The man folded his arms, and unfolded them again, and tried folding up his forehead instead. He clearly wasn’t sure how cross to be. On the one hand, people were not meant to turn up in this exclusive hallway uninvited and start playing charades with parcels. On the other hand, eleven-year-old girls with plaits spilling out of their bobble hats were not exactly the kind of nuisance he had been hired to keep out.

“He is busy,” said the man, trying English to bridge their language gap.

Max sat up very straight in her chair. In her best English, she announced, “I wait.”

Before the man could disagree, a phone rang from somewhere further down the hall. The man looked towards the ringing. He looked at Max. He looked at the ringing again. He did a little shifty dance of confusion. The phone call was obviously important.

He made up his mind. “Wait there,” he said. And he tapped away down the hall with small, neat, very hasty steps.

As soon as he was gone, Max was across the hallway, and had one ear to the third door.

A sign proclaimed that it was the office of ISTVAN MAREK himself. Istvan’s voice was breathy and soft, barely dribbling through the door. Ester was loud and clear. At first Max assumed that they were speaking Hungarian, but the words were sort of smoother round the edges than the Hungarian she had heard, and she realized as she listened that they too were using English. There was a clicking noise just to the left of the door; she guessed that Klaus had been left to sit and knit while they talked.

She got out her notebook. She wished her English was better: she could only understand the odd word.

Even so, she could tell that Ester was not happy about something. More not happy than usual. Every time Istvan Marek said something soft and reasonable, there was an answering thump of Ester pounding some unseen furniture, and her voice would get a notch louder.

Max scribbled down what she could understand. There was “much too cheap”, and “very good price”, and the word “stupid” a lot. She strained to hear more. Was Ester trying to sell something? Could it be the diamond? If so, it didn’t sound like they were going to reach an agreement.

Voices in the room rose – Ester sounded by now as not-pleased as it was possible to be – and then Max made the important discovery that Istvan Marek’s office door opened outwards. She discovered this because Ester shoved it open without warning, and sent her flying.

She landed with a thud, which was followed by two medium-sized thuds and a large one: Max knocked over the hatstand, Ester tripped over the heap of hatstand-and-Max, and Klaus tripped over the heap of Ester-and-hatstand-and-Max. Max didn’t know the word that Klaus rumbled in German, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t polite.