Inside he made her a cup of tea while she settled herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. He concentrated on the teabag, taking his time in order to choose the right words.

‘Why did you go see her?’ he asked.

‘LeBrac,’ he said, when she didn’t respond.

Rachel removed a file from her satchel and placed it between them. ‘I think Noor and I are on first-name terms,’ she said. ‘We’re besties. Like this.’ She twisted two fingers together, and managed to look both surprised and angry at herself. ‘Don’t ask me why, Bish, because you know. Bee’s involved with this business whether we like it or not, so let’s not put our heads in the sand. David says —’

Bish put up a hand. ‘Can we leave out what he says? Just this one time?’ It seemed to him that whenever David Maynard spoke, his words were quoted and spun into pure gold. David Maynard’s take on education. David Maynard’s views on youth. David Maynard was the most quoted wife-stealer in England.

‘Okay, I won’t go into what David says, although he did say hello.’

Sod off, David.

‘Noor LeBrac made mention of something and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.’ Rachel was searching through the file with one hand and sipping her tea with the other. ‘She told me that all those years ago, she’d given a doctor a letter to send to me.’

‘To you?’

‘She was looking for a human rights lawyer. This doctor apparently recommended me.’

‘You never mentioned Noor LeBrac contacting you back then,’ he said. When they were married he had always known what she was working on, just as she had known what was going on in his world.

‘Well, she did, but too much was happening and I must have forgotten to tell you,’ she said. ‘It was two weeks before Stevie was born. I passed on all my cases to Robert Houghton and forgot about it. Forgot about her.’

From the file she removed an envelope with handwriting on it, still pristine. Bish couldn’t believe she had spent the day travelling from Ashford to Holloway to her chambers and then here to the Docklands.

‘She was guilty, Rach. She confessed.’

‘This letter is logical, smart, and convincing,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘And on that basis you believe what, that she’s innocent?’ he asked in disbelief. ‘Rachel, she has a copious amount of degrees from Cambridge. You’d hope for the sake of British education that she does know how to string a sentence together.’

‘It’s unbelievable to me that the person who wrote this letter then confessed the day after.’

She pushed the file towards him. Another volume on the subject of Noor LeBrac to sift through.

‘I’m not investigating Noor LeBrac’s case,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m trying to work out where those kids are.’

Rachel glanced over his shoulder towards the pantry. Her way of hinting that her sweet tooth was about to make her narky if she didn’t get a fix.