‘Well,’ said Rozalia, a touch defensively, ‘that’s the reason your predecessor went looking to see if he could find any evidence.’

‘Did he talk to you or Nadia? Is that how you know all this?’

Rozalia nodded. ‘He spoke to Nadia, but not me. Unfortunately, she refused to share the full details of their conversation with me.’

‘Why?’

‘She was trying to protect me,’ she replied, with undisguised bitterness.

‘What from?’

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I loved that woman to bits, but at times she was like a damn mother hen.’ She reached into a pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. ‘You mind?’

I shook my head – I wasn’t a smoker, but the kitchen window was open next to where she sat. I waited as she lit up with a battered lighter, her breath faltering slightly as she let out the first rush of smoke.

‘Like there was this one time I got sick,’ she continued, waving away some of the smoke. ‘This is before we were retrieved by the Authority, mind.’

‘You survived together, the two of you, didn’t you?’

Rozalia nodded. ‘Nadia spent a lot of time and energy looking after me and keeping me alive back before our retrieval. Sometimes, if things got really bad, she’d keep it from me. She’d just . . . clam up rather than say anything. Maybe it’s because I’m more than ten years younger than her; I don’t know. But any time we had bad arguments then or since, it’s because she’d kept something back from me. I didn’t even know she’d spoken to Jerry until I came home and found them sitting there in our living room.’ She laughed. ‘I actually got worried they were having an affair or something, the way they were acting so secretively. But I made her tell me the truth in the end, and that’s when I knew she was doing it again . . . protecting me, when I didn’t need protecting.’

I reached up to touch a pendant that was no longer there, imagining what it might have been like if Alice had survived to stay by my side through the post-extinction years. Had she fallen ill, or been in danger of any kind, I might easily have been guilty of the same well-intentioned but overbearing care.

Rozalia got up and held the smoked butt of her cigarette under the tap before dropping it in the trash.

‘You’ve been here for years,’ I said, ‘and I’ve barely arrived. You don’t have any idea why either of them were so intent on keeping their concerns under their hats?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe they were afraid of the Patriots finding out. Everyone’s scared to death of them, even the other Authority types. If they ever found out what your predecessor was up to, things might get worse for us.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked her.