There is a stinging silence and then I say, ‘All I want is to know where she went. Eva. I want to know where they sent her. I have no interest in you. Your name doesn’t even need to come up. Unless …’

Through the quiet, there is a baby’s cry from the next room.

I look at her and cock my head. ‘Oh dear,’ I say. ‘Is that your baby? Oh dear, I wonder what will happen to it when the police …’

‘You have no idea what you’re getting involved in,’ Gordana says, shaking her head at me. ‘No idea.’

‘So tell me,’ I shrug. ‘Eva, where did they take her?’

‘There was a girl,’ she says at last, the baby’s wailing getting louder from the next room, though she makes no attempt to go to it. ‘Gorani, like you say.’

I wait, my breath tight.

‘She was going to live with her sister. That’s all I know.’ Her voice is quieter now, defeated. ‘Please, I need you to promise me my name won’t come up. They can’t know I told you.’ Gordana’s face is desperate. ‘Please. My son.’

I lean forward in my chair. ‘This sister. Where does she live?’

Chapter 56

Gabriela

Heathrow’s Business Class lounge was hot. Her head throbbed as she took a glass of champagne from the attendant’s perfectly manicured fingers, trying to steady the trembling in her hands. What the fuck was going on? How could he think it was OK to do this, without running it past her first – and yet, she reasoned, was it that different to Paris? Wasn’t it those unexpected acts that were in part what had attracted her to him in the first place? Why did she feel like the ground had torn open beneath her?

‘Will your husband have one?’

‘He’s not my husband,’ she said, wishing she could suck the words back in as soon as she’d said them.

Only hesitating for a second, the waitress laid down the second flute and walked away. Trying to push down the feeling that something wasn’t right, Gabriela let her mind circle the particulars of how he had done it without her noticing. The arrangements made behind her back, the conspiring with Polina, the silent accessing of her passport. She felt a chill as she pictured him rifling through her things; the bags she had already stripped of any remnant of her other life.

But still, he shouldn’t have done it. It was not his place to rifle through her life like that. She felt herself bubbling with rage at the thought of it.