At her front door, Esther swayed. Her fingers were numb round her keys because of gripping them so hard, supposedly in readiness to ward off an assailant. A good stab at the eyeballs was the advice. Yeah, right, like she would ever manage that. She’d go quiet with terror, more like, become one of those victims who had juries shaking their heads. The key was gritty in the lock and hard to turn, one of the trillion things in the house that didn’t work smoothly: annoying, but too trivial to make a fuss about.

The lock turned at last and the door gave way. In the same instant, a muffled thud from the street made Esther swing round, her heart pounding. But it was only Chico, her neighbour’s tank of a tabby, jumping onto the bonnet of a car, from where it crouched, watching her, its yellow eyes lasers in the dark.

2

Esther leant up against one of the book stacks at the rear of the shop for a breather, keeping an eye on the proceedings through a gap in the shelf. Her heels were high and her lower back stiff from charging around in them all day. Professor Tobin, whose catchily titled tome, Philosophy Maketh Man, was the reason for the event, was still in full flow to the fifty or so attendees. In his late sixties, with a long, straggly beard that Esther wondered his wife didn’t chop off with some garden shears, the professor was attired in a mustard-coloured, corduroy suit and a gold bow tie, which, like his half-moon spectacles, glinted under the ceiling lights of the bookshop. He twirled the stem of his wine glass as he talked – one of the batch Esther had been mandated to collect, along with drinks and snacks, from a nearby off-licence that afternoon.

Just behind his left shoulder, leading the audience with head-nods of appreciation and glass-raising, was Stephen Goddard, Esther’s lover as well as her boss, and senior editor in the academic wing of the small London publishing house that had employed her for over a year as its Girl Friday. Charismatic and flatteringly besotted, Stephen also happened to be married; but only until the right moment to extricate himself arrived, as he had spent the last nine months earnestly and repeatedly reassuring her. A literary event out of London would provide a rare and perfect pretext for them to be together properly for an entire night, he had pointed out excitedly, when appointing her to help with the organising; a real treat after all the sporadic, snatched hours at her place, grabbed at if her flatmates were out and his wife was working late. Stephen had booked a hotel in celebration and had been making excited eyes at her through the glass walls of his office all week.

‘A spy in the camp?’ came a whisper from the end of the book stack.

‘Oh… no…’ Esther jerked round. ‘I just…’