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places she is likely to go, which is precisely why she should not go there. From now on, you have to leave behind all the familiar landmarks, Sophie, it’s crucial. You have to use your imagination. Do things you have never done, go to places no-one would expect you to go. The thought of never being able to visit her father panics her. It has been six months since she has been to see him, and now she can never go there again. They will have his house under surveillance, they will have his telephone tapped too. She sees the figure of the old man in front of her, still tall and powerful as if carved out of an oak tree, just as old and just as strong. Sophie had chosen Vincent because he was carved from the same mould: tall, calm, serene. She will miss her father. When everything fell apart, when all that remained after Vincent’s deathwere the ruins of her life, her father was the only person left, the last man standing. She can never go and see him again, can never talk to him. She is completely alone in the world, it is as though he too were dead. She cannot imagine a world in which her father is alive somewhere where she can no longer see him, no longer speak to him or hear his voice. It is though she herself is dead.
    The thought makes her dizzy, as though she is stepping into another world from which she would never be able to return, a hostile world where everything is unfamiliar, everything is dangerous, where there is no place for spontaneity: everything she does must be new to her. She will never be in a place where she can feel safe, there will never be a place where she can give her name; Sophie no longer exists, she is just a fugitive, someone scared to death, living like an animal, focused only on surviving; the antithesis of what it means to live.
    Another wave of tiredness: is it all worth it? What will her life be now? Forever moving, never staying in one place. Such a life is doomed to failure, she does not have the strength to fight. She does not have the temperament to be a fugitive, she is an ordinary criminal. She will never make it. They will catch you easily . . . She heaves a sigh of defeat: surrender, go to the police, tell them it is all true, but that she remembers nothing, that this was bound to happen some day, that there is such black bile in her, such a bitter hatred for the world. Better to end this thing now. She wants nothing to do with the life that awaits her. But what was her life like before? For a long time now she has not been herself. Now she is faced with a choice between two futile lives. She feels so tired. “I have to stop,” she thinks. And, for the first time, this seems like a concrete solution. “I’ll turn myself in,” and she is not even surprised to find herself thinking as though she is amurderer. It has taken only two years for her to go insane, a single night for her to revert to being a criminal, and barely two hours for her to become a hunted woman with all the attendant fears, the suspicions, the ploys, the thwarted plans, the rising panic, and now even the vocabulary. This is the second time in her life she has realised that a normal life can tip over into madness, into death. It is over. It has to end here. She feels overwhelming relief. Even the terror of being locked up, which prompted her to run in the first place, has faded. A psychiatric hospital no longer seems like hell, but rather an equable solution. She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. After this one, I’ll go. One last cigarette and then she will do it, she will dial 112. Is that even the right number these days? It hardly matters, she will manage to get through to the police, to explain. Anything is better than these last few hours. Anything is better than this madness.
    She blows a long plume of smoke, exhaling forcefully, and it is at that moment that she hears the woman’s voice.

6
    “I’mso sorry . . .”
    The woman in grey is standing next to her, nervously clutching a small