She must have smelt them for she turned her head and uttered a soft distressed cry. The vet stooped over her and made a thorough examination, palpating her still swollen abdomen and checking for tears and bleeding. ‘She wasn’t in good enough condition to get them through.’ He cocked an eye at Laure’s now ruined cardigan. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘So am I,’ she said. ‘It was expensive.’

She stood and watched, breathing in the smells of frightened animals overlaid with disinfectant that pervaded the room as he gave Kočka the works – vitamin shots, antibiotics and a drug to stop her lactating. Once, he looked up from Kočka’s prone body and said, ‘This is going to cost you a fortune.’ Finally, he laid the dead kittens on the table beside her. ‘She must be allowed to mourn.’

They watched as the frail, wounded, disadvantaged Kočka nuzzled each one in turn.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to take her,’ the vet said eventually. ‘We have no room.’

‘I can’t do that.’ Those oh-so orderly arrangements of her life upended. Allowing in the music and fire and grief of a past? She looked down at the little cat who was trying to say farewell to her kittens. She grasped the edge of the instrument trolley and struggled to explain through the lump in her throat. ‘There’re rules where I live.’

The vet indicated she should leave off hugging the trolley. ‘Hygiene,’ he said, not unsympathetically.

An expert in these situations, he handed her a tissue. ‘In my experience, most animals live where there are so-called rules. Kočka cannot be put back on the streets. Else why did you bring her in? When she is better and we are less pressed then something might be able to be done.’ He allowed a second or two to elapse. ‘We might have to put her down.’

She stared at the vet. It was obvious he had been in this situation before, and kind and skilful as he was, he knew how not to blink.

A noisier than usual row was in full swing in the Poirier apartment. Even so, smuggling the cardboard carrier containing Kočka past Madame Poirier’s sentry post took nerve and ingenuity. The old skills she had learnt in Prague kicked in. Move at normal speed. Do not look round. Tiny Kočka was weightier than she looked but Laure didn’t falter on the stairs.

Inside the apartment, Laure placed the carrier on the floor and went through into the bedroom. The hair dryer was on the bed where she had flung it this morning and so, too, was the scattered make-up on the shelf by the mirror.