‘It’s Marie!’ one of the old ladies cried. ‘Haven’t seen her for a long time!’ The other two nodded silently.

The couple at the table behind Norah had also noticed the young woman.

‘It’s a wonder she can still fit through her front door!’ the man said, and his girlfriend giggled. Norah glared at them, but they took no notice. Norah’s friend Coco popped into her head. Not that Coco looked anything like the young woman, but she, too, made people turn and look. Thinking of Coco made Norah think of Berlin and the disaster, and soon her good mood had evaporated.

When she left the bistro, it had begun to rain again. The houses seemed to be bracing themselves against the wind and weather, and the street, with its shuttered shops, closed grilles and darkly clad figures carrying umbrellas, looked almost hostile. Norah stopped, fished her phone out of her bag and opened Instagram. She took a photo, tagged it #winterinvienna and #melancholia, and posted it. She’d been so caught up in events these last months that she’d neglected her social media channels and her blog. No wonder no one had replied last night. She’d better start posting more regularly; this beautiful, lonely city certainly offered enough material.

The underground station smelt of sadness and cement. Norah heard snatches of a melancholy eastern European air, the fruity cough of a homeless man, the ghostly echo of heels. She got on a train and stood wedged between strangers—headphones, lowered gazes, steamed-up windows, the dull noise of a throat being cleared. People’s bodies were pressed up close to hers, but the distance between them was unbridgeable. Berlin had been the same—cold and bleak and unwelcoming, though in a different way. The train stopped, the doors opened and people poured out, carrying Norah with them.

The old fortune teller she had come in search of was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the cold, damp weather seemed to have driven the beggars from the streets altogether. Maybe Norah would have better luck later in the day. She was determined to talk to the old woman again. The date was probably pure coincidence. Norah was probably just imagining that the name Arthur Grimm rang a bell. But probably had never been enough for her.

In the magazine offices Norah felt like a ghost, almost entirely ignored. Although her job didn’t officially start for two weeks, she’d already moved into one of the shared offices overlooking Kärntner Strasse. Berger had shown her around and introduced her to everyone, and she had found her new colleagues polite but aloof. That was fine by her; she’d always tended to keep her social life separate from work, and apart from Werner, she had no journalist friends. Norah knew Werner from her Hamburg days. He was an excellent reporter, but he and Norah had something else in common, too; there had been a time when he’d taken even more drugs than she had. Hard to believe that they’d both been clean for ten years; it was as if they’d been given a second chance. Norah certainly had no intention of straying from the straight and narrow again.