She checked her watch. Ten forty. It might take a while to get through security and queue for the lifts. This was it. Time to go inside.

She flashed her ticket at the man in red livery by the door, then headed up the stairs to the security area. Once through that, she stood in line for the lift to the thirty-third floor. Everyone was dressed up to the nines and in high spirits. Anna couldn’t help being swept along a little with the buzz. She was excited, she realized, more so than nervous, not that it made any difference to her skittering pulse.

One ear-popping ride later, she queued for a second lift to take her all the way to the top. She emerged on the sixty-eighth floor and inhaled deeply as she took in her surroundings. There wasn’t much square-footage when you were this high up in the needle-like structure of Europe’s tallest building. A wide strip of floor ran around a central block that housed stairs and lift shafts, and what little other space existed was filled with people. Some milled around the long bar, others sipped their cocktails and looked out through the overlapping layers of glass and metal to the twinkling city beyond.

Anna turned and faced the stairs. She and Brody had agreed to meet on the top floor of ‘The View from The Shard’, where it was open to the air. She buttoned her coat to the top, took a deep breath, and headed up a few short flights of stairs to the seventy-second floor.

It was busy when she arrived, but not as crammed as it had been below in the warm. Music played and low lighting in different hues illuminated not just the guests but the large glass panels that rose jaggedly into the sky above their heads, cycling through the colours of the rainbow. She stepped forward and peered around. She’d told him she didn’t need a photo, because she already knew what he looked like, but she now realized that relying on the grainy and out-of-date black-and-white photo from his website to make an identification hadn’t been the best idea.

While a couple of the men within view might have fitted the bill, they were all with partners or friends. Anna took a deep breath and headed off in an anti-clockwise direction. A few moments later, in the opposite corner of the structure to the one she’d entered from, she spotted a lone figure staring out across the city skyline. Although he was less than ten feet from the nearest group of partygoers, he seemed separate, totally self-contained.

It was him.

Anna’s heart skipped but she remained where she was, content to study him unobserved for a few moments. He was taller than she’d imagined. Broader too, although not bulky, and he gripped the railing in front of him not so much as if he was resting on it but clinging onto it. It made her feel a bit better that he might be nervous too.