At the back of the cupboard where she kept her linen, she found a worn swimming towel. This she spread over an armchair in the sitting area. Inside the carrier, Kočka was crying and she lifted her out of it and placed her on the chair.

The vet had warned her that what was an, essentially, feral cat would not respect an interior and might be spooked by being enclosed but she was probably too weak and doped-up to react. Laure hunkered down beside her, stroked the small head and, one by one, fed her the cat biscuits that the vet had given her.

After a while, Kočka slept, the rise and fall of her breath barely rippling her torso that was both swollen and emaciated. Unwilling to move, Laure settled herself on the floor beside the chair and reached for her laptop. Figures. Plans. Projections. With the movement of a finger, these slipped over the screen and vanished. She didn’t take in any of them.

If Kočka was peaceful, Laure was not. Leaning over, she extracted the frame with the railway ticket from her bag which she had brought home. (It was hers to take.)

She reprised May’s questions.

‘So why Czech?’

‘I lived there for a long summer.’

‘And that’s a broken promise?’

‘Actually, yes, as it turned out. It was.’

She sat for a long time with the frame propped on her knee. Tomas refused to contemplate leaving the country until it became clear that he had no option. ‘I fight through the music,’ he said during one of their many discussions in the early days when they drank beer in the sun or wandered along the river. ‘The patriot stays. Anyway, what would happen if they caught me?’

She knew enough to answer. ‘Prison.’

He picked up a lock of Laure’s hair. ‘You’ve just proved you’re a Westerner from a soft, liberal culture. If I’m caught they will screw information out of me however hard I try to resist. I cannot put others in danger.’

‘Screw?’ She had made a joke of it.

It wasn’t funny. It would never have been funny. ‘All right, get it out of me.’

In Communist Prague there was one life playing out on the surface while another parallel one with its own language and myths was hidden from view.

He shouldn’t have done but Tomas’s friend, Milos, had told her about the escape routes. By then they knew each other well enough.

Drive the Trabant to Hungary and attempt to get over the border. The guard dogs were notorious.

Get to Berlin, organize a contact from the West to come over with fake documents and do an exchange in the so-called Hall of Tears, the Tränenpalast, where the Ossis and Wessis were forced to say goodbye to each other. Very high risk and only recommended for German speakers.