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she’d smoked a pack of Gauloises a day in her wild student days, before she’d ever dreamed she’d sell people the homes they were going to live in, or sleep with a famous footballer.
    â€˜You said two things.’
    â€˜When I got back up here just now, I switched on my laptop. I wanted to read a bit about Shalimar, see how long it’s been around and what it costs to buy and what sort of women would have been likely to have used it.’
    â€˜Whether it’s of a piece with
Kind of Blue
, you mean.’
    He didn’t answer that. He said, ‘My screensaver’s changed. It was a shot of Gordon Banks saving point blank from Pelé in the 1970 World Cup. People still say that’s the greatest save a goalkeeper’s ever made.’
    â€˜I saw that, last night, on your desk.’
    â€˜It’s been replaced, by a charcoal sketch of a cat. It’s identical to the drawing I found in the basement except for one tiny detail. Now it has a set of initials in the bottom right hand corner.’
    â€˜What are they?’
    â€˜You’d find them familiar. They’re yours, Rebecca.’
    â€˜I didn’t sketch the cat. I didn’t tamper with your laptop either.’
    â€˜Happy to put it all down to coincidence?’
    â€˜No, and neither are you. What do you intend to do?’
    â€˜I’m not being threatened here, I don’t think. I don’t think whatever’s happening is a deliberate effort to scare me. I’m bloody sure now it’s not one of the lads or a bunch of the lads playing a practical joke. It’s more like something’s being hinted at, or I’m being teased.’
    Rebecca thought about the laugh she’d heard the previous evening: husky, abrupt and more hostile each time she recalled it.
    â€˜I’m going to have a very large whisky,’ Tom said. ‘Then I’m hoping to have a peaceful night’s sleep.’
    â€˜If anything happens, call me,’ Rebecca said. Like I could do anything useful, she thought. But he didn’t call and eventually, she went to sleep herself.
    The man in charge of the alumni archive had a hipster beard with waxed points at the ends of his moustache. He wore bespoke jeans and pointy brogued boots and a brown cardigan so coarsely textured it looked like it was woven out of horse hair. Rebecca was fairly certain the glass in his horn-rims was non-prescription. They were a prop, an affectation. He wasn’t so much dressed, as costumed. Observing him and his contrived appearance reminded her with a pang of anxiety just how devastating Tom Harper looked simply in a suit.
    The basement of number 7 Absalom Court had been 21a in the period when it had been used as accommodation by the LSE. Rebecca found who she thought she was looking for almost straight away. She’d moved in when she’d enrolled in October of 1963. The name was a clue, because it provided those initials. She was Rachel Gaunt, her degree course was Politics and Philosophy, and when Rebecca saw the photocopied admissions photo paper-clipped to her tenancy agreement, she almost recoiled in shock.
    â€˜She looks like you,’ the hipster archivist said, having stolen up behind her, peering over her shoulder. ‘She could be your sister. Blimey, she could even be your twin.’
    That wasn’t true. Rachel Gaunt had been 18 when the picture had been taken and Rebecca was almost a full decade older. The hair was different. Rebecca wore hers carelessly long and loose and Rachel’s was cut in a chic and precise geometric bob. With her heavy lipstick and the kohl around her eyes and in her black crew-neck sweater, she had a Left-Bank Parisian look about her. It was the Paris beatnik style first personified in the model-actress Juliette Gréco, all smoky and existential, except that Rachel didn’t resemble Juliette Gréco, she resembled Rebecca Green. Their features were similar and their