‘It’s a bit silly not to walk the few metres from one building to the next,’ she said, as if she felt a need to excuse herself, although this was his job and he was the last person she needed to apologise to.

‘Pretty much everyone who has had a driver misses it afterwards,’ he said.

Óðinn had said the same thing. Maybe this was a standard civil-service answer: a way to persuade ministers to have a driver at their disposal, with the same mixture of bossiness and concern that she had encountered more than a few times over the last few days.

‘I imagine I’ll get used to it,’ she said, and realised as soon as she had said them that the words sounded odd. ‘That doesn’t mean I 64don’t appreciate your work,’ she added quickly. ‘It’s just a very strange feeling – I seem to have become the kind of figure everyone buzzes around.’

The driver nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But it’ll become part of the routine.’

They were outside the ministry, and as he had instructed, she waited while he got out of the car, went around it and opened the door for her. Then he accompanied her to the door, not turning away until Eva came to meet them, a phone in her hand, which she handed to Úrsúla.

‘I feel like a child being babysat,’ she whispered to Eva as she took the phone.

‘It’s Rósa,’ Eva whispered. ‘The woman who came to see you that first morning. The one whose daughter…’

Úrsúla needed no further information and sighed as she took the phone.

‘I’m so relieved to hear from you,’ she said, as the woman began to apologise down the line.

‘I hope I’m not being too pushy by going through your assistant. Your own number goes straight to the government offices and I didn’t want to call your home number…’

‘That’s all right,’ Úrsúla assured her. ‘I wanted to get in touch with you. I didn’t take your number the other day and it seems the assistant got things wrong. I’m sorry about that.’

‘Please don’t apologise,’ the woman said. ‘I’m so grateful that someone’s prepared to help us. Everyone seems to have lined themselves up against us. There are kids online who have been calling my daughter a whore. And she’s never even done it … apart from … except when…’

The woman’s voice cracked and for a moment Úrsúla had no idea what to say. There were no words of comfort that would suffice.

‘I’m deeply sorry to hear it,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s a hard world, and it’s painful to see our children experiencing the bad 65side of it.’ She heard the woman sigh and sniff. ‘Give me your full name and ID number, and your daughter’s as well,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘This isn’t going through an assistant. I put everything in the hands of the permanent secretary this morning, so it should go through the system quickly.’