I stopped.

A list of the dead. Dr Tortsen Ulk, drowned in his own toilet. Magda Müller, stabbed to death in her kitchen by a stranger, her daughters asleep upstairs. James Richter and Elsbet Horn, found in each other’s arms, their eyes ripped out and insides spread across the floor of the cabin of the little boat they were sailing up the Rhine. Though the police had never linked the killings, lamented the author, we have done so, for these victims were part of us, and it was by Josephine’s hand, and at Kepler’s command, that they all died.

I read the words once and, not sure I had understood, read again.

They were no different on the second look, and no less lies.

The Belgrade train shrieked like a metal mother-in-law, white sparks bursting from its wheels as it crawled to a halt in Kapikule. A few lights were still on behind the blinds of the couchettes. Doors opened here or there, thick orange panels swinging out, metal stairs dropping down. The train had once been orange and blue, Bulgarian Railways’ finest. That colour was long since lost, obscured beneath layers of spray paint, the pride of the line overwritten by the pride of the kids who haunted the terminals at either end of the line. I smelt urine from the toilet that guarded the door, heard the illicit pressure pump of a passenger committing that ultimate offence–flushing while in the station–and turned to find my cubicle.

A cabin for six, four of the beds already taken. A husband, wife, teenage son occupied three; in the other was an old man who chewed something herbal with the circular grinding of a camel’s jaw and lay on his back to read articles about ancient cars and journeys through the east. The family had a makeshift feast, which they passed up and down the three-bunk tier they inhabited. Hard-boiled eggs, slices of ham, pieces of goats’ cheese, crumbling bread that shook golden shards across the floor. With every crunch of the knife through the loaf, the old man with the car magazine flinched, as if the blade were cutting bone.

I climbed into the top bunk as the train jerked into motion, put my bag of clothes beneath my head, my bag of weapons beneath my feet, and lay back to think. Metal bunk below, plastic ceiling above, the space between barely wide enough for a tomb.

No one came to check the passports.

Chapter 14

There are many ways to catch a ghost sitting in the body of a loved one. Basic questions–name, age, father’s name, mother’s name, university–can be answered by any well-informed inhabitant, but it takes a matter of minutes to probe a little deeper.

First place you lived when you left the family home?

Name of your primary school headmistress.

First girl you ever kissed.

Or–my personal favourite–can you play the violin?

The delight with that particular enquiry is of course when the ghost, relieved to be asked something it can successfully answer, stands up and rattles off five favourite tunes in the key of G, only to be informed upon the final semibreve that the body’s natural owner has never held a violin in all her life.

First skin I ever jumped to, the first question I was ever asked, I failed.

I was an empty-bellied killer, and the constable who pinned me to the watchtower floor wanted to know my name.

So I told him.

“Not that name,” he growled. “Not the poor soul you killed. I want to know your name.”

I had beaten a stranger to death, and that stranger, me.

I was a killer caught with blood on my hands.

“What’s your name?!”

I was a flake-skinned youth, the weight of a club across my neck, the pressure of a knee against my back, two ribs cracked, one eye swollen, never to see right again. And like the men who beat me, I too was curious to find the answer to that most thorny of questions.

What’s your name, bastard? Murderer, butcher, liar, thief. What’s your name?

When they threw me into Newgate, in the hot pits where the masses went, fifty to a room–forty-seven and three bags of flesh by morning–I laughed the hysterical laughter of a mind too shattered to remember that it should weep. When the judge sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, my knees buckled, but my face was empty and my soul was calm. When Fat Jerome, king of the underbelly of the prison, tried to get there first, his great wet paws around my throat, I didn’t fight him. I threw up no defence, made no noise, but consigned my soul to Satan, to whom, it seemed, it had no choice but to go.

Yet it transpired I did not want to die, so with Fat Jerome murdering the murderer who had murdered me

rather inevitably, upon reflection,

I looked back into my murderer’s face from Fat Jerome’s eyes, and forgot to squeeze.

My killer fell to his knees, gagging for air, his face red, eyes popping. A small crowd had gathered, pinioning us together, body to body, sweat to sweat, and one voice said, “Why didn’t you finish him, Jerome? Why’d you let him live?”

I couldn’t speak.

“I’ll do it, Jerome!” piped up another, a crooked-lipped thief with a brand on his hand who desperately wanted to impress the king of the cellar, the lord of the throng.

My silence was taken for consent, and with a little whoop the spry-limbed convict leaped forward and drove the end of a spoon into the socket of my killer’s eye.

Chapter 15

Sleeper train is a misnomer.

Starting-awake-in-the-night train is more apt.

As drivers change and carriages are shunted in and out of platforms in the dark, the journey towards Sofia is a stop-start of teeth-grinding screeches and head-bobbing rattles. You do not sleep on a sleeper train, but rather doze in and out of a fitful sense of unconsciousness, aware that this is not awareness, that the thoughts with which you think this are not thoughts at all, and so infused with so profound an understanding of your condition, you sleep to wake again ignorant that you slept at all.

We reached Sofia at 4.23 a.m. I would not have known, but the lone passenger had set his alarm to buzz at 4.15 a.m. precisely. It made the sound of a nuclear siren, a klaxon that knocked the entire compartment awake with a clenching heart. He rolled out of his bunk dressed in yesterday’s clothes, picked up his bag and left without a word. I tweaked the blind back as we passed into the station. The sun was still down over the city. A lone luggage handler waited on the deserted platform. I pushed my wafer-pillow higher against the back of the bed and rolled over to sleep.

The blind stayed down as we pulled away from Sofia. A city, its history and people, its stories and its tragedies, holds no interest to me at 4.23 a.m.

The Serbians did check passports.

At Kalotina-Zapad a team of fresh hard-jawed officials boarded the train, while the grimy-eyed crew of the previous night disembarked, wheeling their little cases to the opposite platform and the journey home. The new officials wore smart peaked hats and scuffed blue coats. As we pulled away from the station, they knocked on every compartment door, calling out, “Tickets, passports!”

Tickets and passports were taken away for inspection. I handed over my Turkish identity, the name newly learned, and lay back in the bunk, wishing we could open more of the window as the Bulgarian countryside flashed by. I had no great fear of detection this side of the border. No matter how good the Turkish police, international arrest warrants take time.