‘I get that, but your founder has been murdered, and your office has just been turned over. Maybe that changes things?’

His phone buzzes twice. The shake of my head stops his hand.

‘Honestly? I don’t know. I’d have to talk to my lawyer. I’m pretty sure the agreement stays in place, not least as we’re most likely going to carry on.’

‘You can carry on without Kleine?’

‘The investors put a lot of money into this; they’re not going to want to see that disappear.’

‘So the break-in doesn’t worry you?’

‘All our computers and servers are safeguarded; the information on them would be overwritten even if someone tried to clone the hard drives, so I’m not worried.’

‘Whatever Kleine came up with, did it have the potential to upset more traditional lines of treatment?’

‘Disrupt? Obliterate more like.’

‘So anyone invested in the old way of doing things wouldn’t like to see this succeed?’

‘You tell me,’ Wust says.

Kush is bored, so he rolls over onto his back and squirms around, trying to reach his own tail. When he fails to catch it he stands up, shakes his whole body, then lies down again and rests his chin on my feet.

‘What about enemies, anyone she’d clashed with recently?’

‘She could be abrasive, but you have to be to get something like this going. And the pressure increased with the funding she’d got. All those investors were suddenly interested in what’s going on, and some of them would drop in unannounced. That really hacked Marianne off, but there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. I know she spoke to her father about them. I think he just advised grinning and bearing it for the moment. If anyone knows how to weather a shit-storm it’s him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The company he worked for, DH Biotech, went through a rough patch years ago. Something went wrong, I think, and he’d been on the front line. Marianne mentioned it once. Something like that would normally put an end to a career, but Pieter-Jan Kleine’s a fighter and now he’s really high up in the same company. She looked up to him, wanted to have that kind of fighting spirit. And she did, until …’

I show him a photo of Huisman I’d pulled from the file.

‘Recognize him?’

Wust looks but shakes his head. ‘Don’t think so. Who is he?’

His phone’s buzzing again, a call this time. The noise sets Kush off.

‘Look, I really need to …’

‘Get it, but we may need to talk again.’

As he answers his phone I scribble down my number and hand it over. ‘In case you think of anything,’ I tell him. He takes it and nods, listening intently to whoever’s on the other end of the line.