She knit her brows, sat up, took notice. Her cab was just now reaching Priory Walk. A sprawling brick and stucco building was to her left, an automobile dealership to her right. There were arc lights over the dealership, and streetlamps all along the pavement; the scene was quite well lit. It was perhaps two hundred yards from here to the junction with Old Brompton Road. Not that far. Harper started counting.

Nine cars went by in the time it took her to reach the traffic light on the corner. Of those, four—a Rover, a Volks, a BMW and a Volvo—had the numbers on their plates: 133, 313, 331 and 133 again.

Harper told herself it was only a mild case of synchronicity. Happens all the time, to everyone- And yet, an intuition brought the goosebumps out in force on her arms.

Coincidences happen more frequently, more profoundly, whenever we get close, whenever the trail gets warm again. That was how Bernard had put it. Recurring numbers, accidental meetings, unlikely chains of events. They’re like the spoor of our quarry.

Now she was watching for it—which complicated matters. Were the number combinations actually appearing more often, or was her attention picking them out, excluding others?

In either case, as the cab wove through the backroads of South Kensington, the phenomenon abated for a while. Harper began to relax, began to shrug it off.

Then the taxi broke out onto Kensington High Street. A newsie near Marks and Spencers hawked the late edition of the Standard: “1:33 to Nottingham Derails.” The taxi climbed up Kensington Church, and the price tag of a brass curfew seemed to stand out from the window of an antique shop: 313 pounds. The cab began traveling faster now, traveling farther north into Notting Hill. Harper looked up at the spotlit charity thermometer under the steeple of St. Peter’s …

She found herself shuddering, found herself thinking against her will: Near. He is very near.

A few moments later, the cab slid over to the curb. Stopped.

“Here we are,” said the driver, smiling round at her. “One-thirty-three Portobello Road.”

Rose Ponsonby lowered her ninety-year-old frame into the purple pillows on the settee, and her cats swarmed over her. They mewed and nuzzled her, flexed and purred. Rose had to hold her cup and saucer well above their heads as she took a dainty nibble of her biscuit.