‘Oh, you know,’ Gabriela replied guardedly, wishing she’d never said anything – though she hadn’t, not really. ‘Just that he’s a creep. Anyway, why should we give a shit? You’ll be in Hanoi soon, and I’ll be off popping out a baby.’

‘Shit, I was right!’ Madeleine said, laughing, and Gabriela tried to smile back at her, ignoring the clawing in the base of her belly.

Chapter 16

Isobel

I stop at my usual café on the three-minute walk to work the following morning and order a large coffee and croissant, which I pick at, once settled at my desk in the offices of Camden News.

The office spreads over two floors of a dilapidated Victorian terrace on the main road, wedged between an off-licence and a 99p shop. As usual I am the first one through the door. Ordinarily, it’s the time of day I like best, cracks of light straining through horizontal plastic blinds, illuminating a space that once would have been the living room of an elegant town house, but is now characterised by cracked ceilings and floors, semi-carpeted with brown and green florals, and a series of messy desks.

I’ve worked in the office ever since joining the paper three years ago, months after dropping out of my second year of college. As usual, Jess was the one to pull me into shape, getting me a shoo-in onto the paper via a friend who did music reviews. Even after everything that has happened, they’ve made no effort to get rid of me.

Si’s desk stands somewhere between mine and Ben’s, a battered copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists and notes scrawled in shorthand strewn across it as testimony to the NCTJ training I never managed. He and Ben will be in soon, and at once the peace will be shattered. On another day I might have taken this moment to drink up the silence, to register the endless piles of papers and the smell of unloved carpet, grateful not to be working in a proper media office, like Jess’s glass carbuncle a few streets away, with its upright leather sofas, mood boards and a coffee machine with individual colour-coded capsules.

Today, however, the space around my desk feels bare, like a carcass picked raw. Despite the October sunshine outside, there is a damp chill in the air which crawls over me, forcing me to pull my hooded jumper tightly around my waist.