THURSDAY Simmons, regional manager for a chain of high street discount stores, slipped his change into his pocket then neatly folded his newspaper in half and tucked it under his arm. He quickly glanced at his watch before leaving the shop and rejoining the faceless mass of shoppers and office workers crowding the city centre pavements outside. He checked through his diary in his head as he walked. Weekly sales meeting at ten, business review with Jack Staynes at eleven, lunch with a supplier at one-thirty... He stopped walking when he saw her. At first she was just another face on the street, nondescript and unimposing and as irrelevant to him as the rest of them were. But there was something different about this particular woman, something which made him feel uneasy. In a split-second she was gone again, swallowed up by the crowds. He looked round for her anxiously, desperate to find her amongst the constantly weaving mass of figures which scurried busily around him. There she was. Through a momentary gap in the bodies he could see her coming towards him. No more than five feet tall, hunched forward and wearing a faded red raincoat. Her wiry grey-white hair was held in place under a clear plastic rain-hood and she stared ahead through the thick lenses of her wide rimmed glasses. She had to be eighty if she was a day he thought as he looked into her wrinkled, liver-spotted face, so why was