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examining the body of the victim in the minutest detail before removing it to the morgue. Amid the mess, a laptop computer sat open on the table, a slide selection of family photographs, installed as a screensaver, illuminating its monitor.
    Truquet leaned over the keyboard and banished the screensaver, to reveal a monthly agenda. He stood up. ‘This is what was showing on the screen when we got here.’
    Commissaire Taillard peered at it, flicking her eyes across four weeks of entries until they settled on today’s date. And her heart seemed to push up into her throat to try to stop her breathing.
Enzo—11am
, it said.
    ‘
Commissaire
.’ A voice from the hallway.
    She looked up, but was distracted, and it took a second call before she reacted. She went out into the hall. The senior forensics officer was standing astride the body in his shower cap and white plastic suit. In one latexed hand he was holding a pair of tweezers, which he held out for her to see. ‘Hair recovered from the victim’s clothes, ma’am. Not hers. Definitely not hers.’
    She took a step closer and saw several long, black hairs held between the legs of the tweezers.
    ‘Long, like a woman’s,’ said the forensics officer.
    ‘Or a man with a ponytail.’ David Truquet’s voice came from behind. She turned to see him watching her closely, and a sick feeling of dread descended, like a shroud on a murder victim.

Chapter Eight
    Kirsty pushed through the crowds in the Place de la Gare towards the huge glass bubble they had built, unaccountably, to mask the station’s historical façade. An architectural aberration to be endured by generations of Strasbourgers to come. Work to renovate the station and link it into the city’s growing tram network had only recently been completed, along with this glass monstrosity.
    Earlier sleet had turned to rain, blowing in on an east wind all the way from Siberia, and travellers hurried, heads bowed beneath battered umbrellas, on pathways that converged like the spokes of a wheel on the hub that was the Gare de Strasbourg.
    The huge clock in the departure hall showed nearly four-thirty. Her father’s train was due in very shortly. Kirsty glanced nervously at the faces of passengers who seemed to press around her on all sides. If someone was trying to kill her, she thought not unreasonably, it could be any one of them. How could she know?
    Kirsty had been unable to sleep since Sylvie’s death. She had lain, tossing and turning in a friend’s apartment the previous night, torn between guilt and confusion. She had no idea why someone might want her dead. It was inexplicable to her. And yet there was, it seemed, no doubt that she had been the target. No doubt, too, that since her would-be killer had failed the first time, he might very well try again. She felt vulnerable, exposed, and powerless to do anything about it.
    The call to her father had been a reflex response. A return to childhood. A little girl reaching out towards safe and comforting arms. Someone who would never let her down, no matter what. And, yet, hadn’t he done just that for all those years?
    A Jewish cleric with a long white beard and black hat was staring at her, and she turned away self-consciously, hurrying through a series of stone arches towards the arrivals hall.
    Which was when she saw him.
    Just a glimpse. An oddly familiar face beyond the dozens of people queuing at the Alsace grocery store. She stopped, catching her breath. Where was he? And then she saw him again. He was looking at her, a strange serenity in piercing blue eyes. And then he was gone, and no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t recatch sight of him. Who was he? She knew she knew him. Then it came to her. Like a moment replayed. A strong hand helping her to her feet.
You’re a lucky girl
, he’d said. And a shiver of fear shook her rigid.
    ***
    She saw her father almost as soon as he stepped off the TGV. He was nearly a head higher than the other