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station, and doubtless beyond.
    Kapikule was a non-place on the edge of not-anywhere-really. Not so long ago I would have avoided it and picked up the train I wanted directly from Edirne’s central station. But these were difficult times, lines suspended for lack of pay, terminals withering as the flow of people dried up with the work.
    The station was a two-storey building of no discernible merit whatsoever, lit in fluorescent white. In another country it might have been a grim commercial development filled with little shops doomed to fail, or a well-intentioned residential undertaking whose purpose had been corrupted by dubious landowners looking to sell on to MegaMart International. As it was, it was neither of these things.
    The ticket clerk sat with his chin resting on the palm of his hand as I approached. His cap was pulled down over his eyes, but when he looked up at the arrival of money on the steel counter before him I was excited to see that here was the last man left in the world who thought that a Hitler-Chaplin moustache was the pinnacle of stylish facial hair.
    I pushed cash and my Turkish passport towards him. He regarded both as a doctor observes a severed leg, waiting to see if there may yet be a body attached.
    “What?” he asked.
    “Belgrade,” I said.
    His sigh as he took my money – and ignored my passport – was the profound heave of a man aware that, strictly speaking, you have him. You have him and really he has to oblige, but, damn it, a kinder man would have walked away, let him rest, rather than trouble him with this ticket-selling business.
    “Train is this evening,” he grumbled, pushing the meagre papers towards me. “You’ll have to hang around.”
    “Is there anything to see in Kapikule?”
    His look could have cowed a cobra. I smiled my most charming smile, slipped the tickets into my passport and said, “I’ll find somewhere to nap.”
    “Don’t nap here,” he barked. “Station property.”
    “Of course it is. How silly of me.”
     
    I was reluctant to wait anywhere too public.
    By now the police may have found my body’s fingerprints, a hair fallen from my fleeing head or some other symptom of a cock-up which I knew not of, and begun to trace its movements. Perhaps they – the great unknown “they” – have followed CCTV footage from the moment Josephine Cebula fell down the stairs of Taksim station, all the way back to a hire car pulling into a car park beneath a hotel, and, if they are especially skilled at their job, an alert could have been issued for my hire car, now sitting in the shade of a cypress tree opposite a fountain where metal sunflowers grow.
    Or perhaps not.
    Perhaps the police were baffled.
    Who was I to say?
     
    I took shelter in a tiny pink-stone chapel by the banks of the river. I was in Turkey, but the neatly ordered dusty fields beyond the water, their crops uprooted for the harvest, the soil already turned for next year’s seeding, were in Greece. A spit and I could be there, and for a moment I considered it – quick knife to the wrists and then away I’d go in the body of a Greek farmer, breath smelling of garlic, shoes scrubbed with sand.
    A priest with a great black beard approached me as I sat in the furthest pew, legs crossed upon a stone bench. He addressed me first in Greek, a language where I have never been strong, and hearing my accent raised his eyebrows in surprise, and switched to Turkish.
    “This church was founded by Constantius I. He was travelling through the empire and came to this place, where he drank the waters of the river. That night, as he lay sleeping, the Virgin Mary came to him and bathed his feet and hands, and daubed his lips with the water from this stream. When he woke, he was so taken with the vision that he ordered a monastery built here. It was a thriving place: pilgrims came to wash their feet and dream of the Madonna. Then the Ottomans knocked down all but this little chapel you see now, but Sultan Selim