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on. We’ll go to your apartment and pack a bag, and you’ll come back with me to Cahors. You’ll be safe there, and we’ll figure out what to do.’
    But she made no move to get up. ‘I haven’t been to the apartment since…since it happened. I stayed with a friend last night.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m frightened to go back.’
    He nodded and took her hand. ‘We’ll get the cab to wait for us. I’ve booked us a hotel, and we’ll get the first train to Paris in the morning.’
    But still she wouldn’t stand. ‘There’s something else…’
    He frowned. ‘What?’ He sat down again.
    ‘When I got there, you know, just as the bomb exploded, the blast knocked me from my feet.’ He could see the consternation in her eyes. ‘This man picked me up. Just kind of lifted me to my feet. It almost seemed like he was smiling. You know, completely unaffected by what had just happened. There was panic, people were screaming. Smoke everywhere. And he just looked at me and said, “You’re a lucky girl.”’
    Enzo had no idea where this was going. He searched her face for some understanding. ‘You were.’
    ‘But it was like he knew I should have been up there. How would he know that?’
    ‘You ever heard of dog acting?’
    Her face creased in puzzlement. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘In TV and movies, when they cut away to a shot of the dog, the dog has no expression on its face. We, the viewer, read into it whatever expression is appropriate. Good actors know that. They can make a blank face say a thousand different things.’
    ‘Dad, I don’t understand.’
    ‘You were right. How
would
he know that you should have been up there? You were the only one who knew that. So you were the one who transferred that interpretation to him.’
    But she took no comfort in his words and simply shook her head. ‘No.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘You see, the thing is, I just saw him again.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Here. In the station. Just before your train got in.’
    And he felt the same shiver of fear that she had experienced just fifteen minutes before.

Chapter Nine
    It was dark when they got there. The snow was wet, falling through the light of the streetlamps in drifts, like down, and thickly enough that it was starting to lie again. Enzo told their driver to wait for them and glanced around as Kirsty unlocked the front door. There was a
boulangerie
and an
agence immobilière
on the ground floor. Some of the windows on the upper floors had small balconies closed in by cast-iron railings. There was a modern apartment block next door, and a row of upmarket villas on the far side of the main road.
    So this was where his little girl lived. The names on the doorplate all looked foreign.
Bozovic
,
Marinelli
,
Boukara
. He wondered if they were all interpreters like Kirsty. An electrician’s van parked in the Rue Bernegger bore the name
Droeller-Scheer
. Nothing about this place seemed French. He might have been in another country.
    He followed her up a dark stone staircase to a long landing with doors leading off to left and right. She hit the light switch and nothing happened. She said, ‘It’s an energy saver. Goes off by itself. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.’
    He held her arm to stop her going any further, and took out his keyring. There was a small pencil torch attached to it, about three inches long, that he used to find keyholes in the dark. ‘I’ll go first.’ The thin beam of light pierced the darkness ahead of them.
    ‘It’s the one at the end. On the left.’
    He stopped outside the door and shone his torch at the lock. He felt himself tense. ‘Have you had a break-in recently? Forgotten your key, had to break in yourself?’
    ‘No. Why?’
    ‘This lock’s been tampered with. See the scratches?’
    She peered into the burned-out circle of light around the lock and saw tiny scratches shining in dull brass.
    ‘Give me your key.’
    She handed him her key and watched as he unlocked the door and pushed it