It struck me, as I described the genesis of SpaceWoman, what a good interviewer Ingrid Richards was. Of course, that had been part of her job, one of the most important parts of her job, right through her career. It was her business to get people to reveal the truth. Under her gentle prompting, I found I was giving out much more detail – much more personal detail – than I would when normally asked about my work.

Also, she sounded genuinely interested. I remember somebody famous – I can’t remember who it was – saying that the first essential for a journalist is curiosity. And Ingrid Richards was profoundly curious. She wanted to know about everything she didn’t already know about. Unlike most people, who only ask me about my work as a bridge to the next thing they want to talk about.

I even found myself telling Ingrid the circumstances of Oliver’s death. Which is an event whose details I very rarely confide to anyone, certainly not on a first meeting. But – as I’m sure many people had done before – I felt real empathy with Ingrid Richards.

Then we got on to her work, and what she was currently doing.

‘I get asked occasionally to comment on some new disaster in the Middle East. Television sometimes, more often in print these days. Back where I started, writing copy, as a cub reporter on the Liverpool Daily Echo … which no longer exists, like so many regional newspapers. But I can still meet a deadline and, unlike most so-called journalists these days, I have actually been to the places I write about. I don’t do it all from behind a keyboard in an office in Wapping.’

Her voice carried a heavy load of contempt for the current state of the Press. ‘And then of course,’ she went on, ‘there’s the magnum opus.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m writing a memoir of my life.’

‘Warts and all?’

‘Most of the warts I encountered are now dead.’ She chuckled at her little joke. ‘But yes, it’ll cover the whole gamut – professional and personal.’

‘Is it commissioned?’ I asked, knowing a bit about such matters from Oliver’s dealings with publishers.

‘Of course it bloody is!’ she snapped, angry for the first time. ‘I’m a professional. I stopped doing stuff on spec in the 1970s. And all this’ – she gestured to the piles of papers and notebooks on her desk – ‘is taking me back to those places where I worked. I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to remind myself of all the militia groups there were in Beirut during the hostage crisis. God, it was so complicated. I had a handle on it at the time but wow, trying to put together all the details now in a way which the average reader’s going to understand … my brain hurts.

‘You’d think a civil war would be between two sides, wouldn’t you? And maybe the Lebanese one started off that way, basically Maronite forces against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but in Lebanon nothing is that simple. You’ve got conflict between Sunnis and Shias, Christians and Muslims. Then Syria and Israel get involved, while all the time strings are being pulled by the Ayatollahs in Iran and Reagan in the States.