Norah walked along the deserted canal. Not a soul about, not even a couple snogging or an old man walking his dog. Only the biting cold and the shallow water, as black as the oily ocean in the gallery. Norah shivered with cold as she hurried along the canal, dodging frozen puddles and potholes to avoid slipping. As soon as she could, she took a flight of steps up from the canal to the street and when her phone told her she was almost at her destination, she looked up to see that there was a bar on the ground floor of the house she was heading for.

It really was a quiet neighbourhood; Norah still hadn’t seen a soul. But there were lights on in a lot of the windows—a comforting sight.

Norah stepped up to the front door of the nondescript house whose colour she couldn’t make out in the dark—maybe cream, maybe white or grey—and studied the names on the doorbells. There were names, which there weren’t always in Vienna, but not the one she was looking for. Krstic, Müller, Celi, Talhouni/Nägele, Wagner. And there was one bell without a name. As Norah saw it, that meant three possibilities. Number one, the woman lived in that flat. Number two, the woman didn’t live here at all and Norah’s reticent informer had simply piloted her to the bar where she was a regular. Number three, her informer wasn’t an informer at all, but a con man. Norah glanced at her phone. Half-past nine. Too late to ring a stranger’s doorbell. If Dorotea Lechner did live here, Norah would have to come back another time. Nobody liked being surprised late at night; you didn’t need to be a journalist to know that. She’d try in the bar and if that didn’t get her anywhere, she’d come back in the daytime. She was also going to have to come up with some way of getting these people to talk if she wanted to write a feature about them. Who liked talking about living on the streets and begging?

Norah went into the bar. It reminded her of Werner’s favourite drinking hole: a long dark counter, a football match on a small TV high up in a corner, walls hung with various pennants and an Austria Vienna scarf, a no-nonsense landlady who looked as if she’d turn you out if you tried to order an alcopop, and in front of her, at the bar, a row of men—and they really were all men—who evidently took their drinking seriously. The underbelly of Vienna’s nightlife.

Refreshingly, a few heads turned to look at Norah as she went in, but none of them showed any real interest in her, so she took a seat at the far end of the counter and ordered a beer, which the landlady set down before her with a mute nod.

Norah thanked her and decided to lay her cards on the table, guessing that careful questioning wouldn’t get her anywhere with this formidable woman. Mid-fifties, Norah reckoned. She had bright eyes and a fierce updo and looked as if she had a healthy dose of common sense.