“Yes. Christ, yes, it’s exactly what I need.”

“Then it’s yours,” he said. “Just… use it well.”

A single rectangle of card with just three lines of text–email address, phone number, name: Alice Mair. He pulled it from the mess of his wallet, from cards he’d never used and memberships he’d forgotten he owned, and as he pushed it towards me, our fingers touched, I lingered, and he shied away.

“This is… unexpected,” he admitted.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to visit like this.”

“It’s… fine. I know that it’s you. There must be reasons. This man you’re… this man you’ve become. Did he hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought as much,” he murmured. “You don’t strike me as someone to do something for no good reason.”

“He killed… someone close to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was aiming for me.”

“Why?”

“It’s something that happens,” I replied. “Every few decades someone new learns of our existence, realises all that we could do and gets scared. This time…”

“This time?”

“This time there were orders to kill my host, as well as me. That’s never happened before. My host was an innocent. I made her an offer and she said yes. Now she’s dead and the people who are coming for me invented lies to justify it.”

He was leaning away, a motion he probably didn’t notice himself perform. My face belonged to a murderer, and though it wasn’t to a killer that he spoke, yet some reactions are ingrained deep in decent men. “What will you do?”

“Find Josephine’s killer. This body pulled the trigger, and for that… but it was also following orders. Someone gave orders that she had to die. I want to know why–the real why.”

“And then?”

Silence between us. I smiled, and it didn’t reassure. “More coffee?”

“No. Thank you.”

His eyes were locked on to his coffee cup, reading the future in its depths.

“How’s your wife?”

A flicker to my face, then away. “Good. Well. Busy. She’s always very busy.”

“And… you’re happy?”

A brief flicker of his gaze, a shift on his face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. “Yes,” he said softly. “We’re happy.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“You?” he asked. “Are you… happy?”

I thought about it, then laughed. “All things considered… no. Not at all.”

“I’m… sorry to hear that. What should I call you?”

“I’m called Nathan.”

“I… will try to call you that. Is it your name, or is it…” A flicker of fingers at my borrowed skin.

“It’s his,” I replied. “I lost my name a long, long time ago.”

Klemens Ebner.

He is, if you look through the weariness, the slouched shoulders and the abandoned dreams, a very easy man to love. It is perhaps the simplicity of his affection, the patience of his understanding and loyalty that makes him too easy to love, for his love is taken for granted by many, who give back nothing in return.

I came to him first in the body of his wife. I did my research, for if nothing else I was a good estate agent, and knew how to pick up a life that was not my own, move it about like so much money on a Monopoly board. The first night that I wore Romy Ebner I said, let’s go out for dinner. Let’s have something Thai.

Klemens Ebner loved Thai food, so we had a platter of spicy treats: duck stewed with cashew nuts, coconut rice, prawn crackers, rice noodles, tofu steamed on a bed of garlic and mushrooms. When we were done I said, come on, there’s a concert round the corner, and it was Brahms and I held his hand as the violins played.

At home, in the dark, we lay together in a creaking bed, and made love like teenagers just discovering their own flesh, and in the morning he held his arms around me and said, “You are not my wife.”

Of course I’m your wife, I exclaimed as my heart started in my chest; don’t be foolish.

No, he replied. My wife hates the things I love, because she hates that I can love anything besides herself, and when we make love, it is to appease me, because sex is dirty and flesh is vile and it is only because men are weak that such things must be so. You–this woman in my arms–you are not my wife. Who are you?

And to my surprise, I told him.

I am not Romy Ebner. I am not Nathan Coyle, I am not Trinh Di’u Ma, sobbing in her father’s arms even as I slip away from her body, relieved to be gone. I am not Josephine Cebula, dead in a Turkish morgue, al-Mu’allim lost by the Nile, or the empty-eyed girl sitting in a village in southern Slovakia, scars on her arms and drugs in her veins, do you want to try something kinky tonight?

Once every few years I return to Klemens Ebner and his wife, who he will never leave, and for a few nights, preferably over a weekend with no social obligations, he commits delightful adultery with the woman he married, and we sail the river and ride the Ferris wheel and live as tourists do, hand in hand, until I leave, and he loves the body I leave behind.

My file calls me Kepler.

It will have to do.

Chapter 36

Klemens asked me if I wanted to stay.

He didn’t want me to, but asked anyway, out of good manners.

Thank you, but no.

In all the times I’ve worn his wife I’ve managed to avoid ever having to meet her for more than the briefest instant of physical contact, and frankly I’m not sure I want to start now.

He says:

If you’re in trouble… you could be me. For a little while. If you need to.

His offer of a bed was false, his offer of a body is real.

I have to remember not to kiss him when I say no, thank you.

He says:

The man you are now? This… Nathan? Are you going to kill him?

The words come tangled, courageous and scared.

Maybe, I reply. Maybe.

He nods, digesting my words, then says:

Don’t. Life is a beautiful thing. Don’t kill him.

Goodbye, Klemens Ebner.

Goodbye, Nathan.

We shake hands formally, and then, as I move away, his fingers touch my arm, the inside, where the skin is soft. He’s frightened, but his fingers stay, barely resting on my skin, and if there was a moment, it would have been then.

I do not look back as I walk away.

Travellers’ hotels.

Seen one, seen ’em all.

This one had a couple of cranky computers in the hall, accessible for half-hour stretches for residents’ internet access. Of the many email accounts I ran, only one had content more interesting than an invitation to buy three new coffee cups at 72 per cent of their original price or anti-cellulite cream for the modern woman.

The email was from Johannes “Spunkmaster13” Schwarb, and came with a business disclaimer at the bottom pointing out that any information contained within was confidential, and that the value of your investments might go down as well as up. He’d forgotten to remove it before pressing ‘send’.

The email was short and to the point.

It had the registration number of a car driven to a hospice in rural Slovakia.

The name of the woman who’d hired it from Eurocar in Bratislava.

The credit card she’d used to secure the transaction.

The last eleven places that credit card had been used.

Five of the eleven were in Istanbul, on the days leading up to the death of Josephine Cebula.

All the rest were in Berlin.

A name and address were at the bottom.

Alice Mair.

Nice to meet you at last.

Chapter 37

An estate agent has two primary roles.

The first is the acquisition of long-term investment property. Male or female, young or old, there’s no point moving long term into a skin unless you know its social situation, criminal record and medical history. I have known seven of my kind hospitalised for asthma, angina, diabetes–all of which could easily have been avoided if they’d done their homework–and two have died of the same, their physical conditions striking so hard and so fast that they couldn’t even get a good grip on the paramedic to jump away. Had one known enough about her target to check the inside jacket pocket, she would have found the epinephrine right there, ready to go. She would have lived but for ignorance of her own wardrobe.