Lana’s phone began to ring. She looked at the curly pink clock on the mantelpiece and stood. ‘I have to get ready. There is nothing else I can tell you.’

‘Do you – did she have family?’

‘Her mother. She is very sad now, I think.’

‘I’m sure. Do you know where I could find her?’

‘Her mother?’ Lana shrugged. ‘She lives in that old place.’

‘Where?’

The girl clattered the coffee cups into the sink. ‘Where all the clever ones go. I can’t think – how is it called?’ She swung round triumphantly. ‘Ah yes. Oxford.’

Before I left London I went to meet Xav. I got a taxi that passed through Parliament Square on the way to the City; I stared out at the fairy-tale turrets of the building that housed our government and it jogged my memory.

I sat up straighter, thinking of Danny’s words last night. How could Kattan possibly have diplomatic immunity? It made no sense. I’d turned up so little when I was looking into him earlier this year; I’d found no mention of any kind of diplomatic status. I wondered about the secret service rumours in Iran: he’d obviously had some connections in Iran in the eighties or nineties but if anything, that surely made him a bigger threat here.

My meeting with Xavier was so tense, though, that I forgot all about Kattan. We met in a fashionably white restaurant in busy Spitalfields, the kind where children are not welcome and celebrities pretend they don’t want to be seen. From the very start, it felt uneasy. Xavier was preoccupied, but I didn’t know why – the abiding theme of my life at the moment.

‘You look very pale,’ he said accusingly after we’d ordered.

‘So do you, actually,’ I batted back. ‘Burning the candle, my dear Xav?’

The cash Liam had eventually sorted would tide me over for a while. But I needed to start earning again, that was quite apparent. The obvious solution was to go back to work full time, and Xav’s offer now made sense. I’d pack up the house and rent it out; move the children back to the flat in London for the time being. I wouldn’t be sorry to leave our stifling village, especially since the story of James’s arrest had broken. I needed to be near my old friends right now.

‘So when do you want me?’ I finished my chicken and wiped my mouth on the pristine napkin. ‘I’m going to move back in the summer holidays. But I can start from home sooner. I’ve got to get the cash rolling in pronto or we’ll be living in a cardboard box soon.’