Looking down at the water from the embankment, she saw it. A dark shape. Norah stopped and blinked, as if to force her eyes to get used to the dark, but whatever it was remained elusive. Norah stood and stared, trying to get a grasp on the situation and when at last she realised what she was looking at, everything seemed to stall and slow, as if the flow of time were suddenly as thick and sticky as tar. There, black against the darkness, was a human figure. It was floating face-down at the shallow bank of the canal, and if it hadn’t snagged on a big, bare branch, it would have drifted away. The ringing stopped and Norah realised that it had come from a dark bundle that was just visible on the grass at the water’s edge. A bag, perhaps, or a rucksack, she thought, running towards it, slipping on the frosty grass in the thin high-heeled shoes she had put on for the private viewing, not for a night walk. She arrived at the bank out of breath and, kneeling down, stretched out an arm to the figure floating on the water, but she couldn’t reach it. She dropped her bag on the grass, lay on her belly and pulled herself as close to the water’s edge and the motionless figure as possible without getting completely drenched herself. She could almost touch the soaked cloth of the woman’s coat, but as soon as she got it between her fingers, the lifeless form drifted away a little, as if trying to escape her grasp. Norah reached out a bit further, panting—she wasn’t shivering anymore, but sweating—and managed to grasp a piece of coat between her fingers. Straining, she pulled the figure over to her, a centimetre at a time to begin with, and then, with a last heave, all the way to the bank, where she grabbed the body in both arms, turned it over and pulled it out of the canal, puffing and cursing, feeling the icy water seep out of the clothes. Then she laid it on the grass and looked down at it. The dark hair was no longer in a thick plait, but loose. The face pale and serious. An aging Ophelia. Norah saw at once that Dorotea Lechner, if that was her name, was dead. She felt her pulse, just in case, but all was still; the woman was cold as ice. As so often in situations of stress, Norah was suddenly calm. She dried her wet hands on her damp jeans and took out her phone. Then she sat down on the grass a few metres away from the corpse, wrapped her arms around her trembling body, and waited for the ambulance and police to arrive.

25

The journey home seemed to go on forever. The fluorescent light in the train, the laughter of late-night revellers, the smell of grease wafting over to her from the seat opposite where a teenage boy was impassively eating chips—it was all suddenly unbearable to Norah. The doctor on call had confirmed that the woman was dead. It seemed that she really was called Dorotea Lechner. The policemen, two men of Norah’s age with lean, muscular bodies, had taken her statement and contact details. She had decided to tell them the more plausible part of the truth—that she was working on a feature about beggars and homeless people in Vienna and had been hoping to speak to the woman about her experience. The officers had implied that they were treating the case as an accident. Ms Lechner had been walking by the canal in an advanced state of inebriation and had, for whatever reason, strayed from the path to the edge of the water. There, presumably, she had slipped and fallen, banging her head on a stone so that she had landed in the water unconscious and drowned.