‘No point in making a fuss,’ Maggie said, taking Carol’s elbow and steering her to the door. Hart watched them leave, then, as Maggie opened the first locked door, he turned and marched off in the opposite direction. Maggie looked after him and smirked. ‘I figured something as menial as seeing you off the premises would be beneath him. He is the absolute antithesis of a class act. I don’t know how Tony puts up with him. I don’t know how I do, come to that.’

As she talked, she led the way towards reception. But just before they emerged into the foyer, she turned abruptly into another office. A young man in a nurse’s tunic sat at a desk, working on a spreadsheet. He looked up when they walked in and grinned. ‘You owe me a drink.’ He leaned across the desk and picked up a few sheets of paper from the printer tray.

‘Thanks, Stephen.’ Maggie accepted the papers and handed them to Carol. ‘There you are. Tuck them away so the snitches on reception can’t see them. Now it really is time to go, Carol.’

‘Thanks. Nice move,’ Carol said as she followed Maggie into the corridor. ‘I have the impression you’ve done that before.’

‘We look after each other here,’ Maggie said. ‘Aidan only looks after number one. Tell Tony, chin up.’

On her way out, Carol made a point of glaring at the receptionists. Anything else would have looked suspicious. She didn’t so much as glance at the papers until she was out of sight of the security guards on the front gate. Then she pulled in to the first woodland track she came to for a read. It wasn’t easy to make sense of the redacted reports, but when she compared them with the dates Nadia Wilkowa had been in Bradfield Moor, one thing rapidly became clear.

Tony had been treated for a nosebleed following an incident with a patient on a day when Nadia Wilkowa had been there. ‘You fucking beauty,’ Carol said, kissing the sheet of paper. The first piece of evidence against Tony had been perfectly undermined.

60

The absence of their bosses didn’t let the workers at Tellit Communications off the hook. They knew their computers recorded every detail of their working lives. Their keystrokes were counted, their phone calls timed, their absences from either form of communication logged and monitored. The workers were so wrapped up in what they were paid to do that they barely looked around them. So Rob Morrison had been in his office for a good twenty minutes before Gareth Taylor appeared in his doorway.

‘Marie Mather’s husband phoned earlier,’ he said. ‘I was the only one in, so I picked up the call. Apparently she’s been taken to hospital with a suspected burst appendix.’

Rob winced. ‘That sounds painful. Did he say how long she’d be off?’