‘Is that right?’ Ramiro replied. ‘Yalda would be proud of you.’ He glanced around the interrogation room, wondering if Greta would ever join them again. She’d sat in on the first few sessions and, as coldly as she’d treated him, the presence of even one familiar face had been enough to make him feel less isolated. But then, perhaps that was why she’d stopped coming.

‘Seven deaths on your hands, and you compare yourself to Yalda?’

‘Actually, it was you I was comparing to Yalda.’ Ramiro drew back from the table and allowed a trace of his anger to show. ‘I mourn those deaths, and I condemn the perpetrators – but I don’t know who they are and I certainly didn’t help them.’

‘If you don’t know who they are, how can you know you didn’t help them?’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Ramiro retorted. ‘Maybe you gave directions to one of the bombers three days before the blast. Maybe you shared your lunch with one of them at school, when someone stole their loaves.’

Maddalena said, ‘Is this funny to you?’

‘Seven people dead isn’t funny at all. But if you want your attempts to do something about it taken seriously, you’re going to have to earn that.’

‘Do you deny that you were giving technical advice to the anti-messager groups?’

‘Not at all,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I helped them make their meetings public – sparing you from any need to go to the trouble of listening in on them covertly. You can still hear every word we said. No one was discussing bombs.’

‘And in the private meetings?’ Maddalena asked.

‘You tell me. If there were private meetings, I wasn’t invited, so that’s when the whole spying thing would have helped.’

Maddalena reiterated his defining characteristics in her eyes. ‘You violated an undertaking not to disclose the plans for the messaging system. You campaigned against it in the referendum. You used your expertise to help everyone opposed to the system—’

Ramiro said, ‘Apparently not everyone.’

‘You expect me to believe that with all those key roles in the movement, you knew nothing about the preparations for the bombing?’

‘I made it very clear to the people I worked with that I wasn’t interested in violence. That might not have been the best way to earn the confidence of any fanatics among them, but strangely enough it seemed like a perfectly ethical approach at the time.’

Maddalena paused, staring past him at the bare wall, possibly consulting some third party through her corset. There were no clocks in the room, and Ramiro had stopped trying to gauge the length of these sessions. All he could do was keep answering the questions one by one, refusing to be cowed and refusing to start fabricating the kind of replies that might satisfy his interrogator.

‘You must have been frustrated with the way the strike was going,’ Maddalena suggested.