The doorbell rang. Everett, exploring the photograph pixel by pixel, half-heard it. Someone was always ringing the bell, trying to sell something, despite the sign that said, politely, We don't buy door to door. Then he heard the voice, and shoes on the wooden floor in the hall. Dragging feet; a low Northern Ireland accent. Paul McCabe. Everett went to the bedroom door, opened it a crack. Paul McCabe stood in the hall, hunched over in his raincoat. No one had worn coats like that for forty years. It made him look like a cheap private detective. He always seemed round-shouldered, skulking, guilty of something. Even in his office at Imperial College he never looked at home, as if he had wandered in one morning in the 1980s and was waiting for the day when someone official would discover he was a fraud and throw him out. His voice, talking to Laura, was soft and hesitating. He always seemed to be apologising in advance. Paul McCabe must have heard the bedroom door open, because he turned and looked straight at Everett.

“Everett. Yes yes yes, are you well? Good good. Terrible affair, terrible. Sincerest good wishes. The police called; everyone at the department is terribly upset, terribly. Colette is distraught, quite distraught.”

No way back now. Everett had grown up a physics brat, running free between lecture halls and labs, whiteboards covered in symbols and high-powered research equipment with exciting yellow warning stickers: Lasers! Radiation! Nanohazard! The faculty staff was his alternative family, but he had always found Paul McCabe, Tejendra's Head of Department, too jolly, too much the embarrassing uncle. Paul McCabe pursed his mouth, as if tasting unpalatable words.

“Actually, Everett, it's you I've come to see.”

Paul McCabe looked uncomfortable in the living room, seated in the middle of the sofa, hands draped over his knees. He hadn't taken off his coat. In the kitchen Laura made tea, a thing she normally never did after nine o'clock. The caffeine kept her awake. Only table lamps were lit, and the flickering lights on the Christmas tree cast an insane shine over the scientist.

“The police called me about your father, Everett. Incredible, simply incredible. On the Mall. In broad daylight—well, you know what I mean. But it's incredible, incredible, in modern London, that it's not been caught on some CCTV camera somewhere. We are the most surveyed nation on earth.”

“I got a photograph of the car. I got the registration number.”

Paul McCabe sat up.

“Did you? Really?” You look like a meerkat, Everett thought. “That's good work, they should be able to do something with that.”

“So what did the police ask you about?”

Laura pulled out a side table and set a mug of tea on it. Paul McCabe waved away a KitKat.