The girl doesn’t move. Knows better not to. The woman hovers nearby, her breath on the girl’s neck. The girl listens, smells the woman’s perfume, a sickly, arresting smell. That is the smell of the outside world, thinks the girl. The sickly, arresting smell of freedom.

The girl shivers.

Satisfied, the woman withdraws without warning, leaving the girl to calm her beating heart. This time, she leaves the lights off and the girl is left in semi-darkness.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Georgie held on as the Tube rattled along. The carriage was hot and airless – most of the seats had been taken and she was squashed up against the corner, conscious that every time the train lurched around she fell on to Charlie’s shoulder.

Five stops down the train pulled in to Bethnal Green and Georgie looked up at Charlie. ‘Is it this one?’

Charlie frowned. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘It’s Mile End next.’

‘Mm.’

Georgie waited. A few people had alighted and an old man had hauled two bags of shopping into the aisle and had stood opposite them. The signal for the doors shutting toned, which is when Charlie leapt up.

‘Actually, it is this one.’

She barely made it as the doors slammed shut behind her.

‘Come along, Someday!’ Charlie called back over his shoulder.

‘Where are we going?’ Georgie puffed as she took two steps for every one of his to keep up. They weaved in and out of busy commuters but somehow he seemed to just keep marching straight ahead as people parted around him like the Red Sea. Georgie, on the other hand, was constantly ducking and sliding past the crowds – less Moses and more of a fairground dodgem.

‘Tomas was never very forthcoming when it came to revealing the original source of the article, was he?’ Charlie called back, ignoring her question directly.

‘Simeon is a bit of an enigma,’ Georgie agreed.

‘Tomas’s original idea was to run a justification defence based on the documentary evidence he had amassed about the Turkey scandal without Simeon.’

‘But nothing directly connects that to Alexia.’

‘That’s right. Some of it’s helpful. There are chains of emails that link to Alexia eventually but nothing that nails the point. It’s all circumstantial, Hagworth will say. Anyway, after I told them I wouldn’t take the case Tomas contacted me and said, albeit reluctantly, that the source for the original article was Simeon Ali, who worked for the Foundation at the time of the scandal and was based in Turkey. He’d since moved to London.’

‘And you think that Simeon wasn’t involved with the siphoning of funds to the Free People’s Army?’

They skipped up the last few steps and out into the street at such a pace that Georgie lost track of which station they had just come from.