Z has had something hot to eat now and is back on track with the Oyster cards, handsets, batteries, SIM cards, ATMs. He tries to tune out the background hum of his spinning plates.

It’s mock-Ofsted week. L’s head of year sits with a notebook and a tick sheet observing the afternoon session.

On his way home from work V’s husband, B, is stopped and searched by the cops under the Terrorism Act. (This is coincidental, and unrelated to L’s referrals.) He is amused. You think I’m an Islamist? You know this is a sikha, right? At home he pulls out the carbon copy of the docket to show his wife. No wonder they catch so many crooks, he says.

X is in Nottingham Waterstones. If I like Sunjeev Sahota, what else will I like?

*

J returns home from another early-hours jaunt. Lightening sky and the suggestion of spring in the air.

M wakes from a dream in which she missed a vital clue about Leeds – several clues – and it was all too late. She splashes her face with icy water and looks in the mirror. She’s up now, so she might as well get up. She sits with a cup of tea watching it get light.

In Syria it is light already. An MSF nurse in Idlib supervises the setting up of a new facility.

The Morning Star arrives in Silvertown. W flicks through it before leaving for work.

In Moscow, trained assassins are briefed on the known recent and likely future movements of the NSA whistleblower. His need to keep himself in the public eye – the only thing that will keep him alive – is also his Achilles heel.

W says to Z, I think that Snowden has been dead for quite some time. They’re good at this, the Russians, she says. Ventriloquizing. You don’t think he runs his own accounts, do you?

I reckon I’ll take a bullet one day, she says. (They are sitting on a park bench, eating their lunch.) Well, not a bullet, she says. It’ll be an accident of some kind, away from work. Gas leak or something.

That’s the trouble, she says. It’s people like us who do it, people with no family. No one to cry for us when we’re gone. No one to look for our bodies.

Inside the Doughnut, coffee at hand, M watches an onscreen transcript of Z’s movements. W has been identified as a close contact, and a file opened.

Z watches the clock: just another hour of captivity.

V looks the social workers up and down and tells them to come back with legal paperwork. And she slams the door.

As Z leaves for home, he places a bar of vending-machine chocolate on W’s keyboard.

(Oh, Edward, they promised not to torture you – and you believed them, didn’t you? What a difference an election makes.)