He was impeccably turned out, a waistcoat buttoned under his jacket and his tie neatly knotted at his throat. As soon as the doors closed behind them, he shrugged off the jacket and hung it on the back of a chair; Úrsúla allowed herself to relax too, kicking off her heels beneath the table and drawing her feet under her chair. Óðinn started by passing her a little bottle of hand sanitiser.

‘Make sure you use it all the time,’ he said. ‘Over the next month you’ll have to shake more hands than you’ve shaken in your whole life so far, and the flu season’s almost on us.’

She laughed, squirted it into one palm and handed it back to him. Then they sat each side of the conference table and kneaded the gel into their hands. The sweet menthol aroma from her palms reminded Úrsúla of how safe she was now. There was no infection here that an ordinary sanitiser couldn’t cope with. In Liberia they had washed their hands in bleach.

He took care to work the gel in between his fingers. His hands 9were large, as was his whole frame. He had to be at least one metre ninety, and with a barrel of a chest, although he was slim with it, which indicated either manual labour in the past, or that he had been a sportsman. Once he had finished rubbing the sanitiser into his hands, he waved them a few times to dry them off. Úrsúla wanted to laugh – he resembled a giant, clumsy bird – but she held back.

‘Being ill isn’t an option, unless you are in hospital with a burst appendix,’ he said.

She nodded. He was making such a point of this, she wondered if he had bad experiences with ministers who were susceptible to infections. Rúnar, her predecessor, had stood down from the post for health reasons, but she assumed that was a heart problem or something equally serious.

‘Do you have high stomach-acid levels?’ Óðinn asked, his expression so serious that she couldn’t stop herself laughing.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘That’s good. In that case I advise you to eat plenty of chilli with every meal to keep stomach infections at bay. A minister with bad guts is nothing but trouble.’

‘Got you,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll do everything I can to stay healthy. But isn’t it time we took a look at the list?’

She pointed to a page of closely typed text on the table between them, listing all the matters they needed to attend to. Óðinn nodded, sat up straight in his chair and started at the top of the list: protocols for a non-governmental minister’s relations with parliament.

She nodded her head and listened absently, examining his face. He had to be close to sixty, with grey in his hair and a network of fine lines around his eyes that suggested that he frequently smiled. His current formal manner had to be because bringing a new minister up to speed with the job was a serious matter.