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table and stirred the fragments of sepia-coloured paper. They were brittle and light as a butterfly's wings. She felt a thrill of guilt; she had clipped them out with a nail scissors, hunched over the newspaper file, expecting the librarian to see what she was doing and come and upbraid her in guttural outrage and in a language not one word of which she would understand. She wondered again at the misprint in the caption to the photograph – Axel Vanden – the inexplicable appropriateness of it. How young he looked, hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, but with such an alarmed expression; it was probably just that the camera flash had startled him, though she could not help seeing fright and foreboding in those eyes. The other one, beside him, wore a grin, insolent and yet self-mocking. She picked up delicately in her fingertips the two rectangles of rice paper, which she had trimmed to an exact fit, and laid one each over the two cuttings, first the report of his death, then the photographs. The fountain pen she had bought was of an old-fashioned design, plump in the middle and tapered at the end; it had cost an alarming amount of money. Inside, there had been not the rubber bulb she had expected – the fake-antique effect was confined to the exterior – only a rigid plastic ink cartridge. It was better this way: a bulb she would have had to remove, for fear of it leaking, or bursting, but she could leave the cartridge in, it would be safe, and small enough to give ample space for her purpose inside the hollow of the barrel. This way too the pen would work, and that was good; verisimilitude is in the details, that was a lesson she had learned at the knee of a master. Now she moved the two pieces of newsprint to the front edge of the table and carefully, not daring to breathe, rolled them tightly on to the spindle of the ink cartridge, first one, then the other, face down with the protective sheets of rice paper between them, and secured them with a loop of fine thread she had teased from the hem of her blouse. Tying the knot was difficult, for the leaves of newsprint and the rice paper all kept trying to uncurl, and she had to make three attempts before she succeeded. She was careful too in screwing back the barrel of the pen; at one of the turns it snagged somehow on its threads and made a cracking noise, and she had the sensation of something soft and warm flipping over in the pit of her stomach. But then it was done. Resting fatly in her fingers the pen felt as full as a loaded pistol. To test it she wrote her name with a flourish on the pad beside the bed; the nib was too fine for her liking. She screwed on the cap again and clipped the pen into the pocket of her blouse and went and stood before the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself for a long time. Her own reflection always fascinated her, and frightened her, too, this inescapable person standing there, so known, so knowing, and so strange.
    Tonight the voices in her head were silent.
    Now there was nothing more to do; she had made all possible preparations. Axel Vander would have had her letter by this time, over there on the far side of the world, they had assured her of that at the post office. She had asked for the swiftest possible delivery; it had taken another dismayingly large handful of her dwindling store of bank notes. She went and leaned by the window and looked out into the night. In the square there were rain puddles, shiny and black as oil, and a line of trees, plane trees, she supposed, throwing ragged, oblong shadows across the pavement. She could hear a barrel organ playing somewhere, with mechanical and sinister cheeriness – a barrel organ, at this time of night? – and there was a faint, sickly aroma of what it took her a moment to identify as vanilla. She liked being here, in the unfamiliar city, the isolation of it. She was sure he would come. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow. He might even have set out already. She pictured him, tried to