Her hand strayed to the nearest available object. She felt it and wanted to cry. It was the precious Bela Szepessy that Harold Middleton had bought for her. The finest musical instrument Felicia Kaminski had ever owned.

She smashed the bone-hard composite chin rest hard into his face. The bottom of the fiddle tore away from the body immediately. It was gone and she knew it. So she took the neck in both hands swung the century-old instrument round like a mallet, dashing the jagged wood into his head until he fell once more to the floor, his nose a bloody mess, his eyes filling with pain and fear.

There was an old vase, big and heavy within reach. She let go of the ruined violin, picked up the vase and threw it at his head, hitting him square on the temple.

He went quiet.

Quickly, efficiently, she snatched a set of spare metal strings from her fiddle case, kicked him over onto his chest, put one knee on his spine and bound his hands behind, then his feet.

By the time she’d finished he was coming to again. He wasn’t moving anywhere. She was thorough. Just in case, she bent down, retrieved his gun and held the weapon tightly in her right hand, hating the feel of the thing.

With tears beginning to well in her eyes, she looked at the ruined remnants of her fiddle and then the crushed man on the floor and said, “I am not little. And I am not a girl.”

A noise made her look up. The front door was still open. She could see it from the living room and cursed herself for being so stupid. A tall, gangly man with exceptionally pale skin and an ugly face was marching through the door, looking both scared and determined at the same time.

Felicia Kaminski wanted to say something but at that moment her mind locked. Szeryng’s luscious rendition of the Bach Partita was reaching its final note, a delicious D played double stringed, one open, one fingered with vibrato, then dying into silence. She loved that touch and had wished for so long that one day she might emulate it. Tonight, maybe, in the Wigmore Hall. Tonight . . .

It took Pierre Crane one strike to knock the weapon out of the fingers of the slender, pretty-plain young woman, and a second to render her unconscious as she stood dumb-founded over a man who lay bound on the floor, face swollen yet still visibly terrified. She crashed down in a heap next to him. Crane’s eyes strayed around the room. There was no one else in the little house. He could sense this.