He was riveting. He knew what he was doing. The audience was his and he played them. He had rhythm. He was sex incarnate. He was telling them that he understood their unvoiced desires, whatever their age or gender. Shrieks and gasps greeted his stage moves, his gyrations, the play of thin fingers over the strings. During a pause between numbers, he pushed back heavy brown hair from his forehead to highlight a bony profile.

Halfway through a song, and at the end of a prolonged guitar riff, he looked down at the faces clustered below him, intercepted Laure’s wide-eyed stare and sang the next line directly at her.

Blood pulsing through her veins, she grinned at him and raised her fist in a salute. A man standing beside her jerked her arm back down. He frowned, shook his head and edged away from Laure.

The grin was wiped from her lips. Her elation vanished. Perplexed as to what she had done, she rubbed her wrist. Even more bewildering, a space opened up around her. Mortified, she tried to concentrate on the stage. It was being conveyed to her that she had transgressed. But how?

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glint of glass and squinted at it. A man stood at the window in a house behind the Jan Hus monument, training a pair of binoculars onto the stage. Below him, a second man in a leather jacket was positioned in a doorway, a sight she quickly realized was repeated around the square.

Her instinct was… well, what was it? To ridicule? To ignore?

Ignore was best. All the same, a finger seemed to run its way down the vertebrae in her spine.

As decisively as it had begun, the concert ended. Taking their cue from each other, the trio hurled a mega chord at the fans. The drummer leapt to his feet and the guitarists held their instruments aloft. The spotlights cut out.

The audience went wild.

Uneasy and unsure, Laure shrank back against the stage. The technicians had returned and were dismantling the equipment in double-quick time. The musicians jumped down to be enveloped by the crowd. A couple of women screamed.

She was left empty but longing for more. Limp almost.

It was certainly time to return to the Kobes’ apartment and, still unsure of the geography, she sketched out in her head the route back. Find the ox-blood house, leave the square by the same street, head for the Charles Bridge, walk straight ahead the other side, keeping St Nicholas in sight.

At that moment, Tomas Josip looked over his shoulder, spotted Laure and smiled. Raising his hand, he beckoned. ‘Come,’ he said in English.

Intriguingly, Tomas did not choose the main streets but piloted Laure along small, sometimes claustrophobic, alleys which ran parallel to, and occasionally crossed, the thoroughfares.