‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, again. ‘It’s only twenty minutes. I’ll make you a cup of tea and some toast.’

‘Half an hour, if the traffic’s bad,’ said Charlotte. ‘I need to be there by nine. And my hair’s still soaking.’

‘You just crack on,’ he said. ‘I’ll check the cab’s booked.’

He passed her, and they kissed, before he disappeared downstairs, and she walked through to the bedroom to begin drying her hair.

Clicked on the Today programme.

‘…in the case of Zeff Mahsoud.’

The voice of the BBC Radio 4 presenter drifted from the speaker.

‘Mr Mahsoud, a charity worker from Yorkshire, you’ll remember, was arrested after arriving home to the UK on a flight from North Africa. He maintained that he’d been on a humanitarian mission to Libya, but six months ago he was given a lengthy jail sentence for terrorism-related offences. He has always protested his innocence, and an increasingly noisy campaign for his release has led us to the Court of Appeal where, later today, his case will be re-considered. Whatever their lordships decide, the appeal has thrown into sharp relief a number of questions about the operations of both MI5 and MI6, and…’

She clicked the clock radio off.

She most definitely didn’t need that.

4.

AT JUST BEFORE 8 a.m., Zeff Mahsoud was taken from his cell to the holding area.

There he was handcuffed to a prison officer, who led him through three sets of steel doors to the cold air outside.

He breathed in deeply, despite the diesel fumes which were filling the vehicle yard.

Overhead, the blue sky was slowly clouding over, but still he felt an overwhelming sense of release.

No matter who you were, and what you were doing there, prison was prison, and Belmarsh was worse than most.

Several police officers, wearing body armour and carrying MP4s fitted with suppressors, watched with undisguised contempt as he was loaded into the back of a prison transport vehicle.

There was a short delay as they waited for an armed robber whose appeal was to be heard on the same day, and then the truck fired up and lurched out of the prison gates, sandwiched between two Met Range Rovers and assisted by a pair of motorcycle outriders.

It’s an hour dead from Belmarsh in Woolwich to the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand – for ordinary vehicles.

With their sirens and blue lights, and the motorcyclists zipping ahead to hold up crossing traffic, they made it in forty minutes.

On arrival in the secure parking area, Mahsoud was debussed and led into a cell in the bowels of the court.

Paul Spicer and Emily Souster were waiting nearby, and were shown to the cell a few moments later.

Spicer and Mahsoud shook hands – Emily knew better than to offer hers – and Spicer cleared his throat.

‘I’m pretty confident, Zeff,’ he said. ‘As discussed, we’ve a strong case and you’ll not find a better pair to put it across than Jim Caville and Charlotte Morgan. But nothing in life is guaranteed, as I’ve said, and there’s always the risk that the judges won’t see it our way.’