‘Wait, hold on.’ Sending her a silent thank you, she took Christine’s notes from her pocket and gave her daughter two twenties. ‘Here.’

‘Really?’

‘Have fun – make sure you eat something. Say hi to the girls for me.’

‘I will.’ She reached over the gearstick for an awkward hug. ‘See you later.’

Robin waited until Lennie had disappeared from view then found the address in her SatNav and headed back to the Westway. Gid lived in Ruislip, on the western edges of London, miles back the way they’d just come. It would have made far more sense to visit him first, on their way in, but she’d wanted to be alone, Lennie safely off with her friends rather than forced to witness her straw-clutching.

It took nearly another half-hour to reach the house but that was okay. As ever, the car was a cocoon and today she had time to kill: she wasn’t picking Lennie up from Carly’s house ’til seven, and she only had two people to see. The other one was at three o’clock, across the city. Unlike Gid, he knew she was coming.

Over the six years they’d worked together, she’d been to Gid and Efie’s several times, for Christmas parties – the cost of the cab back into town was a nightmare – and the annual summer barbecue, when their modest back garden became a sort of mini-carnival, half-barrels of charcoal cooking all afternoon and into the night, tables of salads and fruit, deckchairs for the adults, a paddling pool and a water slide set up for the children where the grass sloped gently down to the conifer hedge at the end.

Both Gid and Efie were second-generation Brits; their respective sets of parents had come over from Freetown in the late Sixties, and they were that rare thing: committed Christians who didn’t make her want to punch them. There wasn’t a scrap of sanctimony about either of them, they’d never even tried to talk to her about Jesus or the Word or any of that crap, and the booze always ran freely at their parties, hence the cabs. They were just moral, community-minded people who tried to live good lives. Pulling up across the road, she realized – again – how much she missed working with Gid, his solidity.