I turned to Amelia for reassurance and saw that she’d fallen asleep with her head on her arms, right where she was sitting at the kitchen table. I’d been up all night crouching in the shadow of that warehouse; she’d spent the night working on her phone and waiting to pick me up. Xander too had been at the computer through the small hours. I had that burning sensation in the pit of my stomach I get when I’m properly exhausted; they had something similar, I bet. Everything in me wanted to go back to the warehouse with reinforcements – from where, I didn’t know – but I convinced myself that Mum and Dad had been unharmed there until now, and I’d go straight there once I was sure the evidence was in the right hands. What’s more, I knew that if we tried to keep going that morning without rest we’d get nowhere sensible, so reluctantly suggested we all turn in, just for a couple of hours. Amelia and Xander took a bedroom each. I flopped down in my clothes on the couch and fell into a black hole so deep I didn’t hear my alarm when it went off, partly because my phone had wedged itself down the back of the sofa. When I eventually retrieved it and checked the screen my ‘No!’ was loud enough to pull Xander from his bed.

‘Eh?’ he said, poking his head round the door.

‘It’s eleven fifteen! Quick, see if you’ve had a reply from the committee chair?’

‘His name’s Mukwege,’ said Xander, clicking away at his laptop. After a pause he said, ‘No, nothing. But look, it’s not too late. You can intercept him on the way to the chamber.’

‘How? I don’t even know what he looks like.’

‘You do now,’ said Xander, turning the screen my way. He’d pulled up a photo of the politician. Martin Mukwege looked to be an enormous barrel of a man. In this picture he was dressed in a boring suit, but his hair was wild, a great white afro haloing his enormous head. ‘He’ll be wrapping up the committee meeting at twelve and going to the vote after that. I’ll do some digging and see if I can work out any more detail,’ Xander said.