Damn it. In my fury I forgot that he doesn’t know that I met Harte. I could kick myself. I stare without speaking.

‘Who do you think you are?’ he says, his face reddening with anger. ‘The lead character in a John Grisham book? Leave clearing his name to his bleeding-heart campaigners and his legal team. Do your job without risking your safety and that of your colleagues. Write the stories we pay you to write!’

He is in my face, so close I can feel his warm breath on mine. Rage is coming off him in waves, and I swear it must be contagious, because I’m angry, too. I’m so bloody angry.

‘I’m doing just that, writing what you tell me to,’ I shout at him, refusing to back away from his stale breath and his toxic, proprietorial masculinity. ‘But I’ll be damned if you control what I do outside working hours. You mightn’t have had the ambition to reach beyond this paper, but we don’t all have to rot here. If I can further my career, and help a potentially innocent man, then of course I’m going to do it. So yes, I have seen him. You’re right, that is where I was on Saturday. Meeting him.’

‘Tell me he’s not stupid enough to have come back to Derry?’ Ryan asks.

I shake my head. ‘He has no intention of coming back here. This city let him down. He’s living in a shitty bedsit in Portstewart, if you must know.’

‘He has some brains, after all,’ Ryan says.

We sit in a silence for a moment or two. The wind has gone from our sails as quickly as it arrived.

‘Can I go now?’ I ask.

‘I need to talk to you about something else first,’ he says. ‘I’ve been on to HR.’

I baulk, can feel the colour drain from my face.

‘Don’t give me that look, Ingrid. You know I had to. Any incident on the premises has to be reported straight away. There are implications. Insurance, et cetera.’

Of course – it had to come down to money and not to the actual welfare of the employees. This time I fail to suppress the eye-roll.

I make to leave. ‘I really do have a lot of work to do,’ I tell him, ‘so maybe we could continue this talk later?’

He ignores me.

‘Ingrid, there’s to be no more lone working here after hours. They’ve been quite clear on that. You’ll have to leave with the rest of us. HR have also asked that all staff leave a note of where they are going when they leave the office and what time they expect to return. You’re to keep your work-issued mobile phone charged and switched on at all times during office hours so that you, and the rest of the staff, are immediately contactable.’