She could feel herself teetering over a great well of despair. She had worked herself up for this; she had borrowed hope at a ruinous interest rate—one that she had no chance of paying back. She had, she forced herself to admit, been spectacularly stupid from start to finish.

She got up. No sinister figure stood to follow her. She put down a couple of quid on the saucer and shambled out of the cafe. Time to go home.

She saw the lights—enough flashing blue for an emergency services convention—and linked it instantly with Mal. She couldn’t help it. Maybe something had happened to her on the way.

Following the flash and the occasional siren whoop as a new vehicle pulled up, she ended up on a street behind all the glitz and bustle, houses converted into tiny flats each worth as much as a small island nation. There was a scatter of police cars and ambulances, and a throng of uniformed people going in and out of one building in particular. Two dozen others were out on the street, some passers-by and some evidently neighbours, including a sleepy-looking old woman swaddled in a duvet. Lee pushed forwards, and then moved faster because they were bringing someone out of the house on a stretcher.

For a moment she saw Mal there—not just Mal, but the Mal of four years ago in her hiking jacket, argent-dyed hair cut spiky short, face pale as death. The vision was so clear that she took it for real before her eyes caught up with her mind and tackled it to the ground. She was looking at a man, first off. A big, overweight man covered in weals and blood, as dead as anyone Lee had ever seen. His skull looked the wrong shape, and one of the paramedics was desperately trying to get a sheet over him as they hauled him out. The stretcher crew looked not only grim but hurried, and as soon as they were clear of the door another pair were in with another stretcher.

Lee snuck close to the other gawkers. It was plain from the way the neighbours were dressed that the casualties being evacuated weren’t this street’s normal stock in trade. One of the ambulances pulled away, and then the police were throwing up a cordon, all grim faces and intractable politeness.

When that invisible line had been drawn, Lee saw a woman on the outside of it, sitting on a doorstep and fumbling in her purse. She was tall and bony, Indian heritage or somewhere close. Her hair was half up, half wildly straggling, and she had a coat over her shoulders, a silk dressing gown beneath. She was the only person paying no attention to what was going on.