‘Woody!’ he yelled.

Woody’s head jerked up and he came over immediately, pen and notebook in hand. He was still at the eager-to-please stage. ‘There’s a punter downstairs. Something about the bombs. See what he’s got, will you?’

Woody nodded and headed for the lift. The man waiting downstairs was Oriental, wearing a blue duffel coat with black toggles, faded jeans and dirty training shoes. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag and was wiping his nose with a grubby handkerchief. He snorted into it and then shoved it into his coat pocket before stretching his arm out to shake hands. Woody pretended not to notice the gesture and herded the old man towards a group of low-backed sofas in the far corner of the reception area. Carrier bags were always a bad sign, he thought, as he watched the man settle into a sofa next to a large, spreading tree with weeping leaves. Punters who arrived at newspaper offices with carrier bags often produced strange things from them. During his twenty years as a journalist Woody had just about seen everything. There were the paranoids who thought they were being followed and who would produce lists of numbers of cars that were pursuing them, or taxis, or descriptions of people who had appeared in their dreams, or lists of MPs who were in fact aliens operating from a base on the far side of the moon. There were the punters who felt they’d had a raw deal from one of the big international companies and had photocopies of correspondence going back ten years to prove it. There were the nutters who claimed to have written Oscar-winning film scripts only to have their ideas stolen by a famous Hollywood director, and they’d open their plastic bags to show their own versions. Sometimes they were written in crayon. Not a good sign.

‘How can I help you?’ asked Woody, his heart heavy.

‘My name is Nguyen Ngoc Minh,’ the man said, and Woody scribbled in his notebook, just a random motion because he didn’t reckon there was going to be a story in this and he didn’t want to go through the hassle of asking the guy to spell his name.

The old man thrust his hand into the carrier bag and took out a colour photograph and handed it to Woody. It was a family portrait of the man, an old woman and a pretty young girl. Woody raised his eyebrows inquisitively.

‘My wife,’ said Nguyen. ‘My wife and my daughter. They were killed this year.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Woody, his pen scratching on the notebook. He wasn’t using shorthand, he just wanted to be seen to be doing something so that he didn’t have to look the man in the eye. The brown eyes were like magnets that threatened to pull him into the old man’s soul and several times Woody had found himself having to drag himself back. They were sorrowful eyes, those of a dog that had been kicked many times but which still hoped one day to have its loyalty rewarded.