A picture of Hadi’s wife, Alia, from the late eighties. Her photo stared out at me; a picture of the two of them at a polo match at the Royal Berkshire Polo Club. She looked a lot like Maya. And she wasn’t who I’d feared; she looked nothing like Huriyyah. Of course she didn’t – Huriyyah was far too young to have been Ash or Maya’s mother. I felt a rush of relief. I didn’t recognise her: thank God, I’d been wrong.

And then another cutting, much earlier, from Tatler, 1972, preserved in a plastic sleeve. Alia was so young, pregnant, beautiful and glowing in an ice-cream-coloured dress. I looked again at the photo. Behind the elegant couple stood a tall imposing man. Lord Higham. Was it my imagination – I craned forward in the harsh light of Peggy’s basement – or was Higham’s hand almost clasping Alia’s?

Silently Peggy passed me one last file. A small article about an oil company, a subsidiary of Shell, franchised by an Iranian-based conglomerate. There was a small photo of two men shaking hands at a do in Kuwait.

‘I always suspected that Higham was not to be trusted,’ she sniffed, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘His own agenda and all that. The posh ones are never much good.’

‘British Government steps into oil crisis: Allies for the good of British industry,’ the headline said.

Beneath it, a few lines about how the pair were allies not just on the polo field, but also in politics and oil.

I looked closer. Higham and Kattan, shaking hands over a huge vase of lilies.

Ghosts whom I thought had been at peace were back walking the earth – images I’d buried after university back in the forefront of my mind. For the first time in a while, I found myself craving a drink.

Standing beneath the sprawling sycamore outside Peggy’s house, I called my dearest friend.

‘Take me for a cocktail? No work talk, I promise. No pressure.’

He took me to his club in Shoreditch. It was full of young girls in long T-shirts and leggings, and men who’d snorted too much cocaine and talked too loudly about it.

We didn’t discuss work. We talked about him, about his constant exhaustion at the moment. And then we ended up on the subject of my marriage. Hardly the lesser of two evils.

‘What’s going on, Rose?’ Xavier sipped his martini. ‘You seem – distracted.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was defensive.

‘Distracted by your life. By it not being what it should be.’

‘That’s you talking, Xav, not me.’

‘You had so much promise, darling.’ He looked positively maudlin. I could see the grey in his cropped hair.

‘Christ, Xavier,’ I pushed my straw very hard into the tiny shards of ice at the bottom of my glass, ‘you sound like my obituary or something.’