‘Well, she did. Do you know who the father was?’

He shook his head.

‘Niall Connor,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell!’ He really was taken aback by that.

‘Did you know him?’

‘Yes. Not well. But I spent some evenings drinking with him and a bunch of other correspondents in the bar at the Commodore. He was a bit of a Jack-the-Lad, always chatting up the birds’ – he coloured – ‘as we used to call them back then. Probably not allowed to say that these days. Offend someone, no doubt.’

‘Might offend birds?’ I suggested.

‘Hm. All I know is that everything I say seems to offend someone these days. But Niall … Niall and Ingrid …’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘That’s a match-up I’d never had considered in my wildest dreams.’

‘Presumably,’ I said, ‘you didn’t see much of Ingrid in the months after you were both injured?’

‘Didn’t see much of anyone. Or anything. I was put into an induced coma out in Beirut, then flown back to Brize Norton. In and out of various military hospitals over the next eighteen months, having operation after operation. Not a lifestyle conducive to keeping in touch with people.’

‘You don’t know how long Ingrid was hospitalized, do you?’

He shook his head. ‘Not as long as me, that’s for sure. I heard from someone it was only a couple of months. Maybe three or four. She wasn’t as severely injured as I was. I suppose that’s my claim to fame. I put my body between Ingrid Richards and the car bomb, so I took most of the shrapnel. How bloody heroic.’ He let out a bitter laugh. ‘Be more heroic if I’d done it deliberately, though, wouldn’t it?’

‘Mm.’ I was following another line of thought. ‘I was just wondering … if Ingrid was unconscious for some months in hospital, when she did come round and find out she was pregnant, it might have been too late for her to have an abortion.’

That would tie in with what Ingrid had said to me about her pregnancy with Alexandra and why she wasn’t aborted. ‘Circumstances meant that that was not an option.’ Such circumstances might well have been being treated in hospital for shrapnel wounds.

The cameraman shrugged his shoulders at my suggestion. ‘That’s possible. I’m afraid I don’t know. I was totally out of it at the time.’

‘So, Phil,’ I asked, ‘do you literally remember nothing from when the car bomb detonated to when you woke up in an English hospital?’

‘I do remember the moment of impact,’ he said, ‘and a bit after that. I think it was a time before I passed out. There was a sort of moment of shock before I felt the pain from the shrapnel wounds to the back of my legs, and my back and … everywhere.’

‘You weren’t wearing body armour?’

‘No, we were slacker about that stuff back then. Cameras were heavier too. I found it much easier to carry and manipulate mine without being weighed down with body armour.’