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guitar very well. We were terrible. Anyhow, this act was good. We knew it was rigged, it had to be, but we none of us could see how the man rigged it and he wasn’t telling. Otherwise, I didn’t believe in telepathy. Or I hadn’t done until that moment, when sitting on my bed and listening, I seemed to hear a kind of echo inside my brain. The sense of the unknown prowler’s presence was overwhelming. I almost thought I could hear him breathing, though that would be impossible. But for a moment there, it was as if his mind and mine had touched.
     
    Cold sweat trickled down my spine. I didn’t dare switch on the light because that would’ve glowed up through the glass disc. I didn’t move again. I forced myself to suggest explanations and knew that I was grasping at straws. He’d stopped to light a cigarette, I told myself. Less innocently, he could be a burglar, sizing up the house and contemplating entry. I ought to make a noise, let him know someone was awake and aware of him.
     
    My brain rejected this feeble suggestion at once. ‘No, he’s not,’ a pert little voice argued. ‘He’s looking for you, Fran. He wants to know where you live. He wants to know about you. He’s looking around, compiling a dossier in his mind.’
     
    Above my head, feet scraped and the footsteps began again, moving away, moving more quickly, as if he were satisfied and had found out what he wanted to know. He was gone. I knew he had left completely, and wouldn’t be coming back, not that night at least. I was alone again.
     
    I let out my breath with a long sigh, not having been aware I’d been holding it. I got up and padded to my kitchenette to make a cup of tea, switching on every light in the flat as I went.
     
    I turned on my telly as well for a bit of company, longing to hear human voices. It was two in the morning and the reception was perfect, wouldn’t you know it? No double-vision. No snow-storm. They were showing an ancient black-and-white film. I settled down to watch, nursing my mug of tea, returning to normal.
     
    The film was about medieval villagers hunting out a witch who was saved in the last reel by the return of her crusader lover. They’d obviously been on a tight budget because they’d employed so few extras. There must have been lots of out-of-work actors like me who’d have given their eye-teeth just to be a bystander in the crowd with a chance to shake their fists at the camera. Yet whether dressed as peasants, or in saggy chainmail and partly disguised by helmets which looked as if they’d been fashioned from tin bowls and probably had, the same familiar few faces kept running past the cameras.
     
    It distracted me for a while. But eventually the film finished and my worries came back. If you’re a young woman and live alone, as I did, the risk of a stalker hanging around the place is always there. They see you around the area, follow you home. Sometimes it gets no further than that. They get bored and seek out other prey. Or they get frightened off.
     
    If that was all he’d been, I could deal with it. But another possibility had occurred to me, that the visit had to do with Albie. If so, then logically the visitor had been Merv, yet I didn’t believe it. I’d seen Merv walk. I recalled how he’d padded with dull muffled tread in his trainers towards Dilip’s hot-dog stall. My man had worn stouter, heavy-heeled footwear. However, it was unlikely that Merv had been drinking alone and Albie himself had seen two men. So, had my visitor been the other man?
     
    Ganesh had warned me about blundering into the pub but the opportunity had been too tempting to pass up. Had my rashness aroused suspicion and had Merv’s companion decided to check me out?
     
    It was a thought which sent my already jittery mind spinning off in several directions, conjuring up a variety of alarming possibilities. What if the two men seen by Albie to snatch the girl had realised they’d been observed? Once they’d