At four months pregnant, the sickness had finally subsided and with it the fatigue that had taken hold in those early weeks. The pallid colour of her cheeks, which colleagues had joked was the result of her time spent in Russia, gorging on dumplings and vodka in a serotonin-deprived purgatory, had lifted in the second trimester so that she felt brighter than she had in a long time as she sashayed through the doors at KCS.

Tom had been brought on to a project in Shoreditch a couple of weeks earlier, which could last until just before Gabriela was due to give birth. They had spent the previous evenings ironing out the details: she would stay at work until a week before her due date, and then take a few months off before returning to her job full-time, when Tom would step in as the primary carer.

She had felt a rush of confidence about her plan to inform the office of her pregnancy that morning as she headed off towards the tube station, Tom squeezing her arm lightly as he saw her off with the words, ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

‘Morning, Lauren,’ she greeted Emsworth’s secretary as she approached her desk, her eyes surreptitiously casting around for signs of her boss in his office.

‘Good morning.’ Lauren smiled, looking up from her computer screen.

‘Is he in?’

‘Not yet. He’s in meetings all morning, let me check … OK, he has a lunch later but it looks like he’ll be back by three …’

She managed a smile, pushing down her disappointment at being made to wait. Already the buoyancy she’d felt on her way in, her belief that everything would turn out well, that all she needed to do was to be upfront and give plenty of notice as to her situation, had started to wane. As if attuned to impending disaster, the minute hand crept ever more slowly around the clock over the course of the morning, towards the end of days.

‘Gabriela, Lauren tells me you wanted to see me?’

It was quarter to four by the time Emsworth arrived at her desk, his eyes shining with drink.

Glancing around the open-plan room, noticing the heads pretending not to be listening, she stood. ‘Do you mind if we speak somewhere more private?’

Emsworth paused before holding out a hand in the direction of his office.

‘I’ve just been having lunch with a few colleagues, one of whom you met in Moscow – Peter Bradford, you remember him? He was very impressed, speaks highly of you … Do take a seat,’ he said, holding the door open for her.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, picturing Bradford’s face at one of the long dinners held by the embassy, his hand holding onto hers a moment too long as they were introduced. He and Emsworth were clearly cut from the same cloth.

‘It sounds like you settled in extremely well over there …’