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music they had just been listening to, light, lilting Strauss waltzes, mocking the way she felt afterwards, staying in her head for years after that night.
    The very air in Prague was full of music; you could go to a different concert every night, many of them totally free, most of them offering cut-price tickets. As you walked around Prague you were always having cheaply printed flyers advertising concerts thrust into your hands. People put on concerts wherever they could, the more expensive ones in imposing concert halls or palaces in which nobody had lived for several lifetimes, some in the open air in summer, in the streets of the Old Town, in one of the many parks which threaded the city with green. There wasn’t just classical music, either; there was jazz or folk music in bars, or in hotels or clubs, sung masses in churches like the church of St Nicholas, the High Baroque church, glittering with gilded cherubs, where Mozart had once played the elaborately decorated organ.
    They had been parked under a lime tree just outside the grey concrete block where she lived. While he tried to kiss her, his hand had slid up inside her skirt, she had felt his fingertips stroking between her legs, soft, warm, tormenting, making her burn.
    She had drunk a few glasses of wine over dinner, it must have been the heat of the wine in her veins that made her want him to go on. She had ached to let the feeling build, to let him make love to her, although she knew she wasn’t even close to falling in love with him.
    But he had made his move too soon. She was still sober enough to stop him, and he had lost his temper, his face red. ‘What’s wrong with you? What are you saving it for, you frigid bitch?’
    She never went out with him again, but what he had said had really got under her skin. A year later she had gone to bed, quite deliberately, to prove to herself that she wasn’t frigid, with a boy from her village, a farmer’s son she had known at school. They had had a brief summer romance but it died out as suddenly as it had begun, like a passing storm over the green woods around her home. A little lightning, a little thunder, and then peace.
    The TV reporter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Are you in trouble?’
    Startled, she looked round at him, eyes wide. ‘What?’
    ‘Why don’t you tell me about it? I get the feeling you could do with a friend.’
    Yes, but it wouldn’t be this man. After all, he was a reporter; he would use anything she told him. Why else had he come rushing over to her just now? Because he had smelt a story. Maybe she shouldn’t even have this drink with him, but he knew Don Gowrie and his family – he might be able to tell her things she badly wanted to know, about Mrs Gowrie, the daughter . . . what had someone said she was called? Catherine . . . yes, Catherine. She must remember that name. There was so much she did not know. But she would have to be very careful that while she was trying to get information out of this journalist she didn’t tell him anything which could be dangerous.
    She had felt him staring at her while those security men were talking to her; she could see how clever he was. He had known there was something behind her question to Don Gowrie, behind the way Gowrie reacted. Her heart thumped painfully, remembering again the way Gowrie had swung round and stared at her.
    She could still see his face. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, hoping for, what reaction she had thought she would get, but she had certainly stopped him in his tracks. He had looked quite ill for a second; she could almost be sorry for him, he had gone so pale, his eyes all black and shiny, the pupils dilating with shock.
    He had got away with it all this time, he must have thought he was invulnerable, as safe as houses, and then she turned up, just as he was taking his most audacious gamble, the one all gamblers dreamt about, the jackpot, the big one. If he became president of the United