The risks she normally ran from her work were quite different. Margarethe had spent years working with live subjects, probing the intersection between their religious beliefs and their personalities. Part of that had involved attempts to undermine those beliefs, and sometimes the results had been unsettling, to say the least. It had provided little comfort to her subjects to remind them that they had given informed consent to the clinical experiments, and she had on several occasions been subjected to strenuous personal abuse. In spite of her training, Margarethe found such confrontations stressful, and she had to admit to herself that the idea of researching the long dead had definite consolations.

She left the library just after four, when her head started to ache from too much close concentration on obscure materials. Emerging into the overcast afternoon had felt like a blessing, even with the humid promise of rain in the air. She didn’t fancy going home to her empty house any sooner than she had to. She still hadn’t grown accustomed to living alone; the rooms seemed too large, the echoes too present in the absence of her son.

For Margarethe the most bitter irony of her divorce was that the very thing that had poisoned her marriage was the single factor that had worked against her when it came to gaining full-time custody of her son. His father was a lazy leech, preferring the excuse of childcare to the demands of a job. Never mind that he didn’t do a hand’s turn in the house, leaving her to fit cooking, cleaning and shopping into the interstices of work and quality time with Hartmut. Never mind that he’d been the one to have an affair while their son was at school. It had left him in the perfect position to argue that he was Hartmut’s primary carer and should therefore continue in that role. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d thought he’d done this out of love for the boy. But she suspected it was more about exerting a last vestige of control over her.

So she preferred not to go home of an evening until she had to. She worked late, she dived into the cultural life of the city, she saw friends, she spent time in her lover’s apartment. It was more than a desire not to be at home that took her into the centre of Bremen that day. She always enjoyed strolling in the narrow cobbled streets of the Schnoor, an enclave of gentrified medieval fishermen’s houses, admiring the contents of the antiques shops’ windows, even though she couldn’t afford their prices. While the university where she worked and the suburb where she lived offered little in the way of aesthetic pleasure for the eye, the old town was a significant compensation.