He never seemed to take on board that he was frittering away the last few reliable years of her own fertility, and that she needed an additional source of sperm. She couldn’t bear the idea of IVF. It was beyond consideration that any stranger’s bodily fluids should be used to create her son. Simon’s suggestion that one of his friends might be willing made her feel sick. Especially as it sounded like Simon had already discussed it with him.

Prisha’s mother had never got on with Simon. It wasn’t just his appalling laziness, but it was his grotesque informality, his lack of deference. The irony was that he was so bloody un-British. And, just like Deepak, he seemed to think Empire of Spice was nothing more than a giant piggy bank. When he’d found Prisha, he’d thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Prisha was now glad that she had respected her mother’s wish not to marry Simon. But for all that, she still couldn’t help liking him. He made her laugh. He made her see that there was more to life than work. But this gambling just had to stop. She checked her Patek Philippe watch, a gift from her ex-husband, before she had exed him. She had not known at the time that he had charged it against expenses for the company. Still, that was Deepak for you.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Simon. ‘I’m going to be late for my meeting.’

Simon nodded. ‘Have fun,’ he said absentmindedly, as he reached for his daiquiri.

Sometimes she thought he had guessed what these meetings were for. She closed the door behind her, grabbed her bag, and set off for the Hotel Orion.

The Orion was as anonymous as any airport hotel could be. The tired 1970s monstrosity crouched so tightly beneath the Heathrow flight path that guests could open their curtains and from their pillows see the lowering of landing gear as an endless stream of Boeings and Airbuses screamed in overhead, from the first Far Eastern arrivals before five a.m. to the last thunderous departure after midnight. Refitted with triple glazing in the 1990s, and aided by noisy air conditioning, most guests managed to sleep, if that’s what they were there to do.

Most of the ground floor was devoted to a succession of small, bland conference rooms rented by the hour for executives flying in from who-knows-where: groggy and jetlagged, they would be welcomed by a large Formica table, ten or so tubular metal chairs, a projector screen, and a Kona coffee machine. The TripAdvisor posts were pretty much to the point: it’s just about okay for quick departmental meetings, but never bring your customers here to impress them.

In the Derwent Suite, number 36, a group of sixteen new graduate trainees were being inducted into a sales and marketing company with a three-letter name, which was aiming to take the technology sector by storm. They would be imprisoned in this hotel for three barely-endurable weeks of stale air and prawn cocktail with Marie Rose sauce. In the Ullswater Suite, number 40, there was a regional sales meeting for a cartridge refill company, hoping to make a mint from selling weight-for-weight the computer industry’s most valuable but archaic input, and the only one that never went down in price: printer ink.