‘You can rely on me,’ she said, and he sneered.

‘Can I?’ As he leaned forward, she felt a chill move across the room.

‘You know you can.’

Without saying anything, he reached into his bag and pulled out a camera. Zooming into the screen he dropped it on the desk, the image of Gabriela and Madeleine in the window of Daphne’s staring back at her. She looked up at him and he arched an eyebrow before picking the camera up again and zooming in further so that she could see, pixelated but clear enough, the image she was holding in her hand: the photo of Emsworth’s meeting at the bar in Moscow.

‘Did you really think I wouldn’t be watching you? That I wouldn’t find out?’ His words were perfectly enunciated, as if he was savouring every one of them.

For a moment Gabriela felt as though her voice box had been cut out, and then she spoke, as though controlled by an outside force.

‘You think you can blackmail me? I know all about you, about Francisco Nguema …’ She enunciated every syllable with precision. ‘I’ll tell everyone.’

His face shifted then. ‘Oh, Gabriela.’ He paused, as though genuinely regretful about what he was about to do, and then he reached again into his bag. This time the photographs he pulled from the envelope made her gag: dismembered body parts, a woman with her teeth and eyes pulled out, lying next to the corpse of a child.

‘Jesus …’ Gabriela bent double and when she sat back up, Emsworth was holding another wad of images. The first was of her house, the ordinariness of the building peculiar to her, in this context. As he pulled out the next picture, she thought she would be sick. Tom, Callum and Sadie on the walk to school, Tom’s head at an angle as if turning to say something to Sadie who was lingering behind in that way of hers.

‘You …’ She couldn’t think of the word. Her mind was spinning, all the blood in her head throbbing at her temples, blotting out Emsworth’s voice as he spoke again.

‘What kind of people do you think we’re dealing with here?’ he asked, his words quiet and measured.

She stood, taking a step back, away from the images of bloody limbs juxtaposed against those of her children’s faces.

There was a ringing sound in her ears as she stood, her legs threatening to buckle.

‘You …’ Her whole body was shaking; her voice when she spoke again was little more than a whisper, as though she’d been kicked in the windpipe.