At home on the sofa one evening, she worked through in her mind what she knew of Francisco Nguema from the files Emsworth had pulled out. Even inside, she didn’t dare look at the page she had photographed – and she didn’t need to. The image was there, like a scan, when she imagined it. She knew from her subsequent Google searches that he was a businessman based in Equatorial Guinea. From what she could gather, the FCO’s interest in him derived from his connection to a British businessman she’d never heard named, however for all her internet trawling, there was nothing to hint at the root cause of the danger that lurked behind Emsworth’s threats. Whatever it was, though it was deemed worth killing for.

When she blinked, once again the image flashed in her mind of the woman, her eyes scooped from their sockets, beside her the body of the child. When she opened them, Sadie and Callum were sitting in their pyjamas side by side on the carpet, and she had to walk out of the room.

‘Are you OK?’ Tom asked, knocking on the door as she rinsed her mouth in the sink.

‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, moving through the hallway towards their bedroom. ‘If it’s OK I think I’ll get an early night.’

In the weeks that followed she feigned exhaustion in the evenings after getting in from what Tom believed was just another day in the office, before heading to bed as soon as the children were asleep, leaving little space for proper conversation. She avoided the length of time in which Tom could look at her and see the lies lurking behind her eyes. In the bedroom, she found herself covering her body as she undressed, aware that the house could be under constant surveillance. There was a sense of betrayal she felt on Tom’s behalf at being unable to warn him, but she had no choice. When she pictured Emsworth’s eyes that day in his office, she was in no doubt of the sincerity of his threats.

She had taken to packing a basic lunch from home along with a piece of fruit to see her through the day, topped up by occasional stops for coffee, languishing in the same café for as long as possible before the looks of the waiting staff became too pointed to ignore. Financially, she could afford to go without work for a few months, eating into what remained of her father’s inheritance, but still she had to be careful.