Rocky Rodean left the Royal Courts of Justice considerably poorer than he had arrived. He retreated to his gated estate in Buckinghamshire and gave strict instructions that he was not, under any circumstances, to be disturbed.

Christine returned to chambers and sent off her application to become a QC.

Second time lucky.

Two men came into the room and very quietly closed the door behind them. Isabelle and Maya huddled in the corner. ‘What do you want?’ bellowed Maya, in the voice that had made her the scourge of the Bedales hockey fields, and then clammed up with a little whimper when one of the men produced what looked like a designer Stanley knife from his trouser pocket.

He stepped towards them, the knife extended. Maya grabbed Isabelle’s arm, and pushed her forward. It was hard to know whether, in her terror, Maya was simply trying to hide behind her, or whether she was offering Isabelle as a substitute. The man with the knife advanced. He had been told not to leave the room without one of Maya Rodean’s fingers in a plastic ziplock bag.

The baby was tiny, a little yellow fledgling that had fallen too soon from the nest, its skin dusty with what looked like flour, its eyes puffed closed as if it had been beaten up. Pipes fed in and out of its body, sensors monitored every inch of its chest. Such a small scrap of life, so insignificant, and yet, it seemed, so tenacious. It had been bounced over the edge of a cliff, poisoned with morphine, ejected into the world long before it was ready, prey to every infection a London hospital could chuck at it – and yet, somehow, it was still breathing, fighting off the jaundice, its heart pumping those few precious drops of blood around its body, determined to live.

When Victoria first saw it through the plastic walls of the incubator, she felt ashamed. She, who had given up on life so many times, who had let people and circumstances trample all over her, pushing her this way and that, forcing her from one disastrous compromise to another, was put to shame by this tiny collection of bastard cells, a mistake whichever way you looked at it, that was so doggedly determined to keep breathing and growing and to cling on to life as the only thing that mattered.

‘I think I’ll call him Felix,’ she said to the nurse. ‘It means lucky, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said the nurse, wondering whether Victoria wasn’t rather counting her chickens.

‘Is he going to live, do you think?’

‘We certainly hope so.’

‘But he might not.’

‘Well, it’s too early to say . . .’

‘Thanks,’ said Victoria. ‘You see, I’m just wondering if I should tell his dad.’

‘Oh,’ said the nurse, to whom this kind of thing was all in a day’s work. ‘Well, it might be an idea.’

If she knows who it is.