She looked left. No sign of her. She looked down the street. Teeming masses. But it was only football or ice-hockey fans on their way to a match. The woman had less than a minute’s head start; she couldn’t simply have vanished. Had she disappeared into one of the houses in the alleyway on her left? Or was the crowd hiding her from view?

Fifty-fifty. Norah plunged into the crowd, fought her way through, dodged and elbowed, stood on tiptoes, wheeled round—nobody there. If she’d gone this way, Norah would have found her by now. She turned on her heel and headed back to the little alleyway, moving faster now that she was going with the flow. She saw a cyclist, a young couple walking hand in hand, an empty taxi with its hazard lights on. That was all. Norah looked left and right, hoping for a clue, but found nothing.

She ran a desperate hand over her face, then pulled herself together, got out her phone, took a photo of the alleyway and another of the street sign—just in case—and headed home.

Back in the flat, Norah found an email from Werner in her inbox headed Arthur Grimm. She opened it and skimmed through the information Werner had tracked down, but there was nothing that leapt out at her. He sounded like a perfectly normal guy. Her mind was on other things anyway. She thanked Werner and clapped shut her laptop.

Later, in bed, staring at the ceiling and waiting for her thoughts to come to rest, Norah replayed the moment at the crossing in her mind and realised there was something strange about it. Something surprising and disconcerting—and not just the shock of seeing the woman again. She closed her eyes, trying to conjure a precise picture.

She had only seen her very briefly and in the middle of a crowd of people, but something about her appearance had bothered Norah.

And suddenly she knew what. Her clothes. She hadn’t been dressed as a beggar.

23

It seemed to Norah that she had only to reach out a hand to feel the rough, porous surface of the meteorites; the pen-and-wash drawings were so lifelike that she was awed. Another series showed a starry sky and there was a third of woods at night whose almost abstract shapes began to reveal face-like images if you stared at them for long enough. Norah tore herself away from the mesmerising images and sauntered on, weaving her way between the other private-view guests who were making small talk over champagne and canapés. The gallery was agreeably crowded with middle-aged couples, hip twenty-somethings and well-dressed thirty-somethings who all looked as if they were shopping for the perfect painting for the lobby of their creative agencies. Since Norah’s review wasn’t due for a few days, she had no reason not to linger a little.

She’d had a hectic day, which was a good thing, because it had given her less time to think about the painful question she had been trying to push to the back of her mind for days: why had Max and Paul lied to her? Max had rung twice since, but Norah had ignored his calls.