“In the three hours it takes the coastguard to board the ferry and fix the engines, seventeen people are dead, five are in a critical condition. And when the forensic police examine the corpses, they find that each body carries the stamp of someone else’s DNA, as though for every victim there was a different murderer, a different set of fingerprints on the blade. Do you know this story?” he asked, gaze returning from a distant place.

“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

“Do you know the names? Of the ships, of the dead?”

“Some,” I replied. “There was a frigate in 1899 off the coast of Hong Kong. A cruiser in 1924. A ferry in 1957, though that was never confirmed–someone opened the cargo bay doors and the living went down with the dead. Something similar happened in 1971: twenty-three dead, the authorities claimed pirate attack. A yacht in 1983 off the coast of Scotland. Two people died on board, a small body count by his standards, but still him. We all know the rumours.”

He nodded at nothing at all. “Santa Rosa,” he breathed. “October 1999.”

“You were there?” I asked.

“Yes. I killed a man. I don’t remember doing it, but I opened my eyes and there was blood on my hands, and a man with a hollow of blood filling the indent beneath his throat. He was alive, but when he breathed, bubbles popped, and then he wasn’t alive, and I was holding the knife and a woman stood in front of me and watched me watch him die. She took the blade from my fingers–it was a kitchen knife from the canteen–and put one hand on my shoulder like a mother and stuck the blade in me, rocked it around, smiled and didn’t say a word. They classed me with the dead until the pathologist called out that I had a pulse. Then they called me murderer. Which, in a way, I was.”

“Galileo?”

He nodded, though barely at me or the word I spoke.

“You should have said,” I breathed. “I could have helped.”

“Helped?” The word choked out, almost a laugh. “You’re a fucking ghost. What good are you to anyone?”

“Might’ve been some. I’ve met your Galileo.”

Now his head turned, eyes striking like an axe on ice. “Where?”

“St Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Miami. Not since Miami.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Contrary to popular opinion, not every ghost you meet is inclined to once-every-twenty-years outbreaks of psychopathic extermination,” I replied. “Those that are, you tend to re member.”

“Tell me!”

“Why?” I breathed, and saw him almost flinch. “You are hellbent on killing me. You killed Josephine, and for all that this is a perfectly friendly little encounter, give or take my hormonal condition and the handcuffs, I find it hard to simply forget the turbulent nature of our relationship. You’d kill me, Mr Coyle, because a ghost nearly killed you. I am not that ghost. You’d kill me for what I am. Why should I help you find Galileo?”

His lips thinned; he turned away, then as quickly turned back. “Because if you didn’t help me, knowing anything at all, it would prove that you are the monster I think you are.”

“You think that anyway. Give me something more. Why did you kill Josephine?”

“Orders.”

“Why?”

“Because I respect the men that give them. Because the file said…” His tongue tangled on the words. “Because the file said she murdered four of our researchers. She did. Not you–her.”

“Why?”

“She attempted to infiltrate one of our projects. A medical trial. You should know this.”

“I know some. She needed money, a medical trial in Frankfurt, something for the common cold. They rejected her when they realised she was a hooker. I did my research too, before making a deal with Josephine Cebula.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t for the common cold.”

“You astonish me. What was it?”

“Vaccinations.”

“Against?” He didn’t answer. A thought. I leaned back, feeling the idea settle like dusty cobwebs on clean skin. “Oh. Against us. You were trying to find a vaccine against us. Did it work?”

“Not with four of our researchers murdered.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“But it was Josephine. I saw footage, CCTV. I saw her with blood on her hands. Then you came to Frankfurt, made her an offer. What were we to think?”

I inhaled the words. I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself not to have a violent physical reaction. My fingers pressed over my belly. “You believe… that I became Josephine because of some medical trial? You think she and I launched some kind of attack against your people? Conspired to murder Doctor whoever-it-was and all his happy brood?”

He thought about it. “Yes. That is what I believe.”

Smell of detergent on my fingertips, a memory of fruit tea at the back of my throat. I counted backwards from ten slowly, and said, “You’re wrong.”

Coyle did not reply.

The train was slowing, carriages clunking against each other as we decelerated towards a siding. I wondered how this body would cope with pregnancy. It seemed a stick-skinny thing, frail ankles and tight waist. I wondered if fruit tea was any use against morning sickness.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You know I’ll find out.”

“Tell me about Galileo.”

“I’m going to keep on wearing your body, Mr Coyle, until someone shoots me in it. You want a happy outcome, I’m going to need more information.”

“You need information?” His voice was a half-laugh, having nothing better to do with itself. “Ten minutes ago it was midday in Istanbul. A man touched me on the train and I was somewhere else, wearing new clothes, talking to someone new. You’ve stripped me naked, talked with my tongue, eaten with my mouth, sweated and pissed and swallowed my spit, and you need information? Fuck you, Kepler. Fuck you.”

Silence.

The train bounced across an uneven set of points, slowing now, the engine winding down. Perhaps there was a station nearby, a midnight traveller looking for a ride. Perhaps a siding where we might sit for a few hours while the driver had a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette on the side of the track. The engine chunked to itself, unwilling to sleep.

I felt my hands on my belly and wondered what my child would grow up to be.

Perhaps he’d work on the railways like mum?

Perhaps she would dream of being something more.

A politician, perhaps, who in thirty years’ time would stand before the nation and proclaim, “My mother rode the tracks between Berlin and Vienna to support me in my youth, so that the future I could make would be better than the life she lived.”

Or maybe none of the above.

Maybe my child would grow up quiet and alone, a mother perpetually travelling, postcards from abroad, a sense that her life was not her own.

“Galileo,” I said, staring at nothing in particular. “You want to know about Galileo?”

An intake of breath, his eyes on my face.

I told him.

Chapter 41

St Petersburg in 1912, and you could almost believe the Romanovs had got away with it. I had heard the rifles crack in 1905, seen barricades in the street and believed, as had many others, that the dynasty’s days were numbered. The social reforms could not keep up with the demands of economics; the political reforms could not keep up with the changes in society, and so, kicking its way into the twentieth century, it had seemed inevitable that some part of Russia would get caught on the wire.

Yet in 1912, dancing beneath the chandeliers of the Winter Palace, silk gloves rolled to my elbows and hair held high with silver and crystal, I could believe that this world would last for ever.

I was Antonina Baryskina, seventh daughter of a grand old duke, and I was there to demonstrate an eligibility that my host singularly lacked. Antonina, sixteen years old, was already branded a flirt, a harlot in the making, and worst of all the kind of woman who would sleep with a proletarian largely because her daddy forbade her from doing so. No coercion, wheedling or downright threat had yet coaxed Antonina into reforming her ways. As rumours threatened to burst into flame, a Moscow estate agent by the name of Kuanyin approached me with an unusual commission from the father.