She removed a set of pages from her bag and, pulling the tabletop down from the seat back in front of her, placed her folder on it and began to read the chapters that the ghost had delivered overnight. To her relief, the story was progressing rather well, although the woman had an infuriating habit of doing what Beverley called ‘writing up’. On one page, for example, a character had fallen asleep ‘counting sheep, but, in her dreams, clouds drifted across the arid landscape of her reveries like inscrutable posies of wool’. On another, a gynaecologist’s surgery was ‘steeped in the blood of lost foeti’, which, frankly, was a phrase that turned Beverley’s stomach. And the heroine appeared to be developing a Sapphic element to her character, too, that none of Beverley’s readers would understand, let alone appreciate. Also, there was a new experimental sequence, five pages of words thrown randomly on the page, like paint splattered across a Jackson Pollock canvas, none of which seemed to connect to each other in any way but which were clearly intended to mirror the confused mind of the protagonist.

She made notes beside each of these and more.

No gynaecologists! she scrawled. And stop talking about her angry cervix!

‘So, what brings you to Odessa?’ asked Beverley’s neighbour, refusing to accept her rebuff.

‘Personal business,’ she replied.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘A lot of women do that. I’m told that it’s a lot cheaper over there than at home.’

She frowned and turned to look at him.

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.

He raised his index finger and tickled it along the flabby skin that hung beneath his chin. ‘You’re getting a little procedure done, I assume? And why not? We all like to make the best of ourselves. Odessa is well known for the skill of its plastic surgeons.’

‘I’m doing nothing of the sort,’ replied Beverley, outraged. She placed the palm of her hand beneath her own chin, concerned that something might have collapsed in the hours since she’d left London, but nothing there seemed untoward. ‘That’s very rude of you, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I don’t mind in the least,’ he said. ‘No offence.’

‘Well, I am offended.’

‘Touchy,’ said the man under his breath. ‘As it happens, I had a hair transplant there a couple of years ago. You’d never know it, but all of this’ – and here he pointed towards a thin thatch sitting atop his head that made Bobby Charlton look like Bob Marley – ‘is fake. It’s taken years off me, though.’

‘And did you pay a lot for that?’ she asked.

‘About five thousand pounds.’

‘So about two hundred and fifty pounds per strand then. No offence.’

He looked a little wounded by the remark and the boy took his headphones off and glanced at them both, as if he was worried that something interesting might be going on and he was missing out on it.