LENNY LOOKED SIDEWAYS at the girl and pictured her rising early that morning, at first light, padding into the cold kitchen of some sort of hostel, and lining everything up on a narrow cluttered counter. She pictured her working the butter quickly into the flour with the chewed ends of her fingers, adding a little iced water and pressing it into a ball and setting it to rest in a large and grubby communal fridge while she got on with separating the eggs and whisking the yolks with the sugar and warming the cream in a pan on the stove.

How thin and sinewy her arms were! And how cold she looked – as if, while the pie-crust was baking beneath a layer of tin foil and kidney beans, she’d gone off to take a shower in some horrible plastic-curtained little cubicle and had never properly warmed up afterwards.

She seemed to Lenny to have appeared from nowhere – to have risen up from the shadows behind the pillar at the end of the crowded pew. A dark-haired, frail-looking thing dressed entirely in black, as if in mourning – a black short-sleeved dress with a worn turtle-neck collar, black stockings with snags in them, an old black broad-brimmed hat that was too big and came down almost to her chin.

If Lenny ducked slightly she could see the girl’s small sharp-featured face beneath the floppy brim of the big borrowed-looking hat. Fierce pixie eyes and hollow cheeks, a brittle mouth. Everything about her made Lenny think of a string pulled tight and about to be plucked, a figure balanced on the crumbling lip of a cliff and ready to jump; a brief electric calm before a storm.

Who was she?

One of Don’s ex-girlfriends? A stalker, a prostitute? A disgruntled employee from his office? A mental patient?