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the Grim came to this place while hunting, and lay down to rest by its banks and dreamed the same dream that his predecessor, Constantius, had dreamed. When he woke, he washed his hands and feet in the waters and proclaimed the river blessed, and said it was a crime to do any further harm against the walls of this place. He left this.” His hand swept the wall, brushing over the faded remains of a great golden scrawl of near-vanished paint, running across three feet of the wall nearest the altar. “The sultan’s
tigra
, stamp of his authority, so that should any man ever threaten these walls again, we could take him inside and show him the word of his master. He saved this chapel, though the pilgrims did not come again.”
    I nodded the slow nod of the theologically well-meaning, eyes running from the signature of the sultan to the sad smile of the Virgin Mary above it, and asked, may I go down to the river and see if it washes my sins away?
    The priest’s eyes widened in horror.
    Of course you can’t, he exclaimed. The river is blessed!

Chapter 13
     
    The body of Nathan Coyle.
    Upon reflection, he’s not really my type. The muscles under my arms and across my back are a little too gym-built, maintained by the lifting and dropping of weights for no apparent purpose. Years of running have strengthened my cardiovascular system, but my left knee aches after too long motionless, and the pain grows steadily until relieved by stretching. I am a little long-sighted – undoubtedly excellent vision at a distance, but close to I find myself inclined to squint. I can find no sign of contact lenses or glasses in my bag. Perhaps he’d been meaning to go to the optician. More likely he simply hadn’t realised that squinting was not the norm, having no experience save his own.
     
    A file labelled “Kepler” sat on my lap.
    The bench on the Kapikule platform was cold, hard, metal. The wind was from the east, the smell of rain on the air, the Belgrade train running twenty minutes late.
    I have no interest in going to Belgrade per se. My aim is to get out of Turkey, away from the police hunting my face. But Coyle’s passports are North American, north European, and there is a text on my phone which reads
Circe
, and a murder kit in my bag, and though it would be simple to kill this body and move on, I remember the feel of the bullet as it went through my leg, and though I ran and Josephine died
    yet it was me he aimed to kill.
    The file on my lap was laid out chronologically, photos and documents. An introduction lamented that no further information on entity Kepler was available than these thin pages of lives stolen, time lost. Not a footnote, appendix or watermark suggested who the author was.
    I turned through sheaves of notes, stiff glossy photos, faces and names I barely remembered, until I reached the most recent photo – my photo. Josephine Cebula.
    A copy of her Polish passport, found in the hands of her Frankfurt pimp. Her face, devoid of make-up and joy, was plain and grim, but no less than the face which had greeted me in the morning mirror.
    A photo, snapped on a street corner, her face half-turned away as the photographer swept by, a moment captured, frozen, discarded.
    The police record for the first time she was arrested, released nine hours later. She wore a short leather jacket that exposed her belly button, a skirt that barely covered her behind, and a bruise beneath her right eye as she glared at the camera.
    The boarding pass I’d used when I caught the plane from Frankfurt to Kiev, ready for a languorous trip down the Crimea. I’d travelled business class, dressed in new, bright clothes, and as the stewardess poured me whisky I’d felt an itching and realised that Josephine was a smoker whose needs I had failed to indulge. Landing in Kiev and cursing all the way, I’d bought a box of nicotine patches and sworn that, by the time I gave her body back, she’d be clean, physiologically, if not mentally.
    A