Hanging up, I light a cigarette and pick up the phone again. This time I try Maureen, out of the need for a companionable voice, if nothing else. In the years since we first met, at the pub next to the women’s refuge Maureen runs just off Kentish Town High Street, she has proved one of my closest confidantes.

As Maureen’s number goes to voicemail, I hang up and immediately the phone rings.

‘Hello?’ I say.

‘Isobel, it’s me.’

‘Oscar, hi …’. There is something about his voice that still has an infantilising effect on me, though I am a month older than him, and I hate him for that above anything else.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ I say.

‘So I hear. I got your message from the station.’

‘And?’ I continue, waiting for the conversation to descend into the usual dressing down.

‘And we’re looking into it.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure, I’ll call you in a bit.’

‘OK,’ I say, holding out the phone receiver in front of me as it goes dead.

At that moment the door opens and Ben, the News Editor, walks into the room.

‘Isobel,’ he says, throwing down a battered briefcase. ‘Why the fuck aren’t you at the council briefing?’

My ability to compartmentalise is one of the things that makes me so good at my job, Ben will occasionally concede after the several pints it takes for him to say anything vaguely complimentary to anyone. But apparently this time I’ve divided the many tasks in my mind so efficiently that I’ve completely forgotten the meeting that had nearly brought me out in hives to think of it on my way back from the party. Though, in my defence, there have been a couple of things to distract my attention since then.

‘I’ve got something else I think you’ll be interested in,’ I say without stumbling. ‘There was a stabbing on the high street at the weekend. The nationals haven’t got a whiff of it yet, and off the record police confirmed that they’re treating it as connected to the ongoing tensions between two rival gangs in Mornington Crescent I’ve been looking into …’

‘That’s my girl,’ Ben says.

As I talk him through the details, I feel the events of Saturday morning begin to fade, the woman’s face sweeping in and out of focus in my mind like a figure stepping in and out of the shadows, until, for the moment, she vanishes altogether.

Chapter 17

Gabriela

Madeleine was still in Vietnam by the time Callum was born, the following July, in a labour that lasted less than six hours from her first contraction to the moment Gabriela held him in her arms for the first time – on the same ward at the Whittington Hospital in which she’d been born three decades earlier.