‘It’s opposite Jane Fielder’s stall, number . . . number . . .’ The churning in my head had dulled my memory.

‘One seven one,’ he said.

I followed him as he pushed past people milling in the aisles, browsing idly as Aidan and I had the day before. It seemed like a lifetime ago. ‘There it is,’ I blurted out when I saw Tiq Taq’s sign from a distance. I looked at my watch: three o’clock. I’d left to go back to the hotel at half past one. My throat tightened. Blood pounded in my ears.

The woman with the dyed blonde hair had gone. In her place was an older woman with a pre-Raphaelite hairstyle—a long plait coiled into a conical bun at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a white linen suit, a clingy red scoop-necked T-shirt and brown sandals with coloured beads on them. Her face, hands and feet were tanned. As we approached, Aidan said, ‘There’s nothing there that’s anything like what you described.’ He turned away in disgust.

Mary’s painting had gone. A picture of exactly the same size hung in its place, of an ugly naked woman standing next to a chicken. She had straggly hair and limbs as thick as a rugby centre forward’s. I hated her, whoever she was. She had no business being there, where Abberton ought to have been. I thought, I knew this would happen. I knew it. All the way to Alexandra Palace in the taxi, I’d had a feeling not of hope but of dread: I was convinced Abberton would be gone, though I’d tried to deny it to myself. I’d read about negative expectations leading to negative outcomes, and now I blamed myself for the picture having vanished. ‘Whoever bought it must have picked it up,’ I said to Aidan. ‘It was here, I swear it.’ I grabbed his arm, tried to make him look at me, but he pushed me away.

‘Excuse me?’ I said to the woman with the coiled plait, loud enough so that Aidan could hear me from the other side of the aisle. ‘I was here at lunchtime. I spoke to your colleague, the one with blonde hair.’

‘Ciara,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘She’s gone, I’m afraid. I’m Jan Garner. TiqTaq’s my gallery. Can I help you?’

‘You had a picture called Abberton. By an artist called Mary Trelease. It was there.’ I pointed to the naked woman and the chicken.

Jan Garner shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We didn’t and it wasn’t. You must be mistaken.’

I couldn’t speak. Well trained though I was in fearing the worst, I hadn’t foreseen this. Why was this stylish, polite, sophisticated-looking woman telling me a blatant lie? She must have known I knew she was lying.