52
The Ironworkers Pub, Cowley, Oxfordshire – The Next Day
‘It’s a map,’ Petra said. ‘It can’t be anything else. It’s a map that she’s drawn because it’s in her writing. It’s a map of somewhere she’s going to go. And there’s a clandestine element to it because she hid it.’
She was sitting in a pub on the outskirts of Oxford with Benny and Rafi. It was off the student and tourist beat, closer to the old manufacturing side of Oxford where cars and light industry were the other side of the city’s prosperity. Long gone, the area was ripe for regeneration.
At 3pm in the afternoon the pub was between-times; in the dismal zone between the pensioner lunchers who’d consumed sad salads and the after-work drinkers yet to come. Their only witness was a solitary drunk woman perched on a bar stool,
