The woman opposite her had been rummaging in her handbag, and she finally produced a cookie, with great triumph. She wafted it kindly at Max. Max did her best to explain, via head shaking, how extraordinarily useless a cookie would be at that moment. Her throat tightened with sadness. The woman was so kind, and so ordinary, and so unlikely to bother herself with diamond thieves on trains. Max missed Marguerite painfully.

When they rumbled over the Danube River, leaving Romania behind and crossing into Bulgaria, she still hadn’t come up with an idea. Gradually they left the snow, and chugged past valleys stiff with frost, and swollen black streams, and still she didn’t have an idea. Even though she was an optimist, her hope wobbled.

The sky began to spit rain, and the drops raced each other down the window. A spider crawled ponderously across the pane.

And that was when Max found that she did have an idea, after all.

She tried putting her hand in front of the spider, but this spider knew a human hand when he saw one. He crouched stubbornly still every time she went near him. So Max tore a page from her notebook, took Sister Marguerite’s jelly-bean jar from her suitcase, cupped it over him, and took him by surprise from underneath with the paper. He waved a leg in feeble protest.

“Sorry,” Max said. “If it helps, I know how you feel.”

The powder-purple lady was now truly worried about her. Max smiled reassuringly – or as reassuringly as she could manage, with a face smudged from crying and a trapped spider in her hands – then she set off down the corridor once more.

Celeste was at the window, staring out, as usual.

Ester and Klaus’s car was in the next carriage, thankfully, away from Celeste’s gaze. Max cupped the jar to the crack at the bottom of the door, and slid away the paper.

“Good luck,” she whispered.

The spider spidered off, not bothered. Spiders do not really worry about good luck and bad luck. For spiders, the world is just made up of flies and not-flies.

Max backed off into the corridor of her own carriage, and watched through the window, trying to look casual for Celeste’s benefit. For a while there was only the sound of a baby crying, and the usual train-rattle.

Just when she began to think that the spider must have threaded itself into a nook somewhere unseen, there was an enormous roar, followed by some very high-pitched croaking. Double-quick, Ester was pelting down the corridor to the next carriage over. Klaus was in close pursuit. The door to the carriage slammed behind them.

Quickly and silently, Max entered the carriage from the other end, and slipped into their car.

The suitcase was stored under a seat. Max heaved it out. It really was heavy.