street corner and turned around it.

Then she started to run.

CHAPTER

2

“IT’S NOT THE same thing. It’s not even close to being the same thing.”

Detective Sergeant Erik Schäfer looked perplexedly at his colleague across the desk.

He and Lisa Augustin had shared an office for almost a year, and not a day had gone by without them having an amicable but heated discussion of some sort. Today was no exception.

“Sure it is,” she said. “You’re just from an older generation, so you have a different mind-set. Society has brainwashed all of us into believing that one thing is completely normal and socially acceptable while the other is morally up there with fraud and manslaughter. Ultimately there’s no difference between the two, but for reasons unknown to us, we’ve decided to think there is.” Augustin emphasized her point by waving with the half-finished turkey sandwich in her hand.

“Right, explain it to me again, then,” Erik Schäfer said. “You’re telling me there is no difference between having sex and getting a massage? Same ball game?”

“I’m telling you that they’re both physically satisfying at a very intimate level. Imagine that you and Connie have both booked a full-body massage—”